A Secret Between Us

Chapter 15: Two Heartbeats, One Room

The room smelled of alcohol swabs and cold paper, and under that, faintly, of the lavender oil Dina had put on her wrists that morning before anyone could talk her out of it. Astrid lay on her back on the narrow exam table, the paper crinkling under her hips every time she shifted, her gown untied at the front and gathered loosely over the slope of her belly. The gel had gone cold first and then warm, and now the wand pressed into the soft flesh just under her navel, gliding, pausing, gliding again.

Two feet away, Dina lay on the matching table, her hand stretched across the gap between them, palm up. Astrid had taken it the moment they were both lying down. She had not let go since.

The screen angled away from her, turned toward the doctor, so all she could do was watch his face. Dr. Okonkwo was a large man with careful hands and a habit of humming two notes under his breath while he measured. He had delivered half the city's babies and had the flat, unbothered voice of someone who had seen everything twice.

"That's a good spine," he said. "Long."

"Long is good?" Astrid asked.

"Long is boring. I like boring."

Behind her, in the plastic chairs along the wall, Shane exhaled through his nose. Leo had his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, and Astrid could hear him breathing, slow and deliberate, the way he breathed when he was pretending not to be afraid.

The wand slid. The room filled with the sound of it, that doubled heartbeat like hoofbeats under water, fast and steady.

Dina's fingers tightened around Astrid's.

"Yours or mine?" Dina whispered.

"Mine, I think."

"Ours," said Dr. Okonkwo, not looking up. "Yours is at one-forty. Hers is at one-forty-five. Both of them are showing off."

Dina laughed, a wet, surprised sound, and turned her face toward Astrid on the pillow. Her hair had come loose from its band and fanned out dark against the paper. There was a smudge of gel on her own belly, low, right where the wand now rested, and her gown had slipped off one shoulder, and Astrid looked at her and felt, absurdly, the same pull she had felt two nights ago on the couch. It did not go away in a doctor's office. It never seemed to go away anywhere.

"Alright," the doctor said. He clicked a key, and the image on the screen froze. "Mrs. Tanaka. Head down. Engaged. Thirty-six weeks by measurement, thirty-six weeks by dates. She is ready when she is ready."

"And mine?" Dina said.

He moved the wand to her. Dina's belly was rounder than Astrid's, lower, and she had told Astrid once that she carried both wide and low like her grandmother, who had carried eleven. The gel went on cold and Dina flinched and squeezed Astrid's hand hard enough to hurt.

"Also head down," the doctor said. "Also thirty-six. Both of you are textbook. Which is not something I say often."

"Cervix?" Astrid asked. It came out flat, lawyer's voice, the voice she used when she wanted a number.

"Closed, thick, high," he said. "Which is what we want. You are not in labor. You are simply enormous."

"Thank you, doctor."

"That was a compliment. Every woman in this room is doing the job correctly."

Shane made a sound that was almost a laugh. Leo did not.

The rest was quick. He wiped her belly down himself, two rough swipes with a towel, then did the same for Dina, and while he wrote in the chart Astrid sat up slowly and let the gown fall back over her. Both women swung their legs down at the same time, bare feet on the cold floor, and sat side by side on the edges of their tables with their knees almost touching, still holding hands.

"So," the doctor said, capping his pen. "Home birth."

"Yes," Dina said.

"With a midwife you trust."

"Rosa," Astrid said. "Rosa Alvarez."

He nodded once, as if he already knew her name, which he probably did; Rosa had been delivering babies in this part of the city longer than either of them had been alive. He turned the stool to face them and set the pen on the counter.

"Then I will tell you the thing I always tell people who come here in pairs," he said. "In nine cases out of ten it will be fine. One of you will go first, and Rosa will call the second midwife, and the other will go a week later, and this will all be a story you tell at the birthday parties."

"And the tenth case?" Leo said from the wall.

"One of you goes into labor. The other goes into labor, unplanned, within hours. Twins of circumstance. It happens more than people think, especially when two women live in the same house and share a bed and a nursery and, I hear, one very large living room." He looked at them levelly. "Rosa is one midwife. She has two hands. She can attend one birth at a time and do it beautifully. She cannot attend two."

The room went quiet. The air handler hummed overhead.

"So line up a second," he said. "A backup you both trust, who knows your chart, who has met you both in the flesh before the night it counts. Have her number in your phone under something you can read at three in the morning with one eye open. That is the whole of my advice."

Astrid looked at Dina. Dina was still holding her hand, and her face had gone very steady in the way Astrid had learned meant she was holding something in.

"Two at once," Astrid said. "Medically, is there any reason we couldn't just both deliver here?"

"There isn't," he said. "But you have both made it very clear to me, and to Rosa, and to this entire hospital system, that you want your own beds. Fine. I deliver babies in bathtubs every month. I am not going to argue with a woman in her third trimester. I am only going to insist that you are not each other's only midwife at three in the morning."

"We understand," Dina said.

"I know you do. It's why I said it once." He stood and offered his hand to Dina first, then Astrid. His grip was warm and dry and entirely unexcited. "Next visit at thirty-eight. Eat. Sleep on your left sides. Call if the bleeding is bright red or the baby stops moving. You are both doing this correctly."

The four of them walked out through the waiting room, past a woman with a toddler asleep face-down across three chairs, past the reception desk with its bowl of lollipops, and through the double doors, and the sun on the parking lot hit like a hand on the back of the neck. It was cold and bright and the asphalt shimmered a little with last night's frost going to water.

Nobody said anything for ten steps. Astrid had one arm across her belly, low, where the weight sat, and the other hooked through Dina's elbow, and behind them Shane's keys turned over in his hand once, twice, and stopped.

"So," Leo said at last. "A second midwife."

Shane looked up at the sky. "Yeah."

The four of them stood at the edge of the lot with the reality of it settling on them like a coat that was a size too heavy, and nobody moved toward the trucks.

The four of them stood at the edge of the lot with the reality of it settling on them like a coat that was a size too heavy, and nobody moved toward the trucks.

Shane broke first. He always did. "Okay," he said. "So we need a second midwife. And honestly, if Rosa's got two hands and two women in labor, two hands isn't going to be enough anyway."

Leo looked at him. "What do you mean."

"I mean doulas," Shane said. "If we go the same night, we've got Rosa and a backup midwife and neither of them is going to have time to hold anybody's hand. We need people who are there for us. Not for the medical part. For the rest of it."

Dina laughed under her breath and pressed her forehead against Astrid's shoulder. "He says it like he's reading a scouting report."

"He's not wrong," Astrid said. She could feel it now, the way she felt a settlement offer coming, that low hum in the chest that meant a thing was real and needed handling. "Two doulas. One for each of us."

"And we interview them," Leo said. "All of them. Before they set foot in the house."

"All of them," Dina agreed.

It took nine days, and most of it happened at the kitchen table after the dishes were cleared. Rosa gave them four names and refused to rank them. "I don't pick your people," she said on the phone, entirely indifferent. "You pick them. Call Bethany Cruz first. She's the closest to your side of town and she's been at two hundred births without once losing her head."

Bethany Cruz came on a Tuesday, in jeans and a fleece, with a canvas bag full of nothing, which Astrid noted and liked. She was in her forties, small, with clipped gray hair and an accent from somewhere flat and northern she didn't explain. She shook hands with all four of them, one at a time, and then sat down in the armchair and said, "Ask me the thing you're embarrassed to ask."

Astrid and Dina looked at each other.

"Ask it," Bethany said.

"Two of us at once," Astrid said. "If we go on the same night, one midwife goes with one woman and one goes with the other. Is that the plan, or do you stay with both of us? Because I want to know who's holding my knees and I want to know who is deciding."

"They decide," Bethany said, meaning Rosa. "I follow. If Rosa takes the first labor, I take the second, because I don't outrank her and I don't pretend to. But if it's the two of you at four in the morning in two rooms, I will be in one of them for the duration and I will not leave it for anything except a crash." She said the word without any drama at all. "Do you want me to tell you what happens if it all goes sideways?"

"Yes," Leo said.

She told them. It took four minutes. She was calm and she did not soften it, and when she finished, Dina poured her a cup of coffee and told her about her grandmother, and Bethany listened with her hands around the mug.

The other two midwives they interviewed never stood a chance. Astrid knew it by the second question both times.

The doulas were harder, because a doula was a person you were inviting into the worst hours of your life, and Astrid had spent fifteen years learning how to read a room for weakness and she could not turn it off.

The first candidate was a woman named Priya Raman, thirty-three, with a soft voice and a birth bag she unpacked on the kitchen island to show them, everything folded and labeled. Dina liked her immediately. Astrid did too, for about twenty minutes, and then Priya said the words "I don't believe in pain management" and Astrid's face went entirely still and the interview ended politely and quickly, and after the front door closed, Dina said, "No," and Astrid said, "No," and that was the end of it.

The second was Cassandra Duval, who went by Cass, who arrived on a motorcycle in a leather jacket and left it on with the helmet under her arm, and who sat down on the arm of the couch like she had lived there for years. She was fifty-one. She had been a doula for twenty-two of them. She had delivered four hundred and something births and she had, she said, one absolute rule.

"What's the rule," Shane said.

"I don't do two clients at the same birth," Cass said. "Ever. That's how you get distracted and that's how somebody gets hurt. If you hire me, I am Astrid's doula, or I am Dina's doula, but I am not both, and on the night it happens the other one is somebody else's problem." She looked between them. "That's the rule. If it doesn't work for you, I'm out."

Astrid looked at Dina across the coffee table. Dina was already smiling.

"That works," Dina said.

Cass stood up, put her hand out to Astrid first. "Then I'm yours," she said. "I want to meet Rosa. I want your chart, all of it, and I want to know where your hospital bag actually is and not where you say it is."

They hired a fourth that Friday, a quiet man named Tobias who had gray hair and enormous hands and who did not say much, and who sat in the armchair and watched Dina move around the kitchen making tea with a midwife's eye, and told her, when she asked, that her hips were out of balance and he could show Leo something for that. Dina hired him on the spot.

That night the four of them sat on the living room floor with the file folder of names and numbers and phone trees spread out between them, and Shane wrote it out in marker on the back of a pizza box: BETHANY, CASS, TOBIAS, ROSA, and underneath, in his square block letters, WHO CALLS WHO FIRST, and they argued about it for an hour, and put it on the refrigerator next to the ultrasound picture where both babies' heartbeats were printed in little typed rows, and stood back and looked at it.

"Four people," Leo said.

"Five with the doctor," Shane said.

"Five." Leo put his hand flat on the fridge door, next to the box, and left it there a moment. "That's a lot of hands."

Dina came up beside him and leaned her head against his shoulder. "That's the point, though, isn't it," she said. "That's exactly the point."

Leo kept his hand on the refrigerator door for a moment longer, then let it drop. He looked at the pizza box with its block letters, at the little typed rows of heartbeats taped beside it, and something in his shoulders came down a fraction, the way a man's shoulders come down when he has decided to stop carrying a thing alone.

"Bed," he said. "All of us. It's nearly eleven."

Nobody argued. That was the thing about the four of them now, Astrid thought as she pushed herself up off the floor with a hand on the coffee table. They had gotten past the part of the evening where anyone pretended they weren't tired.

She went down the hall with her hand low on her belly and Dina walked beside her, close enough that their hips brushed twice, and behind them the men turned off the kitchen light and the living room light and the small lamp by the door, one after another, the whole house going dark in a line.

In the big bedroom the two beds had long ago become one. There was a low light on the far side of the room where Dina had left it burning, and the room smelled of the lotion the two of them used on their bellies and of clean sheets and the cold coming off the window. Astrid sat on the edge of the mattress and worked her bra strap down off her shoulder, and Dina came around the other side and sat down next to her, both of them on the same side of the bed now, side by side, facing the same wall.

Neither of them moved to lie down.

"That was a lot of names," Dina said.

"It was."

"Cass scared me a little."

"She's supposed to," Astrid said. "That's the job. She's the one who tells you the truth at four in the morning so you don't have to find it out yourself."

Dina was quiet. Astrid looked sideways at her. In the low light Dina's face had the heaviness it got in the evenings now, the fine lines around her eyes deeper than they had been in the summer, her hair loose and pushed back behind one ear. She had one hand spread over the top of her own belly, thumb moving in slow circles, and she was looking at the wall the way people look at water.

"You're thinking about the tenth case," Astrid said.

"I'm thinking about the tenth case."

"Say it."

Dina turned her head. "What if it's me. What if I go first and you're in the other room and I can hear you."

"You won't. The rooms are at opposite ends now. Shane made sure."

"That's not the part I mean." Dina's jaw worked once. "What if I hear you, and I can't come, and I have to just lie there and know."

Astrid did not have anything clever for that. She had spent the whole of her pregnancy with the thing kept at a distance, a problem to be scheduled and staffed, a chart with numbers on it, and Dina had just put her hand flat on the middle of it.

She reached over and took Dina's hand off her own belly and laced their fingers together, palm to palm, the way they had been laced on the exam tables two weeks ago with the gel cold on their skin and the doctor humming his two notes.

She squeezed Dina's hand tighter.

Not hard. Hard enough that the bones of their knuckles pressed and then shifted, hard enough that Dina felt it and looked down at their joined hands and then back up at her face. It was the only sentence Astrid had that could carry all of it, the fear and the wanting and the promise in one grip, and she held it until Dina squeezed back, and they sat like that while the men's voices came down the hall, low and ordinary, about the game and the truck and nothing.

"You'll be in the room," Dina said finally. "Both of you. In the room, or right outside it, and when it's over I'll see you."

"Or I'll be the one in the bed and you'll be the one outside it."

"Then you'll be the one who's fine," Dina said. "Because you always are."

Astrid laughed, low, without much air in it. "You've met me."

"I've met you." Dina lifted Astrid's hand and pressed the back of it against her own cheek, which was warm, and then against her mouth, quick, and let it go. "Come on. Left side. Rosa's orders."

They lay down facing each other in the middle of the big bed, bellies touching, and Dina found Astrid's hand again in the dark between them and held it there on the mattress, and that was where Shane and Leo found them when they came in.

Shane pulled the covers up over both women without being asked. Leo turned off the lamp. In the dark Astrid felt Dina's thumb move once across her knuckles, and felt the baby shift and roll in her own belly, low and heavy, a slow turning like a body settling itself into the position it meant to keep.

She squeezed Dina's hand tighter, and did not let go, and lay awake a while listening to three other people breathe.

Astrid woke before the alarm, the way she had every morning for a month, to the pressure of a small foot wedged under her ribs. The light came gray through the window. Dina was still asleep beside her, mouth open, one hand flung over the edge of the mattress, and the two men were a wall of warmth at their backs. She lay still and let the room come into focus around the ache in her hips, and then she got up, because lying still was a kind of waiting and she had never been good at waiting.

The yoga happened three mornings later, and it happened the same way every time, which was the whole point of it.

They cleared the living room themselves. Shane rolled the coffee table back against the window and Leo dragged the armchair into the corner, and Astrid and Dina unrolled the two thick mats side by side on the rug, close enough that the seams touched. Rosa had left them a page of poses in her blunt handwriting, the same four she had given them at the first session, and had told them on the phone not to get clever with it. Deep squats, she had said. Tailor's pose. Cat-cow, on all fours, if the wrists let you. And the breath, the four in and the six out, the same counted breath she had drilled into them over the balls.

"You do the video or you do me," Rosa had said. "Your choice. I charge extra to watch you argue about it."

They had downloaded the video and never once used it.

Shane put on the music, something slow without words, and Leo turned the heat up, and the two women stood at the head of their mats facing the window with their bare feet apart and their hands hanging loose at their sides, and they breathed together, in for four, out for six, until the count stopped feeling like a count.

Astrid could feel every pound of it this week. Her center had moved forward and the ground had gotten further away, and when she shifted her weight from foot to foot the whole front of her body swung like something lashed to a mast. Dina beside her was lower, heavier, and had started standing with her feet turned out, and when she raised her arms overhead on the inhale, Astrid watched the underside of her belly press white against the waistband of her shorts and felt the familiar pull, right where it always was, low and impossible to argue with.

"You're staring," Dina said, without opening her eyes.

"I'm checking your alignment."

"Rosa's not here."

"No," Astrid said. "She's not."

They moved through the standing poses, the slow lunges, the gentle twists, the cat-cow on hands and knees with their wrists turned out to spare them. The rug smelled of the wool shampoo Dina had used on it after the last time. The window had fogged at the bottom corners. Somewhere behind them, one of the men put a kettle on, and the sound of it was so ordinary that Astrid nearly forgot to be afraid.

Then the squats.

Rosa's page had them stacked at the bottom: deep squat, heels down, hands on each other for balance. Astrid had read that line a dozen times and had privately decided it was a small cruelty, because a deep squat at thirty-six weeks was a thing that had to be either brave or stupid, and she had not yet decided which.

Dina stepped into it first. She turned her feet out, set her heels on the mat, and sank, slow, one hand on the arm of the couch, the other out. Her breath went out on the way down, six counts, and her knees tracked wide over her toes, and by the bottom of the squat her thighs were flat and her belly had settled between them, low and round and heavy, and her face had gone entirely still.

"Okay," she said. "Okay, that's a lot."

"Hands," Astrid said.

She stepped onto the mat beside her, turned out her own feet, and reached. Their fingers found each other in the middle and linked, and Astrid braced one foot, felt for her heel, and sank down to meet her.

The bottom of the squat was a place with no furniture in it. Her knees creaked and then gave, and her calves stretched hard, and the weight of the baby came down and sat between her hips like it had found its own seat, and everything that had been pressing on her ribs for a week suddenly was not. She let the breath out over six full counts, and beside her Dina let hers out too, and they stayed there at the bottom in the same counted silence with their hands joined between them, palm to palm, and neither of them said a word.

Astrid looked sideways. Dina's face was tipped down, her eyes closed, and her other hand had come to rest on the floor between her feet to steady herself, and the light from the window lay across her shoulders and along the round of her cheek. She was enormous and she was low and she was, Astrid thought, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in a squat.

"You're still staring," Dina said, eyes shut.

"I'm breathing."

"You're breathing on my hand."

"It's my hand too," Astrid said.

Dina opened her eyes and looked at her, and something moved through her face, quick and unguarded, and Astrid felt the grip of their linked fingers change, the palms settling together, the thumbs crossing each other's wrists where the pulse was.

It was not a grip for balance anymore. Rosa could have called it whatever she liked, but it was not.

"You owe me a thing," Dina said, low.

"I know."

"You never told me what you thought about the tenth case."

Astrid's thighs began to shake, a long slow tremor under the skin, and she did not let go and she did not rise. "I thought," she said. "That if it happened. If we went the same night. I wanted it to be me in the room and you outside. Because I'd rather be the one drowning than the one standing on the dock."

"You've thought about which drowning you'd rather have."

"Every night since the doctor said it."

Dina's thumb pressed into her wrist. "I'd rather we drown together."

"I know you would."

"Rosa would never allow it."

"Rosa just wouldn't tell us what she was doing," Astrid said, and Dina laughed, one short breath, and the laugh shook the both of them down to the bottom of the squat, and their hands rocked together against the mat and then held.

The kettle clicked off in the kitchen. Footsteps came down the hall, two sets, and stopped in the doorway, and neither of the men came in. Astrid could feel them there the way you feel weather, without looking, and she kept her eyes on Dina and Dina kept hers on her, and they stayed in the squat until the trembling in their legs said it was enough.

Then Dina said, "Up," and Astrid said, "Together," and they rose on the same six-count out-breath, palms locked, thighs burning, hauling each other up off the floor with their joined hands until they stood at the top of the mats again, belly to belly, breathing hard.

Neither of them let go.

Behind them, Leo said quietly, "How long have they been at the bottom of that."

"Too long," Shane said, but he was smiling, Astrid could hear it. "Let them."

Dina leaned forward, and her forehead came to rest against Astrid's, and the weight of her came in and settled, and the two of them stood in the middle of the warm fogged room with their hands linked between their bellies and did not go anywhere, and in Astrid's low body the baby turned once more, slow and heavy and patient, moving into the place it had decided to stay.

The forehead against hers was warm and damp with the morning's work, and the grip of Dina's hands loosened by one finger at a time, the way hands do when the body that owns them has decided it has had enough. Astrid let her own drop last, and for a moment they just stood there breathing at each other like two old wrestlers after a long bout, both of them slick at the hairline, both of them huge.

"That was too long," Dina said finally.

"That was exactly long enough."

"Rosa's going to hear about it." Dina lifted the hem of her shirt and fanned it once, twice, over the underside of her belly, which was flushed pink from the squatting. "My knees are going to file a complaint."

Behind them Leo cleared his throat. "You're done?"

"Done," Astrid said.

The men came in then, the way they always did when the invisible line was crossed, Leo with the two water glasses and Shane with a towel he had warmed against the radiator, the pair of them moving around the women with a practiced economy that Astrid still found faintly astonishing. Three months ago Shane would have asked her whether she wanted a towel. Now he just put it across her shoulders and stood there with his hand flat between her shoulder blades while she drank.

They sat on the couch for a while with the fogged window going clear above them. Leo had one of Dina's feet in his lap and was pressing his thumb along the sole in slow lines, the way Tobias had shown him, and Dina had her head tipped back against the cushion and was making a low, involuntary sound every few breaths. Astrid watched the two of them and drank her water and let her own hips settle into the cushions.

Her back had started again, that low dull band across the top of the sacrum, three days of unpacking and now three days of squats. She shifted once and it did not shift with her.

"You're doing the thing," Dina said, without opening her eyes.

"What thing."

"The jaw thing. You're in pain."

"It's the same back it's been for a month."

"Which is why you should be horizontal." Dina opened her eyes and turned her head on the cushion. "Or the next best thing."

"What's the next best thing."

Dina looked at her for a moment, that plain, measuring look she had, the one that had gotten Astrid into her car and into the back room of the deli and onto this couch two nights ago. Then she said, "A bath. A proper one. You, me, the big tub, and nobody talking about midwives."

Shane's hand paused on Astrid's back.

"The big tub," Astrid repeated.

"The one we bought because it fits two pregnant women and it's been sitting there for three weeks making us look like optimists."

Leo set Dina's foot down. "You're going to need someone to get you in and out of it."

"We've thought of that," Dina said, and then, with a perfectly straight face, "You two can be the crane."

Shane laughed. Astrid did not, because she was already thinking about the water and the heat and the way her back had been screaming all week, and she heard herself say, before she had entirely decided, "Yes."

So: the bathroom.

It had been the one room they had rebuilt twice. The tub was deep and long, white porcelain with a grab bar on the far wall that Rosa had ordered them to install and that Astrid had privately resented and now privately blessed. The tile was gray and warm underfoot, and Dina had put a candle somewhere on the sill for no reason at all other than the fact that she liked candles, and it was burning now, low, the little flame doubled in the fog of the mirror.

The water was almost too hot. Astrid found that out by putting her foot in first and taking it back out. Shane was crouched at the tap with his sleeve pushed up to test it with his wrist, taking it down a notch, then another, and Leo was behind Dina with both hands on her elbows as she lifted one foot and set it into the tub, then the other, her face entirely focused, the baby riding high and hard under her ribs as she stepped down.

Then it was Astrid's turn. She gave her hand to Shane, who took it without a word, and she stepped in and lowered herself down with one hand on the grab bar and the other closed around his, and the water came up to the middle of her belly and went still all around her.

The heat moved into her back like something poured. She heard herself sigh and did not feel any need to apologize for it.

Dina sat down opposite her with her knees coming up out of the water, and the two of them arranged themselves on the shallow bench at the bottom of the tub, and the water lapped at the soft undercurves of both bellies, and the bathroom was quiet except for the drip of the faucet and the candle.

"Alright," Dina said, letting her head fall back against the rolled towel Shane had wedged behind her neck. "I want to know if this is anything like what you imagined it would be. Pregnancy. The whole thing."

"No."

"No. I imagined a problem. I imagined a contract I hadn't read." Astrid floated her hands out on the water and watched her own belly rise and fall with the breath. "I did not imagine sitting in a tub with another woman at thirty-six weeks while two men stand over us looking like they're auditing something."

"How do they look?"

"Terrified."

"We're not terrified," Leo said from the tile, where he had sat down with his back to the vanity. "We're attentive."

Shane, still standing with the towel over his arm, said nothing at all, but Astrid could feel him looking at her, that particular stillness he got when he was memorizing something.

The water moved. Dina had stretched one leg out under it until her foot found Astrid's thigh, and then her calf, and then her knee, and then instead of pulling back she left her foot where it was, the ball of it resting gently against the outside of Astrid's hip.

Neither of them looked at each other for a moment.

Then Dina said, quietly, in the half-voice she used when there were other people in the room and she still meant every word, "You know, when Rosa said baths every night, I don't think she meant this."

"No."

"But I'm going to tell her anyway."

Astrid laughed under her breath and turned her wrist in the water and let her hand drift against Dina's shin, just the back of the knuckles, unhurried, no destination in it, the way you touch a thing you don't intend to put down. The heat was working into her hips now, loosening them, and the weight that had been sitting in her pelvis since morning was easing off by degrees, and she let her head tip back and closed her eyes, and for a little while there was nothing in the room but warm water and the candle and four people who had decided, all at once, not to be afraid of it.

"Astrid."

"Hm."

"You're leaking in the bath."

Her eyes came open. Dina was watching her, entirely unembarrassed, chin on the rim of the towel behind her head. Astrid looked down. The water had gone faintly cloudy on either side of her belly, two thin drifting threads, and she felt the old hot flush climb from her chest up her neck.

"Okay," she said. "I know."

Dina smiled, slow, and pushed her foot a little harder against her hip. "I told you. Two nights ago. I do the same thing when it's you."

Behind her, Leo shifted on the tile, keenly interested in the floor.

Shane crouched down at the edge of the tub and put a hand flat on the rim beside Astrid's shoulder, nothing else, no towel, no management, just the hand. "You want me to leave you two alone?"

"No," Astrid said.

"Then I'll stay."

"Yes."

Dina's foot went still against her. The candle guttered once on the sill and then stood up straight again, and the steam ran down the mirror in long slow lines, and under the water Astrid moved her hand from Dina's shin, up along the line of her calf, to the back of her knee, and left it there, palm cupped to the hollow, feeling the heat of her through the water the way you feel a pulse through skin.

Nobody said anything for a long while. Nobody needed to.

The bath ended the way all good things ended now, with someone's hips deciding for her. Astrid was the one who moved first, one hand on the grab bar and the other on Shane's forearm, and she came up out of the water with a groan she did not bother to hide and stood dripping on the mat while he wrapped her in the big towel and Dina laughed at her from the tub and would not get out until Leo hauled her up by both hands. They dried off in the steam, and the candle on the sill went out on its own, and nobody said anything worth repeating, and by the time the four of them were dressed and in the living room the afternoon had gone gray at the window and the day was mostly spent.

It was over dinner that Shane brought it up.

He waited until the plates were mostly empty, which was his way. He had learned, somewhere in the last year, that Astrid heard things better when she was full. He set his fork down and looked at the three of them around the table and said, "I want to do a dry run."

Leo looked up. "A what."

"A rehearsal. Tonight." Shane turned his water glass a quarter turn on the table. "We have two rooms, two beds, five names on a pizza box, and not one of us has ever done this. If it happens at three in the morning I don't want to be standing in a hallway trying to remember which number is Bethany's and which one is Tobias's and where the hell the hospital bag is."

"It's in the closet by the front door," Dina said.

"Is it?"

There was a pause.

"It's in the nursery," she said. "Under the changing table."

"Which is why we do this," Shane said.

Astrid set down her fork. She could feel the lawyer in her waking up, the part of her that liked a plan on paper, and she hated how much she liked it. "What does a dry run look like?"

"Like tonight, except nothing's happening," he said. "We pick who's in labor. We run it. Who calls Rosa, who calls the second midwife, who gets the towels, who gets the girls in the room and the lights down, who stays and who moves. Where the bags actually are. How long it takes to fill the tub. All of it. We find out now what we don't know."

"That's a lot of work for a made-up night," Leo said.

"It's less work than finding out at four a.m. in the real one," Shane said.

Dina looked at Astrid across the table. Astrid looked back, and saw in her face the same thing she could feel in her own chest, a reluctant, practical yes.

"I'll be the one in labor," Astrid said. "I'm the one who'd be most useless at being told what to do."

"You're the most useless at being told what to do when you're not in labor," Dina said.

"That's true," Astrid said. "Which is why I should be in the bed. Then we find out who falls apart, and it won't be me, because I'll be busy."

They cleared the table and washed up quickly, and then Shane went to the hall closet and came back with a legal pad, the one he used for his own training notes, and sat down on the coffee table with the pen and drew two boxes and labeled them ROOM LEFT and ROOM RIGHT.

"Okay," he said. "Astrid's in the left room. It's three in the morning. It starts. Go."

It was strange how fast the ordinary house turned into something else. Astrid went down the hall and lay down on the left bed with the lights on low, the way she imagined it would be, and put both hands on her belly, and listened. For the first minute nothing happened, and she heard the four of them in the living room talking over the pad, and then she heard the plan start to move.

"Phone," Shane said. "Who's got Rosa?"

"I do," Leo said. "I've got her on my phone already. Rosa Alvarez. It's under her name."

"What did she tell us to say?"

"Contractions, how far apart, how long they last, and whether the water's broke," Leo said. "In that order."

"Say it."

Leo said it, flat, in his own voice, into the empty air of the room. It sounded rehearsed and it didn't matter, because it sounded right. Shane wrote on the pad. Then there was the question of the second call, and this was where the dry run earned its keep, because it turned out that Leo had Bethany Cruz's number saved and Astrid had it written on the back of a receipt in her purse and Shane had it nowhere at all, and the two of them stood in the kitchen for a full two minutes finding out that the number everybody had been carrying around in their heads was one digit different from the number on the pizza box on the refrigerator.

"That would have been a fun one," Shane said.

"Write it on the wall," Astrid called from the bedroom. "In marker. I mean it."

"Astrid."

"I mean it, Shane."

He wrote it on the wall. Astrid heard the marker squeak and decided, privately, that she had just won something.

Then the rest of it, and the rest of it was where the seams showed. Nobody knew where the extra towels were, because the bathroom towel rack was small and the linen closet was packed with things Dina had bought in a burst of third-trimester optimism, and it took three tries to find the clean stack. The tub took nine minutes to fill, and Shane timed it on his phone and wrote nine minutes on the pad, which was longer than anybody had expected, and Leo said out loud what all four of them were thinking, which was that if both of them went at once the tub was a luxury they could only afford for one. The hospital bag was in fact under the changing table and in it were two sizes of baby clothes, all of them wrong, and no pads, and one toothbrush.

"Is there a snack in here," Dina said, unpacking it onto the nursery floor. "Whoever is in labor is going to be hungry and I have never once in my life been able to sleep through a hungry woman."

"There's a granola bar," Astrid said from the bedroom.

"One."

"Then pack four."

Dina packed four, and put the bag back under the table, and then moved it to the closet by the front door, where it should have been all along.

By the end of it the pad was three pages long and the two boxes had been crossed out and redrawn twice, and they came and sat around Astrid on the left bed, all four of them, the men on the edge and Dina lying down beside her with her belly against Astrid's hip, and they went through the pages together once, top to bottom, out loud, until each of them could say their own part without looking.

"So," Shane said, and set the pen down. "Now we know what we don't know."

"That's what I said in the tub," Dina said, and Astrid laughed, low, and pushed her forehead against Dina's shoulder.

Astrid lay there with the lamp low and the pad between them and the three other people breathing and felt, for the first time since the doctor had said the words tenth case, the thing in her chest loosen by a degree. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at Shane, who was looking at the pages of his own handwriting, and said, "Tomorrow you fix the number on the fridge."

"Tomorrow I fix the number on the fridge," he said.

"Tonight you lie down."

He turned off the lamp, and the room went soft around the edges, and out in the hall Leo was still reading the pizza box by the light of the kitchen, his lips moving over the names, saying them to himself one more time so he could not get them wrong.

He said them to himself twice more, then turned off the kitchen light and came down the hall, and the house went quiet, and for a few days after that the pizza box stayed on the refrigerator with the corrected number written over the wrong one in a second layer of marker, and nobody touched it.

Three nights later the house woke up on its own.

It was past two in the morning. The room was black except for the strip of hallway light under the door, and Astrid surfaced from a dream with her hand already flat on the side of her belly because something under it had gone hard. Not a kick. Not the patient roll she had learned to read a month ago. This was a band, low and wide, tightening around the whole circumference of her like a hand closing on a jar, and she lay very still under it and counted, because counting was what she did.

One. Two. Three.

The band held.

Four, five, six.

It let go.

Beside her, Dina had gone rigid on the mattress.

Astrid turned her head. In the dark she could just make out the shape of her, curled on her left side facing away, one arm jammed under the pillow, her back a long curve under the sheet, and her breath was wrong. Short, held, let out, held again.

"Dina."

"I'm fine."

"Your voice is doing the thing."

"It's fine. It's just. It's the same thing." Dina shifted, and the mattress moved, and her hand came back over her hip and found Astrid's wrist and closed on it. "It's the whole front. Like a belt. Three times now. I thought it was the baby settling."

"How long."

"An hour. Maybe an hour."

"Braxton Hicks."

"I know what they're called." Dina's grip tightened, then loosened, then tightened again, and her breath went out of her in a long hiss. "It's doing one now."

Astrid did not answer. She was doing one too, and she did not want to say so into the dark, because saying it would make it true. She laid her free hand flat over the top of her belly and felt the skin there pulled drum-tight, the whole soft dome of it going hard as the muscle underneath took over, and she worked the counted breath through it, in for four, out for six, the way Rosa had drilled her over the ball, and the count did what it always did and made the thing survivable.

"Astrid." Dina's voice was small.

"I'm here."

"Both of us."

"Both of us," Astrid said. "Same time."

The mattress dipped on the other side. Shane was up on one elbow, no glasses, hair loose around his face, and he reached across Astrid without a word and put his palm flat on her belly, high, where the hard band was riding, and left it there, warm and heavy, feeling it himself.

"How long's it been coming?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe."

"Same as me," Dina said, from the other side of Astrid, her voice muffled in the pillow. "It's been doing it since one."

Behind Astrid the second body moved. Leo was up, sitting, and Astrid heard him take a breath the way a man takes a breath when he has been woken into a thing he does not recognize and has already decided not to show it. His hand came past Astrid's shoulder and landed on Dina's arm, and he said her name once, low, and she said, "It's all right, it's early," in a voice that did not entirely believe it.

The two men looked at each other across the women in the dark. Astrid watched them do it. She knew that look now, the wordless council on the other side of a thing, and she knew Shane's face in it, the flat and careful calm, and Leo's, which had one question in it that had no good answer.

"Rosa," Leo said.

"Not yet," Astrid said, and the next wave took her mid-sentence, and she rode it out with her jaw locked and her eyes on the ceiling, and when it released she said again, "Not yet. They're not regular. They're not getting closer. We call when they've been every five minutes for an hour. That's what she said. That's the rule."

"You just had one," Shane said.

"I know I had one."

Dina laughed, breathless, into the pillow, and the laugh turned into another wave and she stopped laughing, and Leo's hand moved from her arm to her back and pressed flat, low, the way Tobias had shown him on the day of the balancing, thumb along the sacrum, elbows straight.

"Breathe out through it," he said.

"I am breathing out through it."

"Longer."

"Leo."

"Longer," he said, and Dina blew the air out of her in a long slow stream and the wave broke and ran and she sagged back into the mattress and swore quietly into the pillow.

Astrid was still coming down from her own. The band released and the belly under Shane's hand went soft again, and she lay there with her heart going hard under her ribs and sweat cooling along her hairline, and felt the first true fear of the night arrive, small and cold, the one that had been sitting behind the closet door since the doctor's voice in that room.

Twice. Together. Same night.

She reached across the small space between them. Dina's hand was already coming, and they met in the middle of the mattress, over the fold of the blanket, and locked, palm to palm, the way they had locked at the bottom of the squat four mornings ago.

"Look at me," Astrid said.

Dina turned her head on the pillow. Her hair was slicked to her temple. Her eyes in the dark were wet and enormous and entirely steady, and Astrid understood, looking into them, that Dina had arrived at the same cold place a minute before her and had decided, the way she decided everything, to carry it with her shoulders back.

"This is not it," Astrid said. "This is practice. This is the rehearsal."

"You don't know that."

"No. But you don't know it's the other thing, either, and I am not going to stand here and call Rosa into this house because two women ate a spicy dinner and lay on their left sides."

Dina's mouth twitched. "You're a terrible liar."

"I'm a lawyer. I'm an excellent liar. This isn't a lie."

Another wave took Dina before she could answer. Astrid watched it move through her, the whole body going tight and the face going smooth and distant, and Leo was behind her now with both hands low on her back, one on either side of the sacrum, pressing in slow circles, murmuring the count into her hair, four and six, four and six, and Dina rode it out with her eyes shut and her hand crushing Astrid's knuckles into the mattress.

The wave passed. She let go of the breath, all of it, and it came out shaking.

"All right," she said. "All right."

Shane had both hands on Astrid now, one across the top of the belly where the band rode and one low at the base of her spine, and he had gotten his legs around behind her in the dark so that she could lean back against his chest if she wanted to. She did not want to. She wanted to be on her side, facing Dina, and she stayed there, and the next one hit before she had finished deciding, and this one was longer than the last, or she had lost the count, and she closed her eyes and rode it with her forehead pressed against Dina's forehead and heard herself make a low sound she did not plan on making.

"Good," Shane said quietly, at her back. "That's it. Breathe it down."

"Don't coach me."

"Breathe it down anyway."

She did, because he was right and she was busy, and the wave went and took the top of her ribs with it. When she came back up, Dina was watching her out of one open eye, the other pressed shut, and Dina's breath was coming hard and shallow, and Leo was still working her back, and on Dina's face there had arrived, unannounced, a smile. Small. Tired. Real.

"Same time," Dina whispered.

"Same time."

"Two of us."

"Two of us."

And then both hands squeezed, hard, at once, and the two women rode the next wave together with their foreheads touching and their palms locked on the blanket, and the two men held their backs on either side of them, four hands for four bodies, in the dark, at two in the morning, in a house with one wall missing between it and the next, waiting for the practice to be over and the real thing to begin.