Knocked-Up Cinderella

by Julie Hammerle

  “There’s such a thing as too much space,” I said. “He basically ignored me while he was in Tokyo, and now he’s avoiding my texts while I’m in labor.”

  Nat reached down and stroked my hair. “I guarantee he’s not avoiding your texts. I’m sure there’s a good explanation, and we’ll hear from him as soon as he gets the messages. Don’t jump to conclusions. Not yet.”

  “And if he doesn’t call me?”

  “Then fuck him. You don’t need his ass.”

  I squeezed her hand, much gentler this time. “Thank you.”

  The three of us stared at my phone, waiting.

  Then it buzzed. Ian’s name popped up on screen.

  “He’s calling!” I squealed.

  “So answer it.” Nat covered my hand with hers. “And be nice. Remember: innocent until proven guilty.”

  I nodded and answered the phone.

  “Erin?”

  My heart almost dissolved into a pool of mush when I heard his voice.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  “Okay.” Those were the only two syllables I could choke out at the moment.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t respond before. My phone was off. It’s the only reason why. I’m at the airport now, but I’m getting on the blue line and coming for you. Wait for me, please. I…” He paused. “I prioritize you.”

  And I said, “Good. Because, Ian, I need you.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ian

  I texted Natalie as I ran to the blue line. “I’m hopping on the train now. The Kennedy is shut down. Text me with any news. ANY NEWS.”

  She wrote back, “Will do.”

  I skidded to a stop in the blue line vestibule. These weren’t the machines I remembered from back in my twenties. These loomed in front of me—shiny, new, and intimidating. I pressed the touch screen. Nothing. I tried the next machine. Still nothing.

  A young guy with red hair scanned his phone on the turnstile and went through. I glanced around. No one in sight. There wasn’t even anyone working the booth.

  I took a deep breath and jumped the turnstile.

  And a cop stopped me immediately.

  “Sir,” she admonished me, one hand on her billy club.

  I held up my hands in surrender. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to get downtown. My…my girlfriend”—white lie, sure, but hopefully about to come true—“is in labor.”

  “Still doesn’t mean it’s okay to break the law.”

  “I know.” I showed her my phone, because the redheaded guy had somehow used his to get past the gate. “I haven’t ridden the El in years. I admit it. I’m a total old fart when it comes to using those machines.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You can get the Ventra app.”

  I nodded. “Good to know.” I mentally added, “For next time.”

  She put her hands on her hips.

  Oh, for this time. She would not free me from this hell. I tapped on my phone screen as my train pulled away.

  I groaned.

  “Another one will leave in ten minutes.”

  “I guess now I have time to…” I waved the phone.

  She nodded.

  I created a Ventra account, entered my credit card info, and paid the whole, whopping $2.25 to ride the train.

  “And next time,” the officer said, “you’ll know what to do.”

  I hopped on the waiting blue line train and found a seat across from two musicians carrying guitar cases. I nodded at them, my feet tapping at a rate of four times per second.

  I finally exhaled when the train pulled out of the station. “Train on the move,” I texted Nat. My battery was low, less than 10 percent, but I had to keep it on, in case Erin needed me.

  The battery percentage ticked down as the train moved, and I did turn it off once we went down in the tunnels. Please don’t need me right now, I mentally begged Erin. I’m on my way.

  At the Washington station, the train stopped, the doors opened, and then they never closed. The musicians and I sat there staring at each other for a full minute. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  They shook their heads. I glanced out the door. No commotion. Then a mechanical, disembodied voice boomed through the speaker: “This train will no longer run due to a service delay.”

  “Someone jumped on the track,” one of the guitarists said.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t, but isn’t that always the case?”

  “Shit.” If that was, in fact, the case, we’d sit here for hours. I grabbed my suitcase and briefcase and dashed off the train, turning my phone on as I booked it up the stairs. No texts from either Erin or Nat. I had 2 percent left on my battery life. I used it to open my Lyft app. Surge pricing, plus a good fifteen-minute wait.

  “What the fuck?”

  My eyes scanned my surroundings. There was something going on, a protest. Whatever had been happening on the Kennedy had made its way down here.

  I was only a mile from the hospital. I had a suit on and was transporting a heavy suitcase, but I’d have to run—in July, in Chicago, when the humidity was nearly corporeal. My shirt dampened almost immediately as I took off on foot toward Randolph. I booked it left on State, flipping off anyone who tried to hit me or head me off.

  When I finally made it to the hospital, I left my suitcase at the front desk, and hopped on the elevator. When the doors opened on the labor and delivery floor, the receptionists stared at me. I’m sure they saw my sweaty clothes and disheveled appearance and figured they should keep their fingers on the panic button under the counter. “Can we help you?”

  “Erin…” I panted, clutching the cramp in my side, while leaning against the desk. “…Sharpe.”

  “Are you a relat—”

  “I’m the father,” I cut her off. “The father of the baby.”

  “Room 1402,” she said, shaking her head. I heard her mutter to her coworker, “Took that guy long enough to get here,” but I ignored it. I had no time to deal with other people’s nonsense. It had taken me long enough to get here, but the only person whose opinion of me mattered right now was Erin’s.

  I skidded around the corner and halted right outside room 1402. The door was shut. I knocked. Erin’s sister, Katie, opened the door a crack. She wore a blue hospital gown and a hairnet. “Hey,” she said.

  “Tell me I didn’t miss it.” I couldn’t have missed it. I couldn’t let Erin down again. I was here for her from this point on, whatever she needed.

  “Ian?” Erin called from inside the room.

  Katie let me in, and the nurse handed me my own blue gown and cap, plus slipper thingies for my shoes. I threw them on as fast as I could, hoping they at least somewhat masked my damp, sweaty clothes, and darted to Erin’s side. She hadn’t delivered the baby yet. I’d made it in time. A nurse sat on a stool at the foot of Erin’s bed, rubbing her shins while her feet hung in stirrups. “Just hold on,” the nurse was saying. “The doctor is finishing up a C-section. You’re about ready to go, but she’ll be here any minute.”

  I grabbed Erin’s hand and patted it, kissing her fingers. She squeezed back.

  “You made it,” she said.

  “Just in time, apparently.” I was choked up already. The room was full of machines and towels and all the stuff they’d need to help the baby once he arrived. It was cold and sterile, dark and frightening. And I’d almost let Erin do this on her own. I’d never leave her side again.

  “I can do this now,” Erin said, arching up to see the nurse at her feet. “I’m ready,” she said. “Ian’s here.”

  Panic drained color from the nurse’s face. “But the doctor—”

  The nurse didn’t even get the sentence out before Erin started pushing. About two seconds later, a baby’s cry filled the room. Just like that, we were parents.

  Holy shit.

  I gazed down at Erin next to me. I’d soaked through my clothes getting to her, but she’d barely broken a sweat. She grinned at me. Em
otion radiated through my entire body—joy and fear and relief and a bursting, all-encompassing love. I brushed a lock of hair out of Erin’s eyes, leaned down, and kissed her forehead. “Good job, Mom,” I said.

  …

  Erin

  Ian and I finally had a chance to be alone about an hour after the baby was born.

  The word “alone” had taken on a new meaning now that we were a trio…if that was, in fact, what we were.

  “So.” I’d actually gotten the kid to latch for breastfeeding, and now he was hungrily taking in food.

  “So.” Ian had pulled the armchair next to the bed in my new, private hospital room. I had changed into my own pajamas, which Katie had fetched for me from home—along with the rest of the hospital bag I’d painstakingly prepared weeks ago, when I’d assumed I’d be safely at home when I went into labor.

  “What’s up?” I laughed.

  “We’re parents.” He tickled the kid’s feet.

  “No going back now. Right, James?” I had a hard time saying his name for some reason, even though it was a perfectly reasonable name, my father’s name, the name Ian and I had both agreed upon. It felt strange on my tongue, though, like it weighed more than one syllable. This was our kid’s name. Did it suit him? Would it suit him? “Is this weird?”

  “Is what weird?” Ian pulled his eyes away from our son’s adorable baby foot.

  I shrugged. “Everything.”

  He moved to sit next to me on the bed and wrapped his arm around my shoulders. He kissed the top of my head. “Yeah, it’s weird,” he said. “But it’s also pretty amazing.”

  James had fallen asleep eating. I unlatched him, fixed my shirt, and let him rest against my chest. God, that was nice. “So…Tokyo.”

  “What about it?” His eyes were on James’s sweet face.

  “Are you going back?”

  He cupped my chin and turned my face toward him. “Never.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’re never going back to Tokyo? Ever?”

  “Not unless you’re with me.”

  “But the business—”

  He touched James’s little foot. “The business can suck it.”

  “Ian.” He had no idea what he was saying. The baby haze had consumed him, siphoned away his reason. This was a man who lived to work.

  “I mean it.” Now his eyes were on me.

  “Where did this come from?” I asked.

  “My mom, of all people. She showed up at the funeral, and I realized I don’t want to make the same mistakes she did.” He laced his fingers between mine. The heat of his skin melted me. Here we were, sitting in my hospital bed, our weird little family. “I’ve always avoided attachments, because I figured work would always be there for me. But that’s not even true. There are hungrier, less-jaded young people out there waiting to take my place. And when they finally do, what will I be left with?”

  “James and me,” I said.

  He touched my nose. “Exactly. Scott said he can start picking up some of the slack, and I think we might want to start bringing in some fresh blood, giving ourselves a little break. We are the bosses after all. What’s the good of being the boss, if you can’t take time off?”

  I felt something in my face shift as he mentioned Scott.

  Ian noticed. “I told Scott, by the way,” he said. “It was actually his idea for me to step back, be with my family—I’m talking about you, by the way.” He raised his hand above his head. “It now goes ‘you and James’”—he lowered his hand a tiny bit—“‘my friends and family’”—he pointed to the floor—“‘work and everybody else.’ If you think you can handle that.”

  “I know I can.”

  Ian leaned down to kiss me, just as the door to my room opened up and in streamed Katie, my mom and dad, and two other Baby Boomers, whom I guessed were Ian’s parents.

  While everyone else huddled near the door, my mom ran to James and cooed, tracing a line down her grandson’s forearm. He rested his head on my T-shirt, gazing up at her with slate-gray eyes under a tangle of black hair, just like his dad’s. “Hi, James,” my mom said. “I’m Grandma.”

  Those words choked me up.

  “Mom and Dad, this is Ian.”

  “And”—Ian smiled down at me—“Mom and Dad, this is Erin.”

  “So, Ian…” My dad sized up Ian, the man who had knocked up his daughter—after a night of drunken debauchery, but my dad didn’t know about that. “Tell us about yourself.”

  I could’ve sunk into the mattress from the embarrassment and the weight of it all—introducing my parents to my man friend, whose baby I’d just pushed out of my birth canal. And being introduced to his parents, whom I was meeting for the first time while wearing no makeup and old pajamas.

  “What are your intentions?” my dad asked.

  “Dad,” I admonished him, finger on the call button. I needed a nurse to bounce these people out of here.

  “I’m going to be a personal trainer,” Katie blurted out of nowhere, shifting the heat to herself. Thank God for siblings.

  My parents stared at her like she’d grown a second head. “You’re what?”

  “Good for you,” Ian’s dad said.

  “I’m going to get certified and help people get fit.”

  My mom straightened up. “Did we not just pay for four years of college for you, not to mention a wedding for a marriage that lasted two years? Now you’re going to take more classes? And who’s going to pay for it?”

  “Erin’s friend Nat owes me some money,” Katie said. “Or she will…”

  My mom’s jaw dropped. “Someone owes you—”

  “I’ll pay for her classes,” I said, coming to Katie’s rescue, because of the sibling code. “I’m gonna…pay for her personal trainer classes, and she’s going to…”

  “Help with the baby.” Katie turned to face my parents. “I’ve been floundering, frankly, working as a substitute and a glorified assistant. I didn’t know who I was or who I wanted to be until I started working out. I want to help other people realize their potential, too.”

  My mom blinked at me. “You two had this all planned out?”

  “All planned out,” I lied.

  Now Mom focused on Ian. “And you’re okay with all this, the Bobbsey twins doing their little daycare thing?”

  He widened his eyes at me, and I shook my head. My parents were the absolute biggest dorks. He straightened his shoulders and looked at my mom, probably regretting everything he’d just gotten himself into. “I’m totally cool with it,” he said. “I’m taking some time off to be with Erin and the baby, but after that Katie will be a huge help.”

  “And you’re getting married?” My mom folded her arms.

  “Mom,” I said, “why do we need a ring when we already have a baby?”

  “Katie, did you know about this?” My mom glared at her second daughter.

  “Hey, Mrs. Sharpe.” Ian directed her attention to the other side of the room. “Maybe you can help us with the car seat, since you’re probably an expert. It’s our final exam. They won’t let us leave the hospital until we pass this last test. Feed the kid? Check. Change a diaper? Check. Once we figure out how to buckle a car seat, we apparently have all the tools we need to raise James for the next eighteen years.”

  Katie sat next to me on the bed and tickled James’s toes. “I think we’re gonna make a great team.” She nodded toward Ian. “All of us.”

  I smiled as he grinned back at me. He managed to distract my mom with flattery, which Katie and I had never been able to do. “I think we will,” I said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Erin

  “I haven’t cried this much since he was born!” I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, wiping my eye makeup off again. I kept ruining my mascara. This was my third attempt at a smoky eye.

  I glanced down at James, who stared up at me from his bouncy seat on the tile floor next to the tub. He pulled his mouth into this huge, toothless grin, and my tears started flowi
ng again.

  “I can’t do this!” I cried.

  “You can and you will.” Ian, in nothing but a pair of plaid pajama pants, walked in carrying two steaming mugs. Here was yet another reason to stay home—my hot, half-naked man friend, who knew just how I liked my coffee and who’d be available for an Afternoon Delight while James napped. “Your school needs you, and you need your school.” He nodded toward James on the floor. “Little Dude and I are going to be just fine.”

  My lip started to quiver at the thought of my tiny baby being just fine without me.

  Ian held up a hand to staunch my tears. “I mean, we’d be more fine with you here, obviously, but the two of us will survive the day, when we’re not counting down the minutes until your return.” He grinned as he sipped his coffee.

  I knew he was messing with me, and I giggled. I was being foolish. Everything would be fine. I’d head back to work and James would spend the day with his dad. Easy peasy. It was just that James and I hadn’t spent much time apart since he was born, save for the one night in August when Nat and her new husband, Third-Base Chris, had basically hijacked the baby and ordered Ian and me to go out for a grown-ups-only dinner. I’d kept my phone on the table the entire time, ringer volume jacked all the way up, just in case.

  And so had Ian.

  “This is good.” Ian rested his hands on my shoulders. “For you and the kid. You love your job, don’t you?”

  I nodded. I did love my job. And, after three months of taking care of an infant all day, every day, I did long for other problems to solve beyond “Does this poop look weird?” or “How do I get rid of cradle cap?”

  Ian massaged my neck, which almost put me in a trance. “Then go back to work today and be brilliant. You’ll be home before five.”

  “I’ll be home before five,” I repeated absentmindedly.

  “And when you get home, there will be an amazing dinner waiting for you.”

  I focused on his milk-chocolate eyes. “What kind of dinner?”

  “James and I were thinking…roasted chicken with root vegetables. And I have a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge for you, for us, to celebrate your first day back at work.”