Matchmaking for Beginners(38)

I look up at Natalie, and her eyes are bright with tears, and my face is streaming wetness. My heart is galloping all around, and my hands look like they might soon start bleeding from the little half-moons of Natalie’s nails pressing into them.

“Good job,” says Joel softly. And Marcus smiles and rips off his gloves. Both of them are so calm and methodical, it’s like they’re injecting calm into the air. Like pure love. I hear that voice again—you are love; you are going to be all right. And my niece—Amelia Jane—is now looking around with wide, navy-blue eyes, making little peeps of protest, her tiny body turning pinker by the second, as though she’s under some kind of cosmic light. She has a fringe of dark hair, and little arms and legs, and fingers and thumbs—all of your most important equipment—and she’s alert and aware. Her filmy eyes lock on to mine, and I am smitten, stunned, thinking: How can this be? How does such a thing happen around us every day—and we just go about our lives like it’s nothing out of the ordinary?

The two guys are busy doing official medical stuff, cleaning Natalie, covering her up. Joel hands the baby to me, which makes me startle. Me? Are you serious? I look around, venture out of my trance. Wow. We’re in an ambulance, sitting in the parking area of the dentist’s office. Outside, there are cars honking, voices of people walking past the ambulance, unaware. Somewhere out there is Jeremy; did he go back upstairs to help somebody with a backache?

But here, in this cocoon, plopped into my arms in a little blanket, is my niece, round and rosy and just as startled as I am.

“Here, let me give her to her mom,” I say. Natalie is propped up now, the stunned look gone from her features. She takes the baby from me, and our eyes meet.

Joel says, “Beautiful baby. You did a great job. Boy, these are my favorite kinds of days, when I get to help a baby come into the world.”

After a bit, I’m aware that the ambulance is moving. Marcus is taking us to the hospital. But slowly. No sirens. Our own little traveling safe place is moving, taking with us all the equipment we could ever need.

“Look what we did!” Natalie says, and her eyes are locked on to mine. “You are the best, the best sister in the world! How did you know—to be here—that I needed you?”

We both gaze down at this little life we just brought into the world. My heart is so full it feels like it will spill out of me somehow.

“You know, of all our antics, I have to say that this is the best sister act we’ve ever pulled off,” I tell her. “Even though it wasn’t the birth plan you had in mind.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but only because I didn’t think I could get this one to work.”

I think I might just die of this.

That evening, the whole family comes to my sister’s hospital room, where she presides beautifully, wearing a lovely peach-colored nightgown I fetched for her from the gift shop, and her hair is clean and shining. She is even more radiant than ever, with her skin looking dewy and lit from within—and little Amelia—rosy little Amelia lies contented in her mother’s arms, pooching out her sweet pink little lips.

Joel, the delicious EMT, shows up at one point with a bouquet of flowers, and my whole family goes gaga over him. He explains that he hardly ever gets to deliver babies, and that he was, in fact, a mess when his own wife went into labor. And that makes everybody laugh, and my mother wants to invite him and his entire family over for dinner, except that my father quietly puts his hand on her arm before she can quite squeak out the invitation.

Brian, sitting by my sister’s side, is clearly smitten with the whole scene. I was a little worried that he was going to feel he’d been cut out of the deal somehow, but he doesn’t seem to mind in the least. Here he got a perfect baby girl without having to even endure one of my sister’s high-pitched screams, screams that will never, ever be mentioned by anyone, though they are going to live on in some pocket of my memory until the end of time.

“She looks like your brother,” says my mother to my father.

“Joe? I think you’re just saying that because he’s bald.”

“No. Look at the chin. It’s Joe’s chin.”

“But that’s just because he had his teeth knocked out playing street hockey. People with no teeth—like Amelia, for now—have those kinds of chins.”

To my surprise, my mother laughs. And my father tucks his head over her shoulder, and for a moment they’re both smiling down at the baby. It seems impossible to believe that this is a couple who communicates mainly through bickering. Maybe, it occurs to me, this is what marriage ultimately turns into: you have to tough it out through the bad times so that you can get to these pinnacle moments when life has just handed you a shiny star.

I’m not even surprised when Jeremy shows up, carrying balloons. Or when my parents greet him like the long-lost son they never had. Nor is it shocking that he and I leave the hospital together, going out for dinner, and that after that, we go to his mother’s house and sit on the screened porch where we spent thousands of hours doing homework and gossiping about other kids.

He’s grown up to be a good-natured, good-looking man who takes care of his mom, and I’m suddenly so sorry I broke his heart, except that I think that we all do need to have our hearts broken at some point, and so maybe I actually did him a good service. It’s something we need to know about ourselves, how that heart breaks and grows back.