Clara looks exhausted, but ready. She is a tough woman, a resilient woman. She can handle anything, and lying there in the hospital bed waiting for the next contraction to arrive, she has her game face on. She’s ready for this. I stroke her moistened hair; she’s been sweating. There’s a washcloth set to the side of the bed, which I dampen with cool water from the bathroom sink and press to her head. I feed her ice cubes with a plastic spoon from a Styrofoam cup that sits on her table tray; the ice cubes have begun to melt and form a puddle at the bottom of the cup. The contractions are coming every few minutes, lasting thirty seconds or more, and within minutes I become a slave to the clock, knowing before Clara does when the next contraction will arrive. She grits her teeth and pushes through them while the nurse and I remind her to breathe.
“We don’t have a name,” Clara gasps between contractions. “We never gave him a name.” And there is panic in her eyes, as if without a name he might justpoof!disappear before our eyes.
I have no good reason why we don’t have a name. We had nine months to decide. Maybe we just need to see him and then we’ll know, I rationalize, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with a sense of eagerness and anticipation that soon my baby boy will arrive. I’m filled with pride. Soon I will welcome a child into the world, and I envision Clara, Maisie, my baby boy and me all curled together on Clara’s hospital bed, and in that moment everything else fades away: the practice and Connor, Kat and Melinda Grey, the malpractice suit. There are voices in the hallway, two men, a new father and a new grandfather, moseying down the hall, discussing the game. I try to turn a deaf ear to what they say, to focus on Clara and only Clara, but I catch wind of it anyway.
They’re talking about basketball. The NBA series. The Golden State Warriors have taken the lead in the series, and I feel this great relief at hearing those words, knowing that out there somewhere, in a POD account, is money. Money waiting for me.
As another contraction grips Clara, I feel the weight of the world lifted from me and, for the first time in a long time, a sense that this will be okay. That everything will be okay.
She cries out from the pain, and I hold her tightly and tell her that she can do this. “You’re the strongest woman I know,” I whisper into her ear, words that are altogether true. Clara is a fighter. If there’s anybody in the world who can do this, Clara can do this. Her body is glossy with sweat, the paper-thin blanket now kicked from her legs and to the tile floor. She breathes heavily as the contraction passes, her rib cage expanding and contracting with each gulp of air. She lays her head on my shoulder, and I stroke her hair.
“Charles,” she whispers to me, gasping for air. “Let’s name him Charles,” she says. A concession. My father’s name and my middle name. But I don’t let Clara capitulate in fear.
“No,” I tell her, kneeling down so that I can see her eye to eye, the floor digging into my knees so that they burn. Clara’s cheeks are flushed, the red spreading from her face to her chin and neck. Her eyes, always so sure, are consumed with fear and doubt and exhaustion. I hold her hand in mine, pressing it to my heart, and say to her, “We’ll know when we see him. When we see him, we’ll know,” and in my voice, there’s conviction, a guarantee, and she nods her head, believing.
“I’m sorry,” she says, meaning our fight this morning over coffee and paint. A dumb fight. An argument that means nothing. I tell her that I’m sorry, too. “It was stupid,” I say, and she agrees, “So stupid,” as our lips press together, erasing the moment from our minds for the time being.
The doctor returns again to check on Clara. This time, she’s nine centimeters and nearly one hundred percent effaced. “You’re in the home stretch,” she tells Clara. “We’ll begin pushing soon,” and again she leaves.
Clara is thirsty, but only ice cubes are allowed, a sorry consolation prize for someone who’s completely parched. I feed her the last from the Styrofoam cup and then tell her I’ll be right back; I’m going to get more. But Clara clings to me, begging me not to go. The kitchen is just across the hall, just a quick hop, skip and a jump away I tell her, but Clara holds tightly to my hand and begs, “Don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me,” and I melt like snowdrifts on a warm spring day. I’m moonstruck. In all my life, I’ve never loved anyone as much as Clara. I fall again to my knees, swearing over and over again that I won’t leave. “I’m right here,” I say. “I’m here. I won’t go anywhere. I’ll never leave you,” I say as the nurse takes the cup from my hands. I stroke Clara’s hair as another contraction arrives, her fingernails bearing down hard on my skin, leaving their mark. But I don’t mind. What I wouldn’t give to do this for her, to birth our baby myself, to take the pain away. “If there’s anybody in the world that can do this, Clara, you can do this,” I say again into her ear as she screams through yet another contraction.
“Breathe, Clara,” I remind her. “Just breathe.”
* * *
Maisie arrives in the room with her grandfather behind her, bearing a piece of construction paper in her hand. She comes in slowly, deliberately, her eyes locked on the new addition, a puckered creature who lies on her mother’s chest in a blue blanket.
“What have you got there?” I ask Maisie as I reach out to gather her into my arms and place a kiss on her forehead.
“I drew a picture,” she says as she shows me her drawing. “Our family,” she says, and I look down to see that in her drawing, our family includes four, and Harriet of course. “Who’s that?” I ask, pointing at each figure in a row,Daddy, and thenMommy, and thenme, says Maisie, but when I get to the pocketsize figure in Clara’s arms, no bigger than a mouse according to Maisie’s drawing scale, she tells me that’s Felix. A buck-naked Felix who, like a bug, has three body parts and maybe an extra few legs. The hair on his head far surpasses mine.
“Felix?” I say, as both Clara’s and my eyes rise up to meet Maisie’s at exactly the same time.
“Who’s Felix?” asks Clara.
“That’s Felix,” she says assuredly, pointing a green crayon at the baby in Clara’s arms as if all along, while Clara and I sat on the fence undecided, she knew that the baby was a Felix. “Like Felix from ballet,” she says and Clara and I release a simultaneous,Ohhhh.Felix from ballet. The sole boy in her class, with his footless tights and his white T-shirts. The love of my four-year-old’s life.
I hear Clara’s voice parrot the word. “Felix,” she says, and there’s a lilt to it, a rising action instead of what has always followed my name suggestions: a firm, deflating no. I turn to Clara to see that she’s reached a hand out to Maisie’s drawing to see if the mousy figure in the palm of her illustrated hand is indeed the same one as the baby sleeping soundlessly on her chest. Her lips display a measured smile, as I set Maisie down and she climbs clumsily onto the hospital bed to join her mother and her baby brother beneath the sheets. Clara looks to me for approval, and I shrug my shoulders and say, “Why not?” Felix. It’s the perfect blend of traditional and trendy all at the same time, and as I lean in closely to stare at the thin, gossamer eyelids of my sleeping baby boy, I see that he really is a Felix. All along he was a Felix.
“Felix Charles,” says Clara, and in that moment, it’s decided. “Welcome to the world, Felix Charles Solberg.”
I sit on the other side of Clara, and Maisie sneaks awkwardly across and climbs up on my lap. Clara lays her head on my shoulder. I set my hand on Felix’s arm, and even in sleep he kicks a firm hello. “Hello, Felix,” I say and Maisie giggles, a sound that is melodious and majestic and pure.
Our family, I think, telling myself how this is the only thing in the world that matters. The rest of it is just packing materials, the upholstery, a filler. It means nothing.
And for one single moment there is bliss.
CLARA
The night comes and the night goes. I sleep, though my dreams are full of zombies, of the undead walking the earth. I dream of Nick as a zombie, alive but dead, in a state of decay. In the dream, his eyes and skin are missing because those things no longer belong to him; they’ve been gifted to someone else. Nick’s blue eyes now disassembled and sent in opposite directions—the cornea one way, the sclera another—so that in my dream an eyeless Nick tracks and trails me, groaning, groping the hollows of his eyes with decomposing hands. Behind him stands a whole horde of zombies, a herd, grotesque figures with rotting, discolored skin, moving in an unwieldy shuffle, as they reach for me, hungry for my flesh.
I wake up screaming.
In the morning, Felix, Maisie and I go through the motions. We eat and turn on the TV, staring vacantly at the animated cartoons that fill the screen. I let Harriet out. I let Harriet in.
It’s then that I remember my father said he’d send photos of my mother’s car to post online. I rise from the sofa to retrieve my laptop and, returning, sit beside Maisie on the sofa where she presses up close to me and snuggles tight.
The truth is that I’m desperate for money, for five thousand dollars to hold me over until I can find another way of earning an income. I hate to take money from my father, and yet desperation prevails. I need the money. I pull up my email to find the same correspondence there that also infiltrates my mailbox: bills and sympathy greetings. I delete them all, delete, delete, delete, looking only for an email from my father. Sure enough, there it is, an email with the photographs attached, and as Maisie clambers awkwardly onto my lap, settling herself somewhere between the keyboard and my legs, she asks, “What’s that, Mommy? What’s that?”
