Page 78 of Omega’s Forward

The game is a mean one. Tight, whistles swallowed, everything earned in the hard ten feet in front of both nets. Linus ties it in the second on a wrist shot I’d swear bends around their defenseman’s skate, and celebrates into the glass right below the box, which is not an accident. We get the winner off a faceoff play Sacco drew up at the morning skate, four minutes left, and the barn comes apart.

The horn goes and I look up. Old habit. There was most of a year when nobody stood at that rail and I looked anyway.

He’s there. And he’s not watching the ice.

He’s standing very still, one hand on the rail, the other flat against his belly, and beside him Belanger has stopped celebrating and is waving somebody over. Even from the ice, even through the glass and the noise and the distance, Everett finds my eyes and holds them, and I know.

I don’t remember leaving the ice. I’m told I cleared the boards without the gate.

One of the suite attendants is already at the tunnel mouth, radio in hand, shouting over the crowd. “Mr. Callahan — message from Mr. Rourke. He says, and I’m quoting him exactly: take your time, and also hurry.”

Nobody in the history of this sport has gotten out of gear faster. Half of it’s still on the floor of my stall when I go — hair soaked, suit jacket over a base layer, one shin pad in my hand for reasons I couldn’t explain under oath. The boys are yelling things after me that would get every one of them fined.

He’s down in the service corridor by the loading dock, upright, coat over one arm, timing something on his phone. Composed as a Monday board meeting, right up until you look at the grip he’s got on the attendant’s cart.

“It started in the second period,” he says.

“The second — you waited?”

“It was a one-goal game.”

“Everett.”

“Don’t take a tone. The bag is in your truck, the contractions are nine minutes apart, and first babies are slow. We have time.” A breath catches him mid-sentence. He rides it down with his eyes shut, knuckles going pale on the cart, and comes back up like a man surfacing on a schedule. “We have some time. Drive like a person.”

The bag has been in the truck for a month. He knows that. He inspected it, removed one of my three phone chargers, and added actual clothes. I put his seat belt low across his hips the way the class taught us, and he lets me, which tells me more about the contractions than the app does.

Every instinct I own is up and roaring — get him inside, get him safe, growl at strangers. I keep both hands on the wheel and drive like a person.

At the halfway light one takes him properly. Both hands go flat on the dash and he doesn’t make a single sound, which is so much worse than screaming. When it lets him go he exhales through his teeth.

“That one meant it,” he says.

“Nine minutes, huh.”

“Seven. Drive.”

There are photographers at the emergency entrance, because it’s a game night and rumors move faster than I do. I don’t slow down. I take the ramp on the far side instead — the radiology door, the back corridor I came through a year ago when it was Linus in the neck brace.

The midwife meets us on the fifth floor. She takes one look at him — at the way he stops walking mid-stride and folds one hand against the wall, coat still hung over his arm like we’re checking into a hotel — and tells us first babies take their time.

Everett breathes his way out of the top of the contraction, straightens up, and nods.

Then the next one takes him, and his hand finds mine and grinds my knuckles flat, and we go through the doors together.

24. Everett

I had assumed, based on television, that labor was maybe twenty minutes of groaning and then a baby.

It is four in the morning and the midwife keeps using the phrase “progressing nicely.”

Brody is hovering, desperate for something to do. The birth class, it turns out, was worth every excruciating minute. Not for the breathing.

For him. He prowls. He fetches. He adjusts. Every time somebody new comes through the door he moves. I think it’s an alpha thing. Protective. Maybe a little possessive, but he looks like he wants to growl every time someone comes in the room.

The night nurse noticed it the first time and looked wary. The midwife noticed it and said, “I’ll introduce myself once, big man. After that you’re furniture.”

He checked it. Then he became furniture. Enormous, hovering furniture that refills my water when the cup is still two-thirds full.