Layla Juliette
The contractions began four days before my due date. I didn’t worry about them at first; I knew I was lucky not to have had them before then. They didn’t come often and they weren’t even that painful, just an annoying reminder that there was a baby trying to make her escape from my body.
Although I had called my doctor, I did my best to get on with my life. Dr. McGuire wasn’t worried so I tried not to be. I went to work as usual, just like I would have done if there weren’t a tiny human beating on my uterus. Tobias and Joey both thought I was insane for working, but I intended to be there until I couldn’t be.
The nightmares had miraculously ceased after Zac’s phone call, but his phone calls hadn’t. He called or texted several times a day during the last month of my pregnancy, and although I didn’t dare ask, I wondered what his wife thought of that, since she apparently kept tabs on him. But I didn’t ask that. I didn’t ask or say anything. Each and every one of his messages went completely ignored.
“If you just don’t want to be the one to throw that phone out the window, I’ll gladly volunteer,” Tobias said when my phone rang for what felt like the four millionth time that day.
I snatched the phone up and turned it off. “There. Happy now?”
“It’s a start,” he replied.
“It’s the best I can do for you,” I grumbled, clutching my stomach when another contraction hit me. This one was worse than the ones the day before.
“Colby?” He asked.
I shook my head. “I’m fine. Blame her bastard father. She’s probably just raising her fist in agreement that he’s a douche and I should ignore him.”
“Maybe he’s actually trying to be there for you. I mean, it’s the most you’ve heard from him the whole time, isn’t it?”
“I don’t need to hear from him. I need him to actually do shit, and preferably the shit he says he’s going to do,” I replied.
I hadn’t realized I was getting louder and louder until Joey came out of the back, an eyebrow raised. He glanced back and forth between me and Tobias and asked, “Is everything alright?”
“Yeah,” Tobias replied.
The second I opened my mouth to say the same, I felt… something. It was like a sudden pop, almost audible, and I wondered just what sort of aerobics the baby was doing on my insides now. Joey’s eyes were widening and I followed them down my body, suddenly realizing just what that pop had been. A very obvious trail of dampness ran down my pink leggings and once I’d seen it, I realized I could feel more of it dripping down.
My water had broken.
“We need… you… I’m just going to go call a cab,” Joey stuttered out.
I nodded, vaguely feeling Tobias’s arms around me, nudging me toward the back room. He practically shoved me the entire way to the bathroom, where I sat until Joey knocked on the door and said the cab was ready. I let them shove me into it and barely managed to rattle off my address to the driver so that I could get the bag I’d prepared and had sitting just inside the front door of my apartment. There was so much I needed to do and I tried to tick the list off in my mind—get my bag, call the doctor, call my aunt—but everything seemed to be happening too quickly and in the wrong order.
At least Tobias had stayed with me. He followed my shaky directions to the overnight bag I had waiting by my apartment door and even managed to stay calm on the phone with Aunt Sus. We had talked this over, and he knew the possibility that he would have to do this if Aunt Sus couldn’t make it in time, but I don’t think either of us really expected that to happen. We should have known, though. We both should have known that my life was always a mess.
Once I was checked into the hospital, things calmed down a little. The nurses were doting, settling me into bed with plenty of pillows and water to drink. Tobias was still texting Aunt Sus and Jaclyn, who were both on their way from Saratoga Springs. For the moment, I could relax, as much as that was possible with the contractions getting closer and closer together.
“How the fuck is this my life?” I asked Tobias once the nurses had finally left me alone.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, here I am, with this little girl evidently—” I paused to wince when a particularly strong contraction hit me. “Evidently banging her head against my cervix repeatedly, because she inherited her father’s stubborn hardheadedness. Her father, who by the way, I couldn’t even begin to locate right now. How, exactly, is this my life at twenty four?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. How is working in a record store at thirty two my life? Shit happens. You just gotta deal with it and move on. I’m happy enough with what I’ve got, and I know you aren’t right now, but you will be.”
“Once she’s stopped abusing my uterus, maybe,” I replied. “But even then… this is just the beginning of the next phase, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t surprised that Tobias didn’t have an answer for that.
With nothing else to say, I turned my attention to the television. It was still early in the day, when there was nothing on but shows for bored housewives and I didn’t see anything that interested me. Then I saw him. His hair, his smile, his laugh… I knew in a split second, even as my finger was on the button to change the channel again, that it was Zac. It took me a moment to figure out it must have been taped weeks ago when he was in New York. When he was with me. I didn’t understand how he could look so happy when he was about to break my heart again, or worse, had already done it and ran away.
“Tobias,” I said. “Take the remote before I throw it through the screen. I really don’t need to make this hospital bill any higher than it’s already going to be.”
He obliged, and just as he was slipping the remote under his ass so I wouldn’t be inclined to grab it back, the door opened and in rushed Aunt Sus and Jaclyn. They were talking over each other at a speed of roughly a mile a minute so that I couldn’t even distinguish what either of them was saying.
I snapped back to reality when Aunt Susanna swept Tobias up in her arms. “Oh, you must be Asher!”
“No, I… I…” he stuttered out, shaking his head.
“Aunt Sus, that’s Tobias. I work with him. Asher’s umm… well, we broke up.”
I tried to ignore both her condolences and Tobias’ judgmental look as my contractions grew closer yet again.
From there on, things got blurry. The contractions grew and grew, and so did the pain, until I was practically begging for relief. It came in the form of an epidural that had me swimming and feeling drunk. I pushed when they told me to push, though at times I could barely even remember why or what I was doing in the hospital to begin with.
The second I heard a baby’s cry, I remembered why I was there.
They cleaned her off, cut the cord and laid her on my chest. My baby. I hadn’t believed that Tobias could possibly be right, but he was. Maybe it was the pain medicine still coursing through my body or relief that it was over, but I just felt happy.
She was absolutely perfect. I was sure everyone thought that when they met their baby, but I was convinced of it. Like the cliché that I was becoming, I counted her teeny tiny little fingers and toes. They were all there and all perfect. She had a full head of dark brown hair and big brown eyes. Mine were brown, too, but one look at hers and I knew she had her daddy’s eyes. But unlike the judgment and anger I sometimes saw in his, in hers I only saw wonder.
I didn’t even realize I was crying until I saw the tears hit her tiny little face. She still stared up at me in wonder, oblivious to my sadness. It wasn’t just sadness, though. It was this strange bitterness mixed with all the happiness I felt at having somehow made something like her. How could such a perfect little baby come out of such an awful situation? And how could I go through all of this and even give birth to her without him there? No one had said a word, but everyone was aware of his absence. None of them felt it more acutely than me, though, and I knew that in the years to come, our little girl would feel it even more.
It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fucking fair.
The bed shifted under someone’s weight, and I glanced over to see who it was. I had been so focused on the baby that I didn’t even notice that the room had cleared out, leaving just one nurse and Aunt Susanna, now sitting on the edge of my bed and playing with the baby’s tiny little foot.
“She’s beautiful,” she said softly, and I could hear that she was fighting off tears of her own, no doubt for very different reasons than mine.
I sniffled and nodded. “She is. She really, really is.”
“Have you picked out a name?” She asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Layla Juliette. Two t’s and an e.”
“It’s almost as beautiful as she is,” she replied, shuffling around a little. It took me a moment to realize she was holding the birth certificate.
It felt like I’d be filling out paperwork all day. I had done at least as much of that as I had pushing and breathing. This was the piece of paperwork I had dreaded, though. Trying not to sigh too heavily, I passed Layla off to my aunt and took the birth certificate from her.
Most of the questions were easy enough. Name, date of birth, social security number, race… all things I knew about myself. Things I could recite in my sleep. Then I came to the difficult portion—the father. I couldn’t list Zac and now I couldn’t list Asher as the father, either. I had no one but a blank space.
Aunt Sus gave me a little hug once I finished the paperwork and passed it off to the nurse. “Do you want a little time alone with her?”
“Yeah,” I replied weakly, and let her hand Layla off to me again.
I wanted a lot of things right then that I knew I couldn’t have. I wanted to nap. I wanted Zac to be there to see the amazing little human being we had made. I wanted Layla to know that she was loved and that I, at least, would never, ever leave her. I wanted to not feel so alone even with my baby laying on my chest.
I wanted to believe there was a chance that at least one of those things might actually happen, but right then, the only one that looked likely was the nap.
Layla gave the tiniest little yawn, reminding me that she’d had a pretty rough day, too. I tucked my blanket up around the two of us and rubbed her hair gently. She might not have been aware of it at all, but she was loved, and she was never, ever going to have to doubt that. I could only hope that my love alone was enough.