Though Brian’s presence at the birth was crucial, there was no way to communicate this mandate to the baby. The baby, however, seemed to understand and went about being born in a way that facilitated not only Brian’s speedy return home, but also some calm pre-birth time together.
My contractions began on a Wednesday morning, while Brian was in New York. They were steady and strong; when I called to tell my OB, he said that labor had begun. I called Brian, he rushed to the airport, caught the first flight. And then, while Brian was over Nebraska, his soul-mule snapped to attention, willing the plane to go faster, my labor stopped. Not tapered off or slowed down. It stopped.
When Brian landed and called from the airport, frantic, I told him to take his time driving home. When he arrived the baby in the belly and I were watching Seinfeld and eating sour cream and onion Kettle chips. We all slept well through the night. The next day we made breakfast for Gracie; Brian wrote for a few hours in the morning. I checked my bag for the hospital, double-checked our checklists and birth plan. Brian triple-checked the cord blood box. My mom came over and took Gracie to the park. Still nothing: no contractions, no labor.
Brian and I decided to run to the local indie book store, Book Passage, where we liked to lurk. On the way there mild contractions started again; I insisted we push on.
“We’ll never go to the bookstore alone together again,” I said. “This is our last hurrah.”
We browsed the new fiction section side by side. Between looking at books, I would freeze with a contraction, gaze into the middle distance, and then straighten up and go back to browsing.
“Heather,” Brian said, after I dismissed his first few suggestions that we go, “great idea! We’re leaving now!”
I thought of my little skirmish, oh so long ago, with the ambulance driver who’d wanted me to ride in front with him, rather than in back with Gracie, and how I’d tried to make my refusal sound like an acceptance of an offer he’d made. I was pretty sure Brian was using my own tactics on me.
We drove to the hospital. After I was admitted we were left alone in a room together. I wasn’t hurting too badly yet. We put our foreheads together, saying nothing. We breathed the same small cup of air, waiting.
People began to arrive. My mom. Suzi and David (with an inflatable tub in which I hoped to labor). Cassie. My dad and his wife. Our spell was broken. Real labor began. Hours went by during which I shouted, every thirty seconds or so, “Where’s the fucking tub?” Dawa—dear friend, ever the man for any job, the world’s best fixer, a guy who once located and rented a live donkey for our college play with only four hours’ notice, a guy who, in essence, could do anything—could not fill the tub. It was unfillable because, as he later put it, “the water pressure was for shit.” It took three hours to achieve ankle depth, and by then the water was stone cold. But David was a paragon of optimism. Every time I asked, he would shout back, “Tub is filling, Harpo!”
I stopped caring about the tub. I wanted drugs. Any drug, up to and including whippets or roofies or polluted street crack, but I was in too much pain to ask. And I’d told my people not to offer me drugs, so no one did. Which was a crying shame.
“I can’t do it,” I told an orderly wandering by with linens. To Brian and my mom and David and Suzi and Cassie, I repeated my new mantra, “I can’t do this!” And they nodded pseudosympathetically. “I’m not kidding,” I said. “I can’t do this!”
On TV babies are born so fast. And Gracie, my sole experience to date, had been born just twenty minutes after we arrived at the hospital. This baby was taking hours; I was out of oomph. I’d never have oomph again. I’d be laboring in the pre-push stage, until this hospital fell down around me.
Brian said, “You can do this.”
And then, presto, a baby boy, seven pounds seven ounces. Huge lips; he looked like Mick Jagger. And he was pink, so pink. He must be healthy, I thought, to be so pink. Inside his body every red cell must be holding together; veins thick with beautiful, fat, blessedly stable red cells.
Moments after his birth, the doctor inserted a long needle straight into the umbilical cord and pulled a stream of crimson stem cells up into the syringe. If our boy matched our girl, these cells would save her life.
Brian squeezed my hand and said, “They got it, they got it all.” The two of us, more than anyone else in the room, knew how much this mattered. It wasn’t only a match that we needed; it was volume. The more cord blood you had, the better your chances at a successful transplant.
Finally, everyone left us alone, the three of us. Me and Brian and our huge-lipped, pink-skinned son.
No one came by at 2 a.m. to say the words blood, brain, barrier, bilirubin, permanent, or damage. No one came by the next day with bad news, either. He was precisely what he looked like, a healthy beautiful boy. We named him Gabriel. Angel of annunciation, who arrived bearing the good news of himself.
18
The next day, in the late afternoon, Brian went to pick Gracie up from day care and brought her to the hospital to meet her brother. Even though we’d told her that there was a person in my stomach and read her every sibling book on the market, she’d remained unconvinced. She was twenty-two months old; her ability to conceptualize a person, in the absence of that person, was foggy at best. She’d parroted back our words, baby, brother, sister, yours, mine, but she had no idea what was in store.
When Brian brought her into the room, she ran to the bed. She seemed happy, surprised, and a little alarmed to find me lying down in the middle of the day. My mom had Gabriel out in the hall. Gracie climbed over the bed railing to snuggle with me. When she was settled, we told her that she had a brother. She said, “Where?” We smiled and called out to my mom who brought Gabriel in and put him in my arms. Gracie looked down at his face, looked back up at Brian and me, looked back down at Gabe. She picked up his hand; he was asleep and stayed asleep. She put her face down into his face and rubbed nose to nose, squishing; curiosity or dominance or a tincture of both.
“What do you think of your brother?” Brian asked.
“Soft boy,” she said, stroking his hand, more statement of fact than appreciation.
My mom cried. Brian cried. I cried. Gabriel slept. Gracie looked at us all with baffled amusement—what were we so worked up about?