Aedan
Livia’s about the toughest woman I’ve ever met, make no mistake, the toughest, fieriest, hardest, scariest woman I’ve ever met. But childbirth is also tough as nails and just lookin’ at my wife, I can’t help but be glad I don’t have to go through it. I’d take a shootout in a bar any day. I stand next to the bed, clutching her hand, and any minute I reckon my bones are going to break from how hard she’s squeezing me.
“Ahhhhhhh!” she roars. “Ahhhhhhhh!”
I went to all the classes, participated in all the breathing exercises, looked at all the diagrams and all the charts. I’ve been a good boy in that department, but, damn, this is way crazier than any of those classes ever showed. I feel like I’ve just been dropped into the dragon’s lair, except instead of a dragon it’s my hot-as-hell wife. Livia’s veins bulge out of her neck and her fingernails slice into my skin.
“I can’t do this,” she pants, as the midwife tries to coax the baby out. Livia turns to me, face looking as though all her energy has drained from it, white in places, red in others. “I can’t…Aedan. This is too hard.”
“You can do it, baby,” I say. I lean into her, whisper in her ear so the midwife can’t hear. “Remember all the shit you’ve been through, princess. Remember the bar; remember how you tricked Carlos. Do you remember Ireland, when you heard about Hare’s Gap? The hardest walk in all of Ireland, the man said, and what did you do? You marched me to the shop, bought some hiking gear, and conquered that damn walk.” I remember the day well ’cause all I wanted to do was relax and fuck, but Livia said that if I had the gall to trick her into coming to Ireland, I’d have to go with her. “By the end of it, I was more tired than you, remember?”
“Aedan, thank you,” she says, “but walking is a little different from pushing a vending machine out of your vagina. Men!”
I chuckle, can’t help but chuckle. Almost a year of marriage—the baby was almost certainly conceived in Ireland…or maybe it was on the plane, actually—and Livia still has it in her to make me feel like that foolish jackass who mistook her for a secretary once upon a time.
“This. Is not. Funny!”
She slaps me across the arm.
“Come on,” the midwife says. “You can do this. It only needs a little push.”
“A little push…”
Livia turns glaring eyes to the midwife.
Thank god she hasn’t got that pen on her. I reckon she’d stab the midwife, no question, a stone-faced sturdy woman who operates down there like this is business as usual.
“Come on, princess,” I say, wiping sweat from her forehead over and over. Her beautiful thick hair is plastered to her skin with sticky sweat and her dimples, which I know she hates but I find so, so cute, are deeper than ever, as though pitted in frustration. I give her hand another squeeze. “You’re stronger than this.”
“Don’t tell me how strong I am. Don’t tell me how easy this is. Don’t tell me anything. Just be quiet, you Irish beast, and let me break your hand.”
I nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
After a few moments of blowing air, Livia makes another push. The veins on her neck bulge so much I’m sure she’s going to explode, like lava coursing beneath her skin. The only other time I’ve seen her veins bulge like that, I reflect, is when the pregnancy made her super-horny and we did it in a club, in the toilets, and she came so hard she looked as she does now, on the cusp of explosions. She pushes even harder and screams so loud I’m shocked when the ceiling doesn’t come crashing down.
“Raghhhhhhhhhhhh!”
But then, after the screaming and the pain and the sense that this is never, in a million years, going to end, the midwife pulls a mewling pink bundle from between Livia’s legs and carries it off to the side, where the cleaning station is. Livia gets on with the rest of the business—stuff which confuses me, truth be told, afterbirth and all that, stuff which I didn’t even know about before Livia got pregnant—and then, finally, she slumps on the bed.
“You did well,” I say. “I’m proud.”
The baby screams louder than its mother.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” Livia asks.
She didn’t want to know beforehand, and I saw no reason to argue with her. The way I see it, as long as the kid is healthy and happy, that’s all that matters.
I’ll be a better dad than Patty, I think. I have to be. I have to do for that kid what Patty never did for me. I have to give him love. Dammit, I’m going to give that kid so much love he’s going to hate me by the time he’s a teenager. Fine, let him hate me. Just let him never think I don’t love him, is all. Let him be one-hundred percent on that. Or her…let her…
But then the nurse says, “It’s a boy,” and carries the tiny pink thing over.
Livia takes the boy in her arms and smiles down at him with such love that you wouldn’t guess she was roaring like an ogre just a few minutes ago. She looks spent and can hardly keep her eyes open, but she spends a good ten minutes stroking his face, playing with his hands. I watch this eagerly, finally feeling, for the first time in my life, that I have a family, a real family, a family of my own. Then Livia offers me the child, and suddenly I’m afraid.
“I…”
She tilts her head at me. “What’s wrong?”
“I just…what if I drop him?” But it goes deeper than that, deeper than I can put into words.
Luckily, I don’t have to; Livia knows me as well as I know myself by now, probably better.
“You are not Patty,” she says. “You are your own man and you’ll do one-hundred times better than he did. I promise you. I won’t let you get out of line.”
I take my child, hands shaking, heart pounding in my ears, more nervous and scared than I’ve ever been on a hit. I hold him close, feeling the warmth of him, and then something changes inside of me. It’s like something is added; the hole which I’ve spent decades trying to fill with Patty’s love is finally filled. I smile, and then I laugh, laugh like I’ve never laughed before, and the baby makes a bubbling, coughing noise which sounds like my laughter.
“Luca,” I say, looking into Livia’s eyes. “I think we should call him Luca.”
Livia nods, tears sliding down her cheeks. “Luca,” she repeats, and then bursts into the tears of a woman who has just given life, happy that the baby’s alive and well, and yet sad that she’s no longer pregnant all at once.
The midwife takes Luca away to be monitored and I stroke Livia’s hair, twining it around my fingers, until she falls into an exhausted sleep.
I’m the luckiest goddamn man alive, I think.