Richard Towne shook his head. Ayinde found herself intoxicated with the sight of his body, the bulge of biceps, the sinewy forearms, those enormous hands.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t have any kind of savior thing going on. I’m a simple man,” he said, spreading his hands. “I just want to play a little basketball, maybe win another ring. Enjoy life, you know? You’re a serious lady. I appreciate that. But even working girls have to eat.”
“True,” she said, allowing herself a smile.
“I’ll call you at the station.” And with that he gave a courtly little half bow and trotted onto the hardwood. By the time she was back at the station, there was an enormous bouquet of lilacs and lilies on her desk.
This is what they call the full-court press,
the card read. Ayinde had laughed out loud before picking up the phone to call Richard Towne and tell him that Friday night was fine.
Ayinde closed her eyes and tried to make her way through the contraction. “Okay,” said Becky. “Breathe…breathe…you’re doing just fine, keep breathing…”
“Ohhh,” Ayinde sighed, as the contraction finally loosened its grasp. Becky had her balanced on a giant blue ball set in the middle of her tiny living room on one of the narrow little streets near Rittenhouse Square. Ayinde had been rocking back and forth, trying not to scream.
“Sixty seconds,” said Kelly from the corner of the couch where she’d bundled herself in a blanket with a notebook and her watch.
“Shouldn’t you girls go to the hospital now?” asked a voice from the staircase.
“Ma, you’re hovering,” Becky said without turning her head.
“I’m not hovering,” said Edith Rothstein, who had, indeed, been hovering on the staircase, visible only from the waist up, never setting a foot into the living room and practically wringing her hands since the three women had walked through the door five hours earlier. “I’m just concerned.”
“Hovering!” Becky said. Her mother, a trim woman with a carefully styled cap of reddish-blond hair and a string of pearls she’d been twisting nonstop, pursed her lips. Edith had ostensibly come north for a cousin’s wedding in Mamaroneck but, Becky confided, her real business involved staring at Becky’s belly and conversing nonstop with her as-yet-unborn granddaughter. “I wouldn’t mind it so much,” Becky said, “except she hardly ever talks to me anymore. It’s like her field of vision stops at my neck.”
Ayinde wiped her forehead and looked around. Becky’s living room was about the size of her own dressing room, and she was sure that no decorator had helped with the selection of the overstuffed bookshelves and the afghans that lay over the couch and the chairs, but the room was charming anyhow and it felt warm and safer than the hospital had.
But not warm and safe enough for Becky’s mother. “Andrew,” she whispered loudly enough so that the three women could hear her, “are you sure this is all right?”
“It’s fine, Edith,” Andrew said from the kitchen in the basement. “The ladies sound like they’ve got it under control.”
“What are they doing down there?” Ayinde asked, thinking how lucky Becky was to have such a sweet husband—a husband who, most important, was here and not three thousand miles away. Andrew reminded her a little bit of her own father…or, rather, she admitted, the parts her father would play on Broadway or occasionally on the big screen. He’d carved out quite a niche for himself by playing caring, warmhearted fathers and, lately, even grandfathers.
“Andrew’s online, and Edith’s probably alphabetizing my canned goods,” Becky whispered back. “We’re fine, Mom,” she called. “Really.” Edith shook her head again and vanished, like a rabbit disappearing down into its burrow. Ayinde reached for her cell phone for what felt like the hundredth time since her water had broken, hit the button for Richard’s cell, then sucked in her breath as the phone rang and rang and another contraction started grinding through her.
“Another one,” she said, curling her body around her belly.
Kelly’s face went pale as Ayinde tried to breathe through the pain. “What’s it feel like?” she asked when the contraction was over.
Ayinde shook her head. It was a horrible pain, worse than anything she’d ever felt, worse than the ankle she’d broken while riding horseback when she was fourteen. It felt as if her midriff was surrounded by iron bands, and they were squeezing her tighter and tighter as the contraction unspooled. It was like being adrift, drowning in a vast ocean with no shore and no rescue in sight. “Bad,” she gasped, pressing her fists against her back. “Bad.”
Becky put her hands on Ayinde’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Breathe with me,” she said. Her eyes were as calm as her voice, and her hands were strong and steady. “Look at me. You’re going to be all right. Let’s give your baby some air. Come on, Ayinde, breathe…”
“Oh, God!” she groaned. “I can’t do this anymore…I want my mother.” The contraction finally loosened its grip. Ayinde started crying, miserable, defeated tears.
Just then—at last—her cell phone rang.
“Baby?” Richard sounded harried and distracted. She could hear the noise of the crowd in the background.
“Where are you?”
“On my way to the airport. On my way home. I’m sorry, Ayinde—I turned my phone off when practice started…”
“And nobody told you?”
She could hear a car door slamming. “Not ’til just now.”
Not until the game was over, Ayinde thought bitterly. Not until they didn’t need him anymore. “Hurry,” she said, gripping the phone so tightly she thought it would break into pieces in her hand.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. You’re in the hospital, right?”
“Not now,” she said, feeling another contraction beginning, knowing she wouldn’t have the time or the breath to explain where she was and how she’d gotten there. “But I’ll meet you there. Hurry,” she said again, and broke the connection, and bent over double, one hand clutching the phone, the other one clawing at her back, which felt like it was on fire.
“Sixty seconds,” Kelly said, clicking the stopwatch.
“Okay,” said Becky, in a voice so calm and lulling that she could have filled in for the yoga instructor. “I think it’s time to go.” She helped Ayinde back onto the couch. “Do you want me to call your mom?”
A chuckle worked its way through Ayinde’s lips. “Mom,” she repeated. “I never even called her that. She wouldn’t let me. She wanted me to call her Lolo. People we’d meet who didn’t know us would think that we were sisters. She never would correct them, either.” She made an abrupt, strangled sound. It took Kelly and Becky a minute to realize she was laughing. “You know what she said when I told her I was pregnant?”
Kelly and Becky shook their heads.
“She said, ‘I’m too young to be a grandmother.’ Not
Congratulations.
Not
I’m so happy for you. I’m too young to be a grandmother.
” Ayinde shook her head, then grabbed at her back and bent over again. “Don’t…call…her,” she panted. “She wouldn’t even come.”
Becky’s hand moved in small circles in the center of Ayinde’s back. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get to the hospital,” she called softly. Edith popped into the room like a jack-in-the-box, so fast that Ayinde figured she had to have been sitting on the stairs, waiting for them to need her.
Not fair,
she thought. Becky had her mother; Becky had her husband. Ayinde was starting to feel as though she had nothing at all.
“Can you grab some extra clothes—T-shirts and stuff, in case we’re there awhile? And some bottles of water?” Edith scurried away. Ayinde bit back a groan as Kelly bent and slipped on her shoes and led her, in mincing baby steps, out the door, where Andrew Rabinowitz was waiting with the car. “Kelly, you get in the front seat,” Becky instructed, helping Ayinde into the back. A homeless guy stood across the street and watched them, rocking back on his heels as he cackled, “Yo! You ladies need a SHOE-horn!”
“Very helpful,” Andrew muttered, holding the door for his wife. Ayinde squeezed her eyes shut, one hand working at the seat belt, the other clutching her cell phone. The pain was moving through her body like a predator, leaping from her legs to her back to her belly, shaking her between its jaws like a lion shakes a half-dead gazelle. She felt as if she would fly apart if she opened her eyes. Becky smoothed her hair away from her temple.
“Hang on. We’ll be there in no time,” Becky said.
Ayinde nodded, breathing, counting backward from one hundred, hitting zero and starting the count again, thinking that she only had to survive this long enough to get to the hospital and then they’d give her something, something to take away the pain and the humiliation that bit at her more sharply than contractions.
Knocked up, no husband.
That’s what anyone who saw her would think, ring or no ring, because where was her man?
Andrew pulled up to the emergency room entrance at Pennsylvania Hospital, and the women worked their way out of the car—Ayinde in the T-shirt and pajama bottoms Becky had lent her, Becky in leggings and a sweater, with her curls swept into a bun. Kelly had refused Becky’s offer of clothing and was still in her chic maternity workout wear, its jaunty stripes and clingy Lycra an uneasy contrast to the scared look on her pale face.
“Triage,” Becky said, leading Ayinde and Kelly into an elevator. Then they were on the third floor, and Ayinde was grasping the edge of the admission desk, trying to spell her name.
“A-Y-I-N…”
“Amy?” guessed the nurse.
“It’s Ayinde!” Ayinde gasped. “Ayinde Towne! Richard Towne’s wife!” She was past caring who knew who she was. Past remembering whether the publicist had told her to sign in with her maiden name or not, past everything except getting the pain to stop.
“Well, why dintcha say so, hon?” the nurse asked complacently, pointing toward a cubicle and handing Ayinde a gown. “Everything off from the waist down, lie on the bed, the resident will be along soon.” She looked over Ayinde’s head, toward the door. “Is your husband parking?”
Ayinde grabbed the gown and lurched toward the bathroom without a word.
“Well,” sniffed the nurse, “nice addy-tood!” She turned to Becky and Kelly. “Is he coming?”
Kelly shrugged. “We think so,” Becky said. The nurse’s tired face lit up.
They left the nurse dialing her phone and found Ayinde on her knees in the bathroom, her pajama bottoms crumpled on the floor, the gown draped over her shoulders.
“Drugs,” Ayinde said. She wiped her mouth, fumbled for the handle, and managed to flush the toilet and push herself onto her feet. “Please help me find a doctor. I want drugs.”
“Okay,” Kelly said. “Come on, let’s get you into bed.” She opened the bathroom door. Instantly, a group of three people in scrubs—a man and two women—backed away. “That’s her?” Ayinde heard one of them whisper. She closed her eyes and let Becky guide her onto the bed. Seconds later, a beaming doctor appeared.
“Hello, Mrs. Towne!” he said, as if he’d known her all his life. “I’m Dr. Cole.”
“I’d like my epidural,” said Ayinde, as she thrust her legs into the stirrups, not caring if she kicked the doctor in his chest in the process, not caring who saw what.
“Well, now, let’s just have a look,” the doctor said briskly, inserting his fingers as Ayinde bit back a scream and tried to hold still. “You’re six centimeters, maybe seven. We’ll page Dr. Mendlow, and we’ll send the anesthesiologist right up.”
The pasty-faced nurse helped Ayinde into a wheelchair and took her to her room. “Time to say good-bye,” she said. “Only immediate family’s allowed in labor and delivery unless you cleared it ahead of time.”
“We’re her sisters,” Kelly said.
The nurse stared at them with her mouth falling open: three women, two white, one black, all three of them pregnant.
“It’s been a very big year for our family,” Kelly said cheerfully. From her bed, Ayinde managed to smile.
“Well, I suppose we can make an exception,” said the nurse. “No cell phones, no pagers, no food,” she said.
Ayinde sipped from the cup of water Kelly handed her. She could hear the woman in the next room who sounded like she had to be nearing the end. “Come on, honey, push, push, PUSH!” her husband cheered. She wondered if the father was a Little League coach on the weekends, the kind of guy who’d stand behind half a dozen six-year-olds and show them how to wrap their hands around the bat.
“Are you okay?” Kelly whispered. Ayinde nodded, then gripped the edges of the sheet, twisting her body, trying to get away from the pain of the strongest contraction yet. “He…better…hurry,” she managed to say. Becky squatted beside the bed, holding her hands. Kelly rubbed her back and watched the door.
“Good news,” she said. “Your epidural has arrived.”
Ayinde opened her eyes and saw a compact, red-headed man who introduced himself as Dr. Jacoby, said he was delighted to meet her, and managed to get off the topic of the absent Richard Towne in less than thirty seconds. As Ayinde rested her weight on a nurse’s shoulders, Dr. Jacoby swabbed her back with Betadine, then reached for a needle so long it made even stalwart Becky blanch and leave the room, saying something about getting some water.
“Hey,” said the nurse Ayinde was leaning on, “when things calm down a little, could your husband give me an autograph?”
“I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” Ayinde said, straining to be polite because she wanted the drugs to work. She started to nod, and the doctor and nurse both said, “Oh, no, don’t move!” So she held herself nodless, perfectly still, while the warmth and then the blessed numbness spread down from her hips.
She let her eyes slip shut, and when she opened them, it had somehow become five in the morning and the door was swinging open, admitting a wedge of harsh light.
“Look who’s here!” said Becky.
Ayinde saw Dr. Mendlow at the foot of the bed, his lanky frame and disarming grin, his curly brown hair tucked into a surgical cap, lifting the hem of her gown. And behind him was Richard, unshaven and weary, all six feet nine and a half inches, still wearing his warm-up suit and beaming at her, with a quartet of nurses in his wake.
He reached for her hands. “Hey, baby.” His eyes crinkled at the corners. His smile looked the same way it did on TV, where it sold cereal and soft drinks and his own line of sneakers. Ayinde closed her eyes, leaning her face against the warm leather of his jacket, breathing his comforting smell of soap and aftershave and the faint whiff of sweat, no matter how long it had been between games and workout sessions…