Page 72 of Blueline Baby

Lorelei bumps my shoulder with hers. “You’re allowed to miss her and be done with her. Both at the same time. One doesn’t cancel the other. But look at the room behind you before you decide you’re alone in this.”

She waits until I turn around and do it. All these loud, chaotic people, here for a baby who hasn’t even arrived yet. And Jack standing in the middle of it, already scanning the room for me.

“You told me once that you thought Britt gave you Jack,” Lorelei says. “She didn’t. She brought you to a game. You’re the one he’s wanted since day one. That part is yours.”

My eyes sting. I blink hard at the glare off the ice until they stop.

“I know,” I say. And I do know it, because I’ve had people like Lorelei and Jack reminding me of it every day.

She squeezes my arm. “Now come back in before those idiots try to teach your husband how to install a car seat. I promise you not one of them knows how.”

Jack crosses the room to us and puts his hand back where it belongs on my stomach. “You okay, Chlo?”

“Yeah.” And I mostly am. “Show me the tiny skates.”

His whole face lights up. He leads me to the gift table and lifts the tiniest pair of hockey skates I’ve ever seen. “Look at these. Look how small they are. Our baby’s going to wear these.”

“That’s generally how footwear works.”

“I already talked to Coach about booking ice time.” He’s not joking. “This kid is going to skate before he walks.”

“Before she walks.”

“Him.” But he says it softly this time, and he keeps turning the tiny skates over and over in his hands. For once, I let it go. He looks so happy that I can barely stand to look at him, and there’s a fifty percent chance his elite instincts are right anyway. Either way, I already know I’m going to love whoever this turns out to be more than I’ve ever loved anything.

A week later, we’re sitting in a birth class.

It was my idea. Jack fought it the whole drive there on the grounds that he’s “good under pressure” and has “played in a Game 7.” I reminded him that this particular medical event wasn’t happening to him. It was happening to me. He’s merely the support staff.

He did not love that categorization.

The class is held in a sterile hospital room with six other terrified couples and an instructor who delivers an alarming amount of information very, very calmly. We had to go around the circle and introduce ourselves, and Jack said, “I’m Jack, this is my wife, Chloe, we’re due at the end of April,” like he’s been saying my wife for years instead of weeks.

Jack is a disaster with the plastic practice doll. He diapers it like it’s a live grenade. He supports its plastic head with a level of concentration I’ve only ever seen him give to game film, and when the instructor tells him he can relax, he says, “I’m fine,” in the voice of a man who is not fine. He treats the breathing exercises as a competitive sport, until she quietly asks him to bring his intensity down before he hyperventilates himself.

It takes everything I have not to laugh at him.

Then, without warning, she puts on the birth video.

Jack turns a shade of gray-white I’ve never seen on a living person. The man who has been unbothered by everything up to this exact moment looks ready to either bolt from the room or vomit.

“What the fuck is that?” he whispers, in horror, loud enough that the pregnant woman next to us turns her head. Behind me, he stops breathing entirely and lets out a small, pained groan.

“You okay back there?” I ask, pretending to be concerned. I’m actually delighted at the catastrophic effect this is having on him.

He doesn’t answer. He inhales through his nose the way he does before a heavy lift, sways once, and then locks his face down and gets through the remaining twenty minutes by staring at a blank spot on the wall two feet above the television.

Barely. But he gets through it without passing out, so he earns partial credit.

We don’t speak until we’re back in his truck. He shuts his door, puts both hands on the steering wheel, and stares out the windshield.

“Chloe.” He turns his head to look at me. “What. The. Actual. Fuck.”

“What did you think was going to happen? You put a giant baby inside of me, Jack. It has to come out somehow.”

“I did not—” He stops and reconsiders the biology. “Okay. I did technically do that. But nobody told me it was going to look like—” He gestures at the hospital behind us, at the screen burned into his memory, at the entire concept of birth. “That.”

He drags a hand over his pale face. Then he reaches over, takes my hand off my lap, and holds it in both of his like it might break.