Chương 3
“Then put these on and don’t touch anything blue.”
He looked down at the bundle.
“What happens if I touch something blue?”
“You make my night worse.”
He dressed without another question.
I was transferred to the narrow operating table while people moved around me with the controlled urgency of professionals who had no use for panic.
Someone asked me to confirm my full name.
Someone else asked whether I understood that an emergency cesarean delivery was necessary.
I said yes because my mouth still worked even though the rest of me felt detached from my body.
The anesthesiologist leaned over me.
“Claire, because of the urgency and the medication you’ve already received, we’re going to use spinal anesthesia if we can get it placed quickly.”
“If you can’t?”
“We put you to sleep.”
I stared at him.
“I don’t want to be asleep when they’re born.”
“Then hold still for me.”
Adrian moved into my line of sight while they helped me curl forward.
He had covered half his face with the mask, but his eyes were steady.
“You can break my hand if necessary,” he said.
“I don’t know you well enough.”
“That’s generally when people enjoy it most.”
The joke was terrible.
It helped.
I gripped his fingers while the needle went into my back.
The anesthesiologist told me to breathe.
My body shook anyway.
Within minutes, heat spread down my legs, followed by a strange heaviness that frightened me almost as much as the contractions had.
A blue drape went up across my chest.
The room became voices, metal sounds, and glimpses of masked faces.
“Pressure, not pain,” someone warned.
Then pressure came.
It felt impossible that my body could be opened while I remained awake enough to hear Adrian breathing beside me.
I turned my head toward him.
“My husband should be here.”
The words escaped before I could stop them.
Adrian did not pretend otherwise.
“Yes.”
“He wanted children.”
His eyes flicked to mine.
“At least he said he did.”
A doctor announced an incision time.
Adrian’s thumb pressed once against the side of my hand.
“People say many things before there is a cost attached.”
It was such a hard sentence that I almost pulled away.
Then I realized he was not talking only about Ethan.
The room shifted around us.
I heard Dr. Ruiz say, “Baby C first.”
For several seconds there was nothing except voices I could not interpret.
Then a tiny sound appeared in the room.
It was not the full angry cry I had imagined during pregnancy.
It was thin and brief and startlingly alive.
My entire body reacted to it.
“Lily?”
“Yes,” Dr. Ruiz called from behind the drape.
“She’s here.”
“Is she breathing?”
The answer came from farther away.
“She needs help, Mom, but we have her.”
Mom.
The word nearly destroyed me.
I had spent twenty-eight weeks thinking of myself as pregnant.
I had not understood that there would be a second when pregnancy ended and motherhood began whether I was ready or not.
A nurse moved quickly past carrying something impossibly small wrapped in clear plastic toward the neonatal team.
I saw one tiny foot.
Then she was gone.
“Baby A next.”
No cry came at first.
I stopped breathing.
“Come on,” someone murmured.
A second later, a rough little squeak broke through the room.
I laughed and sobbed at once.
“That’s Noah?”
“That’s Noah.”
Adrian lowered his head for a moment.
I noticed because everyone else in the room was moving.
He was the only still thing.
“Baby B.”
Sam arrived with more noise than his brother and sister combined.
His cry was weak but furious, a kitten-sized protest against the indignity of existence.
“That one sounds expensive,” Adrian said.
I laughed again, and the laugh turned into shaking.
The anesthesiologist adjusted something near my shoulder.
“Claire, you’re doing well.”
“Can I see them?”
“They’re stabilizing them.”
“I need to see them.”
“You will.”
“No, I need—”
Adrian leaned closer.
“They’re here.”
It was not the answer I wanted.
It was the answer I could survive.
One of the neonatal physicians stepped around the drape.
He spoke quickly, but not carelessly.
All three babies were alive.
All three were extremely premature.
Lily had required intubation.
Noah was receiving respiratory support.
Sam was breathing with assistance but had the strongest initial response.
They were being moved to the neonatal intensive care unit.
“Can I touch them?”
“Not yet.”
The doctor hesitated.
“We can bring each incubator close for a moment if they remain stable enough.”
I nodded so hard my head hurt.
Lily came first.
She disappeared beneath tubes, tape, and wires.
Her skin was red and almost translucent.
Her entire hand looked smaller than the top joint of my thumb.
I stared through the clear wall of the transport incubator.
“That’s my daughter?”
“Yes.”
My voice broke.
“She doesn’t look real.”
“No,” Adrian said quietly.
“She looks very real.”
Noah came next, one arm shifting weakly beside his face.
Then Sam, his mouth hidden beneath breathing equipment.
I could not touch any of them.
That cruelty felt disproportionate.
I had carried them inside my body, had felt them turn beneath my ribs, had complained when one pressed on my bladder during dinner, and now there was plastic between us.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
I was not sure which child I meant.
Maybe all three.
Maybe myself.
Maybe the version of their lives I had assumed would happen.
The incubators left one after another.
The room became abruptly too large.
Dr. Ruiz continued working behind the drape.
I was still holding Adrian’s hand.
I released it.
“You can go.”
He flexed his fingers.
“I probably should before permanent damage sets in.”
“Your mother.”
“Yes.”
“You abandoned her for a stranger.”
“She was stable.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“No.”
He looked toward the door but did not move.
“My sister died in a hospital.”
I waited.
May you like
He seemed surprised by his own sentence.
“She was thirty-one,” he continued.
