It's Complicated

by Julia Kent

  With Laura, he hoped, too, that she would find as little suffering as possible, and that he could help Sherri in whatever way to make sure that the birth was smooth, managing the risks as much as possible. More than anything, he hoped that it was a long, slow, steady birth that gave him plenty of time to talk to Josie.

  Touching her like that had been a gamble. Her blushing response emboldened him, made his body react so swiftly he cursed the scrubs, which showed all too publicly what regular pants could hide. That simple touch ignited him and made him want her more. Pretending to read the chart, he mulled over the handful of seconds he’d touched her inner arm, how her breath had hitched, the way the pulse at her throat had been visible, picking up.

  She stood behind Laura now, rubbing a lacrosse ball up and down the chain of muscles from her mid-back to her coccyx. Laura bent over slightly, supported by the brown-haired guy, groaning with ecstasy—and then her knees buckled as another contraction hit, and both men shifted to hold her up.

  The contractions were coming closer together than he’d predicted, and he and Sherri exchanged a glance. She tapped her watch and shrugged. He nodded, put the chart back, and backed out of the room. If they needed an OB, Sherri would call him. And if the birth went on past 7 a.m., whichever CNM took over for Sherri would call whichever resident took over for him, short of an imminent birth at shift change.

  Mentally settling in for a long night and a long labor, he began to plot in his mind how he could use these hours to the fullest, assuming no more big cases came in tonight. Could he get Josie to join him for coffee? Could he come in to offer to help? Could he make it plausible that he wanted to read a fetal monitor strip or assess surgical possibilities? All of that took up the rational part of his brain. Meanwhile, the irrational part drummed a steady beat as he looked at Josie and studied her more carefully. Her attention was focused solely on Laura’s back, giving him a moment to stand in the threshold and just take her in.

  On the surface, his friends would think he was crazy for being attracted to her, because she was the kind of woman he normally just wouldn’t look twice at. And that was precisely why she intrigued him so. From the first day he’d seen her at the research trial, he’d been drawn to her. Now, even with this brief bit of interaction, he was drawn all the more, once again feeling a familiar tightening below the waist that made him think maybe he needed to start wearing a fucking cup to hide his intermittent arousal.

  The fire in her eyes, the sarcastic retort she threw out to the brown-haired guy, the way she seemed to be able to touch Laura and whisper something in her ear that instantly made the laboring woman seem a little more at ease—it was all part of the allure of Josie. Beyond that, though, he just didn’t know. How could he pinpoint it when he’d exchanged more words with her in the past fifteen minutes than he had in his life prior?

  If he could explain it, he would. But he couldn’t. Some primal attraction that went deeper than the surface, deeper than language, made him want her, made him want to possess her, to be the center of everything for her. And he knew it was crazy. Alex had built an entire career on the known, on facts, on medicine and science and that which could be measured and tested, and then applied to the human condition to provide relief, to provide remedies, to provide comfort.

  He had decided to specialize in obstetrics after going to his first birth in medical school. All the mother’s kinetic energy had focused, even through the epidural, and Alex was transfixed. The head had emerged, and then one shoulder, and then the slide and slipperiness of the baby had poured out of the mother’s body, a new life in the deft hands of the doctor. That transition from the safety of the mother’s body into the light of the world was a bridge that Alex wanted to walk for the rest of his life. Obstetrics it was for him.

  The surgical side had come easily; he had rock-steady hands, no matter what. It had become a joke in med school that you could feed him fourteen cups of coffee, a considerable amount of sugar, and probably throw in a Red Bull or two, and his hands would be as calm and neutral as Switzerland. Yet, handed that gift by some outside force, he largely rejected it, choosing to find as many medical methods as possible to preserve vaginal births for his patients. He didn’t care that he was largely ignored, or worse, belittled, for his old-fashioned views. Medicine, for Alex, wasn’t about reputation, or climbing a ladder, or any of the other petty things that his classmates considered important.

  For him, medicine was his identity. Being a doctor was who he was, deep in his blood. Helping patients was the focus, and the rest—money, prestige, competition—didn’t appeal to him. Those issues weren’t part of his ethical calculus. So why, if he could so easily reject conventional ideas about his career, did he find it surprising that he would fall for a woman in such an unconventional way?

  He turned around and walked back to the elevators, riding them down to the main desk where his other patients’ charts waited for him like baby birds begging to be fed. His handwriting looked like regurgitated worm as he scrawled his way through note after note after note of earlier patients. He found himself on autopilot, thinking solely about Josie, scheming to find a way to get back up to the labor and delivery wing without being too obvious.

  Did it matter? He hadn’t come out and asked her on a date, but before that baby was born he was going to. At the rate his mind was consumed by her, he was going to end up fucking her before transition.

  Josie tried to imagine what the four of them looked like, wandering down the halls of the maternity wing. Laura straddled an invisible bowling ball and stepped as if she were walking on burning coals in some sort of new age practice. Dylan looked like a deer caught in the headlights, eyes wide and frantic, his entire being trying to keep it together whenever Laura would look at him. Mike was Mike, calm and steady, but holding on to a bracelet filled with beads and mouthing words as they walked along. Every so often Josie could hear little bits and pieces of whatever prayer he was saying—Om, Tara, Pad me—and she guessed it was something Buddhist.

  If Josie were about to have her daughter enter into the world she’d be praying too, but it wouldn’t be quite as calm and peaceful. It would be more like, Oh, dear God, make the fucking pain stop!

  Laura was pretty close to that, but the walk had made a huge difference. She sipped on a cup of cranberry juice as they strolled at a pace about as slow as a bill making its way through Congress. On their second lap around the nurses’ desk, a slightly pudgy, brown-haired shift nurse with piggish eyes joked, “There goes Mario Andretti.” The guys had laughed and Laura faked a polite smile, but Josie’s heart sank. That was the last thing that any woman in this condition needed, the joke failing miserably for the one person who needed it to succeed.

  Time and space had condensed into this hallway, and the next hallway, as they made a left turn, the one after that, past the bank of born babies that they could “ooh” and “ahh” at and that could hearten Laura, to give her more spirit. Any rift in that and Laura’s support network wouldn’t be enough. Ultimately, they all knew, this rested on Laura’s ability to dig deep and find a core of love and strength within herself that would allow her to ride this out, to bring a new life into this world. No chant, no prayer, from anyone else could accomplish that. And when all of this was over and Laura held her brand-new daughter in her arms, Laura alone would be the bridge this little soul had traversed into being.

  The rest of them? They were there to remove obstacles from Laura and the baby’s path. But not to complete the journey.

  Mike seemed to sense that the nurse’s tossed-off joke had had a deeper layer to it, and pulled Josie aside. “Should we avoid the nurses’ station?” he asked, intense eyes steady and stable. Josie could look into them for hours and find peace. Note to self, she thought, when—uh, if—I do have a baby, ask Mike to be there.

  “Yeah,” she said, grimacing. “I don’t think that was helpful.”

  He nodded. Laura was wearing earbuds, her attention focused on the music as she shuffled
along. She burst out into braying laughter suddenly, punching Dylan playfully in the shoulder.

  “What?” he said, his face lighting up as if a heavy burden were suddenly lifted and he were joyful.

  “You made the playlist.”

  “I did,” he said, grinning ear to ear, the charming smile that made women want to take their pants off and burn them now teasing Laura as she was about to give birth to their child. Josie kept reminding herself. Their. Their, their, their. Not his—theirs.

  “Really? ‘I’m Too Sexy’ by Right Said Fred?”

  “I thought it was a good one.” He started to sing the song and they all laughed.

  “He also thought ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ by Queen was a good one, but I talked him out of it,” Mike whispered in Josie’s ear.

  “Dead. He’d be a dead man if he did that,” she whispered back.

  “Twice dead. Laura would kill him and find a way to kill him again,” he said, chuckling low. “His karma would be ruined for multiple lifetimes.”

  “He really thought that was a good song for an overdue pregnant woman in labor?” Could the guy be any more juvenile? Saving Laura from a fire in her apartment a few months ago and being a loving partner were his only saving graces. Okay, she had to admit to herself, those were pretty big character aspects, but still…

  “He said he loves fat-bottomed girls and never considered it an insult.” Mike shrugged. Dylan started shooting them the hairy eyeball and Josie ignored him.

  “That’s because he has the social graces of a nine-year-old boy with a box of fireworks and three espressos in him.”

  Mike choked on his attempt to stifle laughter as Dylan glared back. Laura was saying something, pulling earbuds out and turning to the group. Her eyes were filled with tears and Josie felt guilty for making jokes, even if they were about Dylan, which justified it.

  “All this dance music on the playlist is fabulous, and the beats help me to get out of my head. Thank you, honey,” she said, reaching out to touch Dylan’s arm. “But I’m not doing that kind of dance.” Her face crumpled, voice shaking. “I’m barely holding it together, because when I do dance, it’s going to be the dance of being split in two so that a new life can emerge,” Laura said seriously. Mike and Dylan wrapped her in a cocoon of their arms, and Josie felt marginal, like a moon orbiting them.

  Laura’s face was tired, and Josie knew that her reserves were running low already. This was like mile ten of a marathon, though. It was one thing to be this tired at mile twenty, but this early? It didn’t bode well for what was coming. Love could be enough for a hell of a lot of things, and if love were the measure of how Laura would fare tonight, she’d be fine. Biology, though, could overpower love when it came to birth.

  Josie found herself wishing with all her heart that biology could be swayed by all the love the three of them were sending to Laura and the baby, hoping more than anything that maybe love could conquer all.

  Alex happened to be at the nurse’s desk, charting away, documenting the case where he’d sniped The Claw, taking away his ability to perform a C-section simply by reading the fetal monitor strip with the consultation of a nurse with thirty years of experience under her belt. The need to rush in had been thwarted, and with a little help from some augmentation drugs, the mom had crowned, and the baby had come out nice and slick, like a little seal pouring forth into the world, big, wide eyes open. The baby was safe in the NICU now, being monitored; if Alex had any sense of predicting the future, he’d say that the baby would be fine in about forty-eight hours. Probably just some junk in its lungs causing minor respiratory issues.

  So many of his med school colleagues had gone into obstetrics with a giant burden of fear yoked around their necks. Fear that a baby would be harmed, fear that a mother would crash, fear that a baby would be injured or die. Fear seemed to drive them and from the outside looking in, and they allowed themselves to make so many consequential decisions based on something that hadn’t happened yet.

  Alex made his decisions on data and, he admitted, on hunches—but when he listened to his gut there wasn’t a third partner there screaming like a giant fire alarm that went on and on forever, and no flame ever appeared. He ruled over his psyche with a steady, reasonable mind that applied a calculus of optimism. For him, the baseline was of course everything will be fine and it was only data that shook that deep core of faith that would make him act.

  When the alarm in Laura’s room went off, he leapt and shot down the hall, barely hearing the clattering of the chart that he’d just been writing in as it slipped down off the counter and banged against a chair. His feet pounded into the linoleum floor as he pushed his body as hard as possible—because that code meant that something was wrong and with a patient with her profile he could walk into damn near anything.

  The flames of fear licked at his ankles right now; he had the briefest of appreciations for what his med school comrades had gone through. Fighting it back as his heart pounded in his chest, as his arms pumped him forward, climbing up four flights of stairs as fast as possible with no time for the elevator, all he could think was get to the baby, get to the baby, get to the baby, get to the baby. It became a mantra, a chant, in his head as his brow began to pound, as his hamstrings began to scream and he burst through the doors just as Sherri came down the hall, wide-eyed and pointing.

  Sherri, Alex, a nurse, and two hospital staff he couldn’t identify slammed through the door to Laura’s room. Sherri plowed through the suite to the bathroom door, finding it locked. His head swinging wildly, eyes darting around the room, Alex saw Josie resting in a chair, her head snapping up as the group crashed into the room.

  “Where is she?”

  “What? What? What?” Josie said, sitting up, her eyes alarmed. “What are you talking about?”

  And then, slam! The bathroom door unlocked. Alex charged in right behind Sherri, who was standing at a dead halt, staring at the scene that unfolded before them all.

  A man’s hairy asshole pointed squarely at the door, nearly at waist level to them all. To the left Alex saw Laura, completely naked now, sitting on the toilet bearing down, her face tipped up in flushed horror.

  The man before them, the owner of the brown starfish winking at them as he bent down to finish turning the jacuzzi water off, appeared to be Dylan—who froze with his hand on the faucet.

  What fresh hell was this?

  Alex had seen plenty of strange things in his years on hospital rotations, and had walked in on some pretty exceptionally sexual situations that ranged from the commonplace to the perverted, but going at it while a woman was dilated to six centimeters or so, in a hospital room bathroom, was a new kind of deviant that—

  As Sherri turned to him and bit her lower lip, covering her mouth with her palm, Alex took charge and said, “Laura, are you okay?”

  Her face was slack and frozen as Dylan turned around and stood, his naked form laid out in tight, muscled detail for Alex and the four women—No, make that five, he thought as he caught Josie out of the corner of his eye—standing behind the two nurses in the back on tiptoes, her head bouncing as she tried to see what was going on.

  If she needs to see any man naked, it should be me.

  Dylan said, “She’s fine. What the hell is this?”

  Alex raised his eyebrows and shot Dylan a look of marvel. “You tell us what this is,” he said. “Someone in this room pulled the emergency cord.”

  Laura looked down at her right hand, which was pressed into the handicapped bar next to the toilet seat, her pinky finger wrapped in the small, thin white string attached to the wall. “Oh my God,” she choked out. “I must have…I was trying to go and I was pushing up to stand and, oh…” She looked at Dylan with abject horror. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

  “Why are you naked?” Josie screeched.

  “Because I feel better that way,” Laura answered.

  Alex felt the rising bubble of laughter in him, barely held back until Dylan, his toned firefighte
r body on full display, planted his hands righteously on his hips and asked Josie in incredulous tones, “Are you talking to me?”

  Josie looked straight at his penis, and then back at his eyes and said, “You’re the only one who really shouldn’t be naked, Dylan.”

  “I was helping her get into the jacuzzi,” he explained.

  “And you needed to be naked to do that?” she asked.

  Alex was struck by the sarcastic tone she used. There was clearly some sort of relationship between the two that relied on poking each other for amusement. He didn’t have time, though, to think about their banter.

  His eyes focused back on Laura. Sherri had moved and was checking her pulse, repositioning the baby monitor to catch the fetal tones which—aha, there they were, nice and strong. Good. Laura’s face tightened and Alex watched her belly move down like an elevator slowly descending, the baby slowly being pushed down to her pelvic floor. She breathed perfectly through the contraction, her body tense at first and then her shoulders slowly lowering to relax, her breath focused in what little bit of diaphragm control remained for someone so enormously pregnant. The belly breathing would help to keep the blood going to the womb muscles and would calm her—he hoped. Without her water popped, this was going to continue to be difficult for her but he wasn’t in charge here—this was Sherri’s gig.

  “I think we need to leave them alone,” Alex said quietly, stepping back, the gap between him and Josie now considerably smaller with Sherri in the bathroom ministering to Laura. He reached for Josie’s forearm and she snatched it away.

  “First I want to know why Dylan was trying to fuck Laura in the middle of having a baby.”

  “I want to know why you think I was trying to fuck Laura in the middle of having a baby,” Dylan said.

  A low voice a few inches above and behind Alex said, “I’d like to know, what you’re doing, too.”