Chapter 110 Thirty-Eight Weeks
The due date was eleven days away.
I knew this the way I knew my own heartbeat, without checking, without counting, the number living in my body rather than my mind. Eleven days. Give or take. Aunt Clara had said give or take with the particular emphasis of someone who wanted me to hold the number loosely, who had seen enough births to know that babies arrived on their own timeline with complete indifference to what anyone had written on a calendar.
I was trying to hold it loosely.
I was not entirely succeeding.
The mornings had taken on a specific quality. I woke early, earlier than I needed to, and lay in the pale light before the day started and listened to the house and felt the baby and ran through the internal inventory that had become my first act every morning. How she was positioned. Whether she had moved recently. The particular pressure of her against my ribs, my pelvis, the inside of me that was entirely hers now, every available inch of it.
She was quiet in the mornings. Had always been quiet in the mornings. I had learned this about her the way I had learned everything about her, through the long patient attention of carrying someone for nine months, through the daily accumulation of knowledge that had no source except proximity and time.
Aunt Clara came on Monday.
She came through the door with her bag and her notebook and the focused energy she always brought, the energy of someone who had somewhere important to be and was glad to be there. She set up in the kitchen the way she had been setting up for months, everything arranged with quiet efficiency, and moved through the examination with the warm certainty of hands that had been doing this long enough to feel like second nature.
She checked everything twice.
Then she sat across from me at the kitchen table and opened her notebook and looked at her notes and looked at me.
“She’s perfect,” she said. “Position is good. Heartbeat strong and steady. Everything is exactly where it should be.” She wrote something down. “You could go any day. Your body is completely ready.”
Any day.
I pressed my hands flat on the table.
Aunt Clara watched me. The doctor part of her and the aunt part of her are occupying the same face, both of them reading me with the same careful attention.
“Tell me what you’re feeling,” she said.
“Ready,” I said. “Terrified. Both at the same time.”
She nodded like this was exactly right.
“I felt that way once,” she said. “Standing outside a delivery room in my first year of practice. My hands were shaking.” She looked at her hands on the table, steady now, entirely still. “The senior doctor I was working under looked at me and said the shaking means you understand what matters. The ones who aren’t shaking aren’t paying attention.” She looked up. “You’re paying attention. That’s all that is.”
I looked at her hands. At the stillness of them. At everything they had been through to arrive at this table, this conversation, this moment eleven days before my daughter was due.
“Were you scared when you came back?” I asked. “To practice. After everything.”
She considered this honestly the way she considered everything.
“Yes,” she said. “Every day for the first month. My hands remembered before my confidence did. I would be in the middle of something and realize I was doing it correctly, that the knowledge was still there, that the illness had taken years from me but not the skill.” She closed her notebook. “And then one afternoon I was reviewing your scan results and I saw her move on the screen and I stopped being scared.” She met my eyes. “Because I remembered why I started. And the reason was always this. Exactly this.”
Lycian came in from the garden. He looked at us at the table and read the atmosphere the way he always read atmospheres, completely and immediately.
“Everything good?” he said.
“Perfect,” Aunt Clara said. She stood and picked up her bag. “Walk slowly. Rest when your body asks. Call me the moment anything changes.” She looked at Lycian. “Make sure she rests.”
“I know,” he said.
“I know you know,” she said. “I’m saying it anyway.”
She left with the particular Aunt Clara exit that was not quite warm and not quite brisk but somewhere entirely her own, the exit of a woman who had somewhere else to be and would be back in two days regardless.
We walked in the afternoon.
Slowly, the way everything happened now, Lycian was adjusting his pace to mine without comment, his hand warm around mine, his thumb doing those slow circles that I felt in my chest more than my hand.
The May afternoon was full and soft. The trees along the park path are heavy with new leaves, the light coming through them in shifting pieces. The path was quiet, just the sound of our feet and the birds, and somewhere distant a dog running through the grass.
I walked and felt the weight of her, low and constant, the particular gravity of thirty-eight weeks, my body doing the last of its work, the final preparation of something that had been building for nine months toward this point.
We sat on the bench by the water.
The same bench we had been sitting on for months, the one that had become ours through repetition, the way places became yours without any formal arrangement.
The water moved. A family of ducks on the far bank, unhurried. The May sky above the trees was pale and wide and entirely indifferent to anything happening beneath it.
I looked at the water for a while without speaking.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
Lycian turned toward me.
“When it starts,” I said. “When we’re in the room and it’s happening. I need you to stay. Not in the hall. Not stepping out. I need you there every second regardless of what it looks like or how hard it gets.” I looked at him. “I need to be able to look for you and find you.”
His eyes were on my face. Completely steady.
“I will be there,” he said. “Every second. You won’t have to look hard.”
I nodded, looked back at the water.
“I’m scared,” I said. Simply. The plain truth of it without decoration.
“I know.” He lifted our joined hands and pressed his lips to my knuckles. Held them there. “So am I.”
The honesty of it settled something in me that reassurance would not have reached. Not I’ll be fine, not everything will be perfect, not the managed comfort of someone trying to make fear smaller. Just his fear beside mine, honest and present, the two of us holding it together instead of pretending it away.
The baby moved. A long slow turn, the unhurried movement of someone with nowhere urgently to be. Her last big movements, the ones that were becoming rare as the space ran out.
I felt every inch of it.
Lycian’s hand on my stomach, having found it without me noticing, the automatic reaching that was as much his now as breathing.
The bench. The water. The May afternoon. Eleven days.
Aunt Clara’s hands were steady on the kitchen table. Her voice said any day with the authority of someone who had been present at enough beginnings to know that they came when they were ready and not before.
We were ready.
I pressed my free hand to my stomach and felt my daughter settle into stillness beneath it, quiet and certain and entirely herself, waiting for her own moment in her own time.
Eleven days, give or take.