No matter what

(Amelia) Morning came, and I went to work like I always did. Halfway through my shift the page came through while I was writing up a chart. Obstetrics, emergency, all hands. I was moving before I finished reading it. Liam fell into step beside me in the hall. "What have we got?" "Preeclampsia, severe. Placental abruption." I was already pushing through the doors. "They're taking the baby now." Neither of us said the rest. We both knew what an abruption this late could mean for a mother and a baby at the same time. We just ran. The operating room was full of noise and fast hands when we got there. The mother was open on the table, the team working to stop the bleeding, and across the room another team was lifting the newborn out and carrying it to the warmer. I saw the baby and my heart dropped. It was tiny. Far too small, far too early, and the wrong color. Blue at the lips, blue at the fingers. Not crying. Not moving. A nurse called out the score and it was a one. A one out of ten. That is a hair above nothing at all. Liam and I reached the warmer at the same moment. "No spontaneous breathing," the nurse said. "Chest isn't rising. Heart rate under sixty and dropping." "Bag him," I said. "Now." Everything after that was hands and seconds. Liam took the airway. I took the chest. The baby was so small my two fingers covered most of it, and I could feel how little there was to work with, the ribs like matchsticks, the whole body no bigger than my forearm. His thorax had collapsed on one side. Every part of him was fighting to quit. "Come on," I said under my breath. "Come on, little one. Not today." I did compressions with the tips of my fingers and counted, and Liam breathed for him, and the nurse pushed what we called for, and the numbers on the monitor stayed low and mean. Sixty. Fifty eight. Fifty. "Come on," I said again. I have done this a hundred times. More. You learn to keep your hands calm even when everything in you is screaming, because a shaking hand helps no one. But something about this one got past all of that. Maybe it was how small he was. Maybe it was the way he had come into the world already losing. Maybe it was the night I had behind me. The phone, the guest room, my sister's voice through the door, the phone, the guest room, my sister's voice through the door. I do not know. I only know that I wanted this baby to live in a way that went past the job. I wanted it with everything I had. "Stay," I told him. "Stay here. Stay with us." Liam's eyes met mine over the warmer for half a second. He did not say anything. He did not need to. We had worked enough of these together that we could pass a whole sentence back and forth without a word, and what he passed me was *keep going.* So I kept going. And then the monitor caught. Sixty. Seventy. Ninety. The number climbed, and the blue started to leave his lips, a thread of pink coming up under the skin like something being poured back in. "Heart rate's up," the nurse said. "Ninety and holding. A hundred." "Come on," I said, softer now. "There you are. There you are." His chest moved. Once, small, on its own. Then again. And then the sound came. Thin at first, then all at once loud and clear and furious, the best sound in the entire world, the sound of a baby who has decided he is not done. He cried like he was angry at all of us for making him work so hard, and the whole room let out a breath at the same time. Somebody laughed. Somebody else said thank God. Liam sat back and dragged a hand down his face and grinned at me, and I realized my own eyes were wet and I did not care. We had him. He was going to be all right. The nurse wrapped him and did her checks, and because I was closest and because my hands were already there, she passed him to me for the moment it took to move him to the unit. He was almost nothing in my arms, a warm small weight, wrapped tight. His crying had settled to little hitching sounds. His eyes were open, barely, dark and new, and they moved and found my face. And he made a small sound that was almost a smile. I know they say newborns do not really smile. I know it is reflex, wind, whatever the books call it. I did not care about the books right then. He looked up at me out of a face that had been blue and still five minutes ago, this whole entire person who had fought his way back from the edge because a room full of people refused to let him go, and something in my chest turned over and would not turn back. I wanted this. Not this baby. He was not mine, he belonged to the exhausted woman on the table who was going to get to meet him because we did our jobs. But the wanting he woke in me was mine, and it was enormous, and it had my name on it. I wanted a child. I wanted to hold something that was mine and watch it fight and grow and smile up at me for real. I had spent so long wanting a man who did not want me back, pouring myself into a marriage that gave me nothing, and here in my arms was the thing I actually wanted, plain as day, and I had almost let two years of silence talk me out of ever reaching for it. The nurse came back for him. I gave him up. I watched them carry him off to the unit where machines and careful people would help him finish the job of living, and I stood there in the middle of the room with my arms still curved around the shape of him. Liam came to stand next to me. He looked at me for a moment, reading whatever was on my face. "You okay?" he asked. "Yes," I said. And I meant it in a way I had not meant it in a long time. "I'm good." He nodded, and let it be, the way he always did. I went to the sink and washed up. In the mirror I saw the same face I always saw, my sister's face, worn tired. But something behind it had changed. Yesterday had left me with a cold empty question, what am I still doing here. Standing over that warmer, I had found the other half of the answer. I was going to have a child of my own. No matter what it took. No matter who was sleeping in the guest room or whose name was on his phone. That much, at least, I could decide for myself.