But here, in this cocoon, plopped into my arms in a little blanket, is my niece, round and rosy and just as startled as I am.
“Here, let me give her to her mom,” I say. Natalie is propped up now, the stunned look gone from her features. She takes the baby from me, and our eyes meet.
Joel says, “Beautiful baby. You did a great job. Boy, these are my favorite kinds of days, when I get to help a baby come into the world.”
After a bit, I’m aware that the ambulance is moving. Marcus is taking us to the hospital. But slowly. No sirens. Our own little traveling safe place is moving, taking with us all the equipment we could ever need.
“Look what we did!” Natalie says, and her eyes are locked on to mine. “You are the best, the best sister in the world! How did you know—to be here—that I needed you?”
We both gaze down at this little life we just brought into the world. My heart is so full it feels like it will spill out of me somehow.
“You know, of all our antics, I have to say that this is the best sister act we’ve ever pulled off,” I tell her. “Even though it wasn’t the birth plan you had in mind.”
“Yeah,” she says, “but only because I didn’t think I could get this one to work.”
I think I might just die of this.
That evening, the whole family comes to my sister’s hospital room, where she presides beautifully, wearing a lovely peach-colored nightgown I fetched for her from the gift shop, and her hair is clean and shining. She is even more radiant than ever, with her skin looking dewy and lit from within—and little Amelia—rosy little Amelia lies contented in her mother’s arms, pooching out her sweet pink little lips.
Joel, the delicious EMT, shows up at one point with a bouquet of flowers, and my whole family goes gaga over him. He explains that he hardly ever gets to deliver babies, and that he was, in fact, a mess when his own wife went into labor. And that makes everybody laugh, and my mother wants to invite him and his entire family over for dinner, except that my father quietly puts his hand on her arm before she can quite squeak out the invitation.
Brian, sitting by my sister’s side, is clearly smitten with the whole scene. I was a little worried that he was going to feel he’d been cut out of the deal somehow, but he doesn’t seem to mind in the least. Here he got a perfect baby girl without having to even endure one of my sister’s high-pitched screams, screams that will never, ever be mentioned by anyone, though they are going to live on in some pocket of my memory until the end of time.
“She looks like your brother,” says my mother to my father.
“Joe? I think you’re just saying that because he’s bald.”
“No. Look at the chin. It’s Joe’s chin.”
“But that’s just because he had his teeth knocked out playing street hockey. People with no teeth—like Amelia, for now—have those kinds of chins.”
To my surprise, my mother laughs. And my father tucks his head over her shoulder, and for a moment they’re both smiling down at the baby. It seems impossible to believe that this is a couple who communicates mainly through bickering. Maybe, it occurs to me, this is what marriage ultimately turns into: you have to tough it out through the bad times so that you can get to these pinnacle moments when life has just handed you a shiny star.
I’m not even surprised when Jeremy shows up, carrying balloons. Or when my parents greet him like the long-lost son they never had. Nor is it shocking that he and I leave the hospital together, going out for dinner, and that after that, we go to his mother’s house and sit on the screened porch where we spent thousands of hours doing homework and gossiping about other kids.
He’s grown up to be a good-natured, good-looking man who takes care of his mom, and I’m suddenly so sorry I broke his heart, except that I think that we all do need to have our hearts broken at some point, and so maybe I actually did him a good service. It’s something we need to know about ourselves, how that heart breaks and grows back.
My own heart, given away to Noah, now stirs somewhere deep down, stretches, yawns, looks at its watch and rolls over, tries to go back to sleep. But it has one eye open, I notice.
In no time, over a glass of wine, we’ve covered our college years and our employment decisions (his good, mine questionable). And then, because this is what you do under these circumstances, we rehash our own breakup, casting it in a new, more philosophical, forgiving light.
After he razzes me for falling for Brad Whitaker, I say to him, “Did you ever think that maybe you could have tried harder to fight for me? Like, you at least could have said you cared about me. Maybe asked me not to date him.”
“Um, I was not equipped at seventeen to have that kind of conversation,” he says.
“Yeah, well, you treated me like I was just one of your buddies and I honestly had no idea you cared one way or the other.”
He smiles and his eyes hold mine a lot longer than necessary. “Didn’t you, really?” he says. “Yeah, I know I wasn’t any Prince Charming, more’s the pity. But on the other hand, I’m the one who gets to sit here with you tonight, while he’s some loser out in the world not spending time with you. So maybe the good guy triumphs in the end, you know?”
He is gazing at me so directly that I have to look away.
Then he says, “I’ve, um, heard through the grapevine that you’ve had something of a rough go. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but . . .”
“Oh,” I say. “Well. Yeah. Pretty much your average stood-up-at-the-altar situation. Not really ideal.”
“Well, that certainly sucks.” He looks at me like he wants to hear what happened, and not just so he can gloat a little bit over my poor judgment.
So I go through the story—the long version, including the two years Noah and I were together, the engagement excitement, and then him showing up late to the wedding and our horrible talk in the meadow, blah blah blah, and then I tell him about the honeymoon and the screaming monkeys, because by now it’s becoming The Story I Tell about My Marriage, and it always gets a laugh as well as a sympathetic clucking, depending on how I tell it.
With him, I confess the part I hadn’t told anyone but Natalie—how I dismantled my wedding dress—because he is the only person who would understand something that bizarre and find it funny. Sure enough, he laughs in all the right places—and he does this thing that I now remember he used to do as a kid: he sort of wrinkles his nose and closes his eyes before he laughs. It’s just a little quirk, but seeing him still do it makes my heart glad.
And then things shift slightly. Jeremy is looking at me without having to look away. He says that this is a momentous day, because not only have we been present at the miracle of birth, but he’s also gotten to hear about a jerk who is perhaps even worse than the jerk I ditched him for senior year.
When he comes over to the couch where I’m sitting and puts his hand idly on my arm, I slide over closer, and it turns out that, thank God, he’s learned something about kissing in the intervening years because I realize that I haven’t been kissed in quite a while, and I need it badly.
It’s still a slightly cautious kiss around the edges, of course, because it’s Jeremy—and also because I have hurt him before, and so maybe he’s wisely holding something back, but I throw myself into it, kissing him as passionately as I can, holding nothing back, just to show him how it can be done, and then—my God, in no time at all, we’re breathless and shocked at the heat we’ve generated.