James resisted the urge to go to his wife and, instead, put all his energy into freeing the car, warming one bare hand and then the other beneath his armpits when the pain of the cold became too great. Warming them but never pausing, brushing snow from the windshield and the windows, watching it scatter and disappear onto the soft sea of white around his calves.
"You didn't mention it would hurt this much," Norah said, when he reached the porch. He put his arm around her and helped her down the steps.
"I can walk," she insisted. "It's just when the pain comes."
"I know." James responded, but he did not let her go.
When they reached the car she touched his arm, and gestured to the house, veiled with snow and glowing in the darkness of the street. "When we come back we'll have our baby with us," she said. "Our world will never be the same."
The windshield wipers were frozen, and snow spilled down the back window when he pulled onto the street. He drove slowly, thinking how beautiful Lexington was, the trees and bushes heavy with snow.
"I called Jeremy before we left," he said, naming his colleague, an obstetrician. "I said to meet us in the office. We'll get there, it's closer."
Norah was silent for a moment, her hand gripping the dashboard as she breathed through a contraction. "As long as I don't have our baby in this old car," she managed at last, trying to joke. James smiled, but he knew her fear was real, and he shared it. Methodical, purposeful; even in an emergency he could not change his nature. He came to a full stop at every light, signaled turns onto the empty streets. Every few minutes, his wife braced one hand against the dashboard again and focused her breathing. Which made him swallow and glance sideways at her, more nervous this night than he could ever remember being. More nervous than on his wedding day, her family filling one side of the church, and on the other just a handful of his colleagues. His parents were dead, his sister too.
There was a single car parked in the clinic parking lot, the nurse's power-blue Fairlane, conservative and pragmatic and newer than James' own. He'd called her too. He pulled up in front of the entrance and helped Norah out. Now that they had reached the office safely, they were both exhilarated, laughing softly as they pushed the door into the bright lights of the waiting room.
The nurse met them. The moment James saw her, he knew something was wrong. She had large blue eyes in a pale face. It was now she gave them her news she was holding in: Jeremy's car had crashed on the unplowed country road where he lived, spun around on the ice beneath the snow and ended up in a ditch.
"You're saying he won't be coming?" Norah asked, anxious. The nurse nodded. She was so tall and thin it seemed like her bones might poke out from underneath her skin at any moment. Her large eyes were solemn and intelligent. For months, there had been rumors, jokes, that she was in love with James. He had dismissed them as idle office gossip, annoying but natural when a man and single woman worked in such close proximity.
"How about the emergency room?" she questioned. "Could you make it?"
James shook his head. The contractions were just a minute or so apart. "This baby won't wait," he said, looking at his wife. Snow had melted in her hair and glittered like a diamond tiara. "This baby's on it's way."
"It's alright," Norah said, stoic. Her voice was harder now, determined. "This will be a better story to tell him, growing up, him or her."
The nurse smiled, a line visible between her eyes, stopping on the bridge of her nose. "Let's get you inside then," she said softly. "I'll get you some help with this pain."
James went into his own office to find a coat, and when he entered Jeremy's examination room his wife was laying on the bed. Her legs parted. He went to the sink and washed his hands, feeling extremely alert. Aware of the tiniest details, as he performed this ordinary ritual, he felt his panic at Jeremy's absence begin to ease. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to focus on his task.
When he turned, the nurse approached him, "Everything looks fine. I'd put her at ten centimeters; see what you think."
He sat on the low stool, and reached up into the soft cave of his wife's body. The amniotic sac was still intact, and through it, he could feel the baby's head. His child. He should be pacing in a waiting room somewhere. Across the room, the blinds were closed on the only window, and as he pulled his hand from the warm of his wife's body he found himself wondering about the snow, if it was falling still, silencing the city and the land beyond.
"Yes," he announced. "Ten centimeters."
"Phoebe," his wife managed to say. He could not see her face, but her voice was clear. They had been discussing names for months and had still reached no decisions. "For a girl, Phoebe. And for a boy, Joseph. After my great uncle. Did I tell you this?" she asked. "I meant to tell you I'd decided."
"Those are good names," the nurse said, soothing.
"Phoebe and Joseph." James repeated, but he was concentrating on the contraction now rising in his wife's flesh. He gestured to the nurse who readied the gas for his wife. During his residency years, the practice had been to put the woman in labour out completely until the birth was over, but times had changed — it was 1964 — and Jeremy, he knew, used gas more selectively. Better that she should be awake to push; he would put her out for the worst contractions and the birth. His wife tensed and cried out, and the baby moved down.
"Now," James said, and the nurse put the mask in place. He watched his wife's hands relax, her fists unclenching as the gas took effect, and as she lay still, tranquil and unknowing, as another contraction moved through her.
"It's coming fast for a first baby," the nurse observed.
"Mm." James responded. "So far so good."
Half an hour passed this way. His wife roused and moaned, pushing when he felt she had had enough — or when she cried out that the pain was overwhelming — he nodded to the nurse who gave her more gas. Except for the quiet exchange of instructions, they did not speak. Outside the snow kept falling, drifting along the sides of houses, filling the roads. James sat on the stainless steel chair, narrowing his concentration to the essential facts. He had delivered five babies during medical school, all live births and successful, and he focused now on those, seeking in his memory of the details of care. As he did so, his wife, lying with her belly rising so high that he could not even see her face, became one with those other women. Her round knees, her smooth narrow calves, her ankles, all these were before him, familiar and beloved. Yet he didn't think to stroke her skin or put a reassuring hand on her knee. It was the nurse who held her hand while she pushed. To James, focused on what was immediately before him, she became not just herself but more than herself; a body like the others, a patient whose needs must be met with every technical skill he had.
It was necessary, more necessary than usual, for him to keep his emotions in check. As time passed, the strange moment he had experienced in their bedroom came to him again. He began to feel as if he were somehow removed from the scene of this birth, both there and also floating elsewhere, observing from some safe distance. He watched himself make the careful incision for the episiotomy. A good one, he thought, as the blood welled in a clean line, not letting himself remember the times he'd touched that same flesh in passion.
The baby's head crowned at last. In three more pushes it emerged, and the the body slid into James' waiting hands. The baby cried out, it's skin pinking up.
It was a boy.
Red-faced and dark-haired, his eyes alert, suspicious of the lights and the cold bright slap of air. James tied the umbilical cord and cut it.
My son. He allowed himself to think. My precious little boy.
"He's beautiful," the nurse said, quietly. She waited while he examined the child, noting his steady heart, rapid and sure, the long fingered hands and shock of dark hair. Then she took the infant to the other room to bathe him and drop the sliver nitrate in his eyes. The small cries drifted back to them, and his wife stirred. James stayed where he was with his hand now on her knee, taking several deep breaths, awaiting the afterbirth.
"Where's our baby?" Norah asked, opening her eyes and pushing hair away from her flushed face. "Is everything alright?"
"It's a boy," James said, happily, smiling down at her. "We have a son, my love. You'll see him as soon as he's clean. He's absolutely perfect."
His wife's face, soft with relief and exhaustion, suddenly tightened with another contraction. James, expecting the afterbirth, returned to the stool between her legs, and pressed lightly against her abdomen. She cried out, and at the same moment he understood what was happening, as startled as if a window had appeared suddenly in a concrete wall.
"It's alright," he said. "Everything's fine. Nurse," he bellowed, as the next contraction tightened. She came in at once, carrying the baby, now swaddled in white blankets.
"He's nine on the Apgar," she announced. "That's very good."
His wife lifted her arms up to hold her baby and began to speak, but the pain caught her and she laid back down.
"Nurse?" James said, "I need you here. Right now." After a moment's confusion, the nurse quickly put two pillows down on the floor, placing the baby on the them, and joined the doctor by the table.
"More gas," he said. He saw her surprise and then her quick nod of comprehension as she complied. His hand was still on his wife's knee, he felt the tension ease from her muscles as the gas took hold again.
"Twins?" the nurse asked.
Twins.