He Left Me in the Snow for Her Labor, So I Delivered It novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Exit 53
Ines's Subaru dies on the Thruway in a blizzard, Bram hears that his pregnant girlfriend is in labor and drives off in the only working car, and Ines takes a plow ride with Dr. Roderick Lyle and drops her wedding ring in the coin tray.
My husband's phone lit up on the dashboard of my dead car, and he read the screen and said, "She's in labor."
I said, "Who is?"
"Sabine," Bram said, and waited for me to know the name.
The wipers were still going, scraping a hole in the snow on the windshield, and the hazards ticked on the shoulder of the highway.
It was twenty minutes to nine on a Saturday night in January, and the engine had quit a mile past exit 53.
Bram had pulled in behind me and climbed into my passenger seat to wait for the tow truck.
Now he was holding his phone to his ear, and a woman's voice came out of it, high and thin and crying.
"I'm coming," he told her. "Stay on the line, baby. I'm coming right now."
He had never called me baby in the nine years I had known him.
"Bram," I said.
"She's thirty-nine weeks. Her water broke. The 911 line says ninety minutes for an ambulance."
"Whose water broke?"
"Ines, I'll explain later." He opened the door, and the wind filled the car with snow.
"You have a girlfriend," I said. "She's pregnant."
"She's alone in an apartment in Lackawanna and she's scared." He said it in the voice he used to ask me to be reasonable.
"I'm a mile from the nearest exit, Bram. My car is dead."
"The tow truck is coming. You're a grown woman. You'll be fine." He was already standing in the snow.
"It's my hospital," I said. "Every other maternity unit on the lakeshore is on diversion tonight. Lakeview is the only one open."
"I know that," he said. "That's why I'm taking her there."
I stared at him.
"You're off tonight," he said. "You told me at my mother's."
"I told you I swapped onto the night. I'm due on at nine. You were texting."
For one second his face went blank, and I watched him do the math.
Then his phone cried out his name again, and the math stopped.
"She'll never be there tonight," he said, almost to himself. "The roads are closed, you can't get in. It doesn't matter."
He shut the door and walked back to the Audi.
I sat there with my hands in my lap and watched his taillights come on, red in the white.
He pulled out around me with his blinker on.
He signaled, on an empty road, in a blizzard, leaving me.
The Audi's lights went down the ramp and were gone.
I put my phone to my ear to call the hospital, and the screen said no service.
I took my bag from the back seat and my scrub top from the bag.
The cold got into the car the moment I opened the door.
It was eight degrees, and the wind came off Lake Erie straight across the road.
My wool coat was the one I wore to dinner at his mother's.
I locked the Subaru and walked up the shoulder toward the exit sign, leaning into the wind.
A mile is not far, but every step sank to my shin.
A girlfriend.
A baby, thirty-nine weeks along, so Bram had touched her in April.
I had been at his mother's table that very afternoon, passing the green beans, while Joan Pollard watched me and smiled.
I did not cry, and I did not stop walking.
I was a mile and a quarter along when yellow lights swung across the snow behind me.
It was a county plow, orange and enormous, throwing a white wave off its blade.
I stepped into the road and put both arms over my head.
The plow stopped with its engine shaking the ground.
The passenger door opened, and a man leaned down out of the cab with his hand out.
He was big and wore a dark parka over green scrubs.
There was a pale scar through his left eyebrow.
"Dr. Maldonado," said Dr. Roderick Lyle, the charge anesthesiologist at Lakeview. "Get in."
I had worked beside him for four years, across a hundred operating tables, and I had never touched him once.
I took his hand, and he pulled me up into the cab in one motion.
The driver, a woman with gray hair under a cap, shoved the plow into gear without a word.
The heater was roaring.
I could not feel my fingers.
"My truck went in the ditch at exit 54," Roderick said. "She picked me up. Where's your car?"
"Back there. It died."
"Where's your husband?" He had met Bram at two hospital parties.
"Gone to his pregnant girlfriend," I said. "It's his baby."
My voice cracked down the middle, and I shut my mouth.
Roderick did not say he was sorry, and he did not ask me anything else.
He took my hands in both of his, bare and white and stiff.
He unzipped his parka and pushed them inside against his chest.
I felt his scrub top, warm and soft, and under it a heartbeat that was heavy and not slow.
His arms came around the outside of my hands and held them there.
"Your fingers are ice," he said.
"I know."
"Stay still. Let them come back."
I stayed still with my hands against his heart, and the pain of the blood returning ran up my wrists.
He didn't let go, and I didn't pull away.
I looked down at the ring on my left hand, caught against his scrubs.
Eight years, and a platinum band, and Bram had picked it out himself.
I worked it over my knuckle, and it came off without any trouble.
There was a coin tray beside the gearshift with a few quarters in it and an old toll receipt.
I dropped the ring in with the quarters.
"Drive," I told the plow driver. "I'm the OB on call. I'm already late."
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