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Sally’s son is born on a beautiful spring day. The bathroom has one small window, so from her place propped up in the bathtub, she can just manage to see outside. They’re in Virginia, somewhere, and everything is green and in bloom. As the contractions get worse and worse, Sally finds herself staring intently out the window at the tree right outside. Its leaves caress the glass in the wind. The sky is so blue.
“You’re doing great, Sally.” Barry is on his knees by the bathtub. His clothes are soaked with water because Sally keeps thrashing around. He’s got a towel beside him with a bunch of things they might need laying out on top of it—including a terrifying pair of forceps he ordered off of Amazon and an unopened pack of gauze. He’s holding her hand; no matter how hard she squeezes, he doesn’t falter.
“I want it out ,” Sally grits through her teeth. “I want this thing fucking out of me. ”
“It’s almost time to start pushing,” Barry says, like he’s trying to be soothing. With his free hand, he reaches out to where his laptop is open on top of the toilet seat, and scrolls down a little on the Wikihow article he’s had pulled up since Sally woke up in the middle of the night with the shooting pain that could have only been a contraction. “Yeah, okay. Looks like it’s about time.”
So they do it. Sally pushes and pushes and pushes, feels like she’s going to evacuate her own body with the force of it, and Barry hushes her like she’s a spooked horse while he, unfortunately, feels around her vagina and makes comments about it like he’s actually a doctor and not a random ex-murderer from Ohio.
“Shut the fuck up! ” Sally screams at him. Her whole body is on fire, licks of flames up her asscrack and into her spine.
“I can feel the baby,” Barry says breathlessly, like he hasn’t heard her. “Oh my—Sally. Sally, I can feel it.”
Sally groans and wants to kill him. “Me fucking too!”
Outside, the tree sways from side to side. The baby’s head pops out, and Sally feels it when it does, the most alien sensation in the world for all that this is supposed to be natural. Barry gasps and starts crying. Sally doesn’t stop pushing. Her brain is blaring at her GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT .
And then—some part of her disappears, for a moment. Sally goes outside of herself, out of this terrible bathroom in this terrible motel, out the window to where the tree is. She feels like a character in a movie. This is just another part. Just another set of lines to recite, another psyche to inhabit. She played a mom in Joplin when she wasn’t one. She can do it again.
There’s a piercing, terrible cry. Sally flies back into her body. The bathtub is half-empty, and the floor is flooded with rust-colored water. Barry is beside her, holding a wriggling, ugly thing wrapped in a threadbare yellow towel. Barry is crying almost as hard as the baby is. Sally stares at them both.
“It’s a boy,” Barry sobs. “We had a boy.”
“A boy,” Sally echoes faintly. She thinks randomly of her dad taking her camping with her uncle and cousins Jeremy and Luke when she was eleven, all the kids horsing around in the leaves while the grown-ups drank beer and bitched about Clinton. The smell of the campfire. Playing tag in the woods until their dads called them back, the cold air bracing her lungs as she ran as fast as she could to beat Jeremy.
Barry is maneuvering the baby toward her. Sally just looks at him until she realizes he’s trying to bring the baby to rest on her chest. She’s gripped with a sudden fear that something will happen, that Barry will drop him or something, so she carefully reaches out and brings the baby to her body without Barry’s help.
“Oh, it’s okay,” Sally says quietly. He’s still crying. His face is wrinkled and red, and he’s got a soft patch of dark hair on his head. “It’s okay. That was hard. I know. You’re okay, though. Right? You’re okay?”
“He’s perfect,” Barry says beside her. “We did it. We’re parents.”
“We’re your parents,” she tells the baby. “Hi.”
His cries mellow to fussing. He rubs his face against Sally’s skin. She had worried that she wouldn’t know how to hold him, but she doesn’t even have to think about it. His weight feels right in her arms.
Later, after the placenta is out and the bathroom is mostly cleaned up and the baby is swaddled and sleeping soundly in the portable bassinet they purchased at a Walmart in Massachusetts, they lay together in bed. Sally is curled on her side to watch the baby sleep. Barry is spooned up behind her, and he’s watching too.
“What should we call him?” He asks. Outside, the sun is setting.
Sally thinks. A few names bounce into her mind, but none of them sound like something she wants to call her son.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I thought maybe we could name him John,” Barry says softly, like he’s telling her a secret. “After my dad?”
Sally goes still in his arms, immediately aware that this is untrodden ground for them. “You’ve never mentioned him before.”
“He died. When I was younger.”
Maybe someone other than Sally would have more questions, but she doesn’t want to know. She’s always figured something really bad happened to him as a kid, that he had some kind of twisted childhood of abuse like a character in a Lifetime movie. If that’s true, she doesn’t want to know the details. But even worse, some small voice in her asks, what if it isn’t true at all? She doesn’t know what she’d do if she found out he had a normal childhood like everyone else. If there was no answer to the darkest question of her whole life
“I like the name John,” she finally says. Looking at the baby, she thinks she could do that. She could nickname him Johnny, or something, if she wanted.
“Yeah?” Barry’s voice cracks out. He sounds so small. Like a kid himself.
“Yeah,” Sally says. “Let’s call him John.”
“Okay.” Barry kisses the back of her neck, and she feels him start to shake a little as he cries. Sally snuggles back into him.
Barry’s weight at her back is comforting, not claustrophobic. The baby is breathing slowly in his sleep. They’ll have to move towns, soon, but Barry promised they’d settle down somewhere for good in the next couple months. They have a plan. Sally has a son with Barry’s dark hair, a son who is making little sounds in his sleep.
“I love you both so much,” Barry says into her neck. His breath is hot. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Sally looks at John, his unblemished little face. That same part of her is going away, out the window to where the sun is setting and the leaves are still fluttering in the breeze, away from this dingy room with her baby and Barry.
“We love you too,” she says. The sound is an echo over a vast canyon. The words are just another line of dialogue.