Page 50 of A Very Bumpy Christmas
20
Melanie
The pain folds me in half before my brain has a chance to name it.
Not a cramp. Not a Braxton Hicks. This is a live wire pulled tight from spine to belly, heat and pressure and inevitability. I lurch to sitting inside the blanket fort, gasping, hands flying to my stomach as if I can press time back into place.
“Lucas,” I whisper, then louder, “Lucas.”
He’s awake before I finish the second syllable, the way a thunderstorm wakes a dog. His hand lands on my shoulder, sure and warm. “Talk to me.”
“Pain,” I manage, and then it eases, leaving me shaky and embarrassed. “Okay, ow. That was… new.”
His watch is already in his hand. “We time the next one. Hydration first.” Of course he says hydration. He’s Captain Safety even when my uterus is staging a coup.
He helps me roll to my side and then up to my knees, the position I liked last week when my back was mad. He’s gentle but efficient, lowering the fort flap so the tree’s glow softens the edges of the room. The apartment hums on generator-steady power, and outside the window the world is an impressionist painting of snow and streetlight.
He gets me water with a straw and a quiet kiss to the hairline, then kneels back beside me, watch ready. “If it was the real thing,” he says in that calm, even tone they should sell in jars, “your body will tell us again.”
It does. Seven minutes later, then six. Each wave steals my breath, tightens everything, then leaves me buoyant and almost high, swaying in the safe pocket of his hands at my hips.
“Okay,” I say through my teeth when one finally recedes. “I think this is the real thing.”
“Copy,” he says, and the word steadies me more than it should. “Do you want to try the tub or the ball for a bit while we decide hospital versus home start?”
“I want an epidural,” I confess, and hear how small I sound. I’m brave, I’m stubborn, I’m a woman who has opinions about lemon zest—but also I am not above modern medicine.
“Then we move,” he says immediately. No lecture, no romanticizing of pioneer births. “Conditions are bad but passable.” He checks the window, the street. “It’s going to get worse in two hours. We’ll beat it. Ten minutes to dress, then go.”
The next contraction doesn’t care about his timeline. It rips through me, and I tense against it until his voice cuts in, low and firm. “Unclench your jaw. Breathe down, not up. I’ve got your weight.” He presses a palm at my sacrum and the painshifts from sharp to doable, like he found a lever nobody told me existed.
By the time it releases, he’s already in motion—go-bag at the door, boots staged, my thickest coat open and waiting. He helps me into leggings and a long sweater between waves with the same care he uses to set wedges under doors. The world narrows to his voice and the rhythm he keeps.
“Amelia?” I gasp.
“I’ll call her from the truck. She stays put. Roads are mean.” He meets my eyes to make sure that lands. “Your mom too.”
We take the stairs because elevators in storms are the stuff of urban legends. He moves one step below me, one hand on the rail, one hovering at my hip. In the garage, the air is metallic and cold enough to bite. He gets me into the passenger seat, buckles me with that gentleness that never crosses into pity, then jogs around to brush the windshield with quick, efficient sweeps.
The streets are a quiet battlefield. Plows have passed but the wind erases their work as they go. He drives like a man who’s done this before. Between contractions I watch his profile, the set of his jaw, the way his eyes are always moving—rearview, road, my knee, back to road.
“Talk to me,” he says every few minutes. “Scale of one to ten?”
“Allegedly a six,” I grit, and he cracks a small smile, like the joke is a rope he’s throwing me.
He calls Duke on speaker—quick, clean update. Then Amelia. “She’s good,” he tells my sister. “We’re en route. Stay put until the plows catch up and the wind drops. We’ll text when we have a room.”
“Tell her I love her,” Amelia says. I’m too busy breathing to shout it back, so he does for me.
We pull under the ER canopy where a nurse waves us toward the maternity entrance, then a new reality hits: the power is out in half the building. Generators thrum, lights flicker in ugly fluorescents, and everything is two notches louder than it should be. The waiting room looks like a snow globe someone shook too hard—people in parkas, a woman with a broken wrist, a kid with a bandaged head, a harried volunteer propping doors with rubber wedges that are much prettier and much less satisfying than ours.
“L&D is on generator,” the intake nurse pants, already moving us toward an elevator that creaks to life like a revived dinosaur. “Crazy night. Lots of babies. Barometric pressure, you know?”
I cling to Lucas’s arm as the elevator lurches. “I knew I was a cliché,” I mutter.
“Best cliché,” he says, kissing my temple.
Upstairs the chaos concentrates—hallways striped with battery-powered lanterns, nurses in sneakers moving like point guards, monitors chirping in an out-of-sync chorus. A carol from someone’s phone tumbles out of a nurses’ station speaker and collides with the generator bassline.
