His mask billowed as he spoke. “How do you feel?”
“Scared, and not at all sure I want to go in there. How about you?”
“The same.”
“We're just being typical parents. Everything will go fine. I'm sure of it.”
“If I don't faint on the delivery-room floor,” Michael said.
Her eyes crinkled. “Birthing room, and I'm sure you'll do just great.”
“If we don't want to go in there, why are we doing it?” Michael said.
“For Lisa.”
“Oh, that's right. That darned kid asked us to, didn't she?”
The interchange took the edge off their nervousness and left them smiling above their masks. Bess could not resist telling him, “If we're lucky, Michael, this baby will have your eyes.”
He winked one of them and said, “Something tells me everything's going to be lucky from here on out.”
When they entered the birthing room again, Lisa's knees created twin peaks beneath the sheet. The head of her bed was elevated at a 45-degree angle but her eyes were closed as she panted and labored through a contraction, her face glistening with sweat and her cheeks puffing as she breathed.
“I've g . . . got to p . . . push,” she got out between breaths.
“No, not yet,” Marcie Unger said soothingly. “Save your strength.”
“But it's time . . . it's . . . I know it's . . . oh . . . oh . . . oh . . .”
“Keep breathing the way Mark tells you.”
Beside her, Mark said, “Deeply this time, in and out, slow.”
Bess's eyes sought Michael's and saw reflected there the same touch of anguish and helplessness she herself felt.
When the contraction ended, Lisa's eyes opened and found her father's, above the blue mask. “Dad?” she said with a weak smile.
“Hi, honey.” His eyes crinkled with a smile as he moved to her side to squeeze her hand. “I made it.”
“And Mom,” she added in a whisper, searching for and finding her mother's eyes. “You're both here?” She gave a tired smile and closed her eyes while Bess and Michael exchanged another glance that said, This is what she wanted, this is what she set out to do. They took their places on Lisa's left while Mark and his mother stood on her right.
A second nurse appeared, all sterile and masked. “The doctor will be here in a minute,” she said. She looked down into Lisa's face and said, “Hi, Lisa, I'm Ann, and I'm here to take care of the baby as soon as it arrives. I'll measure him, weigh him and bathe him.”
Lisa nodded and Marcie Unger moved to the foot of the bed, where she removed the sheet from Lisa, then the end cushion of the bed itself, before tipping up a pair of footrests. She told Lisa, “These are for your feet if you want them. If not, fine.” On the side rails she adjusted two pieces that looked like bicycle handles with plastic grips, and placed Lisa's left hand on one. “And these are for you to hang onto when you feel like pushing.”
Mark said, “Here comes another one . . . come on, honey, show me that beautiful breathing. Pant, pant, pant, blow . . .”
Lisa moaned with each blow. In the middle of the contraction the doctor swept in, dressed like all the others in blue scrubs and skull cap. She spoke in a feminine voice. “Well, how are things going with Lisa?” Her eyes darted to the vital signs, then she smiled down at her patient.
“Hello, Doctor Lewis,” Lisa said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. Her voice sounded weak. “Where've you been so long?”
“I've been in touch. Let's see if we can't get this baby into the world and have a look at him. I'm going to break your water, Lisa. After that, everything will happen pretty fast.”
Lisa nodded and rolled a glance at Mark, who held her hand folded over his own, smoothing her fingers.
While Dr. Lewis broke Lisa's water, Michael glanced away. The doctor was giving Lisa a monologue on what she was doing but Lisa made small sounds of distress. Under cover of the doctor's voice, Bess whispered to Michael, “Are you all right?”
He met her eyes and nodded but she could tell he was not, especially when he observed the faint pinkish fluid that ran from Lisa and stained the sheets beneath her. She found his arm and rubbed it lightly while from across the room she caught Hildy watching. Hildy's eyes smiled and the two women, who'd both borne children of their own, exchanged a moment of silent communion.
Lisa's next pushing contraction brought even greater sounds of distress. She cried out, and her body and face quaked as she clasped the handles and tried mightily to push the baby from herself.
The contraction ended with no results, and when it ebbed Bess bent over Lisa and said, “You're doing fine, honey,” worried herself but hiding it. She lovingly wiped Lisa's stringy, wet bangs back form her brow and thought, Never again, I'll never watch this again!
She straightened to find Michael's eyebrows furrowed with concern, his breath coming fast, luffing his mask in and out.
The next contraction seemed worse than the last and racked Lisa even harder. Her head lifted from the bed, and Bess bolstered her from behind while Michael stared at the swollen shape of the baby's head engaged in the birth canal and repeated along with Mark, “Pant, pant, pant . . . push.”
Still the baby refused to emerge, and Bess glanced at Michael's eyes to find them bright with tears. His tears prompted some of her own and she glanced away, wanting to be strong for Lisa's sake.
The doctor ordered, “Get the mighty vac.”
Marcie Unger produced it: a tiny cone-shaped device at the end of a rubber tube and hand pump.
“Lisa,” the doctor said, “we're going to give you a little help here. This is just a miniature suction cup we're going to put on the baby's head so the next time you push, we can pull a little, too, all right?”
“Will it hurt him?” Lisa asked, attempting to lift her head and see what was going on below.
“No,” the doctor replied while Mark pressed his wife back against the bed, leaning over her, soothing her, urging her to rest as much as possible between pains. Bess did likewise from the opposite side of the bed, cooing comforting words, softly rubbing the inside of Lisa's knee.
Lisa murmured, “I'm so hot . . . don't touch me . . .”
Bess dropped her hand and felt Michael secretly grope for it in the folds of their blue scrubs. She gripped his hand and squeezed it all the while the tiny cone was inserted, and the hand pump worked by Marcie Unger, all the while Lisa moaned and wagged her head deliriously against the mattress.
With the next contraction the mighty vac began helping but midway through the suction broke and the cup flew free, spraying blood across six sets of scrubs and striking terror into the eyes of Mark, Hildy, Bess and Michael.
“It's okay,” Marcie Unger reassured. “No harm done.”
It seemed to take hours for them to get the suction cup reapplied.
But with the next pain, it worked.
Dr. Lewis said, “Here it comes . . .” and all eyes were fixed upon Lisa's dilated body. She pushed and the doctor pulled, and out of her swollen flesh emerged a tiny head with bloody, black hair.
Bess gripped Michael's hand and stared through her tears while he did likewise, both of them wonder-struck by what was happening before their eyes.
Between breaths Lisa managed to ask Mark, “Is it born yet?”
Dr. Lewis answered. “Halfway but one more push and it'll be here. Okay, Mark, help her through it.”
The next pain did, indeed, bring the full birth. Michael and Bess watched it happen, still clinging to each other's hands, smiling behind their masks.
“It's a girl!” the doctor announced, catching the infant as it slipped forth.
Lisa smiled.
Mark cried, “Yahoo!”
Hildy rubbed Mark's back.
Bess and Michael looked at each other and found telltale dark splotches on their blue masks. Michael shrugged a shoulder to an eye and left another dark spot, and Bess felt her heart go light with joy.
The nurse named Ann came immediately with a soft blue towel, scooped the infant into it and laid her on Lisa's stomach. The doctor clamped the cord in two places and handed a pair of scissors to Mark.
“How about it, Daddy, do you want to cut the cord?”
The baby was wriggling, testing out its arms in the confines of the towel while Bess bolstered Lisa up so she could see the baby's head and touch it.
“Wow . . .” Lisa breathed, “. . . she's really here. Hey, Natalie, how you doing?” Then to the doctor, “Isn't she supposed to cry?”
“Not as long as she's breathing, and she's doing that just fine.”
Lisa sank back and discovered there was more work to do—afterbirth to be delivered, and stitches to be tolerated.
Meanwhile, Natalie Padgett was being passed around from hand to hand—to her father, her grandmothers, her grandfather, whose dark eyes beamed above his mask while he, too, welcomed her with “Hi, Natalie.” She was about as pretty as a baby bird, still plastered with afterbirth and working her head and arms with the diminutive motions of a slow-motion film, trying to keep her eyes open while her fists remained tightly shut.
Hildy said, “I'd better go tell the news to Jake.” While she was gone Bess and Michael had one lavish minute to appreciate their grandchild themselves. She lay in the soft blue towel, squirming, held in Michael's wide hands, with Bess cupping the warm flannel around her tiny, smeared head.
The instinct to kiss her was irrepressible.
Tears kept welling in their eyes and blurring her image while a wellspring of love encompassed them both.
Michael said, “How awful that I missed this when our own were born. I'm so glad I was here this time.” He passed the baby to Bess, who held her far too short a time before she was claimed by her father, then by Ann, for weighing and measuring. Hildy returned with Jake in tow, and the birthing room became crowded, so Bess and Michael left for a while, repairing to the family room next door. There, all was quiet and they were alone. They turned to each other, pulled down their masks and embraced, wordless for a long time, the birth they'd just witnessed melding with the birth of Lisa in their memories.
When Michael spoke his voice was gruff with emotion.
“I never thought I'd feel like this.”
“How?” she whispered.
“Complete.”
“Yes, that's it, isn't it?”
“A part of us, coming into the world again. My God, it does something to you, doesn't it, Bess?”
It did. It brought a lump to her throat and a yearning to her heart as she simply stood in Michael's arms, softly rubbing his shoulders through the ugly blue scrubs, disinclined to ever leave him again.
“Oh, Michael . . .”
“I'm so glad we're together for this.”
“Oh, me too. It was awful before you got here. I kept thinking you weren't coming, and I didn't know how I'd get through it without you.”
“Now that I've been through it, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”
They remained locked in an embrace until their emotions calmed and weariness made itself known, then Michael asked, against her hair, “Tired?”
“Yes. You?”
“Exhausted.”
He set her away and looked into her face. “Well, I guess there's no reason for us to stay. Let's go see the baby once more and say good-bye to Lisa.”
In the room next door the new parents created a heartwarming tableau with their clean, red-faced infant between them, wrapped now in a pink blanket, Lisa and Mark radiant with love and happiness. So radiant, it seemed a transgression to interrupt and bid them good-bye.
Bess did so first, leaning over Lisa as she rested in bed, touching her hair and kissing her cheek, then the baby's head. “Good night, dear. I'll see you later on this afternoon. Thank you so much for letting us be a part of this.”
Michael went next, kissing them, too, deluged with the same emotions as Bess. “I didn't really want to come in here tonight but I'm so glad I did. Thank you, honey.”
They congratulated and hugged Mark and left the hospital together.
* * *
Outside it was nearly dawn. Sparrows were beginning to cheep from the nearby trees. The sky had begun its fade from deep blue to lavender. The night dew seemed to have lifted into the air and hung damp all around. The visitors' parking lot was nearly empty as Bess and Michael walked across it with lagging footsteps.
As they approached Bess's car, Michael took her hand.
“That was really something to go through, wasn't it?” he said.
“I feel as if I had the baby myself.”
“I bet you do. I never had one, and I feel like I just did!”
“The funny thing is when I was the one giving birth I don't think the wonder of it struck me so hard. I suppose I was too busy to dwell on that part of it.”
“Same for me. Waiting in another room—I wish things had been different in those days and I could have been in the delivery room like Mark was.”
They reached her car and stopped but Michael kept her hand. “Can you believe it, Bess? We're a grandpa and grandma.”
She smiled up at him wearily and said, “A couple of very tired ones. Do you have to work today?”
“I'm not going to. How about you?”
“I was supposed to but I think I'll let Heather handle it alone. I'll probably sleep for a few hours then come back up to see Lisa and the baby again.”
“Yeah, me too.”
There seemed little else to say. It was time to part, time for him to go to his condominium and for her to go to her house on Third Avenue.
They had been through an exhausting night. Their eyes hurt. Their backs hurt. But they stood in the parking lot, holding hands until it made no sense anymore. One of them had to move.
“Well . . .” she said, “see y'.”
“Yeah,” he repeated, “see y'.”
She pulled free as if someone were dragging her against her wishes, from the opposite direction. She got into her car while he stood with both hands crooked over the open door, watching as she put her keys in the ignition and started the engine. He slammed the door. She shifted into reverse and waggled two fingers at him through the window, wearing a sad expression on her face.
He stepped back as the car began to roll, slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and remained behind feeling empty and lost as he watched her drive away.
When she was gone, he sighed deeply, tipped his face to the sky and tried to gulp down the lump in his throat. He went to his own car, got in and stuck his keys into the ignition, then sat motionless with the engine unstarted and his hands hanging limply on the wheel.
Thinking. Thinking. About himself, his future and how empty it would remain without Bess.
It began deep down within him, a bubbling rebellion that said, Why? Why must it be that way? We've both changed. We both want, need, love each other. We both want this family back together. What the hell are we waiting for?
He started his engine and tore out of the parking lot doing a rolling stop at the stop sign, then wheeled out onto Greeley Street on Bess's trail, doing a good fifteen miles an hour above the speed limit.
At the house on Third Avenue he screeched to a halt and opened the car door even before the engine stopped running. Her car was already put away in the garage, the door was down. He jogged up the sidewalk to the front door, rang the bell, thumped on the door with his fist several times, then stood waiting with one hand braced on the doorframe at shoulder level. She must have gone upstairs already. It took her some time to get back down and answer.
When she did, surprise dropped her jaw.
“Why, Michael, what's wrong?”
He burst inside, slammed the door and scooped her into his arms. “You know what's wrong, Bess. You and me, living in two separate houses, being divorced from each other when we love each other the way we do. That's no way for us to act, not when we could be together and happy. I want that . . .” He gripped her
harder. “. . . oh God, I want that so much.” He interrupted himself to kiss her—hard, brief, possessive—before wrapping his arms around her firmly and holding her to his breast. “I want Lisa and Mark to bring that baby to our house and the two of us waiting with outstretched arms, and keeping her overnight sometimes, and all of us together on Christmas mornings after Santa Claus comes. And I want us to try to make up for what we did to Randy. Maybe if we start now we can turn him around.” He drew back, holding her face in both hands, pleading, “Please, Bess, marry me again. I love you. We'll try harder this time, and we'll compromise, for both us and the kids. Can't you see, Lisa was right? This is the way it should be!”
She was crying long before he finished, the tears coursing down her cheeks. “Aw, don't cry, Bess . . . don't . . .”
She dove against him and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Michael, yes. I love you, too, and I want all those things, and I don't know what's going to become of Randy but we've got to try. He still needs us so much.”
They kissed the way they'd wanted to in the hospital parking lot, sealed together full-length, earnest with passion while at the same time too tired to know if they were standing on their own power or supporting one another. Their lips parted, their gazes locked but even so, they floundered in their attempt to impart the depth of emotions coursing through them.
He kissed the crests of her cheeks, sipping up her salty tears, then her mouth, softly this time. “Let's get married right away. As soon as possible.”
She smiled through her tears. “All right. Whatever you say.”
“And we'll tell the kids today. And Stella, too,” he added. “We're going to make her the second happiest woman in the whole USA.”
Bess kept smiling. “The third, maybe . . . behind me and Lisa.”
“All right, third. But she'll be smiling.”
“She'll be doing cartwheels.”
“I feel like I could do a few myself.”
“You do? I'm falling off my feet.”
“On second thought, so am I. Should we go to bed?”
“And do what? Get caught again by Randy? He's due home, you know.”