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I've watched it climb and dip for two hours, and I know this one is different before the number even settles. A contraction rolls up on the top line and Baby A goes down with it, and down, and stays down a beat too long. Then it climbs, but slowly, and not the way it snapped back when we first got here.

Nobody says anything yet. But the nurse who was leaning against the counter isn't leaning anymore.

It happens again, the same slide and the same crawl back that takes too long.

The door opens and there are more people in the room, and they move fast without looking scared, which is worse than scared. The one who's been calling me Dad and telling Mackie little jokes isn't cracking any now. Somebody's hand is on the rail of the bed.

I watch the tracing because it's all I know how to do now, and each time the line comes back it comes back slower.

Rao is back in the room. She reads the strip for two seconds. "We're going to the operating room. Now."

Then the bed is moving. The wheels unlock, and Mackie goes through the door with three people around her. I stay standing where the bed used to be.

Someone pushes folded blue cloth into my arms. "Put on these scrubs. Bathroom's there. Be quick."

I change in a closet of a room with my hands not working right, and I get my boots on the wrong feet the first time. Then I'm out in the hall, and they've taken her through the double doors to give her the spinal, and I can't go yet.

Ninety seconds. There is nothing here to fix, no gate off its hinge, no calf to turn inside its mother with my whole arm, no check I can write that makes this cost less, no monitor I can lean over and read. I have two hands that got me everything I own, and they are empty.

The doors open and a nurse waves me through.

Inside it's bright and cold, full of people, with a blue curtain hung across Mackie at the chest. The nurse points at a stool by her head.

"Dad, you're going to sit right here, and you don't get up."

"No, ma'am."

I sit, taking Mackie's hand in both of mine. I keep my eyes where they belong, on her, not the drape, not whatever is happening past it that I can't change and wasn't asked to watch.

Her lips are gray at the edges. "What do you see?"

"The ceiling," I say. "And you."

I can't drop her pressure. I can't lift her platelets or make that little heart climb, but I can sit here and hold on to her.

At 3:06 in the morning, a baby cries.

SIXTEEN

Mackie

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child / Bye, bye, lully, lullay

The cry cuts through the room, and I laugh before I know I’m going to. I’m a mother now, and this is what comes out of me, which my friends would say is completely appropriate for me.

The blue drape stands up across my chest. Below it there's no pain at all, only pressure, a deep tugging that reaches up under my ribs and moves things that shouldn't move. My arms won't stop shaking. They rattle against the padded boards on both sides.

Carson holds one of my hands in both of his. He watches my face, and his eyes are wet.

"She's mad," he says.

"She's a girl. She reserves that right."

Then the pulling shifts, and someone says, "Here comes your boy."

Nothing comes at first, and I count without even thinking about it. One, two, three, four, five, six.

He cries, and my whole chest caves in around the sound of it. Now the tears come.