Page 92 of Knocked Up

"Okay," Eli said.

He did not speed. I have thought about it since. He drove exactly the way he drives. At every single light he put his right hand flat on my knee, and at every green he put it back on the wheel. He talked the entire way in a low even voice about nothing at all. He talked about the schedule, about who was doing the four o'clock, about Margaret being in the clean towels again. I understood after a while that he was doing the voice he does at four in the morning to a four-week-old cat.

"You're doing the kitten voice. On me."

"Yeah," Beckett said.

"Don't stop," I said.

They had me in a gown in nine minutes, which told me everything about the number.

There was magnesium, which is not a drug but a punishment. It made me feel like I was lying on a beach on the surface of the sun. There were two belts and a monitor. There was a senior doctor who came at eleven at night and looked at the readout a long time without talking.

The numbers would not settle. That is the whole night. They would come down and sit at one fifty-eight for an hour and I would think we had it. Then they would go back up.

Beckett did not leave that room. Somebody offered him a chair at ten and he did not take it for an hour. When he did he pulled it up beside the bed, put his forearms on the mattress and stayed there.

At three in the morning I said, "It’s the twenty-ninth of May. The date’s the twenty-sixth of June. That's four weeks. He's not going to let me get to June."

Beckett put his hand over mine on the mattress.

"No," he said. "I don't think he is."

I have been given information by professionals all my life. Nobody has ever done me the courtesy he did me at three in the morning, which was to not tell me it was going to be fine.

Mateo came at twenty past six with his glasses in his hand, which is his tell. He said it exactly the way he said it in November, which is straight.

"Your protein's up and your platelets are down. I've got a pressure that has not come under one sixty since two o'clock. There's one treatment and you know what it is."

"Today."

"This morning. She's thirty-six and a bit, which is a good place to be. I'd rather do this on a Sunday morning with a full theatre than at midnight because we waited."

"Say it back to me."

"The baby comes out," I said. "That's the only treatment there is."

I knew too much about that operating room and it did me no good at all.

It was cold. They keep it cold on purpose. I have run a surgical suite for nine years. I had never once been on the other side of that drape and never want to be again.

I could not stop shaking. That is the spinal anesthetic and it is a normal effect. I said that to myself in Mateo's voice over and over and it did not help. I could hear the suction and I know what the suction means. Two people at my left hip were having a calm conversation about a retractor, which holds a wound open.

Beckett was gowned and sitting by my head with his hand around mine. At some point I stopped being able to keep hold of it and he took over. When it got bad he leaned over and put his mouth against my forehead. He left it there and did not say anything at all.

"Talk," I said.

"About what."

"Anything. Do the…"

"Brodeur's four eighty," he said, against my hairline. "Mister Tony gained two grams on Thursday and has no opinion about it. Stevie's back on peanut butter."

"She isn't."

"She changed her mind on Wednesday. I didn't tell you because you'd have said the butter was my fault."

"It was your fault."