Page 22 of Fox
“Hey, sweetheart, what are you doing up?” Fox asks, his arm sliding around me.
It’s three in the morning.
I can’t seem to sleep these days.
My body has become a foreign country—I am learning its geography, its new rules, its revolts. I sit at the dining table with a glass of water and my hand on the small curve of my stomach.
He puts his hand on mine and smiles. “You need anything?”
I shake my head, loving his care, his love, his concern. I lean into him and sigh. “She’s restless.”
“She?” he asks, amused.
I didn’t mean to say it out loud.
I bite my lower lip and shrug. “I think so…that’s how I feel.”
He comes around then and crouches in front of me, puts both his hands on my stomach. “You want a girl?”
“I want a healthy baby…as the cliché goes. You?”
“Boy, girl…doesn’t matter. I just…” He leans forward and pulls up my nightshirt and kisses my stomach. “Hey, baby.”
This is so unlike Fox that I stop breathing.
“Hey,” he says again. “I can’t wait to meet you. I don’t know what kind of father I’m going to be”—he pauses and looks at me—“but you’re going to have an excellent mother.”
I bite my lips to keep from crying. My hormones are all over the place, and seeing Fox like this is all my dreams come true.
“Come on, let’s go back to bed.” He rises and extends his hand.
He holds me as we fall asleep, and I know that what we have is forever and ever and ever.
The alarm goes off just then, and I hear Fox say, “Wake up, sweetheart.”
Then there are other voices.
Frantic.
“Pulse ox is dropping?—”
“Get me suction?—”
“How far out are we?”
“Two minutes. Tell them we’ve got a head injury, possible internal, they need to?—”
The sounds layer over each other.
Then they slip through.
I cannot hold them.
I cannot find the surface.
“Wake up, sweetheart.”
That’s Fox’s voice, from when I was pregnant, from three in the morning when I sat at the dining table.
