“Don’t even think about taking that, Rob.”
I looked at her face. Now definitely wasn’t the time to argue.
* * *
The doctor had just left when Anna screamed and my first thought was that she had lost the baby. I pressed the emergency bell, but already a tuft of hair, the beginning of Jack’s head, had begun to emerge. The doctor came running back and called for a nurse but she was elsewhere, on her break.
Anna was still screaming, so the doctor shoved her legs into the stirrups and then thrust a tray of instruments into my hands. She barked something at me but I didn’t know what, so I just stood at the end of the bed, holding on to the tray for dear life, as Anna screamed out her pain and screamed out Jack.
We joked at first that he wasn’t human—our little alien, we called him. Because even when I saw his slick dark hair emerge, his tiny body encased in gunk; even when I heard his screams pierce the cold matronly air, as he lay on the antique mechanical scale, I could not believe that he was real.
I would never forget the way that Anna smiled at him, when she held that little snuffling body in her arms and put him to her breast, so naturally, as if she had been taught by a heavenly midwife. Her smile was so natural, so unguarded, and I didn’t think I had ever seen her smile like that at anyone before.
“Do you want to hold him, while I stitch Mom back together?” the doctor said.
I cradled him in my arms, gently, afraid I would crush him. He was wrapped up as tight as he was in the womb, straitjacketed, his eyes swollen slits. I was glad he was now getting some comfort away from the cold scale, the doctor’s coarse hands.
In the baby books I read, they said it would take time to develop a bond, that while Anna would feel it, with me it would take time. It wasn’t true. I felt it instantly, and it was like a lightning bolt down my neck, my spine, a feeling that everything, everything had been for this.
That we could produce this—this—a little bundle who squawked and cooed; no, it couldn’t be true. That the two of us could create another person, with fingers and toes, a brain, a soul. That we could create a life. That we could create Jack.
4
It was hot for spring, and Hampstead Heath was full of runners, day-trippers, families with strollers. The grass was a patchwork of picnic blankets and hampers. The regulars, the elderly men who came up here every day, sat on their usual benches holding up small radios to their ears. A girl and boy kicked a football around with their mother: big run-ups, little kicks, the ball pinging around in the wind.
Jack had just got a new Spider-Man bike, with a windshield and cannons on the side, and he wanted to try it out. It was difficult to find somewhere flat around Parliament Hill, somewhere without a busy road, so, as we always did, we came up to the heath.
I watched Jack as he marched up the hill, the bike still too big for him. How quickly the contours of our world had changed. He was five, a proper little boy, as my dad would have said. Gone was the bow of his toddler’s legs, the babyish lilt of his speech. Now our world was library books and parents’ evening and trying to persuade Jack that the after-school drama club was cool.
“How about here?” I said, as we got to some flat ground.
“Okay,” Jack said, putting his leg over the crossbar.
“Boys, no,” Anna said. “It’s far too steep here. I thought we were going to the flat bit.”
“This is the flat bit,” I offered.
“It’s okay here, Mom,” Jack added.
Anna thought about it, looking up and down the path. “No, I don’t think so. It’s too steep.”
Jack sighed and rolled his eyes, something he had learned in kindergarten.
“C’mon, Jack,” I said, “let’s go to that bit up there.”
“Okay,” Jack said, starting to push his bike up the hill.
When we got to the top, to the plateau of flat ground, we watched a boy on a tricycle, his father anxiously running behind him.
“Should be okay here,” I said.
Anna looked perturbed, a little flustered, as if she thought she was somewhere else. “Okay,” she said, checking out the terrain, “but you go carefully, Jack.”
He secured the strap on his helmet like a fighter pilot and then pushed himself down the path, weaving in and out of the walkers. I ran alongside him, smiling, brimming with pride, and it was like an old home movie shot on Super 8, the trees whizzing by, the lens-flare in the blinding light.
I felt something touch my arm and realized that Anna was by my side. At first I thought it was out of nerves, that she was ready to swoop in and save Jack, until I realized she was smiling, happily letting him trundle down the hill.
Jack slowed a little, now facing a gentle incline, and I ran behind him and gave him a push, my hands on the back of his saddle. I remembered the feel of my father’s hands, the powerful thrust as he pushed me, his cheers of pride as I rode my bike for the first time on our street.
“There is one more present,” Dad said that Christmas, and I remembered Mom smiling, her cheeks flushed with wine. “But you gotta close your eyes, son.”
That December, I thought Dad was working a lot on his car. After I had gone to bed, I could hear him, tinkering in the garage, the radio on low, the occasional ptush as he cracked open a can.
Mom tied one of her old scarves over my eyes,
