“I don’t think the baby got the memo,” I gasped, and I gritted my teeth against another contraction.
She didn’t say what we were both thinking: that I could not have you naturally. “Where’s Sean?”
“I…don’t…kno-oh, Piper!”
“Breathe,” Piper said automatically, and I started to pant, ha-ha-hee-hee, the way she’d taught me. “I’ll call Gianna and tell her we’re on our way.”
Gianna was Dr. Del Sol, the maternal-fetal-medicine OB who had stepped in just eight weeks ago at Piper’s request. “We?”
“Were you planning on driving yourself?”
Fifteen minutes later, I had bribed away your sister’s questions by settling her on the couch and turning on Blue’s Clues. I sat next to her, wearing your father’s winter coat, the only one that fit me now.
The first time I had gone into labor, I’d had a bag packed and waiting at the door. I’d had a birthing plan and a mix tape of music to play in the delivery room. I knew it would hurt, but the reward was this incredible prize: the child I’d waited months to meet. The first time I had gone into labor, I’d been so excited.
This time, I was petrified. You were safer inside me than you would be once you were out.
Just then the door burst open and Piper filled all the space with her assured voice and her bright pink parka. Her husband, Rob, trailed behind, carrying Emma, who was carrying a snowball. “Blue’s Clues?” he said, settling down next to your sister. “You know, that’s my absolute favorite show…after Jerry Springer.”
Amelia. I hadn’t even thought about who would watch her while I was at the hospital having you.
“How far apart?” Piper asked.
My contractions were coming every seven minutes. As another one rolled over me like a riptide, I grabbed the arm of the couch and counted to twenty. I focused on that crack in the glass door.
Trails of frost spiraled outward from its point of origin. It was beautiful and terrifying all at once.
Piper sat down beside me and held my hand. “Charlotte, it’s going to be okay,” she promised, and because I was a fool, I believed her.
The emergency room was thick with people who’d been injured in motor vehicle accidents during the storm. Young men held bloody towels to their scalps; children mewed on stretchers. I was whisked past them all by Piper, up to the birthing center, where Dr. Del Sol was already pacing the corridor. Within ten minutes, I was being given an epidural and wheeled to the operating room for a C-section.
I played games with myself: if there are an even number of fluorescent lights on the ceiling of this corridor, then Sean will arrive in time. If there are more men than women in the elevator, everything the doctors told me will turn out to be a mistake. Without me even having to ask, Piper had put on scrubs, so that she could fill in for Sean as my labor coach. “He’ll be here,” she said, looking down at me.
The operating room was clinical, metallic. A nurse with green eyes-that was all I could see above her mask and below her cap-lifted my gown and swabbed my belly with Betadine. I started to panic as they hung the sterile drape in place. What if I didn’t have enough anesthesia running through the lower half of my body and I felt the scalpel slicing me? What if, in spite of all I’d hoped for, you were born and did not survive?
Suddenly the door flew open. Sean blew into the room on a cold streak of winter, holding a mask up to his face, his scrub shirt haphazardly tucked in. “Wait,” he cried. He came to the head of the stretcher and touched my cheek. “Baby,” he said. “I’m sorry. I came as soon as I heard-”
Piper patted Sean on the arm. “Three’s a crowd,” she said, backing away from me, but not before she squeezed my hand one last time.
And then, Sean was beside me, the heat of his palms on my shoulders, the hymn of his voice distracting me as Dr. Del Sol lifted the scalpel. “You scared the hell out of me,” he said. “What were you and Piper thinking, driving yourselves?”
“That we didn’t want to have the baby on the kitchen floor?”
Sean shook his head. “Something awful could have happened.”
I felt a tug below the white drape and sucked in my breath, turning my head to the side. That was when I saw it: the enlarged twenty-seven-week sonogram with your seven broken bones, your fiddlehead limbs bowed inward. Something awful already has happened, I thought.
And then you were crying, even though they lifted you as if you were made out of spun sugar. You were crying, but not the hitched, simple cry of a newborn. You were screaming as if you’d been torn apart. “Easy,” Dr. Del Sol said to the OR nurse. “You need to support the whole-”
There was a pop, like a burst bubble, and although I had not thought it possible, you screamed even louder. “Oh, God,” the nurse said, her voice a cone of hysteria. “Was that a break? Did I do that?” I tried to see you, but I could only make out a slash of a mouth, the ruby furor of your cheeks.
The team of doctors and nurses gathered around you couldn’t stop your sobbing. I think, until the moment I heard you cry, a part of me had believed that all the sonograms and tests and doctors had been wrong. Until the moment I heard you cry, I had been worried that I wouldn’t know how to love you.
Sean peered over their shoulders. “She’s perfect,” he said, turning to me, but the words curled up at the end like a puppy’s tail, looking for approval.
Perfect babies didn’t sob so hard that you could feel your own heart tearing down the center. Perfect babies looked that way on the outside, and were that way on the inside.
“Don’t lift her arm,” a nurse murmured.
And another: “How am I supposed to swaddle her if I can’t touch her?”
And through it all you screamed, a note I’d never heard before.
Willow, I whispered, the name that your father and I had agreed on. I had had to convince him. I won’t call her that, he said. They weep. But I wanted to give you a prophecy to carry with you, the name of a tree that bends instead of breaking.
Willow, I whispered again, and somehow through the cacophony of the medical staff and the whir of machinery and the fever pitch of your pain, you heard me.
Willow, I said out loud, and you turned toward the sound as if the word was my arms around you. Willow, I said, and just like that, you stopped crying.
When I was five months pregnant, I got a call from the restaurant where I used to work. The pastry chef’s mother had broken her hip, and they had a food critic coming in that night from the Boston Globe, and even though it was incredibly presumptuous and surely not a good time for me, could I possibly come in and just whip up my chocolate millefeuille, the one with the spiced chocolate ice cream, avocado, and bananas brûlée?
I admit, I was being selfish. I felt logy and fat, and I wanted to remind myself that I had once been good for something other than playing Go Fish with your sister and separating the laundry into whites and darks. I left Amelia with a teenage sitter and drove to Capers.
The kitchen hadn’t changed in the years since I’d been there, although the new head chef had moved around the items in the pantries. I immediately cleared off my work space and set about making my phyllo. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I dropped a stick of butter, and I reached down to pick it up before someone slipped and fell. But this time, when I bent forward, I was acutely aware of the fact that I could not jackknife at the waist anymore. I felt you steal my breath, as I stole yours. “Sorry, baby,” I said out loud, and I straightened up again.