Max was stuck, Margo said, turned upside down. They were worried about the cord, and my head was bleeding pretty bad and the doctors couldn’t wait on any of it.
I don’t know what I remember and what I’m imagining, but there’s so much in my mind that feels new, like a movie I watched when I was fighting to stay awake. One scene jumps into the middle of the next.
There’s Carly driving us up to the hospital doors, screaming for help, and so many hands on my body. There’s the way it hurt to be lifted, how everything inside me was shifting, and I could feel Max, all elbows and feet, fighting to free himself like a raccoon in a pillowcase. Someone cut away my clothes and there were too many people touching too many parts of me.
He’s breech! someone said.
Get scrubs for her partner! someone said.
Count backwards. Count backwards. No, backwards, someone said, so I started at Z and Carly laughed even though she was crying.
A woman with a baby blue mask on her face stretched my arms out on a big white cross and the room was cold like the walk-in fridge at Ollie’s, but Carly’s fingers were sweaty between mine. Just as clearly, I remember the surgeon was a grizzly bear in a white coat and the room we were in was full of laughing salmon hanging from the ceiling on meat hooks. So how am I supposed to know if any of my memories are real?
I stare at Max through the clear plastic sides of his bassinette and hope with all my heart that I’m not stuck in some kind of dream. He’s already my favorite thing that ever happened to me. He reminds me of Justin in the shape of his nose, and his dark eyelashes, and I think that’s okay because Justin was someone I used to love to see. He was smart and sometimes he could be very sweet and maybe I can teach Max to be sweet even more of the time. I’ll always look at Max and think about shouting into the waves at night and how the sand was still warm from soaking up the heat from the day and it felt like the world was a wild beast who allowed us to walk on her back. That was a good moment, and it’s where Max came from, so it’s even better as a memory than what I knew at the time. I wonder if maybe when Max meets the sea, he will understand how it’s his oldest friend. He’ll think, Oh, I know you, and he’ll feel like he belongs. I’m going to take him soon, I think. As soon as I can. Maybe Margo will come with us, maybe even Carly, and I’ll sing songs for my own baby on the beach.
Max fusses and I don’t know what to do. My stomach is full of stitches. It hurts to move. I’m scared I’ll drop him.
I catch Carly stirring out of the corner of my eye. “Oh,” she says, sitting up and looking around the room like she’s trying to figure out where she is. “April.”
“I can’t pick him up,” I say, in a panic. His cries make me sure we’re not in a dream, but they also make me want to cry.
“Can I?” Carly asks.
“Please.”
She nestles Max in her arms like she knows what she’s doing. “Hey, hey, little man,” she says. “It is all okay. Everything is okay.” She jiggles him and he starts to settle.
“You’re a natural,” I tell her. I wonder what she thinks of me. I can’t believe she’s here.
“I was the first one to hold him,” she says, tears spilling down her cheeks like they belong to those words.
“You were there?”
Carly nods. “One of your nurses demanded they let me in. I didn’t want to leave you. They said they had to put you under. I didn’t want him to be alone. Max, right? You said in your letters.”
“Max,” I say.
“He looks like you.” She sits on the bed next to me so I can see Max and smell his head and touch his cheek and he can get used to being near me. “He has that serious thing going on right here.” She points to her brow with her free hand. “And he’s beautiful. He was beautiful right away. He cried before they even got him all the way out and then he peed on the doctor.”
I laugh and it hurts, and Carly can see it on my face. She winces too.
“I saw your insides,” she says. “They told me not to look over the curtain they put up, but I heard all these noises and then Max was crying, and I thought, ‘Oh no! He’s hurt!’ instead of remembering babies are supposed to cry when they’re born. So, I looked over like he might need help and I could be the one to help him. They were still pulling his legs from you. Your blood is very red. And Max looked blue until he cried enough oxygen into himself. I had to sit down before I held him, because my knees were wobbling.”