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I laugh, but it’s shaky. So are my hands. I’ve never been around a baby being delivered, and while I don’t love people outside of my people, Brooklynn is the second closest to them.
“Baby, I’ll build you a goddamn birthing center.”
“I have my own money, even if there is something wildly sexy about a man willing to do anything to make his woman happy. But I don’t know, you think?”
“I think.”
“Yeah,” she says dreamily. “Me too, actually. My clinic will be dope. We’ll do all the women’s health stuff.”
“With Georgia O’Keeffe images on your walls?”
She sputters out a laugh. “I never put that together until now. She painted flowers that look like vaginas, and I help vaginas bloom into flowers.”
“What?”
“Yeah, that didn’t come out as poetic as it sounded in my head. But she is my namesake, sorta, even if I’m named after my mother’s great-grandma Georgia.”
Waves of white flow on either side of the truck, like the parting of the Red Sea, as I plow through the path that leads us back to the road. “Georgia, I have no clue what you’re saying right now.”
“Samesies. I’m just amped. It’s adrenaline rambling. I wish my paperwork for my Maine license were already approved.”
She falls silent after that, a little tense as the truck digs through mountains of snow in the dark, scooting through trees in ways that make her breath hitch, but she doesn’t have to worry. I’ve done this drive so many times I could do it with my eyes closed.
Five minutes later, we hit the main road that hasn’t been plowed in at least the last few hours. I curse under my breath but push us along. Brookylnn and Max’s house is on the other side of town, and by the time we reach their house, I think Georgia is on the brink of her adrenaline rush.
The second the truck stops, she flies out and trudges up the front steps through the thick snowbanks that have settled there, then pounds on the door.
I grab her bag—the one she forgot in the truck in all her excitement—along with all my stuff and follow her up just as the door opens, and a harried Max greets us with the look of a man wandering through the desert only to spot an oasis when he sees Georgia. I can’t imagine how scared and helpless he must feel with Brooklynn in labor and not being able to get her to the hospital.
I follow past her, clapping Max on the shoulder. “Thank you,” he says and I give him a nod because he doesn’t need to thank me.
Brooklynn is in their living room, her head down on the arm of the couch, her body crouched, her face twisted in visible pain. Shit. This is really happening.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Scared out of my wits has a very new meaning in my vocabulary. Brooklynn is drenched in sweat, wearing a short, loose black dress, and bent over the side of her sofa with her forehead pressed down in the arm as she works through a contraction.
“The ambulance told us that they’re forty-five minutes out,” her poor husband Max tells me, his hands wringing in front of him. “I had nine-one-one on the phone for a while, and they were going to walk me through what to do, but I?—”
I give him my best version of a reassuring smile, the one I give to all my patients no matter what’s going on. “I’ve got this.”
I hope. I’m honestly terrified, and I don’t know if I have this because I have no monitors, nurses, or backup help should I need it. I don’t even have a lot of equipment, practically none, actually. And when the baby comes, I don’t have a lot for him either. I throw on my stethoscope and reach the diaphragm around to Brooklynn’s chest. Her heartbeat sounds good, but I hate that I don’t have a blood pressure cuff.
I just have to pray that I won’t need anything beyond what I have and what I know.
Max blows out an uneven breath and collapses into a chair, his head dropping to his hands as he starts to shake. The poor guy thought he was going to have to deliver his child. I nod for Lenox to go over and comfort him, but Lenox isn’t catching my drift. His eyebrows pinch, and he gives me a quick head jerk, like he wants me to spell it out for him. I give him and then Max a pointed stare and a very obvious head bob.
Lenox is still confused and truly, that’s just so Lenox I can’t even.
I sigh. “Comfort him, Lenox. Get him a drink or give him a pep talk or do whatever it is guys do.”
“I’ve never in my life given anyone a pep talk.”
Brooklynn releases a wrecked breath. “Why does that not surprise me?”
“I don’t even know what to say to that, but I need to check Brooklynn’s cervix, and I’m guessing she doesn’t want an audience for that.”
“I don’t,” Brooklynn agrees, but her expression is very serious, and she’s not moving much, her position holding which tells me she’s at the transition phase, which could mean she’s close.
