“Ethan,” my brother breathed. I could hear stress and panic in his voice. “Where are you?”
“I’m outside the Convention Center. Where are you?”
“Hospital.”
“Are you okay? Is Casey with you?”
“She’s here,” Eli said, his voice trembling. “She went into labor.”
I paused. Labor? Casey was still several weeks out from her due date and the doctors had even warned she might carry late, putting her past the second week of January.
“Labor?” I asked lamely.
“The baby is coming, Ethan. Mom and Dana are already on their way and they told me to call you because you’d want to be here and I’m freaking out man. He wasn’t supposed to come until January and we don’t even have the nursery finished and—”
“Eli, take a breath.” I waited for my brother to inhale and exhale on the other end. He did it a couple more times. “I’m on my way. I’ll be there for whatever you need. As long as Casey and the baby are okay, everything else will fall into place, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“Okay,” Eli said again. I could tell he was off his game. He hadn’t expected this to happen so early and I doubted Casey did either. They were both probably scared out of their minds. I couldn’t deny my stomach was full of butterflies too and there was a bit of concern creeping up in the back of my mind.
I told myself babies were born early all the time with no health complications.
This little boy just wanted to be here for the holidays. That was all. A true Collinder through and through.
“I have to get back in there with Casey,” Eli said. “Hurry, Ethan, okay?”
“Little brother?”
“Yeah?”
“Try not to freak out so much that you miss the moment, okay? You’re about to become a dad. This is a big deal. Soak it in. Casey’s a badass and she’s going to do great and so will you. Got it?”
“Got it,” Eli said, and he sounded more confident.
I hung up the phone and stepped out onto the road as another cab approached. He hit the brakes and pulled over for me and I swung into the front seat.
“Vancouver General,” I said.
Dana and my mother were already in the waiting room when I arrived just before two in the morning. Mom looked strung out with a paper cup of coffee in her shaking hands and Dana was pacing. I hurried over, collected them both in my arms, kissed the tops of their heads, and asked how everything was going.
Dana gripped my forearm. “The last update we got was that she was pushing.”
“Everything happened so quickly,” my mother said. “She woke up at midnight in pain and they rushed here thinking something was wrong, only to find she’d dilated six centimeters.”
I didn’t know much about childbirth but I knew that was something that usually took hours for most women.
“She didn’t get here in time to get the epidural,” Dana said, “so she’s going all natural.”
I winced. “This is Casey we’re talking about. She wants this baby out of her more than any woman has ever wanted a baby out of them before. She’ll knock this out of the park.”
My mother and sister nodded.
I took the coffee out of my mother’s hands. “Maybe you should cool it on the caffeine, Mom. How many have you had?”
“I don’t know. Three?”
“Yeah, we’re done with those,” I said, dropping the coffee in a garbage can before falling into the chair beside it. My head still felt a little fuzzy from the drinks with Kathryn. “How long has it been since you talked to them?”
“Ten minutes?” Dana said.
“And how long does this part usually take?”
“There’s no way to know.” My mother sat down beside me. “We’ll just have to say our prayers and wait.”
I offered my mother my hand. She took it and squeezed as Dana sat down on her other side. We all held hands and sat in those stiff-backed waiting-room chairs for over an hour and a half. Time crept by. Nurses avoided us when they walked past because I had questions for them they couldn’t answer.
But at three in the morning, my brother emerged from the delivery room in a blue gown with a stupid look on his face and tears on his cheeks.
“He’s here,” Eli breathed.
Mom was out of her chair first. She rushed to her son and cupped his face in her hands. “He’s healthy? And Casey is okay?”