Maggie bit her lip and looked at me, eyes skating back and forth between mine. “Are you ready?”
I wanted to shake my head. My erratic heartbeat thumped with doubt.
Thump.You can’t do this.
Thump.You’re too young.
Thump.You’re not ready.
But the fear in Maggie’s eyes was a gut-punch of a reality check: it didn’t matter if I was ready. I had a child. I promised I would be there. I was doing this.
“I am ready.”
Doctor Gaines spent a few minutes adjusting the screen next to Maggie and inserting a wand beneath her hospital gown after asking for her consent.
Maggie inhaled sharply, and I reached for her. One small, cold hand in a large, rough hand. She looked to me for reassurance and, despite the rocket bouncing from my stomach to my chest, I offered the most certainty I could muster. My lips tipped up, and the television on the wall in front of us began moving. I watched the screen with intent, my breath still unable to catch. It was happening. We were about to see our baby for the first time.
Grainy black and gray blobs shifted on the screen, further confirming that I had no fucking idea how to do this. I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at.
“Okay, here we go,” Doctor Gaines piped. What looked like a bean popped up between the blurred movements. Then the screen zoomed onto the object. The bean turned into a circle next to an oval shape. If I squinted, I could try to make out body parts, but I wasn’t so sure. “So, this right here,” she zoomed the frame toward the left side of the screen, “...is baby’s head.”
I gripped Maggie’s hand tighter.
“We can see the brain developing here. That looks good. And if you look closely, do you see the movement there in the chest? That’s the baby’s heartbeat.”
My throat dried again.Holy shit.The heartbeat.
Right there before me was my little baby’s heart beating on the television screen. I wondered if it was pounding as quickly as mine. Of course, they didn’t know their parents were looking at them for the first time. They were just lying there in their mother’s belly and having no idea the effects they had on Maggieand me. Having no idea that my life was changing before my eyes.
Right there before me, my entire world shifted. Polo dropped off the face of the earth. Other women were gone. Alcohol and my mother and overthinking everything…they phased into the distance for that one moment. Everything from here on out was about Maggie and this baby.
I fucking wanted to be a dad. I wanted a little girl who looked just like her mother. I wanted to be the man my girls looked to for everything. I wanted tobetheir everything.
“The heartbeat,” I repeated hoarsely. I wanted to look at Maggie, but…ourbabywas right there on the screen. How could I look away? “Can we hear it?”
I felt Maggie turn to me, rubbing her thumb over my hand. “Yes, can we hear the heartbeat?”
“Of course.”
A few seconds and clicks later, a track of sound waves appeared on the screen, and audio came into earshot. Muffled noises emerged, sounding a bit like wind through a telephone speaker. Rumpled and distant, butright here.
My heart thumped in my chest as I listened to the babyIhelped create—the baby Maggie and I made in the back of that gift shop all those months ago. It threatened everything I thought I loved, everything I thought I knew about life, and shoved it beneath a steel-toed boot. Whatever felt important before was monumentally inferior tothis.
Our baby’s heartbeat.
For the first time, I heard it.
I looked at Maggie, and she looked at me.
I didn’t think there was another sound I ever wanted to hear again.
Chapter seventeen
Maggie
Seeing my baby for the first time was surreal. I swore I felt butterflies as Jack and I walked out of the doctor’s office with black and white photos in hand.
Every time something new happened with my body, another Mack truck of realization hit me. It rattled me from the inside out and brought me back to that moment on my bathroom floor. The moment I felt completely uncertain and alone and out of control. At least now, though, I wasn’t alone. Jack held a file with information about each trimester of my pregnancy and about the tiny fig growing inside my belly. Even still, processing this made skydiving feel like a piece of cake.
