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“Uhhhhhh.” I can’t think of anything, and Nova puts her hand on my arm. I had no idea a mother’s brain chemistry changed. “What’s skin-to-skin mean?”
“It’s how babies bond with their parents. You lay with the baby on your bare chest.”
“Okay,” I respond, still not fully caught up.
The loudness of my thoughts blurs out the doctor’s voice, and the images of babies everywhere finally sink in, setting my heart racing. A flash of me sitting bare-chested with a baby on me doubles me over. A tiny, frail human that will fit in my hands. I look to the doctor, my brain pleading silently with her, and she seems to understand.
She smiles at me. “It’s okay to feel overwhelmed, Zeke. It’s part of the process.”
I glance at Nova, begging her to rescue me and she does by launching into her own string of questions. I clench my jaw and force the thoughts to quiet down.
Dr. Smith sits on her rolling stool. She shakes a bottle and squeezes out this gel on Nova’s belly.
“This is a fetal doppler,” she says when she sees my sky-high eyebrows. “It will listen to the baby.”
The room falls quiet as the doctor moves the wand around.
“Will we hear the heart?” I ask, and the doctor nods, her brows lowering in concentration. She moves around Nova’s belly in a mix of slow and fast strokes, pressing into the flesh. I want to ask if it’s necessary to push that hard, but I bite my tongue.
The silence stretches out, and the doctor’s features pull in more and more as time passes.
Nova grabs at my hand and squeezes my fingers tight, which brings my attention to her face. Her eyes are wide with fear, and I finally catch up to what’s going on. The quiet, the concern, the fear.
“What happens if you can’t find the heartbeat?” I ask, and Nova’s grip turns bone-crushing. The world falls out from under me in an instant, and fucking hell, I didn’t think of this part. Of miscarriages and stillborns and all the millions of things that could go wrong with the baby or Nova. I am not ready for this.
“It might not mean anything.” The doctor’s tone changes. “It’s still pretty early on. The baby is quite small and tucked behind the pelvic bone. The uterus is starting to stretch beyond, so using these smaller dopplers is….” She trails off, and my heart can’t take this fucking stress.
I lean my elbows on the edge of the bed and lift Nova’s hand in mine to my forehead.
The doctor laughs suddenly, and I whip my head up. She’s grinning and moving the wand in a much smaller circle on Nova’s lower pelvis, tucked right in against her hip bone.
“Sneaky little one was playing hide and seek with me.” Dr. Smith pitches her voice up in the way adults talk to puppies and children. She swipes her thumb against the side of the machine in her hand, and sound fills the room—staticky and jarring at first.
But then it hits me: rapid little thumps that twist my entire universe and compress it into this one moment. I feel the shift in my body happen so suddenly, it’s dizzying.
“That’s the heart?” I ask, pointing to nothing. I’m not sure what my face is doing, but both of them are watching me with amusement. “That’s it. Just hanging out in there?”
“Well, not hanging out. Working really hard to grow.”
“Yeah, but…” I trail out, staring at Nova’s belly like I might somehow develop X-ray vision and see this tiny human in her. There’s a person inside her.
“This is typical for fathers.” Dr. Smith talks to Nova, as I’m still dumbfounded and way more emotional than I thought I’d be by this itty-bitty drumbeat. “You can feel the changes in your body immediately, but it often takes dads time to see it. Hearing the heart, seeing the baby in the ultrasound, watching you become visibly pregnant, and especially holding the baby for the first time are the most significant moments for the father’s journey. Especially in an unplanned pregnancy.”
Nova’s cheeks flare, but I’m stuck on the wordfather.
There’s a human in there. And I’m its father.
When the appointment’s done, Nova and I pick up her new cell phone, then drive home in complete silence. No music, no talking, no sound. A few times, I reach across the truck and put my palm on her belly, as if I’m checking to make sure she’s still there. That they’re still with me.
But as I expand and open, Nova is visibly contracting on herself.
Her phone keeps pinging, over and over again. Each time, her shoulders tense, her fingers tightening around the device.
“Well, you’re popular,” I say, trying to ease some of the weirdness that suddenly sprang up. Nova looks out the window with a shrug.
Her silence is killing me, so I just ramble to fill it. “With it being broken for so long, I bet there’s a lot to catch up on. Email, calls, texts. If I went a week without checking in with Tabby, she’d send someone to hunt me down.”
I laugh, and Nova whips her head to stare me down with rage and terror in her eyes. It’s completely unlike her, and like at the doctor’s office, something inside of me changes in an instant. There’s a sudden clarity that shifts everything into focus.
