“Mad… Ma… Madix,” she wailed, sounding like the world was ending. “She doesn’t like my vagina, and they’re gonna gut me like a f… f… fish!”
Keeping my hand firmly over my eyes, I felt around the air in front of me as I moved toward the direction her voice had come from. With the help of someone’s hand, presumably a nurse’s given that they were wearing gloves – clean ones hopefully – I was moved to an area beside the bed. Immediately she stuck her sweaty face right in my palm.
“Luna, you can do this. All you have to do is think of how time sensitive it is,” I told her, trying to sound as calm and strong as possible. I wasn’t feeling that on the inside, but she didn’t have to know that.
“What do you mean?” she asked, then I felt her wiping her nose on my palm. Gross!
“Well, remember when you were little, and we’d pull a funny face at each other, and Nana would tell us our faces would get stuck like that if the wind changed?”
“Uh, yeah?”
I might have been worried, but I was still a big brother and it was my right to mess with her at any point. At the same time, I knew that this analogy would sink in and motivate her to give it her all.
“Well, you’ve had her in the chute for two hours,” he reminded me. “What if what Nana was saying was true? Two hours with her head right there…”
I heard her growl before she yelled, “Get out, get out, get out!” as she grabbed my hand and groaned loudly then she pushed. “Whatever happens, forget it happened. Do you hear me?” she screamed before she pushed again.
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but her husband’s yell joined mine as she crushed our hands at the same time. At least I knew she was crushing my hand, I didn’t know what she was crushing of his. Seeing as how he’d gotten her into this situation, I couldn’t stop myself from praying it was his balls.
On the tail end of our pain, came a new scream as the baby made itself known at the same time that Luna screamed again in pain.
I didn’t remove my hand from in front of my eyes once. Not until the doctor announced that my niece was here, and then no one could have stopped me from looking at her.
“She’s beautiful,” I croaked, taking in the angry smushed face of the baby who was still screaming.
“What’s her name?” one of the nurses asked as they cleaned her off and the doctor did things under the blanket covering the lower half of my sister.
“Oh shit,” Noah gulped, getting a glare from me in return.
He’d gone slightly pale when he’d moved down to the bottom of the bed to cut the cord and I’d seen him glance down at what the doctor was doing briefly, but then he’d looked at his daughter and his face had immediately gone back to normal. I’d also been watching carefully as he cut the cord so I knew his hand hadn’t slipped (even though I’d had to gulp a couple times to stop myself throwing up as he did it, something that I noticed him do too). So, this had to be something else.
“You don’t have a name for your daughter after months of begging me to be the one to choose it?” Luna shrieked over the wails coming from the baby.
“I forgot it is all,” he stammered, looking around the room and not at Luna as he lied outta his ass. “Um, well, there was a couple and I’m trying to decide which one she suits best,” he lied – again.
“Oh, you better decide,” she growled as the doctor finished up doing whatever it was that needed to be done, and then patted her on the leg before joining the nurses who were laughing silently in the corner as they did measurements on my niece and wrote stuff down on a chart.
“Uh,” I saw the second his eyes stopped on a women’s magazine on the table in the corner of the room, with some guy called Jamie Dornan on the cover. “Jamie!” he yelled, spinning back with a grin on his face.
It must have been the right name because not only did my sister settle back on her bed with a happy smile on her face, but the baby stopped screaming in the corner and made a tiny little cooing noise.
Lucky bastard!Two hours later…
I had a problem, a huge one.
I was afraid of babies. I’d never been around one since Luna was born, and even then I was five years older than her, so it’s not like I could really remember it. Or even that I had to do much apart from poke her and run when she had a blowout.