by Julia Kent
I just blink.
“I'm the head of Anterdec.”
Zero recognition.
“What do you guys do?”
I play it safe. “Real estate.”
“Gotcha.” Uncertainty makes his eyes shifty, until finally he looks at Amanda and says, “I don't know what to do next.”
Her hand flies to her throat, nervous and flittery. “Oh, Dad. I think you're doing it.”
“But I'm not doing anything.”
“You're here. That's more than you've done in decades.”
“Jesus, Mandy. I owe Pam one hell of a life debt. She raised you right.”
And then Leo's shoulders begin to shake, all pretense of holding it together draining away. His butt plunks down on his seat, the umbrella tilting slightly from the force. Head down, the bill of his hat covering his eyes, he rests weathered elbows on his knees and cradles his face. I'm sure he's crying.
Guys like this don't sob in public. I'm embarrassed for him.
Admire him a little, too.
The guy I thought I had to protect my wife from turns out to be more complex than I ever expected.
Maybe I'm the one who needs some lessons in all-or-nothing thinking.
Amanda's crying now, and gives me a look that says, What do I do now?
I shrug. I squeeze her hand. I look at Leo.
How the hell do I know?
Abruptly, he wipes his eyes with the backs of his hands and stands, red-rimmed irises the color of Amanda's own staring at her.
“Look, Mandy, I–I gotta go. Not to be rude or anything. I'm–I'm breaking patterns, you see? And right now, this is me making amends. Sorta. But I have to confess, I want a drink right now, real bad. Awful bad. And when I get like this, I have to go call my sponsor and talk it out. Do the work. So I need to leave. Not because I don't–I don't...” His voice cracks. “Not because I don't care, but because I do. I need to change, Mandy.”
“You have changed, Dad.” She stands and waddles over to him, taking his hand. He jerks, eyes going down to where their skin meets. “And I understand. This isn't the last time we'll see each other.”
“It's not?”
“Of course not.” She holds her arms out. “Can I have a hug?”
Leo pulls her in, hard. He whispers something I can't hear.
“Yes. Of course,” she says.
And then he lets her go and offers me his hand. I shake it.
And Leo Warrick turns abruptly on one heel, walking like a man with ghosts chasing him.
We walk slowly back to the car and climb in. Amanda lets out a huge sigh of relief, but her hands are on her knees, forearms pressing against her belly, head down, eyes wide.
“He didn't ask for money,” I comment as I turn on the car and the air conditioning kicks in. Amanda's turned toward the halfway house, staring at it.
“What?”
“I thought he would.”
She tilts her head. “I can see why. But he didn't. All he asked for was a chance to see the babies after they're born.”
“All,” I murmur.
Her voice is shaking now. I reach for her hand, the fragile shell of my wife needing me.
“He spent all those years not seeing me. And now all he wants is...”
All that my wife can do now is cry. And all that I can do is hold her.
Because all I can do is this:
I can give her my all.
Chapter 20
Amanda
I'm drinking my one and only daily breve when my back starts aching like crazy.
And for someone carrying fifty-eight pounds of extra weight around, back pain has to be bad to be worse than baseline.
“Ohhh,” I say, the little pity sigh leaking out, then turning into a longer, lower, deeper groan. Andrew's head pops up from the report he's reading on the couch, lounging in sweat pants and no shirt. I’ve told him his new reading glasses give him a hot-geek look, and he thinks that’s silly, but I find it incredibly arousing.
But not now.
“What's wrong?”
“I'm fine,” I start to say, but as I lean forward to start the arduous process of getting up out of a soft chair, all I can say is, “Fi–”
Followed by another “Ohhh.”
The frown he gives me makes his glasses slide slightly down his nose. He takes them off, stands, and offers me his hands to help me up. As I stretch, I roll my pelvis forward and realize I can't.
I can't move.
“My back,” I gasp.
“The doctor said this might happen. Back labor can be the start.”
“But I'm not supposed to labor at all! The c-section is scheduled for Thursday!”
“Maybe the boys decided Sunday is a better day to be born.”
“They need to listen to their mother!”
“They are. Just not the right mother. Mother Nature has entered the game and she has a different mission.”
I walk slowly to the kitchen, Andrew right behind me. I'm reaching for a water bottle when my hips turn into wrenches. Bones grind against each other as the contraction pulls on my swollen midsection with a fierceness that is nothing like the contractions that hit me nine weeks ago. I grip the edge of the counter.
All the air in the world is sucked away, my body unable to so much as blink.
And then I'm wet.
Andrew looks down at the ground, eyes widening. “That's–you're–your water broke!”
“I have to call Shannon,” I gasp as the grip on my womb lessens. I'm wearing light socks, now soaking wet around my ankles.
Giddy laughter chokes my throat.
“It's time,” I tell him, the look we share too poignant to describe. Then he starts texting as I pick up my phone and hit Shannon's number.
This is really happening.
“Hey,” she says, sounding bored. “Did you know that there is an actual, quantifiable number of times you can tolerate picking dropped cups off the floor from a toddler who’s discovering object permanence? It's 238, for the record.”
“My water just broke.”
“What?”
“My water just broke. I'm in labor.”
“You can't be! You're having a scheduled c-section.”
“Well, tell that to the twins, because they have other ideas.”
“Oh my GOD! DECLAN!” she screams. “Don’t leave yet! You have to stay home with Ellie till I can get a sitter here!”
“WHY?” he bellows back.
“AMANDA'S IN LABOR!”
She sounds like her mom.
“LABOR?” I hear him boom.
“I'll meet you at the hospital!” she gushes. “Maybe you'll have a vaginal birth after all!”
“Maybe?” I've become so resigned to the idea of the c-section that her comment makes adrenaline spike through me.
Or maybe I'm just dehydrated. The floor looks like Walden Pond right now.
Andrew's phone rings.
“What?” he snaps.
Declan's voice comes through, though I can't hear the words. A great whoosh of fluid pours out of me, and I freeze.
Cord prolapse. Cords and amniotic fluid. Random portions of childbirth class start flooding into my brain.
“We really need to go now,” I urge.
“José's pulling the car around. He already covered the backseat with plastic.”
“He did?”
“Last week. Just in case.”
“Wow. That's... thorough.”
“Suzanne's right behind you, so Gerald told José and it was on his mind.”
José's knock on the door makes us both look. The bag has been sitting by the door, ready just in case, but I never thought we'd reach in case.
Once we scheduled the c-section for Thursday, I thought that was it.
Thought we had four more days.
Shakes take over my body as I stand there. Andrew hands me a stack of kitchen towels and I hold them, staring dumbly.
“For between your legs,” he says.
“Is it any worse than having your breasts exposed at a wedding and falling into a pool to rescue a dog?” he quips.
“I guess we're about to find out.”
José takes in the scene as he comes into the kitchen, eyebrows shooting up as he watches me waddle/drip.
Waddle/drip.
Waddle–
“Stop!” he says firmly, running upstairs, emerging within seconds as Andrew thumbs toward the front door, my bag in hand. As my husband disappears, José rushes down the stairs, a bedsheet and stack of towels in hand.
He thrusts one big bath towel into my hands. “Here. Put it between your legs.” Then he takes the sheet and twists it, as if he's going to tie it to a joist and escape out a window. He places it on the floor between my legs.
Andrew returns and halts dead in his tracks. “José? What are you doing?”
“Andrew. Take that end.” He points behind me. “Amanda, hold the towel up between your thighs. All the way up.” One end of the sheet in his hand, he juts his chin at Andrew. “We're making a toga.”
“A toga?” Andrew asks incredulously. “What are you talking about?”
“It's genius!” I gasp. José's fixing my problem.
“How did you know what to do?” I ask.
Kind, dark eyes meet mine. “My sister had a baby six months ago. And Gerald warned me.”
Within ten seconds, I have the ends of the sheet tied over one shoulder, the thick towel absorbing my amniotic fluid, and we slowly make our way to the car. Halfway down the porch stairs, my back starts to crack my hips in half.
Andrew pulls out his phone, presses on the glass, and suddenly, “Love Will Find a Way” by Yes starts playing. I close my eyes, breathe slowly, and let my mind take me to a quieter place, turning inward until the pressure eases.
We climb in the back of the car, my ass jutting up because of the weird toga-diaper thing I've got going on, but at least I'm not in pain.
“My sister says that hypnosis stuff doesn't work,” I hear José mutter to Andrew.
I don't say a word, my hands on my belly, doing an inventory of the boys. Lefty eases to the right just enough to confirm he's fine, but Righty is being awfully quiet. I can't find his head, the location different now.
Maybe he's not transverse anymore.
Maybe I don't need the surgical birth.
Instantly, panic fills me. I didn't think I had a choice. But the idea of possibly being able to deliver vaginally fills me with diffuse terror.
“What's wrong?” Andrew whispers, hand on my knee. I can tell he doesn't know what to do with himself as José navigates the car quickly on the back roads, hitting the entrance to the Pike with a professional precision that infuses me with gratitude.
“I'm not sure I want a vaginal delivery.”
“Why would you have one?”
“Righty's head isn't where it was last night. Maybe we can do both twins vaginally after all. I spent a lot of emotional energy accepting a c-section, and now...” I make a helpless sound, hearing it echo in my ears, down my throat, nestling under my heart like a cold, scared mouse.
“Here.” He hands me a stainless steel water bottle and I take a sip. It's honey ginger water, with a touch of lemon. Ice cold, too.
“You made this for me?”
“I've had a few in the fridge, ready for this. You said you didn't want to puke orange Gatorade all over the place and never be able to touch it again, so I followed Hope's electrolyte solution.”
The concoction is perfect, like drinking in Andrew's love.
And not the kind with a high protein count.
I sit up slowly, back muscles pulling in toward my spine, my hips cranking in as if someone's turning a gear. The tightness makes it hard to breathe, the band of pressure pulling my pubic bone up, down, in, out, everywhere at once. The deep, searing stretch and contraction is something I have to ride through.
We hit a pothole and I feel like my nerves turn into fireworks.
“Andrew,” I gasp, losing control. “I can't. I can't I can't I can't–”
Strong hands go immediately to my hips. He twists his torso to accommodate me, eyes within inches of mine, laser focused and intent.
“Breathe,” he says, counting a long inhale. “Expand your belly as you inhale.”
“I can't!”
“You are.”
The confidence in his deep baritone unlatches some of the stubborn muscle fibers encasing the babies and I feel a lurch, a softening, a smidgen of relief as I exhale, then push through the tightness for another long, slow inhale.
“You are. You are. You are,” he says, low and slow, the words turning into a vibration that takes my fear to a place where it can flitter and fret but doesn't get in the way of the rescue I need.
And then the pain recedes, slowly replaced with a brisk tingling that saps all my energy.
“Seven minutes away,” José announces as Andrew lets go of my hips, unclicks his seat belt, and positions himself better in front of me.
“That's not safe if we get in an accident.”
“José's good and I need to be able to get to your hips better.”
“I'm fine, Andrew. The contractions aren't that close.”
“That was four minutes, and it lasted almost a minute.”
Pregnancy math happens fast in my head. “Uh....”
“Drink,” he orders. As I tip the bottle up and take my first swallow, the twinge at my back grows again.
“Oh,” I gasp.
He takes the heels of his hands, finds the spots on my hips where Hope taught the partners to push in case of back labor, and works with precision to do whatever it takes to make the contraction easier for me. This one fades faster.
This one feels like a giant red alert.
“That was four minutes,” he says calmly. “Hydrate. Breathe. We're doing fine.”
Bzzzzzz
My phone.
I'm here at the hospital, Shannon texts. What entrance are you coming in? I'll meet you there.
Bzzzzzz
Hi Amanda. This is Alex Derjian. I'm the doctor on call this weekend. I'll meet you at the hospital.
“Oh, no!” I groan.
“What's wrong?”
“I can’t believe this!”
“You're giving birth?”
“No. Not that. The doctor is the one doctor in the practice who I haven't met. Alex Derjian.”
“Why is that name so familiar?”
“Isn’t he the guy who coached Declan on how to catch the baby when Shannon went into labor in the elevator?”
“Dec is going to rib me for copying him.”
“It wasn't like we planned this! Dr. Rohrlian was supposed to do the c-section on Thursday!”
José pulls the car up to the ER entrance. I see Shannon there, hair in a ponytail, a backpack slung over one shoulder.
She lights up when she sees us.
My heart hugs her from a distance.
Having a bestie is the best in a crisis.
Especially a BFF who's already been through childbirth, even if it was in a broken elevator and involved turning her vajayjay into a possible Pulitzer Prize opportunity for the right photographer.
Rushing the SUV, she opens my door and offers a hand. I'm mid-step when my lower belly tightens and it feels like someone's stabbing my cervix from the inside out.
I freeze.
I can't move.
Behind me, I feel Andrew's arms lock in place, his body rigid to support mine. Shannon puts her hand on my hip. I groan.
“Contraction?” she asks.
“Uh,” is all that comes out of me.
Suspended in midair, I can't even move the few inches to set my foot on the ground, the sensation of being a thousand pieces of glass held together by a spiderweb too much. One millimeter and I'm in bone-grinding pain.
So I wait between two realities, car and ground, until enou
gh time passes and I can let gravity continue to do its job.
“Wow,” Shannon finally says, fishing around in her backpack. “Let's get you inside. That was a full minute long. How far apart are they?”
“Two to four minutes.”
Time changes, as if someone snaps their fingers and I experience everything in extended time. The pain itself doesn't intensify, but it elongates, stretched out and settling in.
The check in. The nurse pointing. Andrew's hand on my back. Shannon's worried face. It's all there, but as backdrop for my own heart beat. The brush of the ball of my foot against linoleum. My refusal to ride in a wheelchair. The pressure of my cervix expanding.
The march of inevitability.
We're in an exam room when a long, low contraction hits, hard and grinding. Shannon sees it before Andrew does and moves my hands to the wall, palms flat, pressure suddenly on my sacrum. Andrew's hands go to my hips, but the sweet relief from his strength isn't enough to combat nature.
These babies are coming.
But everything I see and hear, aside from pain, is so slow. So full. Gravity works on my body but my mind floats. Mouths move, words come out of people with eyes on mine, machines are deployed, measurements are charted.
None of it makes sense.
Andrew speaks for me, with me, translating.
“Transverse,” I hear.
Still transverse.
“C-section,” he says, bending down, looking up at me with love and a kind of deep, aching empathy that makes my lungs fill with as much of his air as I can.
“Okay,” I reply.
Because it is.
And it will be.
A water bottle with a straw is thrust before me and I sip, grateful. Nurses come and go, then a man bigger than Andrew comes in.
No small feat, that.
He's in scrubs, with the matching green cap on his head, and carries himself with an affable competence that makes me want to be held by him. Tall and broad, he has the body of an athlete, the groundedness of a guy you want to spend time with. Friendly eyes take me in as he thrusts his hand to me, then jerks when he sees Shannon.
“Shannon?”
“Dr. Derjian?”
I'm shaking his strong hand as he turns to her, but he corrects himself, eyes on mine. “Amanda. I'm Alex Derjian. And very shortly, you get to meet your sons.”
“I–”