Easton was at my shoulder.
"We need to move her," I said.
"Tell me what you need."
"Get the stretcher to the car. I'll take her weight."
Easton went. I got into the back seat beside her. The sedan was small, and the angle was wrong for everything I was about to do. I got my arm behind her shoulders. She grabbed my forearm with a grip that was going to leave marks, and I let her.
"Audrey. We're going to move you to the ambulance. I need you to let me take your weight. Can you do that?"
She looked at me. Through the pain, through the sweat on her face and the hair stuck to her temple, she looked at me with the clear-eyed focus of a woman who had spent six years on an L&D floor and knew exactly what was happening to her body.
"I can do that."
We moved her. Easton had the stretcher flush with the open car door. I took her weight out of the back seat, one arm under her shoulders, one at the small of her back. We got her onto the stretcher and into the back of the medic unit.
The contractions were ninety seconds apart by the time I'd put on my gloves.
I checked dilation. I did it fast, with my eyes on her face, and the number I got back told me we were not going to Hartsdale General for this delivery. We were doing it here. On the shoulder of Route 9, in the back of a medic unit, with the engine idling ten feet behind us and the traffic going past in the far lane.
"Audrey. You're fully dilated. The baby's coming now."
"I know."
Easton was across from me. He had the vitals cuff on her arm and the pulse ox on her finger. He was doing his piece of the work without a word, leaving the patient interaction to me because the patient was Audrey, and both of us knew it.
The next contraction came. Her whole body bore down. I talked her through it.
"Good. That's good. Breathe through it. One more."
She breathed through it. She made a sound that I will hear for the rest of my life, a low, guttural thing that was not a scream but was past every other word I had for it.
I saw the crown.
"Almost there, Audrey. One more push. Give me one more."
She pushed. She gripped the rail of the stretcher with both hands, and her back came up off the surface, and she made the sound of a woman finishing something her body had been building toward for nine months.
The baby came into my hands.
She was small. She was wet, and red, and furious, and she came into the world screaming at the top of her lungs that were working. I caught her. I held her with both hands, her body not as long as my forearm, the weight of her so slight it barely registered against the gloves, and the scream she was making filled the back of the medic unit and went out through the open doors into the afternoon.
I clamped the cord, cut it, wiped her face with the sterile cloth Easton put in my hand, cleared her airway, and wrapped her in the thermal blanket from the OB kit before I placed the baby on Audrey's chest.
The baby stopped screaming. Her body settled against her mother's skin, the furious red face pressing into the space below Audrey's collarbone, and the silence that replaced the screaming was louder than the screaming had been. Audrey's hands cameup. She placed them on the baby's back, both palms, fingers spread, holding the full length of her daughter against her chest.
I looked up at Audrey's face. She was crying.
"Hi," I said.
She looked up at me. The tears were still coming. She didn't wipe them. She didn't speak. She looked at me over the baby's head, and something passed between us that I couldn't name, because the moment was too large for any word I had, and because I didn't yet understand what I was looking at.
The ambulance doors closed. Easton was in the jump seat across from me. The siren came on a beat later, and we were moving.
The back of the ambulance was small, bright, and humming with the road.
I had work to do. Vitals on Audrey. Vitals on the baby. Blood pressure, temperature, the small, steady tasks that came after a field delivery, and that my hands performed without consulting the rest of me. The baby was on Audrey's chest, her color good, her breathing even, the thermal blanket tucked around her by hands that were still mine and still doing their job.
