Downstairs, Stephanie was just trying to control her breathing. Shit! Why hadn’t she paid more attention to the breathing? Practiced? She couldn’t manage her breathing, couldn’t get ahead of the pain. She sat on the living room floor, pulled out her phone, and after a brief, unsettling conversation with her doctor during which she had two contractions and the doctor said, “I’m hanging up and sending an ambulance,” and before she could even check the time again—and she knew this was very wrong, way too soon—she had to push.
“Tommy?” she wailed up to him. Where was he? “I have to push.”
“No, no, no,” he yelled down to her. “No pushing. Absolutely no pushing.”
But telling her not to push was like telling her not to breathe. Her body was pushing, her body wouldn’t not push. She reached up from the floor and pulled a cashmere blanket off the back of the sofa. She could hear sirens, but it was too soon for her ambulance and she knew she wasn’t going anywhere. She tried to remember if she’d learned anything about what to do once the baby was out. Would she have to cut the cord? Oh, God. The afterbirth? What the fuck was she going to do! The contractions were seamless; a constant tsunami of pressure, there was no break, no moment when she didn’t feel like every internal organ was trying to exit her body in one concerted rush. She pulled up her maternity skirt, managed to work her underpants off, and place the cashmere blanket next to her on the floor.
Nothing but the best for baby, she thought, hoping she would remember later that she’d had the presence of mind to make a tiny joke.
She was trying to fight the urge to push, but she knew she’d already lost. Her body was doing what it needed to do and it was completely clear that her job was to surrender. Tommy had come down the stairs and dumped a pile of things near her head and was in the kitchen washing his hands. At least she thought that’s what he was doing. She’d lost count of the contractions. She’d lost track of time. She thought she could feel something emerging, but how could that be true? It couldn’t be true. She remembered she was supposed to be trying short little breaths—ha, ha, ha, ha. No use. She reached down between her legs and felt it: her daughter’s head, slick and wet and grainy with hair. Her daughter was in a hurry.
“Tommy,” she yelled into the kitchen. “She’s coming.”
Her daughter was here.
CHAPTER FORTY–FIVE
There were three things Paul Underwood assiduously avoided: the beach, watercraft, and so-called street food. He genuinely disliked the beach, enjoyed neither the sand nor the beating sun nor the occasional whiff of putrefying sea creatures, nor the practically prehensile barnacles cleaving to a twist of brown otherworldly, goose-fleshed kelp. He made certain exceptions. On a cool, cloudy day, preferably in winter, preferably with an offshore breeze, he could be persuaded to walk along the waterfront for atmosphere if, say, a bowl of chowder or a bucket of steamers were offered as recompense at the end. But otherwise? Thank you very much, but no thank you. He’d never learned to swim, and marine vessels of any kind from kayaks to cruise ships petrified him. (He’d never even learned to drive a car, so the prospect of a stalled boat was also disturbing.) And the entire concept of street food was befuddling and abhorrent: the greasy cart with its questionable sanitation, the paper plates that lost all tensile strength before you were finished, eating while standing, having things drip down your hand or onto your pants, and how to accommodate a beverage along with flatware and napkins? He didn’t even approve of dining al fresco—what was the point when there was a perfectly wonderful, bug-free, climate-controlled room nearby? Street food was dining al fresco minus the petty luxuries of a table and a chair. In other words, minus civilization.
So Paul’s discomfort, while standing on a slightly swaying dock, under the relentless afternoon Caribbean sun, waiting to board a ferry while eating a plate of jerk chicken and fried plantains served from a truck in confounding proximity to the diesel fumes from the nearby idling ferry, was immense. Immense and vaguely nauseating.
His consolation? Bea. She was across the dock, sitting on a bench, her face bent to her plate of food and momentarily hidden by the wide-brimmed straw hat