Page 93 of Knocked Up

"It was probably my fault," Beckett said. There was pressure that was not pain but was the worst thing I have ever felt. I said something with no words in it. He said, "I'm here, I've got you, I'm right here," over and over in the voice. I do not know when the pressure stopped, because there was a sound.

It was not a mew or a cry or any of the words people use. It was an outrage. It came up off that table at a volume that made the anesthetist laugh out loud. It was one enormous furious complaint, delivered by a person who had been very comfortable and had been interfered with. And it kept not stopping.

Every single number in that room changed meaning at once.

"There she is," Mateo said.

Beckett's forehead came down onto mine and stayed there. His whole body was shaking and he did not make a sound.

"Go with her," I said.

"I'm not leaving you."

"Beckett. Go with her."

He went with her.

Five pounds and eleven ounces. Thirty-six weeks to the day. She had a good cry and good muscle tone. She wanted one night under observation, because that is what they do at thirty-six weeks. She was breathing ordinary air the entire time and never needed one thing.

He stood at that warmer the whole night. They put a chair beside it. He did not sit in it. He was six foot four in a paper gown at the side of a plastic box, with his hands on the edges of it. He stood in the exact stance he takes at the top of his goal crease. A nurse named Ruthie told me at four in the morning that she had been doing this twenty-two years. She had never seen a man stand up that long.

They brought her to me at half past two, and then again at half past three. At three in the morning on the thirtieth of May the three of us were in a dark room with a machine going somewhere down the hall.

She was on my chest. He was on the edge of the bed with one hand on her back, because his hand covers her entire back.

"We should do the name," I said.

"We've had five months and you wouldn't discuss it."

"Because every time I tried, you said we'll see her and know. That is not a method, Beckett. That is what people say on television. So."

He looked at her a while.

"Not Roy," he said.

"The second grade will be devastated. Thirty-one votes."

"They can have the cat."

And then neither of us said anything for a bit. There was nothing to say. Both of them had been in that room all night and had been in it for months. I do not know which of us got there first.

"Walt," I said.

"You can't call a girl Walt."

"You can call a girl Willa."

He went completely still.

"Willa," he said.

"Willa June," I said.

And Beckett Douglas has been hit in the face with a puck at a hundred miles an hour on national television and stood up and asked for the faceoff. He put one hand over his eyes and could not speak for about a minute. I lay there with our daughter on my chest and let him have it.

"Willa June," he said, eventually.

"Yes."