Thunderstorm

Dess

The day the baby came was the hottest of the year, and it began, as everything did in her life, with an inventory.

She lay on the sofa at six in the morning with the afghan kicked to the floor and a damp washcloth on her forehead and went down the list. One: the bag. It was by the door, packed since the fifteenth of May, a navy duffel containing nine onesies, a hospital gown she had bought herself out of defiance, three paperbacks, a phone charger, a plastic hairbrush, and a small knitted cap in gray-blue wool with a longer left earflap. Two: the car seat. Installed, checked, and re-checked by Mrs. Ferreira's grandson, a Providence firefighter with enormous hands and an oath-bound reverence for the LATCH system. Three: the ledger. On the table. Four: the phone. On her chest, face-up, charging, with a text on the lock screen from Adeyemi that said Induction slot Thurs 6/10 6am, W&I, don't be early. Seriously.

Five.

She stopped.

Five: whatever that is.

It was a small dull ache in the small of her back. It had been there since four. It came and went. It felt like nothing at all, a stitch, a muscle stiff from a thirty-ninth week of lying on the same side. It was, she told herself, the sort of thing that a woman who had read every book would recognize as "pre-labor" and a woman with any sense would ignore.

She ignored it.

She ignored it through the shower, and the toast, and the call from Colleen, who had been sleeping on the pull-out for a week with a pillow shaped like a donut and a suitcase of pills, and who stood in the kitchen doorway in a nightgown with Tweety Bird on it, holding a cup of coffee, saying: "You're up early."

"I couldn't sleep."

"You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You're doing the face."

"What face?"

"The Dess face. The one where you're lying and you've decided it's going to be true." Colleen sipped. "You had it when you broke your wrist."

"I did not break my—"

"You fractured it. In a car accident. And drove yourself to work." Colleen put down the mug. "Baby, if something's happening—"

"Nothing is happening."

"Okay."

"It's the heat."

"It's definitely the heat." Colleen pushed open the window over the sink. A wave of air came in, thick and still and wet, smelling of tar and cut grass and some far-off electrical hum. The sky above the rooftops of Fox Point was an odd flat yellow, like an old bruise. Not a leaf moved on the maple. "It's gonna storm."

"It's June."

"It's gonna storm," said Colleen. "I can feel it in my knees."

…

At ten twenty, she had a contraction.

There was no mistaking it. It came the way the books said it would not, without warning or ceremony, like a hand closing around her middle and squeezing, evenly, firmly, with no malice whatever. It lasted forty seconds. It went. She stood in the kitchen with her palm flat on the counter and a spoon in her other hand and thought, with the clear calm of a woman examining a claims file: Huh.

She looked at the clock on the stove. 10:21.

Huh.

She did not say anything. She put the spoon in the sink. She took her pressure on the cuff in the drawer (one-thirty-two over eighty-four; Adeyemi would have called it "boring") and wrote it in the ledger. She wrote the time of the contraction beside it, in the margin, in pencil, in the same small hand: 10:21. 40 sec. She underlined it. And then, because she was her mother's daughter and a coward, she closed the ledger and put it in the drawer.

The second came at 10:47.

The third at 11:09.

By noon she was timing them on the back of an envelope. They were twenty-two minutes apart, then nineteen, then twenty-four. They were erratic and mild and, she told herself, practice. Adeyemi had said it would happen. The books said "false labor." The internet said "Braxton Hicks." The baby, who by now had sunk so low that she could feel his head like a bowling ball between her hip bones, said nothing, and rolled his heel against her ribs with an air of deep and satisfied conspiracy.

We're not telling anyone, she thought. Not till it's real.

Not till it's definitely, undeniably, in-the-car real.

She did not examine why. She knew perfectly well. She was thirty years old and she was about to be responsible for another human being, and the last place on earth she wanted to be was the center of a room full of people looking at her.

At 12:40, standing at the window, she saw the towel.

It hung on the porch line of No. 14, as it had every day since the fifth of April. A plain white dish towel. No knots. She looked at it for a long time. She thought of the plastic chicken in a man's breast pocket, and the half-sheet in his wallet, and a pair of hands gripping an orange chair.

Term six, she thought. You will be called first.

Not yet.

I want one more hour of being a person.

…

It was the best hour of her life, and she knew it as it happened, which is rare.

She spent it at the kitchen table with the windows open and the ceiling fan turning and the yellow light going gray. She drank a glass of ice water. She ate three saltines, and a slice of cold watermelon, which Mrs. Ferreira had left on the step at nine with a note that said FOR THE GIRL. NOT FOR THE MAN. HE HAS HAD ENOUGH. She looked at the room. The yellow walls. The scarred pine table. The shelf of paperbacks. The mismatched mugs on their hooks. The lemon tree on the sill, Gerald, who had recovered in March with a gusto bordering on insolence, and who carried, on his highest branch, a single small, hard, dark-green fruit about the size of a golf ball.

He had put it out in May. She had watched it daily. It was the first lemon he had ever made, and it was wildly premature, and it hung there against the glass like a green exclamation mark, absurd and stubborn and entirely alive.

Hello, Gerald, she thought.

You did that on your own.

She laid her hand on the curve of her belly. It was hard as a drum. It rippled under her palm.

It's you and me, kid, she thought. For about nine more hours, give or take. And then it's a lot of other people. A twinge started low in her back. She breathed through it, the way they'd taught her in the class: in through the nose for four, out through the mouth for six. I just want you to know that I didn't do this by myself. I want you to know that I thought I would. I wanted to. I was proud of it.

And I was wrong about every single thing, and I'd do it again.

The twinge crested. It went.

She opened her eyes.

And the sky outside the window cracked in half.

…

It was not thunder. It was something larger and more personal than thunder, a sound like a boxcar dropped from a height onto sheet metal, and it came with a flash so white and so total that for an instant the whole kitchen vanished, every object, every shadow, wiped to a sheet of blank brilliance. The windows shook. The ceiling fan stuttered and died. The fridge cut out with a groan. In the silence that followed, from every direction at once, came the sound of a thousand car alarms.

"Jesus Christ," said Colleen, from the sofa.

Dess was on her feet.

She did not remember rising. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hand on the back of a chair, and there was an odd, hot, enormous pressure low in her body, a sort of swelling, and then something went. It went with a small distinct pop, like a cork drawn from a bottle, deep inside her, and a great warm gush of fluid poured down her legs and onto the linoleum.

She looked down.

"Oh," said Dess.

She stood in a puddle, in the sudden gray gloom, with the rain beginning on the roof in a great drumming roar, and the lights out, and the fridge dead, and the baby shifting under her palm like a man turning over in bed.

"Mom."

"Yeah, baby?"

"Mom, my water just broke."

There was a pause.

It was approximately one second. It was, Dess thought later, the longest second of her mother's life. Colleen came through the doorway in her Tweety nightgown with her hair on end and her reading glasses crooked, and stopped dead, and looked at the floor, and at her daughter, and at the floor.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay."

"Okay. Okay. Okay." Colleen put out both hands, as one approaches a skittish horse. "Don't panic."

"I'm not."

"I'm panicking. Don't you panic. One of us has to." She took a breath. "What do I do?"

"Get my bag."

"Your bag."

"By the door. And the cap. And my phone."

"Your phone. Okay." Colleen darted away, came back, darted away again. There was a crash and a curse. "Did you call him?"

"Not yet."

"Dess."

"I know."

"Term six," said Colleen, from the hall. "You wrote it on a napkin. I saw it. Call the man."

…

She called him on the second ring.

No. She called him on the first. He answered before the sound of the first ring had finished, as though he had been holding the phone in his hand; and she heard behind his voice an enormous, undifferentiated roar, the sound of water falling on a very great quantity of tin.

"Dess."

"Hi."

"Is it—"

"My water broke."

There was a pause, no more than a breath. And then he said, in a voice she had not heard before, a voice so calm and so level and so utterly without panic that she knew at once he was terrified out of his mind:

"I'm coming. Don't move. I'm coming."

"Where are you?"

"I'm on a ladder."

"You're—"

"I am on Mrs. Ferreira's roof. I was fixing the gutter. It was dry an hour ago. It was a perfectly dry gutter, and then—" A crash. A clatter. A muffled oath, in a Wexcombe accent, of surprising violence. "Forgive me. I've dropped the wrench. I'm coming down."

"You're on the roof in a thunderstorm?"

"I was on the roof before the thunderstorm. I'm now a person in the middle of one." Something that might have been a laugh, or a sob. "Dess. Listen to me. Stay where you are. Sit down. I shall be at your door in two minutes."

"Theron—"

"I run. I'm the one who runs. You said."

He hung up.

She stood with the phone in her hand. The rain beat against the window. The thunder rolled away eastward, grumbling like an old man, and came back, closer. In the gray light she saw the gutter of No. 14, three feet from the glass, overflowing in a long silver rope, and above it, on the slope of the wet slate roof, a dark and gangling figure scrambling down a ladder in a drenched white shirt, missing a rung, catching himself, sliding the last six feet, and landing on the soaked porch roof on his hands and knees.

He did not stop.

He rose, and he ran.

She watched him cross the yard. It was not a graceful run. It was a headlong, undignified, flailing sprint through the rain, over the mud and the puddled lawn and the sodden clothesline, in shoes that had not been made for it. He splashed through the gap in the hedge. He slipped on the grass, went down on one knee, rose again. Water streamed from his hair. His shirt was transparent. His face, tilted up to the rain, was blank with an effort so total that it looked almost peaceful.

Two minutes, she thought.

He's going to do it in ninety seconds.

Under her hand, the baby kicked, very hard, once.

…

The thing about a thunderstorm in a triple-decker in Fox Point is that it is a communal event.

By the time Theron had reached the third-floor landing, wet to the skin and gasping, with a streak of mud down one side of his face, the entire building was in the stairwell. The Okafors stood on the second-floor landing: Mr. Okafor in a bathrobe, Mrs. Okafor with her hair in a satin scarf and a flashlight in each hand, and Chidi, in pajama bottoms, with a bucket on his head for reasons known only to himself. Mrs. Ferreira was halfway up the last flight, in her plum coat and a plastic rain bonnet, holding a bat. Colleen came through the door with the duffel on one shoulder and the cap in her fist. And behind them, down in the vestibule, a gray-clad figure in an oilskin was taking off a peaked cap and shaking it, with an air of grave and unshakable punctuality.

"Mr. Wexcombe," said Dell, from below. "The car is at the door. I have taken the liberty of removing the golf umbrellas from the trunk, for the bag."

"Thank you, Dell."

"The roads are flooding on Gano Street. I have a route."

"Of course you have."

"I have had it since the first of May," said Dell, with dignity. "I memorized four."

Theron stopped in the doorway.

He stood in the frame of her kitchen door, dripping, with the rain pouring from his hair and puddling at his feet, and looked at her across the room. She was standing by the table with one hand on the back of a chair and the other on her stomach, in a gray maternity dress soaked at the hem, and her face was white and set. Her hair had come down. She had the look of a woman who has been told that the building is on fire and has decided to wait for confirmation.

"May I," he said.

His voice was hoarse. Water ran down his face. He did not wipe it.

"Come in."

"I'm very wet."

"I noticed."

"I shall ruin your floor."

"It's already wet. I broke my water on it." She tried to smile. It wobbled. "Theron—"

"I'm here."

"I'm scared."

"I know."

"I'm really, really scared."

"I know," he said. "So am I. I'm terrified. I've never been so afraid in my life. I think my knees may be about to give." He crossed the kitchen in three strides and stopped in front of her, an arm's length away, and held out his hand. It was open. It was palm-up. It was shaking so hard that the drops of rain fell from the fingertips in a rapid scatter. "May I hold your hand?"

She looked at it.

"Yes," said Dess.

He took it.

And the shaking stopped. She felt it stop. It went out of his fingers all at once, as a wind drops, and left his hand strong and cold and wet and perfectly still around hers, a hand that closed on her own with an exactness she would remember for the rest of her life.

"There," he said. "That's better."

"Yeah."

"Shall we go?"

"Yeah."

"Can you walk?"

"I can walk."

"May I carry you?"

"No," said Dess. "You may not. I'm a grown woman. I walked into a hospital at twenty-seven weeks with a monitor on, and I am going to walk down thirty-nine steps in the middle of a thunderstorm." A contraction took her. She gripped his hand. It lasted a long time. When it released her she said, through her teeth, "But you can hold my elbow."

"With pleasure."

"And Mom?"

"Yeah, baby?"

"If you cry before we get to the car, I'm going to kill you."

"I'm not crying."

"You're crying."

"It's the rain," said Colleen, and blew her nose into the Tweety Bird sleeve. "It's coming in the window."

…

They did it in the dark.

It was a slow procession, a sort of reverse wedding. Theron went first, backward, one step at a time, holding both her hands. Mrs. Ferreira went behind, holding the bat. The Okafors lined the second landing with their flashlights, forming a corridor of wavering light, and from somewhere above, thin and clear and astonishingly in tune, a child's voice began to sing. It was Chidi. He had taken the bucket from his head and was holding it against his chest, and he was singing, in a high piping treble that rang in the stairwell, the first verse of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."

"Gently down the stream," sang Chidi.

"Merrily," chorused the Okafors, a little ragged.

"Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily," sang the entire building.

Dess began to laugh.

She laughed on the third-floor landing, and on the second, with her face wet with rain and tears and sweat, holding a man's hand in the dark, passing through a gauntlet of neighbors who had known her for six years and had said hello in the hall. She laughed through a contraction that bent her double and nearly sent her to the floor. And Theron, walking backward, steadying her, said gravely: "I believe it is meant to be a round."

"It is a round."

"They're all singing the same line."

"They don't care."

"I observe that." His mouth twitched. "Shall I join?"

"Do not sing."

"I have a quite acceptable baritone."

"I will leave you in the stairwell."

"As you wish." He paused on the step below. A flash lit the hall, and for an instant she saw his face, white and streaming and absurdly happy, a boy's face, undone by joy. "But I should like it noted that I was, for a moment, tempted."

…

The Bentley took the flood on Gano Street like a boat.

It was a sight she would never forget: a vast black car, sleek as a seal, ploughing through the foot-deep water that sheeted the road, throwing up a bow wave of silver, its headlights stabbing the gray rain. Dell drove with both hands on the wheel and his cap pulled down, silent as a figurehead. The wipers flailed. The thunder rolled and cracked and fell away. In the back, on the leather seat, with her head on Theron's shoulder and her mother's hand on her knee, she felt the contractions come closer: twelve minutes, ten, nine.

"Breathe," said Theron.

"I'm breathing."

"In for four. Out for six."

"I know the count."

"I'm not instructing. I'm only counting with you." His arm was around her. His shirt was drenched, and the water ran down his collar, and she could feel the pulse in his throat, going like a drum. "I read a book."

"You read a book."

"I read eleven. Joelle gave me a list."

"You read eleven books about childbirth?"

"I like to be prepared."

"Of course you do." She gritted her teeth. The contraction peaked, and she dug her nails into his forearm. "Theron."

"Yes."

"I don't want you to think—" She stopped. She gasped. "I don't want you to think this means anything."

"It does not."

"I mean about us."

"I know."

"I'm only— it's just that you're the one who— you came off a roof."

"It was a very short roof."

"You came off a roof," said Dess, and her voice wobbled, "and ran through a hedge. And I just— I want you to know I noticed."

"I know," said Theron.

"I'm still mad."

"Yes."

"Term twelve."

"I remember."

"But you came off a roof."

"I would come off a great many roofs," said Theron, very low, and kissed her hair. It was a small, quick, wet, accidental kiss, and he drew back at once, as though he'd been burned. "Forgive me. I did not ask."

"I let it go."

"I shall ask next time."

"Next time," said Dess, and the contraction took her, and for ninety seconds she ceased to be a person and became a force of nature. When it ended she lay back against him, gasping, and said, in a small flat voice: "You can ask."

"I— what?"

"Ask. I'll tell you."

"Dess—"

"Not now. Ask later." She shut her eyes. "I just wanted you to know that there's going to be a later."

Dell, in the front, cleared his throat. He did it very gently, as a man clears his throat who has not been listening. "Sir," he said. "We are at the hospital."

…

It took nineteen hours.

She would not remember most of them. She would remember them in pieces, as one remembers a journey through a long tunnel: a series of lit windows, rushing past. A white room. A bed with metal rails. A series of hands, brisk and kind and impersonal, tying and untying and checking. Dr. Pratt in a surgical cap with penguins on it, saying, "Four centimeters, and the head's nice and low." A nurse called Rosalie with a gold tooth and a Barbados accent. A monitor with a green line, going up and down, up and down, like the horizon of a distant sea.

She would remember Joelle.

Joelle had come at five, straight from a twelve-hour shift at St. Brendan's, in scrubs, with her hair in a bun and her badge swinging, and had stood in the doorway of the labor room and burst into tears. Then she had wiped her face, rolled up her sleeves, said, "Okay, I'm done, I'm a professional now," and taken command of the room like an admiral boarding a flagship. By six she had rearranged the furniture. By seven she had briefed the nurses, who regarded her with the wary respect of one profession for another. By eight she had Colleen on a rolling stool in the corner with a plastic cup of ice chips, instructions not to speak, and a rosary Dess had never known she owned.

"She's doing great," she told Theron, in the corridor.

He had been standing against the wall since five. He had a blanket around his shoulders, a gift from Rosalie, who had taken one look at his wet shirt and his white face and said, "Honey, you're no use to anybody like that." He had not gone in. He had not been asked. He stood with his back against the cinderblock and his hands pressed flat to his thighs and his eyes on the door, and when Joelle came out he straightened as if he had been called to attention.

"Is she—"

"She's at five. She's got an epidural, she's on a drip for the contractions because the labor was stalling. Her pressure's been a little high. They're watching. She's doing great." Joelle took the blanket by its edges and tugged it up under his chin, like a mother with a child. "She asked about you."

"Did she?"

"She said, 'Is he out there?' I said yes. She said, 'Is he standing?' I said yes. She said, 'Make him sit.'" Joelle pointed down the corridor. "There's a chair."

"I am quite all right."

"Theron." She looked up at him. She was five feet two, and he six foot two, and for a moment she contrived to look at him from a very great height. "I'm going to tell you something. I'm still mad. I'm going to be mad until about September. But I'm going to say it once, and then I'm going to deny I said it."

"Please."

"You're a good man." She said it fast, through her teeth. "You were wrong. You were a terrible idiot. But you're a good man. And if you faint on me in the middle of this, I'll never forgive you. So sit."

He sat.

It was an orange plastic chair. It rocked slightly on a short left leg.

He looked at it for a moment.

And then, to Joelle's horror, he began to laugh.

…

By three in the morning, Dess had come to hate the sound of her own name.

Dess, you're doing great. Dess, I need you to breathe. Dess, can you give me a big push. Dess, don't push yet. It was a hall of mirrors. It was a long gray swim. The epidural had worn thin, and been redosed, and worn thin again, so that at some points she lay in a warm numb blur and at others she hung on a hook of pure pain, with her fingers sunk into the rail of the bed and a sound coming out of her that she did not recognize. She had asked for Theron at one. He had come in. He had stood at the head of the bed, white-faced and silent, and held her hand when she said he might, and let her squeeze until his knuckles cracked. He had said nothing. He had not told her she was brave. He had not told her it would be over soon. He had stood there and been a hand, and she had thought, through the haze: thank God.

At two she had said, "Chicken."

It slid out. She had not meant to. It came out in the middle of a contraction, in a voice like a snapped wire, and the room went dead still: Joelle, Colleen, the nurse, Pratt, all of them frozen in the green light. She had said it again. "Chicken." And then she had said, in a smaller voice, "I mean— I mean everybody stop. I can't— I can't hear myself. Everyone's talking."

And Theron had said, calmly, "Out."

He said it to the room. He said it in a voice she had never heard from him, low and level and utterly commanding, the voice of a man who had run a company of a thousand men: "Please. Everyone. Out. Two minutes. Dr. Pratt, if you wish to remain, you may. But everyone else, into the corridor. Mrs. Rourke, Mrs. Baptiste, please."

They went. They went like sheep, at once, with a single glance back. Even Pratt had retreated to the foot of the bed, pulled off her gloves, and stood in the corner like a statue.

The door shut.

It was very quiet. The monitor beeped. The drip clicked.

"Dess," said Theron.

"Don't talk."

"I shan't."

"Just— stay."

"I'm here."

"Hold— not my hand. Hold my—" She grabbed at the air. "Hold me up. I can't lift my head. I'm drowning."

He leaned over the bed.

He did not ask. There was no time. He slid one arm under her shoulders and lifted her, as one lifts a child from a pool, and held her against his chest, in the green-lit room, with her face in the hollow of his neck. She smelled the rain on him, still, faintly, and the cedar, and the coffee. She felt his heartbeat. It was fast. It was steady. It went on under her ear, thump, thump, thump, like a ship's engine in a long night.

"There," he said.

"Don't say it'll be okay."

"I shall not."

"Don't say it."

"I don't know that it will." His breath stirred her hair. "I know that I am here. I know that I shall be here at four, and five, and six. I know that whatever happens in this room, you will not be doing it alone." His arms tightened, very slightly. "I do not know anything else. I am sorry. I know it is not much."

"It's enough," said Dess.

"Is it?"

"It's the right amount."

She lay there. She breathed. She counted, in for four, out for six, with his chest rising under her cheek, and the pain, which had been a wall, became a wave, and then a tide. The room swam. The light was green. And in that quiet, clear, drowning moment, she thought: I'm not in love with him.

That's not what this is.

I don't know what this is.

But I know I'd rather be here than anywhere else on earth.

…

At four-twelve a nurse said "Hm."

It was a soft, neutral, professional sound. She was a small dark woman named Rosalie, with the gold tooth, and she was standing at the foot of the bed with her eyes on the monitor, and the sound she made was the sound of a woman who has just seen a number she does not like.

"Hm?" said Dess.

"Nothing, sweetheart."

"What is it?"

"Just a little dip." Rosalie smiled. It was not a convincing smile. "Baby's heart rate. It's decelerating with the contractions. I'm going to get the doctor."

Dess looked at the monitor.

It was a line. It was green on black, and it went along in a series of regular hills, and beneath it a second line went up and down in rhythm with her pain. She had been looking at it for nine hours. She knew its language. She had seen every rise and dip. And she saw now what Rosalie had seen: a long slow trough, like a valley, where the line fell and fell, and fell, and took an age to climb back.

"Theron."

"Yes."

"That's wrong."

"I do not know how to read it."

"I do." She had pushed herself up on her elbows. "That's a late deceleration. That's— the baby's not getting enough—" She stopped. Her voice cracked. "Oh God."

"Dess—"

"The pressure. Check the pressure."

The cuff on her arm inflated with a long electronic groan. It held. It let go. The screen above her bed flashed three numbers in red.

168 / 112.

"Okay," said Pratt, from the door. She had come in fast. She was pulling on gloves. Her voice was very calm, the voice of a woman who has delivered three thousand babies and lost none, and who is not about to begin. "Dess. I need you to listen to me. Your pressure's up, and the baby's not tolerating the contractions. I've been hoping we could avoid this. But I think it's time."

"Time for what?"

"A cesarean. Now. Within the half hour."

The room did a slow, tilting somersault.

"No," said Dess.

"I know."

"No, I— I wanted to— I wrote a birth plan. I wanted to push. I did the class."

"I know you did." Pratt's hand closed on her wrist, warm and dry. "It's a good plan. It's a lovely plan. And it doesn't have a thing wrong with it, except that your baby's heart rate is telling me he'd like to come out now." Her voice softened. "He'll be fine. You'll be fine. I've done it two thousand times. But I need to do it now, and I need you with me."

Seizure, said a small cold voice. Magnesium. Preeclampsia. A baby who would fit in a hand.

"Is it—" She tried again. "Is he—"

"He's okay. He's got a good heartbeat. He's just tired." Pratt nodded to the nurse. "Rosalie, get anesthesia. Page Adeyemi. Call the OR." She turned back. "Dess. I'm going to tell you what happens. Then you tell me yes. Okay?"

"Okay."

"We take you to the OR. They give you a spinal. You'll be awake. You won't feel pain. You'll feel pressure. It'll take about ten minutes to get him out, and another forty to close. One person can be with you, at your head, behind the drape. Who do you want?"

"Joelle," said Dess, at once.

Then she stopped.

She looked across the bed.

He was standing at the rail with both hands wrapped around it. He was white as paper. His wet hair stuck up in tufts; his eyes were enormous, and fixed, and the rail was rattling very slightly in his grip. He had not said a word. He had not moved. He stood there like a man in a gale, bracing for a wave, and the line of his mouth said everything that he did not.

I won't ask, said the line of his mouth. I won't ask, and I won't beg, and I won't claim a single thing. Whatever you say.

"Joelle's a nurse," Dess said slowly. "She'd know what everything meant. She'd tell me what was going on. She'd be useful." She drew a breath. "But I think— I think I need somebody who doesn't know anything."

"Dess—"

"I need somebody who'll be scared with me. Not for me. With me." Her eyes were on his face. "Theron. Do you want to be in the room?"

He did not answer.

He didn't seem able. His lips moved. No sound came out. He stood, gripping the rail, and the muscles of his throat worked.

"Is that a yes?" said Dess.

"Yes," said Theron.

It was barely audible.

"Say it again."

"Yes."

"Twice," said Dess, and began, quite helplessly, to laugh. "That's twice. Pratt, put it on the form. Emergency contact, birth partner. He's the one who runs."

…

The operating room was cold and white and bright as the inside of a refrigerator.

She lay on the table with her arms out to the sides, like a woman being crucified, and a screen of green cloth hung in front of her face. Around her moved a ring of masked figures in blue. She had been given the spinal. It had gone in at the base of her back with a pinch and a cold spreading ache, and within minutes her legs had gone. Her belly was gone. She was a head and a pair of shoulders, floating on a table, in a sea of light.

A chair had been placed at her head.

He was in it.

They had dressed him in scrubs, green ones, with a paper cap and a mask, and in the bright light he looked at once absurd and heartbreaking: a very tall man folded onto a stool beside the head of an operating table, with his eyes huge above the mask and his hands in his lap. His left hand was trembling. She could see it. She could see it from the pillow, a small fast flutter, like a moth's wing against glass.

"Theron."

"Yes?"

"Give me your hand."

"May I?"

"Don't ask. Just give it."

He gave it.

She took it in both of hers. She laid it against her chest, over her sternum, where the hospital gown was damp, and pressed it flat. The tremor stopped. She felt it go. She felt his fingers go still and warm under her palm, and the thud of her own heart, going fast, going hard, under the back of his hand.

"There," she said. "Now we're both fine."

"We are not fine."

"No. But we're holding."

"Yes." His voice came muffled through the mask. "We are certainly holding."

"Ms. Rourke?" said a voice at her feet. "Dr. Pratt. We're going to start. You'll feel some tugging. It's normal. If you feel pain, tell me."

"Okay."

"Ready?"

"No."

"Good answer."

She turned her face toward the man on the stool. She looked at the green mask. At the paper cap, askew over his dark hair. At the eyes, gray, huge, rimmed with red, fixed on her face like a man looking at a lighthouse.

"Theron."

"Yes?"

"Tell me something."

"What?"

"Anything. A story. Talk. I can't— I can't think. Tell me about Kit."

His eyes widened above the mask.

"Kit?"

"Tell me something he did. Something small. Not the boat. Something stupid." She tried to smile. "Make me laugh."

He thought.

It took him several seconds. She felt, on the back of his hand, the slow warm thud of his pulse. Behind the drape, something pulled. She felt the movement through the table. A cold, wet, tugging pressure under her ribs, not painful, merely enormous, as of a large animal turning over beneath a blanket.

"When he was eleven," said Theron, "he made me a mug."

"The uncle one."

"Yes. He made it in a pottery class. It was meant to be a birthday present. He wrote on it with a glaze pen. He had meant it to say World's Best Brother." His voice caught, steadied, went on. "He ran out of room. He had written WORLD'S and OKAY— and then the handle got in the way, and he said, 'Oh, bother,' and finished it with the only word that fit."

"Okayest."

"He was very proud. He presented it at dinner. My father looked at it for a long time. He said, 'Christopher, that is a spelling error.' And Kit said, 'No sir, it is a judgment.'"

She laughed.

It hurt. It shook her, under the cloth, in the white glare, and she heard behind the drape Pratt's voice say, "Hold still, Dess, I've got a lot of stuff in here," and she laughed harder, helplessly, with tears running sideways into her ears.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

"It's the most— it's the funniest—"

"I know."

"He called it a judgment."

"Yes. He did."

"And you—" She gasped. "You never told me that."

"I never told anyone. I didn't think it was funny." He was looking at her. His eyes were bright. They were swimming. "I thought it was an insult. For fifteen years I thought it was an insult. It was a gift. It was the whole of him, in a sentence. Okayest. And I—"

"Ms. Rourke," said Pratt. "Dess. Here he comes."

…

She would never be able to say what she heard first.

It was not a cry. Not at first. It was a sort of wet, rending, sucking sound, like a boot being drawn from deep mud, and then a pause. A terrible pause. A long, vast, silent, hollow pause in which the bright white room hung suspended and nobody breathed and she thought, with perfect clarity and no feeling at all: this is the moment. This is where it goes wrong.

I'm going to look at the clock. I'm going to remember the time.

She turned her head.

The clock on the wall of the operating room was a white disc with a red second hand. It said 5:11 and some seconds. The red hand swept. It was slow. It went round like a thing underwater.

Come on, she thought.

Come on, come on, come on.

"Come on, little fellow," said Theron.

It was barely a whisper. He had said it into the mask, into the air, into the chill, in a voice she had heard once before, on a sofa, in the dark. His hand was crushing hers. His whole body was rigid on the stool. And he was not looking at the drape; he was looking at the clock, the same clock, with the same white-faced concentration, as though the two of them were a pair of sailors watching the same patch of horizon for the same sail.

Five-twelve.

And then the room split open.

It was a cry. It was a thin, furious, outraged, ragged cry, rising and rising, a sound like a rusty gate, a sound like an alarm, a sound like a trumpet blown by someone who has never held a trumpet and is determined to learn. It rose to a shriek. It broke. It took a vast gulp of air and rose again. And behind the cloth, a voice said, in great and rising joy:

"He's here! He's here! It's a boy! Seven-oh-two! Look at those lungs!"

Dess closed her eyes.

She did not know she was crying until the tears reached her mouth. They were hot and salt and endless. They ran sideways into her hair. She lay on the table with her eyes shut and her arms out, and she thought nothing, nothing at all, in a great white spreading peace, while the cry went on, and on, and on, and a hand that was holding hers shook, and shook, and then, with a sound she would hear in her sleep for thirty years, broke.

She opened her eyes.

Theron was bent double on the stool.

He had pulled the mask down, with his free hand. His face was naked in the white glare. It was a face she had never seen, and it was one she would know anywhere: wet, open, disordered, undone from the forehead to the chin, mouth wide, eyes screwed shut, with tears running in a steady stream down both cheeks and falling onto the green paper gown. He was making no sound at all. His whole body shook. His shoulders heaved. He was crying the way a child cries who has been lost for a very long time and has just heard his name.

"Theron," she said.

He could not answer.

"Theron. Look."

A nurse in blue had come around the screen. She was a stout woman with a round kind face, and she held, in both hands, wrapped in a white towel, with a tiny knitted hat on his head, a gray-blue hat with a long left earflap, which someone had put on him in the last half-minute, and which was, already, falling off, a small furious red-purple thing with a wizened face and a thatch of black hair and a mouth wide open in a howl.

"Here he is," said the nurse. "Here's your boy. Would Dad like to—"

"I'm not—" said Theron.

"Dad?"

"I am his—" He stopped.

He looked at Dess.

It was not a question. It was something larger. It was a look of such total, naked, unguarded supplication that she felt it in her chest like a hand. Tell me what I am, it said. I will be whatever you say.

She looked at the baby.

She looked at the red crumpled face, the open mouth, the small clenched fists beating the air like a man hailing a taxi. She looked at the hat. She looked at the left foot, which had come out of the towel and was kicking, with remarkable force, in the general direction of the ceiling.

"He's yours," said Dess.

She meant it in all the ways. She meant it, and she knew that she meant it, and it was a thing that she could not take back, and she did not want to.

"He's yours to hold," she said. "For now. Take him."

"Dess—"

"Take him, Theron. Twice. That's twice. Take him."

He took him.