Relief sweeps in and brings with it a rush of emotion of a different sort. Suddenly, I’m heartbroken, and I don’t even remember why. What have I missed? What’s happened?
“Nate, what’s happening? I’m scared.” Though my tears are hot, they leave icy tracks from my temples into my hair.
“Shhh.” His voice soothes. “Don’t be afraid. I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere. You have an epidural. That’s why you can’t feel your legs. Dr. Stephens is taking Grace because her cord has wrapped around her neck. You’ll both be fine. I promise. Don’t worry, baby,” he whispers, his lips at my ear.
When I look up at Nate, his upside down face only makes me feel further confused. Desperate to see him, desperate to see the familiar angles and planes of his face, I tilt my head until the image of him is mostly righted. Only then does the level of my alarm yield to the point where I can take a single deep, calming breath.
“Nate,” I say simply.
The sound of his name in the quiet room, the feel of it on my tongue…it’s everything. The moon and the stars, the sun and the wind.
My world.
He is my world.
“Don’t cry, baby,” he murmurs, his face blurring as he leans down to set his forehead against mine. “Don’t cry.”
I think I hear a catch in his voice, but I can’t be sure. The slowing beat of my heart is thudding in my ears, in my head, making the world around me tremble unsteadily.
“Don’t…don’t let them…” Nate’s face swims in front of my eyes. I try to blink to better focus, but the darkness, the silence is pulling me under.
“Lena, you can relax now,” a voice I recognize as Dr. Stephens’s hums. “In just a few minutes, you’ll be meeting your daughter. Rest. Just rest.”
I don’t want to rest. I want to see Nate, to hear him and feel him, but sleep is relentless in its pursuit of me. And I’m too weak to fight.
“I love you, Lena Grant,” is the last thing I hear before I drift off.
Nate.
********
Nate
I keep my eyes glued to my wife’s resting face as I listen to the foreign sounds of an operating room during an operation. Despite the questions and concerns chasing one another around in my head, seeing my precious Lena sleeping so quietly calms me.
It seems like she hasn’t rested well in a lifetime, even though I know it can’t have been that long. But it feels like it. It feels as though the days since her diagnosis have crept by like years, but also that they’ve flown by at the speed of light.
I want desperately to rewind the clock, back to a place in time where there was solid ground, firm footing. I long for the days when our biggest worry was where to spend Christmas and what color to paint the sunroom we added on to the rear of the house. Any time before today, before now.
Now is the beginning of the end. Even more than the diagnosis had, this feels like the beginning of the end.
Once Grace is born, everything will change. I can’t be sure how, but in my gut I know it will. Lena has fought to carry this baby. Will she give up now?
We’ve had a reprieve from following the progression of her disease. Will they find that she’s beyond time and treatment now?
I have no way of knowing the answers to those questions, but in the darkest part of my mind, I think I already know.
I’m so lost in thought, lost in the silky-soft texture of my wife’s hair that I’ve tuned out the goings on around me, but a sound, one single sound, brings me back. It’s a shock to my insides, one I wasn’t expecting.
It’s the cry of a baby.
My baby.
Our baby.
Every hair on my arms stands up at attention when I lean around the makeshift curtain and see the doctor place a slimy, squirmy little purple-red bundle into the towel-draped arms of a waiting nurse. The nurses turn away, but not before I catch a glimpse of the most beautiful profile I’ve ever seen.
Aside from my wife’s.
It’s Grace’s.
My child’s.
Now completely spellbound, I watch the back of the nurse. My eyes don’t leave her as she moves her arms, as she shifts this way and that, working on my daughter.
I watch and I wait, wait for the moment when I can see her again.
Suction slurps in the background. Voices ring alongside it, voices like Dr. Stephens as she asks for things like suture and staples and more light. A nurse’s as she responds. All the while, I don’t take my eyes off the place where the newest addition to my life is being held.
Then, as if she’s moving in slow motion, the nurse picks up Grace and turns with her, smiling as she makes her way to me. My heart pounds so briskly, I feel like it might rip through my chest like in Alien. The beat grows harder and louder with each step the nurse takes.
And then she’s passing me a small bundle.
With greedy hands, I reach for my baby. I take her into my arms, cradling her as I would cradle a wounded baby hummingbird. I feel as though I’m handling something so tiny and delicate. Something so precious that a deep breath could crush it into oblivion.
I stare down at the only skin visible from the tight folds of the blanket—a small, angelic face still pink from her gusty cries.