The pair waddled over to the open door and Arthur stared out. There was nothing. Just open blue sky and a haze of clouds all around. He couldn’t see the ground. Shouldn’t there be a cornfield down there somewhere? A Little League baseball diamond? Something, anything to remind him that he was still on earth? Vertigo kicked in; his head began spinning. His stomach lurched and he thought he might throw up. All the bravery and urgency he’d been feeling moments ago had apparently been sucked right out the open door.
“Hold on, wait.”
“We’ve got the green light, we gotta go!”
“One sec, one sec!! I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can do this.”
“You have to!”
“But what if we die?! I can’t die the same day my child is born. Wren will be traumatized forever. And I don’t even have a will yet! I can’t. I can’t.”
“Take it from me, as a dad and a skydiver with over a thousand jumps under my belt,” the instructor said, leaning in even further, “you’re never gonna feel fully ready! But you are!”
“You think?”
“Hey. It’s gonna be a helluva story to tell your kid one day, yeah?”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”
“On the count of ten.”
“OK.”
They counted together.
“One. Two—”
“TEN!” the instructor yelled, and with one final push, Arthur was airborne.
Arthur burst into the hospital room, hair still matted from his helmet, fresh rings around his eyes from the goggles. All of it made even more ridiculous by the surgical mask the nurses made him throw on, which only accentuated his dishevelment.
He was expecting chaos, a war zone. Screaming and blood and a dozen medical professionals tripping over one another as they hurried to deliver the baby.
Instead, the room was dark. Quiet. His own panting aside, the room was completely peaceful.
Wren was lying in the bed, torso propped up slightly, a woozy, relaxed look in her eyes. Arthur ran to her, grabbed her hand.
“Did I miss it? Oh God, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Shh,” she said. “You’re harshing the vibe.”
Arthur didn’t understand.
“Where’s the baby?”
“Still here.” She pointed to her belly. “It doesn’t happen that fast, dummy. Charlie got me here in plenty of time.”
“She couldn’t stay?”
“I’d already kept her long enough. She had a honeymoon to get to, and I knew you’d make it.”
A sigh of relief that he had, in fact, made it. More than relief. Arthur felt as if someone had just suddenly decided that the apocalypse was called off. If he’d missed the birth of his first child, he’d have never forgiven himself. That was the kind of moment you could never get back.
“I know that,” he said. Some semblance of logic and reason began returning to his brain as the adrenaline wore off. Flashes of passages from books and blogs appeared to him. Things like length of contractions and average duration of labor and how dilated Wren would need to be before she could start pushing. “I was just so desperate to get here, I had no sense of time. It felt like it took forever.”
The jump had been exhilarating, but after the initial rush had subsided—and after allowing just a moment to imagine himself as Superman, flying through the air to save Metropolis—all Arthur had wanted to do was land. Eventually, they did. In a big empty field, where they had to wait an eternity for the shuttle to come pick them up and take them back to the start.
It all took way too long.
