Page 167 of Roadrunner

No polite dab at the eyes, no turning away to collect herself. She sat at her kitchen table and let it happen and didn’t apologize for it and Addy handed her a dish towel and Della used it and handed it back.

The room was full before I was ready for it to be full.

That was how it went. One moment it was just the nurses and the efficient quiet of a delivery room and then Elena was there, announced without ceremony, and then the room was something else entirely.

Riley was beside me.

He’d been beside me since four in the morning when I’d woken him with the news that something was happening and he’d been dressed in under two minutes with an absence of hesitation that was pure him.

The hours in between had their own strange shape. Pain that arrived in waves I’d forgotten the exact geometry of, and between the waves, ordinary conversation, absurd and grounding. Riley reciting motorcycle torque specifications at my request because I’d told him, somewhere around hour six, that I needed him to talk about literally anything else, and he’d taken the assignment with complete seriousness. Martina in and out with ice chips. Arthur banned from the room itself but camped in the hallway chair the nurses eventually stopped trying to move, doing his homework by the vending machine light because he’d refused, flatly, to do it at home.

Somewhere around hour nine I stopped being able to talk through the waves at all, and Riley simply held my hand and let me crush his fingers and didn’t once mention it afterward, though the bruising told its own story for the better part of a week.

He held my hand through the whole of it.

When Elena arrived he stood and looked at her with the expression he reserved for things that mattered completely.

Open. Unguarded.

She was small and furious and unbothered by the size of the room she’d just arrived in, one fist working free of the blanket to hang in the air like she had something to add to the proceedings. Her hair, what there was of it, was dark, and her face had the particular squashed, indignant dignity of every newborn who has just been asked to do something as undignified as being born.

The nurse asked if he wanted to cut the cord and he looked briefly overwhelmed by the question, a rare enough sight that I filed it away to tease him about later, and then he did it anyway, carefully, with the same exact focus he brought to a carburetor or a stubborn bolt, like the task deserved nothing less than his full attention regardless of what it was.

The nurse placed her in his arms before mine. I don’t know why. Perhaps she sensed something. Perhaps it was simply the order of things.

He held her.

He looked at her face.

His throat moved once.

That was all he showed and it was everything.

“She’s got your temper already,” I said, watching her fist.

“She’s got her own temper,” Riley said. “Give her that much credit on day one.” But he was smiling when he said it, the real one, unguarded, and he didn’t look away from her face for even a second while he said it.

I don’t remember the room emptying, or being moved, or how much time passed between one thing and the next. If I tried to lay that day out in a straight line, saying this happened, then this, I’d be lying about how it felt from the inside. It came to me in pieces, the way things do when a body that’s just run itself past empty decides for itself when it’s present and when it isn’t.

I surfaced once to find Martina already there, though I couldn’t have said when she’d arrived or how long she’d been holding Elena like she’d been doing it her whole life.

“She looks like you,” Martina said.

“She looks like Riley,” I said, my voice thick with a sleep I hadn’t agreed to.

“She looks like both of you.” She touched her forehead to Elena’s, brief and private, and by the time I opened my eyes again she was gone, and I couldn’t have told you whether the kiss on my own forehead had actually happened or whether I’d only wanted it to.

I went under again.

I came back up to a hallway doing something no hospital hallway was built for. Lowered voices that were still too loud. Boots on linoleum. Brisco, almost certainly, explaining to a nurse that capacity guidelines were more of a suggestion. Riley went to the door and said something brief and the noise dropped to something reasonable, and I never surfaced far enough to see who was actually out there. Just fragments through the little window when I managed my eyes open. Lackey on his phone. Sparks talking to the man beside him. Price at the end of the row, arms crossed, hair pushed back, not moving.

I meant to ask who else had come. Sleep got there first.

Price came back while I was somewhere between waking and not.

I only know because, when I surfaced enough to focus, there was a kutte folded over the back of the chair by the door, leather, worn soft at the folds, a patch on it I hadn’t seen in years, with Riley sitting beside it, looking like a man deciding how much of the story to tell.

“He came back in?” I asked.