drinks for everyone but Orla, even Linus. Linus looked at his mother. She surprised them all by saying, “If you can get it down, go for it.” She was wearing jewelry she hadn’t had on that morning—a platter of a necklace, dripping earrings, thick bracelet—and it seemed to improve her mood slightly. Orla was grateful that Manny had shopped well, and early.
They cleaned up together. Orla dried dishes until Mrs. Salgado took the towel from her hands and told her, firmly, to sit. The Ukrainian man carried the old woman, who was drowsy and flushed from the liquor, to the couch.
They were all just settling in, thinking the same thing, Orla could tell—what do we do now?—when they heard a roar coming from outside. It came in waves, rising and dying, and there was an intimidating force to the sound. But they were more stir-crazy than they were frightened, so they held the super’s Bic lighter to the wicks of his wife’s tapers. They went outside.
It turned out to be singing.
Eighth Avenue was crammed with people facing east, looking up at a man leaning precariously out his window on the third floor of a low-rise. He wore flashing Christmas-tree novelty glasses. He was leading the crowd in song with wild, wide-armed gestures. In one hand, he held an oversize martini glass, its liquid sloshing onto the street. In the other, he held an oversize dildo, purple and illuminated. He slashed it back and forth as he led the crowd in “O Holy Night.”
“That’s nice,” Manny said, grinning. His wife countered, with a sharp look at the dildo, “No, it’s not.”
Orla looked down the block. Someone had ransacked the Starbucks. The mermaid that usually dangled from a post above the door was facedown on the sidewalk, wires sticking out her back. Farther north, the screens on Madison Square Garden were black and quiet. The Empire State Building was snuffed out, its dark spire slicing the moon. The sounds Orla was used to had evaporated—no horns, no sirens, no engines. It was almost comforting to see the wild-eyed man from the corner of Twenty-Sixth Street shouldering through the crowd, still yelling about Jesus. “It’s too late!” he was saying to the singers. “Too late!”
When he got to Orla, he stopped and stared at her. Instinctively, she took a step back. “You’re wet,” the man said, in a completely normal voice.
“What?” She wrapped her arms across her midsection.
“I said you’re wet,” he repeated. “Your pants are wet.”
She thought he meant at the bottom, from the way her cuffs dragged in the slush, but then Mrs. Salgado lowered her candle. Orla saw that her sweatpants were soaked in the crotch, darkening down her leg.
“Your water broke, Orla,” Mrs. Salgado said. “We need to get you to a hospital.”
“No,” Orla said. Tonight was not the night, so this had to be something else. Then there was a hot push going through her back, filling her vision with sparkling pain. “I want to wait,” she said.
But no one heard her. Mrs. Salgado was calling to Manny, who was calling, over the music, to a cop. Orla heard his voice woven into the chorus, the masses and her super competing. Yo, night divine, need some help over here, oh night divine, gotta lady in labor. Oh night divine.
* * *
The generators at Mount Sinai West were already sagging. The lobby went black, then blinding, then black, like the kind of nightclubs Floss had always loved and Orla had always hated. Mrs. Salgado was beside her as she made her way to the desk.
The power seized again as a nurse led Orla and Mrs. Salgado past the nursery. Babies, no babies. Babies, no babies. The newborns, indistinguishable in their caps and cotton wrappings, seemed not to notice the blinking.
A new pain hit as Orla settled into bed. “Breathe,” someone said, but she held in all the air she could get. A nurse with a snarl of watches in a small bin handed one to Mrs. Salgado. Mickey Mouse’s white-gloved hands claimed it was eight fifteen. “You’re in charge of contractions,” the nurse said to Anna’s mother.
The doctor stood next to Orla’s bed with her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. “Sorry, honey, no epidural,” she said. “We’re short-staffed. But you can do this. Millions of women have done this. You have your mother here with you. It’s gonna be fine.”
“I’m forty-six,” Mrs. Salgado sniffed.
The doctor stuck her fingers inside Orla, who tried not to gasp. “Three