Page 18 of Midnight Mass (Priest 1.50)
By herself. Those were the two worst words in the English language right now, or at least the most incriminating.
With difficulty, I moved my mind from the Christmas tree back to the present. Morales was leaning forward now, one hand braced on her desk as she stared lock-jawed into the middle distance. And then she let out a low groan—the kind of noise that I normally heard when my wife was on her hands and knees in front of me—and so I blushed in automatic response, until I realized that Morales was in pain, real and excruciating pain, and I stepped forward to go to her.
“Professor? Would you like me to get someone?”
“I think I need to call my doctor,” she managed after a minute or so. Her body relaxed slightly, but she kept leaning forward, as if afraid that standing up would trigger her pain again.
“Um, okay,” I said, letting my laptop bag slide off my shoulder and digging my phone out of my blazer pocket. “What’s her name? Maybe I can find her number online.”
“I can do it,” she said, and her voice was a little less strained now, a little more lucid. “Will you bring me my purse?”
I did so and she found her own phone, and within a few minutes, she was talking to a nurse, things like six minutes apart and thought it was just back pain and no, no it hasn’t broken.
Which was around the time that I realized that she was in labor. Holy shit.
Holy.
Shit.
Once, I’d been qualified to baptize babies. I’d been qualified to join people together in marriage, and I’d been qualified to pray at their bedside. I’d guided people through some of the happiest and unhappiest parts of their lives, the highs and lows, the agonies and the ecstasies.
But I had no idea what the fuck to do with a woman in labor. Especially a woman who potentially held the weight of my academic future in her hands.
“Okay,” she said into the phone. And then, “Yes, I have a ride to the hospital.”
Like a character in a sitcom, I instinctively glanced behind me, as if searching for another person in the room, and then I realized—I was the ride to the hospital.
As if sensing my burgeoning panic, Morales met my eyes as she hung up the phone. “Tyler,” she said. “You have to stop with those puppy eyes. I can’t handle them even when I’m not—ugh.” She bent over again, both hands on the desk, breathing hard.
Unsure of what to do, I patted her awkwardly on the back.
“Don’t. Touch. Me,” she snarled.
“Yes, ma’am.”
After another minute of this, she finally straightened up. “Where are you parked?”
“Outside the building in the faculty lot. Should I bring the car around or…?”
“Fuck it, we’ll walk.” She eased herself upright, made a flapping motion with her hand to indicate that I should grab her purse, and then started walking. I felt like a fifteen-year-old, awkward and useless. I had no idea what to say or even which hospital entrance to pull up to when we got there. Surely, I should be doing something, right? The weird breathing stuff—they always did that in the movies.
When I glimpsed her wedding ring flashing in the light of the hallway as we walked out, I asked, “Should I call Mr. Morales?”
Professor Morales shot me the same withering look she gave clueless undergrads in her medieval church history classes. “Do you honestly think I took my husband’s name when I got married?”
“Um. No?”
“Hell no, I didn’t. And my husband is visiting family because the baby wasn’t actually due until next week…oh shit.” She stopped about three feet away from the elevator, her hands extended, as if looking for something to grab onto. I offered my arm, which I instantly regretted, because she dug her fingers into me so hard I knew I’d bruise later. But I bore it up as stoically as I could, and when she gritted out a request to knead her lower back, I reached around her and did it, hoping no one walked by and saw me basically embracing one of the members of my dissertation board.
And so it went all the way down to the truck, a few minutes of walking, a few minutes of stopping and laboring, where she gradually turned all the bones in my hands into loose pebbles and I kneaded her back as hard as I could. In the truck, she faced the seat backwards and hung off the headrest while I called her husband and left him a (very awkward) voicemail explaining why I was driving his laboring wife to the hospital.
It only took me ten minutes to make a twenty-minute drive, but by the time I pulled up at the Em
ergency Room entrance, Professor Morales had gone from definitely in labor to abso-fucking-lutely in labor, and just the few steps from the truck to the front door took us several minutes. A nurse came out with a wheelchair, earning herself the most vicious run of curse words I’d ever heard from Morales, and when I tried to peel myself away to park the truck, I was informed in no uncertain language that I was staying the fuck with her. So I did, letting her crush my hand and swear profanities at me that would even make the Business Brothers blush, until we made it up to a room on the labor and delivery ward.
“Are you the father?” a nurse asked me.
“No,” I stammered. “I’m her PhD candidate.”
