It wasn’t until the drive home that it came.
The idea.
Poppy had again drifted off, after making me promise to help her put up the Christmas tree once we got home. Once she started snoring, I figured it was safe to turn off the Christmas music she’d put on and listen to my audiobook again.
The narrator was relating the story of Theseus and the Labyrinth of Crete, and as I thought about the labyrinth itself, I began to think of other iconic symbols in mythology. Celtic knots and crosses and triskelions and spirals. And then I thought only about spirals as I drove down the wet but mostly empty highway, and then it came to me why I struggled with jealousy over Anton, even though I’d let go of my jealousy over Sterling.
Life is a spiral.
As long as we lived, we would keep moving forward. But on a spiral path, getting closer to your destination meant periodically passing the same things—emotions, issues, character flaws—over and over again, the way a person walking up a spiral staircase would continually find himself facing north every ten steps or so.
My jealousy was my north, and perhaps I was wiser than the last time I had encountered it. Perhaps this time it would be easier to master, and then when I inevitably faced it again, it would be even easier…
But my mind didn’t stop there. Because I realized that this didn’t just apply to individuals. It applied to institutions too. Like churches. Like the Catholic Church, actually. Because historically, the church had its own spiral, times where it had been forced to modernize or adapt, great leaps forward in humanitarianism and philosophy, and giant leaps back with dogma and persecution.
The Church didn’t need me to tell it how to change. It already knew how, because it had done it so many times before.
The Catholic Church doesn’t need a prescription for reformation, I composed mentally, wishing I were at my laptop and able to type this out. The Church only needs a call to awaken…
Oh my God. Had I really broken through the barrier of my dissertation’s conclusion? Could I finally write this motherfucker?
Excited, I sped up the truck and glanced at the clock. Only a couple hours until home. And then I would start kicking this rewrite’s ass.
“I thought you said we’d put up the tree together?” Poppy said, her arms folded.
I was on my way out the door, and I’d stopped to give her an absent-minded kiss—rookie mistake. Because then she’d noticed my laptop bag stuffed full of snacks and deduced that I was planning on being gone the whole night.
I ran a hand through my hair. I hated disappointing her—Poppy loved Christmas the way most people loved babies—fiercely and sometimes irrationally—and we’d put up the tree together every year since we’d been married. On the other hand, every minute I stood here arguing with her was another minute wasted, when I could be tapping out the words that would finally bring this cursed thesis to its end.
“Can we put it up another evening?” I asked, trying to sound penitent and genuinely eager. (I was neither.)
Her lower lip bowed into something dangerously like a pout. My heart lurched at the sight, but then my brain chanted write write, finish finish, at me, and my heart stopped with the guilt.
“It’s the day after Thanksgiving,” she said. “That’s the day Christmas trees are supposed to be put up, but if you want to wait…”
“I do, thank you. I promise the minute I finish this thing that we can put up seven Christmas trees, okay? We’ll put up as many as your mom has at Pickering Farm.” I dropped another kiss on her unmoving lips. “I’ll be done with this thing so soon. I swear.”
Her arms were still folded when I walked out the door.
The next afternoon, I knocked on the open door to Professor Morales’s office. “Professor? Can I come in?”
Morales stood at the small window of her office, rubbing her lower back with the heel of one palm. She didn’t give me an immediate response, so I just hovered at the threshold like a vampire, until she finally turned to me. Her lips made a flat, unhappy line, and her eyes were distant and murky.
“Is this a bad time?” I asked. I’d nearly jumped up and clicked my heels in the air when I’d seen her light on as I walked from my tiny shared office to the library, and I decided to take the chance to show her my latest revision. I’d spent the night at the library last night, coming home late this morning to shower and indulge in a quick nap before I drove to campus in the latest round of freezing sleet. Poppy hadn’t been home—I’d assumed she’d run off early to prepare for the gala—but the Christmas tree was in the living room to greet me instead, a seven-foot monument to my failures as a husband, winking away in the dim gray light of winter.
I told her we could put it up later, I’d thought irritably. Putting it up without me seemed rather passive-aggressive, and I’d let the resentment rankle in my chest as I showered and lain down to nap. I’d finally had a breakthrough, we were finally at the end game, and she was going to start doing things without me now? Now, when we were so close to the end of all this bullshit?
But I wasn’t programmed for anger. I was programmed for guilt. And it wasn’t long before my irritation was superseded by depressing fantasies of Poppy hanging ornaments herself, drinking eggnog by herself, singing off-key carols by herself.
By herself. Those were the two worst words in the English language right now, or at least the most incriminating.
With difficulty, I moved my mind from the Christmas tree back to the present. Morales was leaning forward now, one hand braced on her desk as she stared lock-jawed into the middle distance. And then she let out a low groan—the kind of noise that I normally heard when my wife was on her hands and knees in front of me—and so I blushed in automatic response, until I realized that Morales was in pain, real and excruciating pain, and I stepped forward to go to her.
“Professor? Would you like me to get someone?”
“I think I need to call my doctor,” she managed after a minute or so. Her body relaxed slightly, but she kept leaning forward, as if afraid that standing up would trigger her pain again.
“Um, okay,” I said, letting my laptop bag slide off my shoulder and digging my phone out of my blazer pocket. “What’s her name? Maybe I can find her number online.”
“I can do it,” she said, and her voice was a little less strained now, a little more lucid. “Will you bring me my purse?”
I did so and she found her own phone, and within a few minutes, she was talking to a nurse, things like six minutes apart and thought it was just back pain and no, no it hasn’t broken.
Which was around the time that I realized that she was in labor. Holy shit.
Holy.
Shit.
Once, I’d been qualified to baptize babies. I’d been qualified to join people together in marriage, and I’d been qualified to pray at their bedside. I’d guided people through some of the happiest and unhappiest parts of their lives, the highs and lows, the agonies and the ecstasies.
But I had no idea what the fuck to do with a woman in labor. Especially a woman who potentially held the weight of my academic future in her hands.
“Okay,” she said into the phone. And then, “Yes, I have a ride to the hospital.”
Like a character in a sitcom, I instinctively glanced behind me, as if searching for another person in the room, and then I realized—I was the ride to the hospital.
As if sensing my burgeoning panic, Morales met my eyes as she hung up the phone. “Tyler,” she said. “You have to stop with those puppy eyes. I can’t handle them even when I’m not—ugh.” She bent over again, both hands on the desk, breathing hard.
Unsure of what to do, I patted her awkwardly on the back.
“Don’t. Touch. Me,” she snarled.
“Yes, ma’am.”
After another minute of this, she finally straightened up. “Where are you parked?”
“Outside the building in the faculty lot. Should I bring the car around or…?”
“Fuck it, we’ll walk.” She eased herself upright, made a flapping motion with her hand to indicate that I should grab her purse, and then started walking. I felt like a fifteen-year-old, awkward and useless. I had no idea what to say or even which hospital entrance to pull up to when we got there. Surely, I should be doing something, right? The weird breathing stuff—they always did that in the movies.
When I glimpsed her wedding ring flashing in the light of the hallway as we walked out, I asked, “Should I call Mr. Morales?”
Professor Morales shot me the same withering look she gave clueless undergrads in her medieval church history classes. “Do you honestly think I took my husband’s name when I got married?”
“Um. No?”
“Hell no, I didn’t. And my husband is visiting family because the baby wasn’t actually due until next week…oh shit.” She stopped about three feet away from the elevator, her hands extended, as if looking for something to grab onto. I offered my arm, which I instantly regretted, because she dug her fingers into me so hard I knew I’d bruise later. But I bore it up as stoically as I could, and when she gritted out a request to knead her lower back, I reached around her and did it, hoping no one walked by and saw me basically embracing one of the members of my dissertation board.
And so it went all the way down to the truck, a few minutes of walking, a few minutes of stopping and laboring, where she gradually turned all the bones in my hands into loose pebbles and I kneaded her back as hard as I could. In the truck, she faced the seat backwards and hung off the headrest while I called her husband and left him a (very awkward) voicemail explaining why I was driving his laboring wife to the hospital.
It only took me ten minutes to make a twenty-minute drive, but by the time I pulled up at the Emergency Room entrance, Professor Morales had gone from definitely in labor to abso-fucking-lutely in labor, and just the few steps from the truck to the front door took us several minutes. A nurse came out with a wheelchair, earning herself the most vicious run of curse words I’d ever heard from Morales, and when I tried to peel myself away to park the truck, I was informed in no uncertain language that I was staying the fuck with her. So I did, letting her crush my hand and swear profanities at me that would even make the Business Brothers blush, until we made it up to a room on the labor and delivery ward.
“Are you the father?” a nurse asked me.
“No,” I stammered. “I’m her PhD candidate.”
The nurse squinted at me like I was an insane person, and I kind of felt like one, surrounded by all these bustling nurses and monitors and then I made the mistake of looking over and seeing a nurse with her hand up Morales’s—
“I’m going to go park the truck,” I said uneasily, backing away. “Is there like a sister or a friend we can call to help with—” I gestured at the nurse/hand/vagina situation on the bed. “—All of this?”
There was a sister, it turned out. And then Morales’s husband called back, excited as hell and racing to the airport in a taxi, and by the time I’d parked the truck, Morales knew her husband was on his way and her sister was walking into the room. I stationed myself in the waiting room, examining my arm for bruises and feeling weirdly jittery. Why was I jittery? This wasn’t my baby.
But then I realized that what I thought were jitters were actually slivers of joy—bright, vibrant things piercing the fog of work and guilt. Morales was having a baby, right now, here in this very building. And I’d gotten to be a part of it, a part of this new life, this incredible, beautiful thing that was happening despite wars and genocides and bad politicians and shitty academic politics.
I couldn’t wait until I was in the hospital for my own baby. I sat back and let myself fantasize about it, about Poppy with a swollen belly, about Poppy swearing obscenities at me. About us, growing our family. It almost became too painful to think about—Poppy having my child—not because it made me upset, but because it made me so incandescently happy. I started smiling just thinking about it, wondering if she would agree to trying for a baby as soon as I finished my degree. Hell, we could do it now, because a baby wouldn’t be born for another nine months after he or she was conceived, although I should then really buckle down and think about what happens after this PhD. I couldn’t ask Poppy to have my child if I didn’t have a plan for my own life yet.
“Mr. Bell?” A nurse came out into the waiting room. “Ms. Morales wants you to know that she just delivered a healthy baby girl, and that you’re welcome to come in and meet her.”
I shouldn’t intrude, I really shouldn’t…
“Alright then,” I said, standing and following the nurse back into the room. As I did, I glanced at the clock. It had only been two hours since we’d gotten to the hospital, which seemed fast for having a baby…not that I really knew anything about having babies. My brothers had no kids, and Poppy’s brothers had their children long before I’d met her. Really, my only baby experience was from baptisms, and those tended to be fairly short affairs.
When I came into the room, Morales had fresh plum lipstick on and an expensive cardigan pulled over her hospital gown. “I’m sorry for all the things I said to you earlier, Tyler,” she apologized briskly. “I’m feeling much better now.”
“Yeah, now that they’ve given you pain medicine,” her sister pointed out.
Morales nodded towards the bundle in her arms. “Would you like to meet my daughter?”
I crept towards the bed, suddenly feeling shy—a feeling Morales rid me of quickly, by stretching the little bundle out for me to hold the second I was close enough. I didn’t know a lot about babies, but etiquette suggested it would be rude to refuse a proffered baby, so I accepted, surprised at how little the infant weighed.
I tucked her into the crook of my arm and peered down at her little face, her eyes slightly swollen and her head capped by a blue and pink striped hat. But she was awake and almost preternaturally calm, her dark eyes blinking and her little mouth parted, as if she were staring in wonder at the world around her. She was so unearthly, so perfect and yet so fragile, and in that moment, where her wide eyes seemed to peer up into mine, I felt both a peace and a turbulent joy, almost like giddiness.
I had heard many explanations for why Abraham had named his son Isaac, which means he laughs in Hebrew. That it was because Sarah had laughed when the Lord told her she’d bear a child, or even that he was named for God’s own laughter at the situation. But right now, I knew how Abraham might have felt, holding his own newborn, a bliss so triumphant and euphoric that he couldn’t help but laugh.
I kissed the little girl’s forehead, my chest rending itself open with adoration and hope, and then I (reluctantly) handed her back to Morales, who gave me a tired smile. “Bet you didn’t anticipate spending your Saturday night like this.”
“Beats writing in the library.” I smiled back, except then something cold and panicked seeped through my thoughts, like a blaring alarm that only becomes gradually discernible as you rouse yourself from sleep.
Saturday night.
There was something about Saturday night.
Out of habit, I checked my phone, where the calendar notification showed me exactly what that something was, and also that I was already an hour late to it.
Poppy’s gala.