Chapter 13: Awake for All of It

Dillon got me from June's kitchen to a bed on the third floor of Mercy General before the next contraction came.

The obstetrician was already there, with a paper gown pulled on over her jeans.

Dillon had called her cell from June's car.

"Membranes ruptured at eleven-thirty," she said, reading the strip. "Breech, contracting, and he isn't waiting for Sunday. We go now."

"Now now?"

"Twenty minutes."

I looked for my sister.

June stood at the foot of the bed in a paper cap, with her sleeves already shoved to the elbow.

"I'm not going to the waiting room," she said. "Don't ask."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good."

The operating room was colder than I remembered from the tour.

A quiet anesthesiologist explained the spinal, and I heard none of it after the word needle.

I sat on the edge of the table with my arms around a pillow and my back bare to the room.

I was shaking so hard the table rattled.

Dillon stepped in front of me, close, in a mask and a blue cap, and put both hands over mine.

"Look at me," he said. "Not at him. At me."

"I can't do this."

"You're doing it now. Tell me the worst mouth you ever cleaned."

"What?"

"Worst mouth. You said you interrogate people for a living."

I laughed, because it was absurd, and it came out wet.

"A man who chewed ice and tobacco for forty years. He had a tooth he called Gerald."

"Named it."

"He said it had been through the war with him."

"Did it make it?"

"No. Gerald came out in three pieces, and he cried."

"Tell me about the pieces."

I told him about the pieces.

Somewhere behind me, a cold wash of antiseptic went down my spine, and I felt a pinch and a push, and I kept talking about Gerald.

"Done," the anesthesiologist said quietly. "That's the hard part."

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