Page 68 of Christmas With A Stranger

A nurse brings Baby A, the girl, to me, wrapped so tight that all I get is her face. The nurse holds her close enough that I can press my cheek to the top of her head. She's warm and damp and gone before I finish the breath.

Then Graham, the same way, his cheek against mine for two seconds, and then lifted away.

Across the room somebody calls out numbers. "Four, one," and then, after a pause, "Four, six."

Neither of them is five pounds.

The teams are already moving toward the doors. I lose both babies behind blue gowns before they even reach them. A nurse turns to Carson. "Dad, you want to come with them?"

He doesn't move. He looks at me instead. "I'm not leaving you."

"Go with them." My voice catches hard enough that I have to swallow. "They need one of us."

"Mackie."

"I'm asking you to go."

He holds my eyes one more second. "Yes, ma'am."

He gets up, and the doors swing shut behind him. For the first time since the headache started, nobody I love is in the room with me. I'm flat on my back while six strangers in masks work somewhere past the drape, pushing and pulling on my body. I have no idea what they're doing because I'm numb from my chest down.

"You're going to feel some pulling," the anesthesiologist warns, and I almost tell him he's late with that warning.

Time comes apart after that. Heat pours through me from the inside, and my skin goes slick with it. There's metal on my tongue that won't wash away. The edges of everything smear. My legs are somewhere below me, heavy and disconnected and not answering.

In recovery, the cuff on my arm inflates by itself, squeezes, lets go. Fifteen minutes later it does it again. There's a catheter, and a pad under me that the nurse tells me not to think about. I don't have the strength to be embarrassed, anyway.

Carson comes and goes several times, checking on me and the babies. Around five, he crouches by the bed with his phone. "That's her. She's a spitfire, I can already tell."

The screen shows a red, scrunched face and one fist up by her ear. "She comes by that honestly."

He goes back down and comes back with weights and temperatures and which nostril the tube is in. The girl kicked her blanket off twice. Graham's nurse is Bettina, and she's been on the unit nineteen years.

Mom comes back around seven with a bag of food nobody touches. She takes the chair in the corner and rattles off questions. Between me and someone I don't know standing beside my bed, we answer most of them.

Another nurse writes on the whiteboard across from me, putting up the date, her own name, and then the charge nurse's name. She fills in the blank lines below with the babies' birth times, weights, and lengths.

For support person, she writes Carson. That stops me for a moment.

I have been everybody's first phone call my whole life, Sadie's and Shipley's and Penny's and my mother's. I'm usually the person who shows up. Nobody asks me what Carson is to me. Somebody has watched him come and go all morning and made that assessment.

Late in the afternoon, my pressure has behaved long enough that my nurse agrees to take me down. The IV pole and catheter bag come with the wheelchair. There are two isolettes pushed close together, and in them two babies the length of my forearm, in diapers that come up to their armpits, taped and wired and lit.

"You can touch them," the nurse says. "Don't stroke. They don't like stroking yet. Lay your hand down and leave it."

I put my hand through the porthole. My whole palm covers Graham's back.

The magnesium bag has been empty since this morning. For the first time in two days, my head belongs to me again. The clock over the door says it's almost noon.

A woman knocks on the open door with a clipboard held against her chest.

"I'm so sorry to bother you." She comes in halfway, like she can retreat if I flinch. "There's no rush on this. But we do need it before you're discharged."

It's the birth certificate worksheet, two columns with a line waiting in each. I take the pen. My hand is steadier than it was last night.

The boy is easy. He's had a name since April. I write it out. Graham Carson North.

Carson is in the chair by the window, and I hear him go still. He reads it upside down, which he does well.