“It is.” Riley places both of my hands between hers. Hers are bigger than mine. They always have been. We’d compare them when we were little, placing our palms against each other’s, checking to see how much longer Riley’s fingers stretched than mine. Then I’d flip Riley’s palm up to the sky and pretend I knew how to read her future in the fine lines etched into the skin. “Your life line is long. Look at this love line. You’re going to have three great loves in your life and four babies and a mansion in Miami on the beach.” Now, Riley’s long fingers wrap around mine, a lifeline.
“Do you think he’s scared? Chase?” The question is ridiculous, but it’s what I want to know.
Both Kevin and Riley speak at the same time. “No. No. He isn’t scared. He doesn’t know what’s happening.”
I stare straight up at the ceiling. “I’m scared, you guys.”
“You’ll be fine. You’re going to do great,” Riley reassures me again.
“Hi, Momma, how about we get this baby out?” another nurse asks as she comes in and starts to unplug and unhook with ruthless efficiency.
“It’s a boy,” I blurt. “It’s a boy, and his name is Chase. Can we please use his name?” In case the worst happens, I need everyone to call him by his name, like he’s a real person in the world. He exists.
The nurse stops moving long enough to look right at me. “Got it, are you ready to meet Chase?”
Riley grabs my hand, runs her finger across my palm. It’s an old code we used to have when we were at the dinner table or church and couldn’t even whisper without someone hearing. A scratch on the palm means, Are you good? Two squeezes means yes. One means no. I squeeze Riley’s hand two times.
“She’s ready,” Riley tells the nurse, still looking at me.
“You’ve got this. You can do this, Jaybird,” Kevin adds, leaning over to kiss my damp forehead.
Riley and Kevin step away from the bed as the nurses prepare to move me. Without either of them touching me I feel suddenly untethered, lost.
“Will you be here?” I ask Riley. Of course Kevin will stay, but I’m terrified that she’ll leave, walk out the door, and we’ll go back to strained emails, unanswered text messages, and broken plans. The thought that I might have to text Riley the first picture of Chase makes me unspeakably sad. I’d always imagined her being in the hospital to see my baby when he was brand-new to the world, to touch him and hold him and kiss his head and help me count his fingers and toes. I need Riley to be one of the first people Chase ever knows.
“I’ll be here.” Riley smiles her big TV smile, no trace of fear, at least to someone who doesn’t know her. But I see it there. I can see through the mask.
“While you’re doing your thing up there, I’m going to buy a bottle of champagne. So we can celebrate after.”
Soon, I’m in motion through the hospital halls, being wheeled into an OR. It’s all a blur.
And then I hear it. The best sound I’ve ever heard—my baby’s wail. Dr. Atunde lifts Chase Anderson Murphy, triumphantly, high into the air.
“His lungs are working,” Dr. Atunde says, the relief in his voice revealing that he was prepared for a different outcome. I feel a rush of love for this stranger, for getting Chase out in time.
I watch Kevin walk from where he’s been stationed at the top of the bed to the other side of the coarse blue curtain at my waist. He’s not prepared for the sight of my belly sliced open from side to side—all of my guts exposed. I see his face flit from fear to disgust to confusion in a matter of seconds before his eyes land on Chase, and then there is only awe.
“Oh God, Jenny, he’s so small.” He sounds terrified and happy and overwhelmed.
The nurse holds up a pair of scissors. “We’re going to have to get this little guy over to the NICU. Do you want to cut the cord, Daddy?”
Kevin murmurs something that sounds like “uh-huh” and the nurse lowers the sheet enough so that I can see Kevin’s hands shake as he cuts through the ropy string of tissue connecting me to Chase. It doesn’t look like a cord at all, rather some kind of lumpy, spongy tube with a pulse, a life all its own.
As soon as he’s finished, Dr. Atunde holds Chase up for me to see. He looks impossibly fragile, with arms like tiny twigs. His hair is thick and black like Kevin’s, his skin almost translucent, and I can make out blue veins furiously pumping blood into his little heart that thumps so hard in his chest I worry it might burst out of his skin.
When I first see him, gooey and gorgeous, I think I might die for the second time that day. It doesn’t seem possible that you could live with this staggering amount of love. It’s almost daunting to feel so much at once. All of the women who said, “Oh, you just wait until you hold your baby the first time and the love you experience,” like it was a mystical passage that you couldn’t comprehend until you were on the other side—I get it now; they were right.
When I think of how much we went through to get here, the miscarriages, the needles, and all the times I nearly forced myself to give up, until some small seed inside me said, No, you can’t. I know the road was supposed to lead me here. Right here. And whatever happens from this point forward, I have this; I have my baby.
* * *
A champagne bottle, an expensive-looking one with a French name that I can’t pronounce, is the first thing I see when my eyes flutter open later, my head foggy with drugs and exhaustion. I’m in a proper room now. It’s not private though, our insurance wouldn’t cover that, but no one is in the bed next to mine. I turn and there’s Riley asleep on a hard chair in the corner.
Riley is here.
Another realization breaks through, the sun burning off the fog. I am a mother. My heart stutters with a stunned relief as I remember this miraculous fact. The rest I piece together more slowly, my mind still sluggish. Kevin went home to get the hospital bag I never packed and plans to return later with Cookie. I need to stay in the hospital three more nights. Chase will have to stay in the hospital a few more weeks. He’ll need the help of a respirator as his lungs continue to grow, and he can’t regulate his temperature yet, but he’s okay. He’s okay. He’s okay.
I’m working up the energy to get Riley’s attention when a nurse wheels a cart into the room. As if I had conjured him, there he is. My baby.
The nurse maneuvers the cart next to the bed.
Riley jerks awake and leaps out of her chair over to the cart, gazes down at Chase like she’s unwrapped a present. “He’s adorable, Jenny.”
The nurse picks him up. He’s bundled tightly in a cotton swaddle, which gives him more bulk. An IV and monitors are bolted to his rolling crib, and wires crisscross his little body. “He can only be out of the NICU for a few minutes. I figured you’d want some time with him. Skin-to-skin contact helps these little guys, if you want to lie with him for a little while, Mommy.” She starts to unfurl Chase from the blanket, and I shimmy my gown to expose my skin and swollen boobs. I’m ravenous for him, desperate to touch him by the time the nurse negotiates all of the cords and settles him into my arms.