Page 48 of One Last Summer
“Me!” I jumped up, shaking off the stiffness in my bones as I rushed over. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s resting now.” The nurse waved me along behind her, clogs clipping on the linoleum floor with purpose. “The doctor just wants to keep her under observation, but she’s doing just fine.”
“So it was what, a false alarm then? Can that happen?” The relief I’d been hoping for swept through me, like sinking into a hot bath. Sam was fine. Fine.
“Braxton-Hicks,” she said matter-of-factly without looking back at me.
“Who?” I asked, racking my exhausted brain for some mention of a person with that name. Maybe I should have tried to sleep; my eyes felt like they were coated with rubber cement. The nurse stopped in front of a cracked door and pulled down her face mask, revealing a kind smile. “That’s just the name of the contractions. They’re more or less harmless and pretty common. Think of them as like the body giving the pregnant person a preview of the real thing.”
I’d long ago made the choice not to have kids, but I still understood how my reproductive system worked, pregnancy included. However, this whole idea of a baby being like, “Here I come. Wait, never mind!” was new to me, and sounded incredibly stressful.
“Oh.” I nodded, grimacing. “God, being pregnant seems fucking awful.”
I smacked a hand over my mouth.
“Sorry,” I added. “My brain is operating at, like, five percent right now.”
She laughed, a hearty, all-knowing guffaw. “I have three kids, and you’re not wrong. But I wouldn’t share that opinion with your friend tonight.”
“Good advice,” I said, and then peered through the cracked door, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sam.
“She’s getting some more fluids. We’ll start her discharge paperwork in the morning, but she won’t be out of here until after lunchtime, probably. She’s asked for company.”
The nurse gave the door a little nudge and ushered me in with a nod of her head. Sam sat propped up on a giant stack of pillows, remote in hand as she clicked it aggressively, trying to get the TV bolted to the wall to do her bidding.
“Careful, you might break that thing,” I said.
“Clara!” she said with a happy shriek as she tossed the remote and opened her arms for a hug. I leaned in gingerly, careful not to bump into her hand that was connected to an IV, a bag of fluids dangling overhead. “It would serve that fucking thing right, making me watch Shark Week in the middle of the night.”
I settled in on the chair angled next to her bed. “You feeling okay?”
She nodded, curls bobbing, but her brows crinkled with worry. “I seriously thought I was about to have a baby in the back seat of Eloise’s car. The pain was so intense.”
“Did you close your eyes and visualize bagels?” I asked, sliding the chair closer so I could lace her fingers through mine. I hated that I could hear the fear in her voice, no matter how brave she was clearly trying to be.
“Honestly I would have, but it happened so fast.” She paused, fiddled with the buttons on the remote. “Clara?”
“Mmm-hmm?” I said casually, expecting some sort of crack to come out of her mouth. Instead, she looked pained with worry. “Sam, what is it?”
“What if I can’t do this?” She turned her face toward me, eyes glassy. “I could barely handle false labor pains. What if I can’t have this baby? What if I’m not ready to be a mom?”
“Sam.” I scooted as close to her as I could without climbing into bed next to her. “When we were kids, you not only knew that we were supposed to wash our sheets every week, but you made the rest of us do it. I would have happily slept in a stew of sweat and dirt every summer if it wasn’t for you.”
She let out a small laugh as she wiped an errant tear away with the back of her hand. “So you think I’m ready to change this baby’s sheets.”
She’d always been the most self-sufficient person I’d ever known, never homesick or lonely, always so certain in every choice she made. Seeing her so unsure of herself now unnerved me.
“I think you’re going to do great,” I reassured her. “At all of it. And right now, I’m at your service. What do you need? Vending machine run? Pillow fluffing?”
I picked up a small empty can of cranberry juice off her bedside table. “Let me get you another one of these.”
“Clara.” She gave me a hard look. “I don’t need you to wait on me. I just like having you here.”
“Okay, well, that I can do.”
“Tell me what happened with Mack,” she said. “That’ll be a good distraction.”
Of all the things I was prepared to do to try to help, this was not one of them. I kicked off my flip-flops and tucked my knees into my chest, wrapping my arms around my legs. “Mack thinks I’m like a big, sparkly rock.”
