Page 29 of Beside the Rolling Waves
He took a breath and looked away.
“Do you want me to ask for a seat for you? I do recall you passing out at least twice in biology class in high school.”
So she remembered. Of course she did.
She didn’t wait for him to respond but walked down to the nurses’ station and asked if he could have a seat.
They seemed concerned, and there was a buzz of activity, but Becky being Becky, she came back with the chair and no extra nurses.
“Thanks,” he said, sitting down. His eyes were just high enough for him to see through the window, and he felt a lot better now that he wasn’t standing. Plus, the blood had been wiped away, and the surgeon seemed to be searching for something. A baby? The uterus? He wasn’t sure.
“It’s unfair that you pay and I shop. That’s not equal.”
“Parenting isn’t equal. People do what their strengths are.”
“Well, I’m not a strong shopper.” Becky’s voice held irritation. She didn’t want to do the shopping.
“All right. You pay, I’ll shop.”
“I already said that’s not fair.” Her voice held more irritation and was slightly louder.
“If you’re going to yell at me in this hallway, I am not going to talk to you. We are not going to have a fight right here in the hospital as our babies are being born.”
She flinched when he said “our babies,” and he almost smirked. There. Take that. Because they were going to be their babies.
And she knew he was right. It wouldn’t be a good look for the two of them to be fighting in the hospital. They were supposed to be a loving couple getting ready to take care of the babies of a poor patient overcome by cancer. They were hardly poster people for parenting if they couldn’t even get along long enough for the babies to be born.
“All right. What do you suggest?” he said when she didn’t say anything.
The surgeon seemed to be pulling something out of a hole that looked way too small for anything human to fit through.
But the next thing he knew, the surgeon was holding up an infant in his hands, still connected by the umbilical cord, and then he turned around and held it up to the window. The surgeon was smiling, but the baby looked purple and wasn’t breathing.
“I don’t see the baby breathing,” he said.
“Me either. The surgeon seems pretty happy. Surely he wouldn’t be happy if he thought there was a problem, right?”
“Right. So this must be normal.”
“Yeah. This is normal.” Becky seemed to be trying to reassure herself of that, and him too, possibly, and then the surgeon turned back around, and they started working on the child.
“I think that was the girl,” Becky murmured. “Marley.”
He hadn’t even noticed. Leave it to Becky to note something like that.
“So the girl’s older. Interesting. I suppose they’re timing this now.”
“They must be,” Becky said.
And then after a short pause, she said, “All right. I’ll buy everything, you pay for it. I’ll text you my info on several common electronic money transfer sites. You can take your pick which one you want to use.”
“That’s fair.”
When she didn’t reach for her phone, he said, “Aren’t you gonna text me your info?”
“Right now? I’m watching the baby be born.” And then she gasped. “I should have been recording it!”
“I see a nurse recording it over there. Maybe they’re going to show it to us later.”
