“You’re going to be fine. It’s just three days. To Catalina.”

“Do it after the baby.”

“He’s going to Vancouver for a movie, and this is the only window we both have.”

“What if something happens? At least take your phone.”

“Nothing is going to happen.”

“Fine, but will you take your phone anyway?” She gripped both of his shoulders. “Just this one time. Please.”

He kissed her gently on the mouth. “Anything for the mother of my child.”

He took off in the Mustang. The house was empty and bleak. In the morning, she ran a few errands, arriving home at one for lunch. Around three, she got drowsy. She got in bed to take a nap and dreamed that she was on Jo with Steven and the young Alex from the glossy photo. Steven was the Steven of now, but Alex was in his twenties. The men were kissing and she was yelling at them to stop, but they couldn’t hear her and went down to the cabin.

She was awakened by a sharp pain in her uterus. Not the mellow kind, like the Braxton-Hicks contractions she had felt before, but a deep, awful one, far worse than her most painful period. The sheets were sticky. She ripped off the comforter and saw a pool of yellowish liquid.

She dialed Steven on his cell, and it rang until it went to voice mail. She left a frenzied message saying she was in labor. She dialed Dr. Baker and said she thought her water had broken. Dr. Baker said to come to the hospital. Maddy called Zack and then Kira, not sure why, but wanting a woman there. Kira was strong and could help her. The Moon and the Stars didn’t matter now. Maddy left another message for Steven and then dialed Alan, who arrived in twelve minutes in the Highlander. She threw together a bag with toiletries, a few changes of clothes, and slippers before waddling out to the car.

Everything that happened in the two hours after her arrival felt like a wrong turn. The contractions were coming more strongly now, and Dr. Baker put her on an antibiotic drip to prevent infection. Then there was another drip, an IV, she heard someone say. It seemed like tubes were coming out of her everywhere, and when she moved, the drips had to move with her, and the pain, the pain, she wanted to do it naturally, she did the Lamaze breathing she had learned in class with Steven, but the pain was brutal and unfamiliar. She watched Dr. Baker watch a monitor and shake her head. “Late decel.” And the doctor was gone, returning with a nurse, who was removing one of the drips. Maddy thought that could be good, fewer drips had to be better.

“Maddy, the baby isn’t responding well to the Pitocin, and we don’t have a lot of time because your water broke.”

“Can’t I push? I want to push. I want a normal birth.”

“We have to get the baby out because of the risk of infection. We have to do a C-section. You’ll be fine. We’re going to give you a mini-prep and then we’ll go to the OR.”

“But I don’t want surgery!” she cried, suddenly afraid she might die. This wasn’t the way she had envisioned it.

“We have to take care of the baby. You’re both going to be fine.”

While she was talking, Zack had come in. His first words were “Where’s Steven?”

She shook her head violently. “He’s on the sailboat with Ryan Costello. You have to find him. Call your mother. His phone is on silent or something. Have them radio him from the yacht club. Bridget will know who to talk to. Or have them call the Coast Guard.”

“You don’t want me to stay with you?”

“I want you to bring him here.”

Zack was gone and a new nurse was in the room, a pretty Mexican girl, shaving Maddy’s pubic hair. And then she was on a gurney like in a television hospital show, and they weren’t quite running but moving her quickly, and Kira was beside her in the hallway, saying, “I got here as fast as I could.” Maddy was numb, not weeping, just thinking about the next moment, getting the baby out of her alive, there was no room to cry, this was happening, they were going to cut it out of her.

“Where’s Steven?” Kira asked.

“He’s on the boat, Zack’s trying to find him. Can you come in the operating room?” Maddy looked up pleadingly at the doctor.

“She can come in,” Dr. Baker said.

“What if something goes wrong and I don’t make it?” Maddy cried out to Kira. “I don’t want to die.”

“You’re not going to die. You’re going to be fine.”

And then a nurse was guiding Kira away. They would have to put her in scrubs because it was an operating room and it would be sterile.

An Israeli anesthesiologist injected something into Maddy’s back after telling her she had to stay very still. Then she was flat on her back with her arms extended like she was being crucified. A sheet went up in front of her, held between two poles. Kira was on one side of her and the anesthesiologist was on the other. Over the curtain was the baby’s team; she wasn’t supposed to watch because her guts would come out; they’d watched a video of a C-section in Lamaze . . .

The anesthesiologist was saying something about pressure, and she could hear Dr. Baker talking on the other side, and then there was a loud, startling noise. A baby’s cry, healthy and long. Piercing the din.

“I can’t see!” Maddy cried. “I want to see my baby!”

“It’s a boy,” Kira was saying, and Maddy was crying because this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, Kira wasn’t supposed to be the one to tell her the gender, they had planned that Steven would tell her, but he wasn’t here. “He’s perfect,” Kira said.

“What’s going on? Tell me what’s happening.”

“They’re cleaning him.”

A minute later, a nurse was holding the baby, swaddled, against Maddy’s cheek, since her arms were still strapped down. She wanted to break out of the straps and touch her son. Her son and all she could do was smell him. He was tiny and scrunched, with dark hair. Blinking, dazed. Not crying anymore. He was in as much shock as she was.

She kissed his cheek, rubbed her cheek against his. Ran her lips over his hair. “I want to hold him,” she said, and she began to weep from the frustration of not being able to.

“You’ll see him very soon,” the nurse said. Maddy kissed him again, but the woman was taking him away. Dr. Baker knew she was on Zoloft, it was in her files, and Maddy had worried about the birth before, the possibility of withdrawal symptoms for the baby. Now he had been early on top of that.

“Kira, go with the baby,” she said. “Don’t take your eyes off him. I don’t want him to get switched.”

“Your baby is not going to get switched.”

“Just go. Make sure he’s okay.”

Maddy could hear Dr. Baker talking to the surgical assistant as she stitched her up. Something about plans for Memorial Day weekend. She couldn’t move her arms. She had given birth, and the baby was on another floor, probably, where was he? She felt a flood of grief for her mother, who had gone so early, was not here now, when she needed a mother. She missed her father, too, but it was her mother she yearned for, wanted in this room with her.

She remembered her wearing glasses in the morning, she wore glasses when she first woke up and a dark purple robe with two white stripes, and she was squatting beside her in Maddy’s bedroom in Potter so their faces were level, and she said, “Is that so?” It was all Maddy remembered, “Is that so?” and the warmth in her mother’s eyes.

All these years when people asked about her, she said she didn’t remember much, she diminished it, but this was the hole in her life, always had been. To have to learn about tampons from her father. Later, when she lost her virginity to that asshole at Dartmouth, she’d stood in the shower and cried, feeling the burning, regretting that she had done it. She had wanted a mother then, wanted her mother to explain why it had been so awful.

And she wanted her now to tell her it would all be all right, she would get better. Just like her baby needed his mommy, she wanted hers. There was no one here to hold her. She was an orphan and she was alone and her husband had let her give birth without him.


A recovery room. The compression boots made loud, mechanical noises as they rhythmically squeezed her calves. A nurse sat by her, watching TV. They were waiting for a complete blood count, she said; Maddy couldn’t be moved until they got it. Kira came in. She said the baby was in the NICU but looked fine. “You should go back and touch him,” Maddy said. “Don’t leave him all alone in there.”

“I feel like I should stay with you,” Kira said.

Zack came in, and Maddy shooed Kira away to the NICU. “Congratulations,” Zack said.

“Have you seen him? He’s so beautiful.”

“I came straight to you. They’re trying to get Steven on the radio. No one’s picking up.”

“What about the Coast Guard?”

“My mother tried, but they won’t send out boats because they say it’s not an emergency.”

“Your mother couldn’t convince them?”

“She’s working on it.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s born.”

Zack looked out the hospital window, feeling numb. His mother had been his first call. Five minutes passed and ten, and he called back and she said the guys at the yacht club were trying to get Steven on the radio. As soon as she told Zack, he knew. The radio was off.

“How can they not reach him?” Maddy asked. “He told me he always has it on.”

“I just don’t know,” Zack said, and felt worse than he had after telling her Kira was going to do Walter’s movie.

Maddy was pale and sad, so frail in her gown and the weird boots that kept pumping. She looked off to the side, and then seemed to muster all her strength and said, “I had to have a C-section.”