“Drive carefully.”
“I will.”
“Chip.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell Matt good luck from us all.”
“I will.”
I picked up Sable from Coach Ronan’s office and briefly explained, and he said he had everything handled and waved me away.
I knewDane was on shift and there had been a fire engine on University when I’d driven in. Not Station Eight. Station Three, I thought, from the decal on the engine that I caught as I passed. I hadn’t let myself look long. I was choosing today to assume Dane was at the station eating someone’s dry oatmeal and not at a fire.
Traffic was horrendous, snarled and untidy, and a couple of roads were blocked off, making it worse. It took me nearly an hour to get to the hospital. Why would the city choose to do road repairs on the day I was going to become an uncle?
Late and out of sorts, I headed up to L&D on the fourth floor. The elevator was empty—a small mercy, because the ceiling fixture in the Genesee elevator flickered, which I’d hated since the night of the fire, and I had to cover my eyes and was thankful there was no one else in there to ask me if I was okay. I gave the desk nurse my name and Lena’s. I told her Sable was a service animal. She nodded once and pointed me to a small private waiting room down the hall.
My mother was there, as was Lena’s mom, Bridget.
“Hi, Mom. Hi, Bridget.” Lena’s mom and I weren’t friends. She’d disapproved of me being Matt’s best man at his wedding, saying the reasons were obvious. I’m guessing it was the autism thing and the chance I might have started throwing out stats about something inappropriate. She said I was awkward, but not to my face, just to my mom, who then put her in her place. My best man speech rocked. Since then, I’m not sure she and Momare friends either. I know Matt finds her impossible, but some people are just born to be impossible, and I ignore them.
“Hi, sweetheart.” Mom got up and hugged me. That was fine because, aside from Dane, Matt, and Lena, she was the only one I was happy to hug. Bridget glanced up at me and flinched. I certainly wasn’t going to hug her.
“How is Lena?” I asked.
“She’s fine. Doing well. Matt is in there with her. Sit. Tell me about practice.”
I sat and told her about practice. The cycle drill, the back-door pass the goalie had saved, and how my knee had held. I told her about Cap’s face when my phone rang. I gave her numbers about labor and the active phase, the time from the first contraction, and Apgar scores, and what we would and wouldn’t be told in advance of being told it, because giving my mother the numbers first was how I’d loved her since I was small.
While I walked her through it, she put her hand on top of mine, Sable lay across both my feet, and Bridget read something on her Kindle.
I stared at the ceiling tiles, tracking the pattern of stains across them. I counted the magazine subscriptions on the table. I held my mother’s hand for one stretch of a long minute. We didn’t talk during it. I had nothing to say. She had nothing to say. I texted Dane:
Chip: Lena in labor. At hospital. Mom here. Will update.
Matt came to the door wearing scrubs they had given him to put over his clothes. There was sweat in his hair. His eyes were red, but he was smiling.
“It’s a girl. You guys want to come meet her?”
“A girl?” Bridget gasped, and Mom grinned next to me. I had a niece.
The hospital room was warm. The lights were low. There was a machine in the corner that had stopped beeping. Lena was in bed in a thin gown with her hair stuck to her temples and a bundle in the crook of her arm. The bundle was very small, very still, and very wrapped. Lena was looking down at the baby in awe.
“Hi,” Lena said. Her voice was wrecked.
“Hi.”
“Come meet her.”
I sat in the chair on the right side of the bed while my mother sat in the chair on the left. Matt stood at the foot of the bed, and Sable settled at my feet without any prompting.
Lena turned the bundle a little, so I could see the baby’s face.
She was the size of a loaf of bread. Her face was red and squashed. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was open in a small, disgruntled O. A tuft of black hair stuck out from under her cap, and one hand had slipped out from under the blanket, making a tiny fist by her chin. She wasn’t still—there was a small, rapid breath going in and out. I was looking at my niece for the first time as a real person, not a number, and all the numbers I’d practiced in the car fell out of my head at once.
“Her name is Iris Elizabeth Cornish,” Matt said, his hand on my shoulder, giving me all the information I needed to make sense of my new niece. “Six pounds two ounces, nineteen inches. Born at 1:23. Her Apgar was ten.”
