Natalia rolled her eyes. “Haven’t you learned by now? I can look into your head.” I thought of the toddler with his “Pay Me!” hat and thought, No, you can’t. And then I thought of our last conversation about our baby, and wondered if there was anything she wasn’t telling me, and whether I could ask, whether it made sense to remind a pregnant woman of a reason to be worried when all we should have been thinking about was how wonderful it was to be reunited, in time for the birth, which would go fine, I was almost certain. Then she grabbed my hand on her belly, moved it lower, and said in a mock-husky voice, “Mason, do you have any idea how horny pregnancy makes you?” I swerved a bit.
Natalia grabbed me, hard.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
“You know what the chaplain told us?” she said. “Take things slow.” She did a stern, preacherly voice. “‘Your soldier might not want to rush into anything. Just sitting in a hammock and relaxing might be paradise to him.’ Ugh. Is that what you want? To sit in a hammock?”
We got home and had sex. It was quick and I was very nervous. She had me attend to her for a while, and then when I was ready we did it again and it was more relaxed, less mechanical, the two of us enjoying the changes in each other’s bodies.
“You’re being so gentle,” she said, laughing. “Nobody but me knows you’re such a gentle, gentle man. Slap my ass or something. You’re just back from Iraq.”
Natalia and I didn’t date during my one year in college before I dropped out to join the army, a year I spent awkward and angry. At the time, I thought the problem was Wake Forest, the popped collars and Beamers and sons of southern aristocracy, like my roommate, Carlton, a two-hundred-pound baseball player I never really got along with. My first night there, lying in the bottom of our bunk bed, wondering what Wake would be like, I saw a stream of vomit, followed by Carlton’s big body rushing down, followed by a thud. He was uninjured and unfazed—thanks, alcohol—and I spent the rest of the night cleaning up after him, never getting so much as a thank you. I guess he was just used to other people making his problems disappear. I felt out of my skin. I felt like I was somehow always violating some unwritten code, stepping over invisible lines of etiquette, revealing myself as rough, coarse, unworthy.
Natalia, on the other hand—who grew up in Springfield, North Carolina, whose father had emigrated from Medellín, Colombia, worked in a factory—seemed to feel right at home, the owner of whatever space she entered, including my dorm room. “Did you feel like this in high school?” she asked me once, and when I admitted that in some ways I had, told me, “Well then maybe the problem isn’t everybody else, maybe it’s you.”
The first week I was home after that Iraq deployment, we spent a lot of time talking about our hopes for our daughter. What dreams we had for her. Natalia had us pray every night, not for her health or that the delivery would be painless, but for the strength to be good parents, to teach her right. Even when I’m not sure I believe in God I’ve always appreciated this about her, that she makes me struggle to find the words to match our hopes. That first week, though, I held back. I didn’t mention any of the children I saw on my deployment to Natalia, not because she couldn’t handle it, but because speaking such things would make them more real, and I wanted to pretend they didn’t happen.
And then at the beginning of the second week, at the Womack hospital, after they took Natalia’s blood pressure, took it again, and did an ultrasound, they told us there was something wrong.
“Are you ready to have this baby? Because you’re having it today.” They told us to go straight to Labor and Delivery. I don’t remember who, they were all faceless.
So we told them, yes, we’d go straight to Labor and Delivery. We didn’t. We went to the hospital chapel, but the chapel at Womack is small and windowless, with white walls, cheaply made chairs, and an altar that looks like it came from Ikea, a place too ugly to even suggest there might be a God.
“I want stained glass,” Natalia said.
She meant JFK Memorial. Five minutes away, given traffic, which we couldn’t count on around that time.
“I’m not dying yet,” she said.
“This is no joke,” I tell her.
“I know,” she said. “But luckily I’ve got an Eighteen Delta with me, in case things get serious.”
So we drove to JFK, and we knelt down in the pews, and we bowed our heads. I don’t know what Natalia prayed, or who she prayed to, but I prayed to the Good Thief. Natalia’s grandmother Inez had told me once it’s good to pray to the less popular saints when things are really urgent, because the less popular saints won’t be as busy.
Then we headed back, me quiet, in that other place, that focused place, and I had Natalia call Jefe to let him know what was going on, but we didn’t call Natalia’s parents or mine, maybe so as not to tempt fate. Traffic had picked up, and we got stuck behind a pickup that was overly timid about making a left turn. The pickup had those truck balls hanging from the back, little plastic purple nuts hanging underneath the license plate, and I resisted the urge to shout, or to ram the truck, or to do anything that might raise Natalia’s blood pressure, and within about ten minutes we were back in the Womack parking lot.
When we got to Labor and Delivery, they put Natalia on Pitocin to force labor, which was the only way to cure what was wrong
