She nodded, and then the doctor began.
“I tried to push the babies out, but I wasn’t able to do it right, I guess, and now they have to cut them out quickly,” she told me.
I nodded. “And they’re going to be fine,” I said firmly. Iwas speaking life over these babies and expecting nothing less.
Lord, she’s been through enough. Have mercy,I begged.
Ella nodded and held my gaze, not looking away, not looking at anything else but me, and it felt like time stopped. It felt like there was an entire conversation going on between us, even though we weren’t talking.
I knew she was scared and wanted James here by her side more than anything. I knew she was happy to meet her babies but also sad that her husband wasn’t here to meet them. I knew she was thinking of my loss and about how I hadn’t gotten to do this with Scarlett, that we shared an invisible thread that tied us together. We were both widows, yes, but I’d lost a child, and she’d found out she was having one in the midst of her grief. We had a deep bond.
Ever since that day I’d caught her hurling insults at God and driving the axe into the ground, I’d felt something for her. I’d vowed that day to see this woman spiritually healed, and now she was. I’d vowed not to let one of God’s precious sheep go astray, and now Ella was back to leaning on God and going to church, and there was a softness about her that hadn’t been there when I’d first met her.
Something shifted in her gaze as she glanced at my lips and then, for the first time, looked away from me and at the doctor.
“Alright, Ella, baby A, your little boy, is coming out. Get ready to meet him,” he said.
Ella squeezed my hand, and I squeezed hers back, silently praying the babies would be healthy. That Ella would be healthy.
Then a wild wail rent the air, and a tiny screaming babypeeked over the top of the blue curtain. He was red-faced and beautiful and appeared healthy.
“Do you want your friend to cut the cord?” the doctor asked Ella.
Ella looked over at me, tears of joy streaming down her cheeks, and nodded. “Will you?”
I had tried to hold my emotions in this whole time, but when Ella asked me to do such an honor, I couldn’t any longer. I burst into tears and nodded.
The doctor handed me some scissors and pointed to where I should cut. The cord was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen in my life, like a twisted blue-and-red candy straw with clamps on the end. I wiped my eyes with the back of my arm and cut through it. Then I handed the scissors back to the doctor as the nurses whisked the baby over to the incubator and began to weigh him.
“Go with him. Don’t let him be alone,” Ella begged me.
I nodded, slipping away from her side, and followed the baby. He was crying as the nurses wrapped him in a swaddle and made notes on a paper. They listened to his lungs and pricked his finger, squeezing a drop of blood onto some machine.
“Is he okay?” I whispered.
“Perfectly healthy,” the nurse said. Then she walked the bundled baby over to Ella and placed him on Ella’s chest just as the doctor delivered the next baby.
“Baby girl is here, Ella!” the doctor exclaimed as Ella cried tears of joy and held her son.
The doctor held up the little girl, who started crying, and her coloring looked good to me, but she was a little smaller than the boy.
I cut the cord and then followed the baby over to the nurses. They weighed her, listened to her lungs, and pricked her finger as well. The machine beeped in alarm, and the nurses exchanged a look. One of the men who’d been standing around watching it all swooped in then.
“Start an IV and push four ML of D10. I want to monitor her in the NICU,” the doctor said just as Ella and I both asked, “What’s wrong?”
The doctor, an Asian man in his fifties, turned to Ella. “Your baby has low blood sugar, which is very common in newborns. Because she’s a little small and premature, I’d like to monitor her in the NICU for a few hours until her sugars stabilize.”
“Okay,” Ella said in a shaky voice as she held her son to her chest. Then she looked at me. “Don’t leave her side.”
It was a command I would take seriously.
They moved with the baby in a wheeling incubator, and I moved with them. We all boarded the elevator as the nurses poked the smallest needle I had ever seen into the baby’s hand. There were little holes in the incubator where the nurses could reach in and touch her. I noticed a hole that was unoccupied by her foot.
“Can I touch her?” I asked.
“Yes, you can hold her foot. We just need access to her arms.”
I reached in then and gently grasped her tiny foot, my heart thumping in my chest as if beating for the first time in my life.
