We Own the Sky(19)

“How long have you had them?” I said.

“I don’t know. Forty-five minutes maybe.”

“Jesus, Anna, you should have called me...”

“I wanted to be sure.” She looked terrified, ashen-gray. “I think we should go.”

“I’ll get the bag.”

“It’s the day one.”

“Okay, sweetheart,” I said. “Shall we go down?”

Anna had two separate bags packed and they were both sitting in the hall with luggage labels tied to their handles. One said “Day,” the other said “Night.”

“Right,” I said as we stood at the door, me holding the bags, Anna going

through a mental checklist in her head. Just as we were leaving, I reached for my camera bag from the side table.

“Don’t even think about taking that, Rob.”

I looked at her face. Now definitely wasn’t the time to argue.

  *

The doctor had just left when Anna screamed and my first thought was that she had lost the baby. I pressed the emergency bell, but already a tuft of hair, the beginning of Jack’s head, had begun to emerge. The doctor came running back and called for a nurse but she was elsewhere, on her break.

Anna was still screaming, so the doctor shoved her legs into the stirrups and then thrust a tray of instruments into my hands. She barked something at me but I didn’t know what, so I just stood at the end of the bed, holding on to the tray for dear life, as Anna screamed out her pain and screamed out Jack.

We joked at first that he wasn’t human—our little alien, we called him.

Because even when I saw his slick dark hair emerge, his tiny body encased in gunk; even when I heard his screams pierce the cold matronly air, as he lay on the antique mechanical scale, I could not believe that he was real.

I would never forget the way that Anna smiled at him, when she held that little snuffling body in her arms and put him to her breast, so naturally, as if she had been taught by a heavenly midwife. Her smile was so natural, so unguarded, and I didn’t think I had ever seen her smile like that at anyone before.

“Do you want to hold him, while I stitch Mom back together?” the doctor

said.

I cradled him in my arms, gently, afraid I would crush him. He was wrapped up as tight as he was in the womb, straitjacketed, his eyes swollen slits. I was glad he was now getting some comfort away from the cold scale, the doctor’s coarse hands.

In the baby books I read, they said it would take time to develop a bond, that while Anna would feel it, with me it would take time. It wasn’t true. I felt it instantly, and it was like a lightning bolt down my neck, my spine, a feeling that everything, everything had been for this.

That we could produce this—this—a little bundle who squawked and cooed;

no, it couldn’t be true. That the two of us could create another person, with fingers and toes, a brain, a soul. That we could create a life. That we could create Jack.





4

It was hot for spring, and Hampstead Heath was full of runners, day-trippers, families with strollers. The grass was a patchwork of picnic blankets and hampers. The regulars, the elderly men who came up here every day, sat on their usual benches holding up small radios to their ears. A girl and boy kicked a football around with their mother: big run-ups, little kicks, the ball pinging around in the wind.

Jack had just got a new Spider-Man bike, with a windshield and cannons on the side, and he wanted to try it out. It was difficult to find somewhere flat around Parliament Hill, somewhere without a busy road, so, as we always did, we came up to the heath.

I watched Jack as he marched up the hill, the bike still too big for him. How quickly the contours of our world had changed. He was five, a proper little boy, as my dad would have said. Gone was the bow of his toddler’s legs, the babyish lilt of his speech. Now our world was library books and parents’ evening and trying to persuade Jack that the after-school drama club was cool.

“How about here?” I said, as we got to some flat ground.

“Okay,” Jack said, putting his leg over the crossbar.

“Boys, no,” Anna said. “It’s far too steep here. I thought we were going to the flat bit.”

“This is the flat bit,” I offered.

“It’s okay here, Mom,” Jack added.

Anna thought about it, looking up and down the path. “No, I don’t think so.

It’s too steep.”

Jack sighed and rolled his eyes, something he had learned in kindergarten.

“C’mon, Jack,” I said, “let’s go to that bit up there.”

“Okay,” Jack said, starting to push his bike up the hill.

When we got to the top, to the plateau of flat ground, we watched a boy on a tricycle, his father anxiously running behind him.

“Should be okay here,” I said.

Anna looked perturbed, a little flustered, as if she thought she was somewhere else. “Okay,” she said, checking out the terrain, “but you go carefully, Jack.”

He secured the strap on his helmet like a fighter pilot and then pushed himself

down the path, weaving in and out of the walkers. I ran alongside him, smiling, brimming with pride, and it was like an old home movie shot on Super 8, the trees whizzing by, the lens-flare in the blinding light.