Chapter 118 The Labour

Chapter 118 The Labour
Lara's POV

The contractions started on a Tuesday morning.

Not dramatically. Not the way things started in films, no sudden gasp, no water breaking at an inconvenient moment in a public place, no rushing to the hospital with one shoe on. Just a tightening that woke me at four in the morning and made me lie very still for a moment, counting, and then do it again seven minutes later, and then again, and by the time the third one came I already knew.

I lay there in the dark for a while after that.

Not because I wasn't ready. Not because I was afraid. Just because I wanted a few minutes of this particular quiet before everything changed again, before the house filled up with the particular noise and chaos and joy of a new thing arriving, before I stopped being the woman who was waiting for this and became the woman who was in it.

I put my hand flat on my stomach.

Hello, I thought. Today is the day.

Damien woke up on his own about ten minutes later, the way he always woke up when something was happening, quickly and completely, sitting up in the dark and looking at me.

"Is it time?" he asked.

"It's time," I said.

He was out of bed before I finished the sentence.

I had never seen Damien move that fast outside of a genuine emergency and I would have found it funny except that another contraction came and I was briefly occupied with breathing through it, which I did, steadily, the way Dr. Obi had told me to, in through the nose and out through the mouth and keep your shoulders down.

"How far apart?" Damien asked, already dressed somehow, already holding my hospital bag, looking at me with the focused expression of a man who had a job to do and was doing it.

"Seven minutes," I said. "Maybe six now."

"I'll call Ethan," he said.

"Not yet," I said. "Let him sleep a little longer. We have time."

"Lara—"

"Damien. I've done this before. We have time."

He looked at me for a moment with the expression he used when he disagreed with me but had decided that this particular disagreement was not worth having.

"I'm calling him in ten minutes," he said.

"Fine," I said.

I got up and went to the bathroom and stood at the sink looking at myself in the mirror while another contraction built and peaked and passed. I had forgotten this. Not the pain exactly, more the particular intensity of it, the way it demanded your complete attention for the duration and then released you and let you be a normal person again until the next one.

I was okay.

I was genuinely okay.

I went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed and Damien was on the phone to Dr. Obi's emergency line, giving details in the precise way he gave all details, times and intervals and duration, and I listened to him describe my labour to my doctor with the same calm efficiency he brought to board meetings and I thought about how much I loved this man.

Dr. Obi told him to come in when the contractions were five minutes apart.

They were five minutes apart by the time we got downstairs.

Damien woke Ethan then, going upstairs and knocking on his door and saying five words through it that brought Ethan downstairs in under two minutes, hair everywhere, one sock on, completely alert in the way he was always completely alert the moment something important was happening.

He looked at me sitting at the kitchen table breathing through a contraction.

He looked at Damien.

"Now?" he said.

"Now," Damien said.

Ethan's face did something complicated and wonderful, something that moved through surprise and excitement and something softer than both of those before settling into the particular composure he deployed when he needed to be useful.

"Richie," he said.

"Mrs. Abara is coming," Damien said. "She'll be here in twenty minutes."

"I'll stay until she gets here," Ethan said immediately. "Go. I'll stay with Richie and wait for Mrs. Abara and then I'll come to the hospital."

I looked at my son.

Fifteen years old, one sock on, hair that had not seen a brush since yesterday, already thinking three steps ahead.

"Come soon," I said.

"I'll be there before anything important happens," he said confidently.

"You don't know when the important things will happen," I said.

"I'll be there," he said simply.

I believed him.

Damien helped me to the car and we drove to the hospital in the early morning dark, the city quiet around us in the way it was only quiet between about four and six in the morning, that narrow window when even the most nocturnal things had gone home and the early morning things hadn't fully started yet.

I sat in the passenger seat and breathed through the contractions and watched the city go past and thought about Ethan at home in his one sock waiting for Mrs. Abara and Richie upstairs completely unaware that by the time he woke up his family would be one person larger.

The hospital was calm and organised in the way hospitals were calm and organised at that hour, a different energy from the daytime bustle, quieter and more concentrated.

Dr. Obi met us herself, which she had promised she would do and which I had not entirely believed she meant until she was actually standing there in the corridor at five in the morning with her hair pulled back and her coat over her scrubs looking completely unperturbed by the hour.

"How are you doing?" she asked me.

"Ask me again in an hour," I said.

She smiled. "That's a good answer."

They got me settled and monitored and assessed, the particular efficient choreography of hospital staff doing things they had done hundreds of times, and I let them do it and focused on the breathing and on Damien's hand in mine, which he did not let go of once, not for a single moment through the whole of it.

The labour lasted four hours.

I will not go through all of it because some things are private in a way that even this story doesn't reach, some things belong only to the people who were in the room, but I will say this.

It was hard and it was real and at no point did I feel anything other than completely present in my own body, completely inside the experience rather than watching it from somewhere outside, which was new, because with Ethan there had been fear underneath everything and with Richie there had been exhaustion underneath everything but this time there was just the thing itself, just this, just the work of it.

And Damien.

Damien who held my hand and said the right things and didn't say the wrong things and at one point, in the hardest stretch of it, just looked at me with his eyes steady and certain and said you're doing it, you're already doing it, keep going.

I kept going.

At nine seventeen in the morning, on a Tuesday in the middle of what had turned out to be a very significant year, our daughter arrived.

She came into the world with considerable opinion about it, expressing that opinion at volume, and the sound of her, that first specific sound, hit me somewhere underneath all the exhaustion and the relief and the physical enormity of what had just happened and made me cry in a way I hadn't cried in a very long time.

Not grief crying. Not fear crying.

Just the kind of crying that happened when something was so exactly right that your body didn't know what else to do with it.

They put her on my chest and she was warm and small and furious about everything and I held her and looked at her face and said hello to her out loud, which felt slightly ridiculous and completely necessary.

Damien was beside me.

I looked up at him.

He was crying.

Properly crying, the fourth time in all the years I had known him, tears running down his face without any attempt to stop them or manage them, just there, present, completely honest.

He was looking at her with the particular expression of a man who had been told something was impossible and had spent years making his peace with that impossibility and was now holding the proof that impossibility was just a word that sometimes turned out to be wrong.

"Hi," he said to her. His voice was not steady. He wasn't trying to make it steady.

She continued to express her opinions about the world.

"She's loud," he said.

"She's ours," I said.

He looked up at me then, from her face to mine, and something passed between us that I didn't have words for and didn't need to.

Some things were beyond words.

This was one of them.

Ethan arrived at nine forty five, which was true to his word, before anything important had happened in the sense that the important thing had happened and he had missed it by twenty eight minutes but he was there quickly enough that she was still very new when he came into the room.

He stopped in the doorway.

Looked at me. At Damien. At the small person I was holding.

His face went through several things very quickly.

Then he came in and sat in the chair beside the bed and looked at her properly, really looked, the way he looked at things he was taking seriously.

"She's very small," he said.

"She was even smaller twenty minutes ago," I said.

He looked at me. "That doesn't make sense."

"It makes complete sense," I said. "Do you want to hold her?"

He looked slightly alarmed.

"I don't know how," he said.

"I'll show you," I said.

And I did.

And he held his sister for the first time with his arms carefully arranged the way I showed him and his face doing the thing it did when he was trying very hard to appear composed and was not entirely succeeding, and she looked up at him with the unfocused gaze of someone who was brand new to having eyes, and he said very quietly, almost to himself, "Hi. I'm your brother. I've been waiting for you."

God.

This boy.

I looked at Damien over Ethan's head.

He was looking back at me.

We didn't need to say anything.