Lola leads me away, but I insist on going in the ambulance. It’s too hard, she says, but I am firm about this. I need to go. And she says she’ll come, too, in that case. We have to be there with Houndy, even though it’s not Houndy. Not anymore.
Houndy/not Houndy.
I pass everyone on the way down, take hold of their hands, look deep in their eyes, and see all the love reflected back. All the amazing, smashing love. The universe of stars. The dance of summer.
The angel of death, you messed everything up. You came for the wrong person.
Somewhere, I know, a baby must be being born—a life arriving and a life leaving. And I feel both things, the joy of both. Houndy is gazing at me through the mists, Houndy so close he can still reach out and touch me. He’s sorry. He’s happy but he’s sorry.
And me saying, don’t worry I’m coming soon please wait for me Houndy love wait because I’ll be there I promise.
FOURTEEN
MARNIE
I text Brian as the ambulance pulls up.
“It’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” I hear myself saying. Two EMTs jump out and come inside the building to Natalie, who is now panting with each contraction and swaying on the bench just slightly. Her lips look a little white to me, and sweat is pouring off her forehead even though she’s shivering.
It’s hard for me to let go of her, but these guys know what they’re doing. They squat down next to her and take her pulse and blood pressure, and ask a lot of questions. “When is the baby due? When did you last eat? What hospital are you using? How far apart are the contractions? When did your water break?” And then they put her on a stretcher and take her inside the back of the ambulance, and one EMT slaps an oxygen monitor on her finger, and the other starts an IV. The radio crackles news of other people, but they are intent on Natalie. One of them talks into the handset for a minute, but I can’t pay attention to what he’s saying.
I sit beside her, trying not to freak out in front of her. Also, I’m trying to help her breathe through contractions, which she is not doing such a hot job of. She keeps looking like she’s going to pass out.
“Okay, Natalie, my name is Joel, and I’m going to help you get your breathing under control,” says one of them, leaning down close to Natalie’s face. He is young and ruggedly handsome with kind eyes and large, capable hands. “I think you’re hyperventilating, sweetheart, so let’s try to slooow down your breathing, okay? Take . . . it . . . easy . . . like . . . this.” He demonstrates how to breathe slowly and deeply, and then gives her a paper bag to put over her mouth. “My wife just had a baby,” he tells me. “Trust me, she’s going to be fine.”
“I’m not—” says Natalie, and then she lets out a yell that I haven’t heard from her since she got a B minus on a research paper in seventh grade, on sea lions, after she had read four books about them. I grab her hand, and Joel says to me, pleasantly as if we’re discussing soccer goals, “Yeah. That was a big one. Okay, Natalie, let’s get ready to ride the next one. They’re coming about forty seconds apart now, so just rest for a minute . . . and okay now, be ready!”
“Are we going to the hospital?” I say to him, and he nods.
“Just want to get her stabilized first,” he says, holding on to her wrist.
Natalie suddenly makes the most unearthly sound I’ve ever heard—and I’m stunned when the other EMT guy, Marcus, slams the back door of the ambulance and comes over to us. Joel leaps into action and starts ripping off her pants, which are wet from that water-breaking incident, and hard to get off, and Joel motions for me to help him, because we seem to be suddenly in a huge hurry.
He exchanges a word I can’t hear with the other EMT, who takes out a tray of something from a drawer. There are towels and cloths and some silver equipment-looking things. I don’t know, but I think we’re about to deliver a baby. My sister’s eyes are closed, and her face is all scrunched up.
“Breathe. Ride the contraction,” says Joel. “It’s fine . . . you’re doing great, Natalie.”
Suddenly it hits me that Brian is possibly going to miss his own child’s birth unless he gets here fast. I turn to say that to Joel, as though there’s something he might be able to do: delay things or something—who knows? But before I can say it, Natalie starts screaming her head off, and Joel motions something to me, and I suddenly understand that this is it. This is it. There isn’t going to be a ride to the hospital—we’re going to deliver this baby right now, in the parking lot, just these two guys and me.
Well, mostly the two EMTs.
But I am here, too. No one is going to turn to me and say, “Um, miss? Could you please get out of here? I don’t believe you’re authorized for this kind of activity, are you? Did you take the baby delivery test? No? Then I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave.”
And I know nothing about this! In fact, I don’t even know what you’re supposed to read to get ready for something like this. It’s like that dream where you signed up for a course and then forgot about it so you didn’t do any of the required reading, and now you’ve realized your mistake but it’s too late to withdraw . . .
“AARRRUUUUUUUUUGHGHGHGHGH,” my sister says.
I take her hand, and when I look down, I see that there is the top of the baby’s head. Like, coming out of her.
“Crowning. She’s crowning,” Joel says. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
My sister’s face is all red and contorted and her eyes are squinched closed. I am thinking a ridiculous thought—that she is not going to like the fact that she didn’t get to have the birth plan she wanted. She was so emphatic about the whole thing. Natalie is swamped by another contraction, and she yells and grabs my hand and grips it so hard that I’m halfway certain that my fingers are going to turn black and fall off by Wednesday.
Joel instructs her on one final push—“Give me a good one, a nice steady push!”—and then, my God, somehow a tiny human, gray and mottled and covered in what looks like cottage cheese, comes sliding out, guided by Joel’s gloved, capable hands. A baby! Oh my God, there’s a baby girl! With eyes open! Looking around! And little fists, curled up tight, legs folded in so compactly, now stretching out, kicking, yelling, breathing like a champ. Joel is holding her in the crook of his arm.
I look up at Natalie, and her eyes are bright with tears, and my face is streaming wetness. My heart is galloping all around, and my hands look like they might soon start bleeding from the little half-moons of Natalie’s nails pressing into them.
“Good job,” says Joel softly. And Marcus smiles and rips off his gloves. Both of them are so calm and methodical, it’s like they’re injecting calm into the air. Like pure love. I hear that voice again—you are love; you are going to be all right. And my niece—Amelia Jane—is now looking around with wide, navy-blue eyes, making little peeps of protest, her tiny body turning pinker by the second, as though she’s under some kind of cosmic light. She has a fringe of dark hair, and little arms and legs, and fingers and thumbs—all of your most important equipment—and she’s alert and aware. Her filmy eyes lock on to mine, and I am smitten, stunned, thinking: How can this be? How does such a thing happen around us every day—and we just go about our lives like it’s nothing out of the ordinary?
The two guys are busy doing official medical stuff, cleaning Natalie, covering her up. Joel hands the baby to me, which makes me startle. Me? Are you serious? I look around, venture out of my trance. Wow. We’re in an ambulance, sitting in the parking area of the dentist’s office. Outside, there are cars honking, voices of people walking past the ambulance, unaware. Somewhere out there is Jeremy; did he go back upstairs to help somebody with a backache?
But here, in this cocoon, plopped into my arms in a little blanket, is my niece, round and rosy and just as startled as I am.
“Here, let me give her to her mom,” I say. Natalie is propped up now, the stunned look gone from her features. She takes the baby from me, and our eyes meet.
Joel says, “Beautiful baby. You did a great j
ob. Boy, these are my favorite kinds of days, when I get to help a baby come into the world.”
After a bit, I’m aware that the ambulance is moving. Marcus is taking us to the hospital. But slowly. No sirens. Our own little traveling safe place is moving, taking with us all the equipment we could ever need.
“Look what we did!” Natalie says, and her eyes are locked on to mine. “You are the best, the best sister in the world! How did you know—to be here—that I needed you?”
We both gaze down at this little life we just brought into the world. My heart is so full it feels like it will spill out of me somehow.
“You know, of all our antics, I have to say that this is the best sister act we’ve ever pulled off,” I tell her. “Even though it wasn’t the birth plan you had in mind.”
“Yeah,” she says, “but only because I didn’t think I could get this one to work.”
I think I might just die of this.
That evening, the whole family comes to my sister’s hospital room, where she presides beautifully, wearing a lovely peach-colored nightgown I fetched for her from the gift shop, and her hair is clean and shining. She is even more radiant than ever, with her skin looking dewy and lit from within—and little Amelia—rosy little Amelia lies contented in her mother’s arms, pooching out her sweet pink little lips.
Joel, the delicious EMT, shows up at one point with a bouquet of flowers, and my whole family goes gaga over him. He explains that he hardly ever gets to deliver babies, and that he was, in fact, a mess when his own wife went into labor. And that makes everybody laugh, and my mother wants to invite him and his entire family over for dinner, except that my father quietly puts his hand on her arm before she can quite squeak out the invitation.
Brian, sitting by my sister’s side, is clearly smitten with the whole scene. I was a little worried that he was going to feel he’d been cut out of the deal somehow, but he doesn’t seem to mind in the least. Here he got a perfect baby girl without having to even endure one of my sister’s high-pitched screams, screams that will never, ever be mentioned by anyone, though they are going to live on in some pocket of my memory until the end of time.
“She looks like your brother,” says my mother to my father.
“Joe? I think you’re just saying that because he’s bald.”
“No. Look at the chin. It’s Joe’s chin.”
“But that’s just because he had his teeth knocked out playing street hockey. People with no teeth—like Amelia, for now—have those kinds of chins.”
To my surprise, my mother laughs. And my father tucks his head over her shoulder, and for a moment they’re both smiling down at the baby. It seems impossible to believe that this is a couple who communicates mainly through bickering. Maybe, it occurs to me, this is what marriage ultimately turns into: you have to tough it out through the bad times so that you can get to these pinnacle moments when life has just handed you a shiny star.
I’m not even surprised when Jeremy shows up, carrying balloons. Or when my parents greet him like the long-lost son they never had. Nor is it shocking that he and I leave the hospital together, going out for dinner, and that after that, we go to his mother’s house and sit on the screened porch where we spent thousands of hours doing homework and gossiping about other kids.
He’s grown up to be a good-natured, good-looking man who takes care of his mom, and I’m suddenly so sorry I broke his heart, except that I think that we all do need to have our hearts broken at some point, and so maybe I actually did him a good service. It’s something we need to know about ourselves, how that heart breaks and grows back.
My own heart, given away to Noah, now stirs somewhere deep down, stretches, yawns, looks at its watch and rolls over, tries to go back to sleep. But it has one eye open, I notice.
In no time, over a glass of wine, we’ve covered our college years and our employment decisions (his good, mine questionable). And then, because this is what you do under these circumstances, we rehash our own breakup, casting it in a new, more philosophical, forgiving light.
After he razzes me for falling for Brad Whitaker, I say to him, “Did you ever think that maybe you could have tried harder to fight for me? Like, you at least could have said you cared about me. Maybe asked me not to date him.”
“Um, I was not equipped at seventeen to have that kind of conversation,” he says.
“Yeah, well, you treated me like I was just one of your buddies and I honestly had no idea you cared one way or the other.”
He smiles and his eyes hold mine a lot longer than necessary. “Didn’t you, really?” he says. “Yeah, I know I wasn’t any Prince Charming, more’s the pity. But on the other hand, I’m the one who gets to sit here with you tonight, while he’s some loser out in the world not spending time with you. So maybe the good guy triumphs in the end, you know?”
He is gazing at me so directly that I have to look away.
Then he says, “I’ve, um, heard through the grapevine that you’ve had something of a rough go. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but . . .”
“Oh,” I say. “Well. Yeah. Pretty much your average stood-up-at-the-altar situation. Not really ideal.”
“Well, that certainly sucks.” He looks at me like he wants to hear what happened, and not just so he can gloat a little bit over my poor judgment.
So I go through the story—the long version, including the two years Noah and I were together, the engagement excitement, and then him showing up late to the wedding and our horrible talk in the meadow, blah blah blah, and then I tell him about the honeymoon and the screaming monkeys, because by now it’s becoming The Story I Tell about My Marriage, and it always gets a laugh as well as a sympathetic clucking, depending on how I tell it.
With him, I confess the part I hadn’t told anyone but Natalie—how I dismantled my wedding dress—because he is the only person who would understand something that bizarre and find it funny. Sure enough, he laughs in all the right places—and he does this thing that I now remember he used to do as a kid: he sort of wrinkles his nose and closes his eyes before he laughs. It’s just a little quirk, but seeing him still do it makes my heart glad.
And then things shift slightly. Jeremy is looking at me without having to look away. He says that this is a momentous day, because not only have we been present at the miracle of birth, but he’s also gotten to hear about a jerk who is perhaps even worse than the jerk I ditched him for senior year.
When he comes over to the couch where I’m sitting and puts his hand idly on my arm, I slide over closer, and it turns out that, thank God, he’s learned something about kissing in the intervening years because I realize that I haven’t been kissed in quite a while, and I need it badly.
It’s still a slightly cautious kiss around the edges, of course, because it’s Jeremy—and also because I have hurt him before, and so maybe he’s wisely holding something back, but I throw myself into it, kissing him as passionately as I can, holding nothing back, just to show him how it can be done, and then—my God, in no time at all, we’re breathless and shocked at the heat we’ve generated.
He looks at me in surprise, and I see his Adam’s apple bob up and down. He smells like aftershave, and my mind briefly wobbles, goes to the backseats of cars in high school, to the hot breath of boys and their heavy aroma of sex—was it Old Spice? Something else?
“So, listen,” he says roughly. “Will you . . . I mean I know it’s weird, with my mother upstairs sleeping, but we used to be good at sneaking around, and—”
“Yes,” I say. “I will.”
He pulls away, wide-eyed. “Yeah? Really?” He blinks, and I think maybe he’ll lose his nerve. But then he says, “Okay then! Okay. Let’s do it!” And he takes me upstairs to his boyhood room, and I swear, it’s like time has stood still up there, with his single bed still in there and his old posters of Harry Potter.
“Dude, your room!” I say. “My God, everything’s still the same except the Star Wars sheets. How
in the world have you not changed anything?”
He looks around like he’s seeing it all for the first time, too, and runs his fingers through his hair. “I’m hopeless, I know. I guess I was thinking I’d move out sometime, so why get new stuff?” He looks very concerned. “It is weird in here, isn’t it? The question is, is it too weird for you? Deal-breakingly weird? Are we going to have to go to Kmart before we can make anything happen between us, do you think?”
“No,” I say. “No! But seriously? Harry Potter?”
“Everybody knows that Harry Potter is cool, and besides”—he wraps his arms around me and puts his face up against mine, whispering—“full disclosure: the Star Wars sheets are in the wash. They’ll be back on the bed next time you’re here.”
I’m laughing as I wrap my arms around his neck. “Well, I can certainly see that you don’t bring a lot of women home.”
He gets all serious. “No. Well . . . I guess I don’t. My mom being here and all.” He starts planting little kisses all along my jawline, down to my neck. With his right hand he unbuttons my blouse. “And can you please . . . could we both stop laughing so we can have sex? Am I going to have to go get a paper bag for you to breathe into, because hysterical laughter really ruins a seduction scene.”
“Oh, brother. Is this a seduction scene?”
“Well, I’m trying,” he says, and he reaches around to unfasten my bra, and I attempt to be serious, which makes me start laughing all over again. “Could you?” he says. “Stop?”
He walks me, backward, over to his bed, and we fall down on the mattress, with him on top of me, and he says, “I can’t believe how long I’ve waited for this,” and I say, “Me, too,” as you do. It’s just the slightest bit awkward, but I’m wondering if life would have been altogether different if we had done this long, long ago—that day way back when he didn’t buy condoms. If I could go back in time, I’d insist we try another drugstore.
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