PART 3
I don’t remember much of the ride.
I remember the ceiling lights of the ambulance swaying. I remember the paramedic, whose name I later learned was Marcus, holding my hand and telling me about his three daughters, just to keep me talking. I remember the fetal monitor beeping too slowly, then too fast, then too slowly again.
And I remember thinking, very clearly, that if my son didn’t survive, it would be because I had stayed too long.
That thought hurt more than anything happening to my body.
At the hospital, everything moved at once. Doors flew open. Nurses ran alongside the stretcher. A doctor with silver hair and reading glasses pushed up on her forehead leaned close to my face.
“Claire, I’m Dr. Okafor. Your placenta has separated from the wall of your uterus. Your baby isn’t getting enough oxygen, and you’re losing a lot of blood. We need to deliver him right now. Do you understand?”
“He’s too small,” I whispered.
“Thirty-one weeks is small, but it’s not too small. We have one of the best NICUs in the state, and they’re already waiting for him. But we have to go now.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Save him. Please save him.”
“We’re going to try to save both of you.”
They put me to sleep.
The last thing I saw was the clock on the operating room wall. It read 9:14 p.m.
Less than an hour earlier, I had walked through my front door with a bag of groceries and a twelve-hour shift behind me, thinking the worst thing that could happen that night was another insult about my cooking.
When I opened my eyes, the room was dim and quiet, and the first thing I saw was a pair of muddy work boots.
They were planted on the linoleum beside my bed. Above them were faded jeans, a canvas jacket with a frayed collar, and big weathered hands folded together like he was praying. My father’s head was bowed. His gray hair was messy, as if he’d been running his fingers through it for hours.
For a moment, I just looked at him.
Thomas Reed. Sixty-one years old. A man who had started as a road trooper patrolling empty stretches of Route 33, who had worked his way up rank by rank for thirty-five years, who still fed his own cattle at five o’clock every morning when he was home, and who had never once, not in my whole life, used his badge to get out of a parking ticket.
When I married Carter, I had asked my father to keep his job out of it.
“I want them to love me for me,” I had told him. “Not because of who you are.”
He had looked at me for a long time across the kitchen table at the farmhouse, his coffee going cold.
“All right, sweetheart,” he had finally said. “But you remember something. If you ever need me, you call. I don’t care what time it is. I don’t care what you promised yourself. You call.”
I had waited two years to make that call.
“Daddy,” I croaked.
His head came up so fast I heard his neck pop. His eyes were red. I had only seen my father cry once before, at my mother’s funeral, when I was fifteen.
“Hey, baby girl.” He took my hand in both of his. His palms were rough as tree bark and warm as a fireplace. “Hey. You’re awake.”
“The baby.” My throat was raw from the breathing tube. “Daddy, where’s the baby?”
He smiled. It was a shaky smile, but it was real.
“He’s alive, Claire. He’s in the NICU, two floors down. Three pounds, two ounces. He’s got a breathing tube and about a dozen wires on him, and he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, after you.”
I started to sob. It hurt my stitches, and I didn’t care.
“Dr. Okafor said it was close,” my father went on quietly. “His heart rate dropped real low before they got him out. They had to work on him for a few minutes. But he came back. He’s a fighter. Got that from his mama.”
“I want to see him.”
“You will. As soon as they say you can stand. You lost a lot of blood, sweetheart. They gave you two transfusions.”
I lay there and cried, and my father held my hand and didn’t say anything else, because he had always known when words weren’t needed.
After a while, I asked, “What time is it?”
“About four in the morning.”
“You’ve been here all night.”
“Where else would I be?”
I looked at his boots again. “You came straight from the road.”
“I was driving back from a meeting in Richmond. I didn’t even stop for gas.” He chuckled softly. “Truck’s running on fumes in the parking garage.”
