The angel of death, you messed everything up. You came for the wrong person.

Somewhere, I know, a baby must be being born—a life arriving and a life leaving. And I feel both things, the joy of both. Houndy is gazing at me through the mists, Houndy so close he can still reach out and touch me. He’s sorry. He’s happy but he’s sorry.

And me saying, don’t worry I’m coming soon please wait for me Houndy love wait because I’ll be there I promise.

FOURTEEN

MARNIE

I text Brian as the ambulance pulls up.

“It’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” I hear myself saying. Two EMTs jump out and come inside the building to Natalie, who is now panting with each contraction and swaying on the bench just slightly. Her lips look a little white to me, and sweat is pouring off her forehead even though she’s shivering.

It’s hard for me to let go of her, but these guys know what they’re doing. They squat down next to her and take her pulse and blood pressure, and ask a lot of questions. “When is the baby due? When did you last eat? What hospital are you using? How far apart are the contractions? When did your water break?” And then they put her on a stretcher and take her inside the back of the ambulance, and one EMT slaps an oxygen monitor on her finger, and the other starts an IV. The radio crackles news of other people, but they are intent on Natalie. One of them talks into the handset for a minute, but I can’t pay attention to what he’s saying.

I sit beside her, trying not to freak out in front of her. Also, I’m trying to help her breathe through contractions, which she is not doing such a hot job of. She keeps looking like she’s going to pass out.

“Okay, Natalie, my name is Joel, and I’m going to help you get your breathing under control,” says one of them, leaning down close to Natalie’s face. He is young and ruggedly handsome with kind eyes and large, capable hands. “I think you’re hyperventilating, sweetheart, so let’s try to slooow down your breathing, okay? Take . . . it . . . easy . . . like . . . this.” He demonstrates how to breathe slowly and deeply, and then gives her a paper bag to put over her mouth. “My wife just had a baby,” he tells me. “Trust me, she’s going to be fine.”

“I’m not—” says Natalie, and then she lets out a yell that I haven’t heard from her since she got a B minus on a research paper in seventh grade, on sea lions, after she had read four books about them. I grab her hand, and Joel says to me, pleasantly as if we’re discussing soccer goals, “Yeah. That was a big one. Okay, Natalie, let’s get ready to ride the next one. They’re coming about forty seconds apart now, so just rest for a minute . . . and okay now, be ready!”

“Are we going to the hospital?” I say to him, and he nods.

“Just want to get her stabilized first,” he says, holding on to her wrist.

Natalie suddenly makes the most unearthly sound I’ve ever heard—and I’m stunned when the other EMT guy, Marcus, slams the back door of the ambulance and comes over to us. Joel leaps into action and starts ripping off her pants, which are wet from that water-breaking incident, and hard to get off, and Joel motions for me to help him, because we seem to be suddenly in a huge hurry.

He exchanges a word I can’t hear with the other EMT, who takes out a tray of something from a drawer. There are towels and cloths and some silver equipment-looking things. I don’t know, but I think we’re about to deliver a baby. My sister’s eyes are closed, and her face is all scrunched up.

“Breathe. Ride the contraction,” says Joel. “It’s fine . . . you’re doing great, Natalie.”

Suddenly it hits me that Brian is possibly going to miss his own child’s birth unless he gets here fast. I turn to say that to Joel, as though there’s something he might be able to do: delay things or something—who knows? But before I can say it, Natalie starts screaming her head off, and Joel motions something to me, and I suddenly understand that this is it. This is it. There isn’t going to be a ride to the hospital—we’re going to deliver this baby right now, in the parking lot, just these two guys and me.

Well, mostly the two EMTs.

But I am here, too. No one is going to turn to me and say, “Um, miss? Could you please get out of here? I don’t believe you’re authorized for this kind of activity, are you? Did you take the baby delivery test? No? Then I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave.”

And I know nothing about this! In fact, I don’t even know what you’re supposed to read to get ready for something like this. It’s like that dream where you signed up for a course and then forgot about it so you didn’t do any of the required reading, and now you’ve realized your mistake but it’s too late to withdraw . . .

“AARRRUUUUUUUUUGHGHGHGHGH,” my sister says.

I take her hand, and when I look down, I see that there is the top of the baby’s head. Like, coming out of her.

“Crowning. She’s crowning,” Joel says. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

My sister’s face is all red and contorted and her eyes are squinched closed. I am thinking a ridiculous thought—that she is not going to like the fact that she didn’t get to have the birth plan she wanted. She was so emphatic about the whole thing. Natalie is swamped by another contraction, and she yells and grabs my hand and grips it so hard that I’m halfway certain that my fingers are going to turn black and fall off by Wednesday.

Joel instructs her on one final push—“Give me a good one, a nice steady push!”—and then, my God, somehow a tiny human, gray and mottled and covered in what looks like cottage cheese, comes sliding out, guided by Joel’s gloved, capable hands. A baby! Oh my God, there’s a baby girl! With eyes open! Looking around! And little fists, curled up tight, legs folded in so compactly, now stretching out, kicking, yelling, breathing like a champ. Joel is holding her in the crook of his arm.

I look up at Natalie, and her eyes are bright with tears, and my face is streaming wetness. My heart is galloping all around, and my hands look like they might soon start bleeding from the little half-moons of Natalie’s nails pressing into them.

“Good job,” says Joel softly. And Marcus smiles and rips off his gloves. Both of them are so calm and methodical, it’s like they’re injecting calm into the air. Like pure love. I hear that voice again—you are love; you are going to be all right. And my niece—Amelia Jane—is now looking around with wide, navy-blue eyes, making little peeps of protest, her tiny body turning pinker by the second, as though she’s under some kind of cosmic light. She has a fringe of dark hair, and little arms and legs, and fingers and thumbs—all of your most important equipment—and she’s alert and aware. Her filmy eyes lock on to mine, and I am smitten, stunned, thinking: How can this be? How does such a thing happen around us every day—and we just go about our lives like it’s nothing out of the ordinary?

The two guys are busy doing official medical stuff, cleaning Natalie, covering her up. Joel hands the baby to me, which makes me startle. Me? Are you serious? I look around, venture out of my trance. Wow. We’re in an ambulance, sitting in the parking area of the dentist’s office. Outside, there are cars honking, voices of people walking past the ambulance, unaware. Somewhere out there is Jeremy; did he go back upstairs to help somebody with a backache?

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.