“If you ladies are done arguing, I think she needs to lie down,” Gallagher growled.
“I’m fine,” I insisted. Then I hissed my way through another contraction. “Gallagher, I need a favor.”
“Anything.” He looked desperate for some responsibility that would make him a participant rather than a helpless observer.
“In a couple of hours, I’m probably going to ask you to knock me out. I want you to promise to take me seriously. Just one good tap on the head. I want to wake up with my baby in my arms, with no memory of how she got there.”
His scowl was like a bolt of thunder. “You know I will not do that.”
I shrugged as I headed for the bed. “It was worth a shot.”
“I’ve read that it’s not that bad,” Lenore said as she helped me into place.
Zyanya snorted as she gently pushed me forward by my shoulder, to make room for pillows at my back. “It’s hell. But on the bright side, the memory of the pain fades much faster than the memory of the baby.”
She seemed to realize what she’d said just a moment too late.
“Of course, no one’s going to take your baby. Delilah, I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.”
“Zy.” I grabbed her hand and held on when she tried to back away, pain written in every crease on her forehead. “We’re going to get your kids back. As soon as I’m able to travel. Please believe me. They’re the top priority.”
She nodded. “I believe you.” But her eyes held very little hope.
“Thank you for being here.” I closed my eyes as another contraction hit, harder than the last time. My stomach seemed to tighten beneath my hands, and pain wrapped around me like nothing I’d ever felt before. “I have no idea what I’m doing, Zy. None of us do. You’re the only one here with any experience.”
“How long will Delilah be in pain?” Gallagher demanded, as if to underline my point. The fact that he couldn’t save me from labor seemed to be killing him.
Lenore climbed onto the other side of the bed and opened the home-birth book we’d all been reading. “According to this, first-time labor averages between twelve and eighteen hours.”
I groaned, though I’d already known that.
“I don’t think yours will last that long,” Zyanya said. “Your contractions seem like they’re already getting closer together.”
“They’re eight minutes apart.” Lenore showed her my phone screen, where she’d been timing since we got back to the cabin. “The book says she’s not supposed to push until they’re two to three minutes apart and she’s fully dilated.”
Zyanya scowled at her. “You don’t need a phone to have a baby. You don’t even need a book.”
“I know.” I carefully swung my legs off the bed, hoping that a change in position would help the vicious ache in my back. “But those of us who’ve never done this take a certain amount of comfort from the books. From knowing what’s coming.”
“But you can never know what’s coming. Unless you’re an oracle.” Zyanya sat on the bed to watch me pace, but Gallagher kept step with me, hovering, as if he were afraid I might fall. “Each labor is different, even for women who’ve given birth several times,” Zy continued. “What you need is a way to pass the time.”
“That’s easy enough.” Lenore closed the book and set it on the nightstand, and I was pretty sure that was when Zyanya decided to let her live. “Delilah has a lot to tell everyone.”
“I’ll just tell Zy for now, and she can fill everyone else in.” As the next contraction began, I sucked in another sharp breath and bent over with my hands on my knees. “You three...are the only...people...I...want in here.”
So over the next couple of hours, between contractions and cervical checks, I recounted what we’d learned during our trip to the land of free Wi-Fi.
By the time I’d told her everything, I was exhausted and in excruciating pain, and my mouth was noticeably dry. “Gallagher, could you get me a glass of water?”
“No, you can’t eat or drink anything in labor!” Lenore zipped in front of him and blocked the bedroom door with a form less than half his size.
I groaned. “That’s in case I need a caesarean.” I’d read the damn book. I knew as much as she did. “If I need surgery, we’re screwed either way. Bring me some water. Please,” I added when they all looked at me as if I were about to projectile-vomit split-pea soup.
For once, Zyanya agreed with Lenore. “If you start feeling nauseated, you’ll be glad you don’t have a full belly.”
“I’m not going to be glad about anything else until this baby is born. Why didn’t we bring back a bag of ice from Sonic?”
While I grumbled, Lenore took Gallagher aside and whispered something to him. He disappeared into the main room, and a minute later I heard a loud pounding. But before I could make much sense of it, I was breathing through another excruciating contraction. When it was over, Gallagher appeared at my side with a plastic cup full of ice he’d pulverized for me himself, with a plastic bag and a meat mallet.
“Thank you.” I pulled him down and planted a kiss on his scruffy cheek, and he froze. Then he smiled.
“Please tell me what else I can do. If I could bear this burden for you, I would.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but I kind of hate you right now.” I shoved a large sliver of ice into my mouth and sucked on it for a moment. “The best thing you can do is stay the hell out of my way until I need you.”
Gallagher laughed and dropped a kiss on my forehead. “You sound fierce today. Like a true warrior.” His voice was full of pride, and it made me feel oddly warm inside. Until the next contraction began, and my world spiraled into nothing but a single focal point of agony, with everything else fading into the background.
“Why do people do this?” I demanded as the pain began to fade. Though this time, rather than disappearing, it seemed to settle into my lower back and apply for permanent residence. “You’d think that in a time when we can talk to people all over the world on a device smaller than my hand, someone would have invented a better way to bring new people into the world. This is ridiculous. Archaic.”
Gallagher chuckled, and I fixed him with an ice-cold glare. “If you laugh at me again, I swear I’m going to rip open one of your parts so you can share in this beautiful fucking moment.”
His grin only broadened. “If I thought that would help, I would do the damage myself.” He brushed sweaty hair back from my forehead. “You are beautiful. You are powerful. Any child that comes from so heroic an effort is destined for great things.”
“Fine.” I glared up at him. “You get a pass. But only because your stupid, formal fear dearg dialect makes this sound much nicer than it must actually look.”
Around the time the pains started coming in five-minute intervals, someone knocked on the door. Gallagher opened it, and Miri, Lala and Genni came in, each carrying a stack of clean white cloths.
I didn’t want to see anyone. But they clearly came bearing gifts, and my pain wasn’t their fault. So I pulled the sheet up to my waist and put on a friendly face.
“What’s this? You did laundry?” We’d bought a bunch of cheap cloth diapers a month ago, because I knew we’d never be able to afford disposables, and I’d been meaning to wash and dry them.
“Not exactly.” Miri set her stack on the dresser, then lifted one from the top and brought it closer for me to see. “They’re a gift, from all of us. Lenore brought us the pattern, last time she went to town. We’ve been sewing all week, after you went to bed. By hand, obviously.” Because we didn’t have a sewing machine.
She handed me the diaper, and I could see that it had been cut into a new shape and sewn with Velcro closures.
“No safety pins necessary,” Lenore said. “It turns out there’s a raging debate online about the best kind of cloth diaper. It also turns out we couldn’t affor
d any of them. So we made what we could afford. The Velcro was a splurge.”
“You guys!” I held the diaper up, and it blurred beneath my tears.
“You have to use a waterproof cover over these, and we got you a few of those, too,” Lala said. “And we cut and sewed some extra washable padding to go in the diapers, in case your baby has a really big bladder.” She glanced at Gallagher with a grin. “And let’s face it, there’s every chance in the world that this little guy has a big everything.”
I groaned. “Including a big head.”
“Sugar and spice,” Rommily called out from the front room, where she was pacing with her eyes closed. She’d been doing that for hours every day, since we’d buried Eryx.
“What does that mean?” Zyanya asked.
“I think she’s telling us the baby is a girl.” I squeezed my eyes shut, grinding my jaw as the next contraction gripped me like the fist of a giant, somehow squeezing from the inside. The pain was so bad that it hardly seemed real. Yet it felt very, very real. So real that nothing else existed in that minute and a half. Not the women staring at me from the doorway. Not Lenore, frantically scanning the birth book for something that might help. Not Gallagher, watching helplessly from the chair he’d dragged next to the bed.
Nothing existed in those brutal moments but me and the pain.
And from that moment on, I hated everyone else in the room. Everyone in the cabin. I hated everyone who could still stand upright or see their own feet. Everyone who wasn’t worried about soiling the bed with more than amniotic fluid. Everyone who would get to hold the baby and coo over her, after doing nothing more than standing there, watching.
I knew that wasn’t fair. They weren’t at fault. But the pain wouldn’t stop, and I couldn’t think straight.
“Zy.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her closer, my grip like iron. “Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean? What do you feel?”
“Ache. Pressure. My back feels like something’s riding my lower spine like train tracks, up and down. Spasming.”
She pried her hand from my grip and gestured for Gallagher to shoo everyone else out of the room. When the door clicked closed, Zyanya peeled back the sheet and lowered herself to take a look. “Okay.” Her head popped back up into my line of sight, over my belly. “It’s time to have a baby.”
“Does that mean nothing’s wrong?”
“That means that if something’s wrong, we won’t know until we see the baby.” She turned to Lenore. “Go sterilize a pair of scissors, for the cord. And get something clean to wrap the baby in. Our softest towel. Or an old shirt.”
“Delilah.” Gallagher took my hand, his features at war between fear and excitement. “We’re about to become parents!”
“Believe it or not, that has not escaped my notice,” I snapped. But his smile didn’t waver.
The next few minutes passed in a pain-filled fog of instructions and a flurry of activity around me. I lifted my hips so the pads beneath me could be changed and Lenore came in with clean towels and cloths for cleaning and wrapping the baby, which she layered on the other half of the bed. But I saw it all in my peripheral vision, my head laid back on the pillows so that only the ceiling was in clear view. And even that seemed to whoosh in and out of focus with my racing pulse.
“Okay, Delilah, it’s time to push,” Zyanya said, one hand on my stomach, so she could feel the strength of my contraction. But I hardly heard her.
“Delilah.” Gallagher slid one hand beneath my neck and helped me sit up. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked Zyanya, his deep voice thick with concern.
“She’s exhausted. Delilah!” Zyanya snapped her fingers in front of my face. “The baby needs you! Push!”
So I pushed. I felt something tear, and fire seemed to lick the wound. I screamed, and Gallagher’s hand tightened around mine.
“Is she okay?” he demanded.
Zyanya ignored him. “One more time, Delilah. Her head’s right there. One more time.”
“I don’t want to do this anymore.” I hated myself for saying it, but it was true. I hadn’t asked for this.
“Delilah.” Zyanya put one hand on my knee and looked right into my eyes. “We don’t always get to make our own choices. It doesn’t matter how you got here. That part never matters, once you’re here. This isn’t about you anymore. This is about the baby. Bring her into this world so you can stop being pregnant and start being a mother.”
With a groan, I propped myself upright again and bore down, my jaw clenched so hard I heard the bones groan from inside my own head. The pain was excruciating. I felt like I was on fire.
Then, all at once, relief. I felt her slide into the world, and the next thing I knew, I was bawling.
Zyanya handed the baby to Gallagher, who suddenly had a clean towel in his hands, and I don’t remember what happened to me after that. All I remember is the baby.
No matter how big she’d felt inside me, she looked tiny in his hands. Red, and little, and beautiful.
He stood there, frozen, staring down at this little bundle of life as if he’d never truly seen anything good before. As if he’d been wandering around in the dark for his entire existence, and suddenly someone had flipped a switch and shown him how brilliant the world could be.
She was that light. Our daughter. But she was so still. So quiet.
“Here.” Lenore tossed the birthing book onto the nightstand and folded the edge of the towel over the baby, while she lay there in Gallagher’s hands. She began to clean our daughter with soft, circular strokes, and the baby started to squirm. Then she sucked in a breath.
And started screaming.
Suddenly she was furious at the world, little red fists waving. Tiny pink feet kicking.
“Does that mean she’s okay? And that she’s a she?” I asked, choking back a sob.
“She looks good to me,” Lenore said, carefully rubbing around the still attached umbilical cord. “And definitely a she.” She began to rub the top corner of the towel gently over the baby’s head, and Gallagher just watched. He seemed too stunned for words.
I knew exactly how he felt. Knowing that a baby was coming was entirely different than finally seeing the baby.
“Let me hold her. Please.”
“Just a minute.” Zyanya set a bowl on the floor, and I made a conscious decision not to look into it when I noticed that the umbilical cord trailing from my daughter ended in the bowl. “Lift.” She made a rising gesture with both hands, and I lifted my hips to oblige, trying to ignore the sharp ache down below.
While Gallagher held the baby, Zy and Lenore quickly changed the padding beneath me and helped me into some special postbirth underwear. Then Lenore pulled the sheet up over my strangely deflated stomach and helped me sit up against the pillows. Zyanya draped a clean, soft towel over the crook of my arm. Then she grinned up at Gallagher and took the screaming baby from his hands, careful to support her head.
She laid my daughter in the crook of my arm, then folded the towel snugly over her.
“Oh my God.” I stared down at her face, and she immediately began to quiet. Her little eyes were squeezed shut, her tiny red mouth pursed in a sucking motion. “Gallagher, look at her!”
“I can’t see anything else in the world right now,” he whispered.
“Have a seat, Papa.” Zyanya pushed a chair up next to the bed, and he sat, as close as he could get to both of us without climbing onto the bed.
While we stared at our child, Zyanya leaned over us with a string, which she used to tie off the umbilical cord. Then she offered Gallagher the scissors. “Lenore tells me it’s a human tradition to let the father cut the cord. To make him feel as if he’s contributed something to the effort.”
I laughed. He scowled at her, but took the scissors and played his part, noting beneath his breath that he was not, in
fact, human.
Our daughter, however, looked completely human.
“Where will she get a hat?” I asked, suddenly worried when I realized I could see her pulse beating on top of her head, beneath a thin, short cap of straight, dark hair. “And how soon will she need blood?”
“We don’t know yet that she will—she’s your daughter as much as mine, so it’s possible that she didn’t inherit bloodlust. But if she did, I will make her a hat. That is our way.”
I smiled up at him. “Just as soon as you’re finished with her bone rattle?”
Gallagher looked suddenly startled. “I haven’t started it yet. I thought we’d have a couple more weeks.”
“I was kidding. And there’s plenty of time. She won’t be ready for toys for quite a while. According to the book, all she’ll be doing for the first few weeks is eating and going through all those pretty new diapers.”
“Everyone out there is dying to meet her,” Lenore said with a glance at the door. “Eventually we will be able to call her something other than ‘her,’ right?”
“Yes, I...” I glanced up at Gallagher. We hadn’t even discussed a name. How could we possibly be so unprepared after such a long pregnancy? “I have a couple of ideas.”
“Let’s give them a minute to talk.” Lenore tugged on Zyanya’s sleeve.
Zy nodded and handed Lenore the bowl from the foot of the bed, then she picked up the trash bag full of used bed pads. “Yes. We’ll go get you something to eat and drink. You’ll need plenty of both, in order to feed the baby.”
Panic must have been written all over my face, because she laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right back to help. I nursed all of mine, until—” Until they were taken from her. We could all hear what she wasn’t saying. “I’ll be right back.”
“We have to help her get her kids back, Gallagher,” I whispered the moment the door closed behind Lenore and Zyanya. “I can’t... The thought of anyone taking her from us...” Fresh tears filled my eyes as I stared down at the baby now asleep in the cradle of my arm.
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