Page 159 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

“Go be useful to a hallway,” I tell them. They go. That’s why they’re mine.

Time does whatever it wants in labor.

It stretches until it snaps and then forgets you existed.

They put us in a room with a window, a paper wreath taped crookedly, and a monitor that beeps like a metronome learning to love.

Elisa leans on me, on the bed, on the words she saved for when things get sharp.

I say all the right things and a few wrong ones.

“I can call your mother,” I offer.

She glares.

“Do you want her to teleport into this room and take your place?”

“Later,” I say.

“You think…” she says, and then another contraction hits and the rest of the sentence gets eaten.

Rizzo is a storm with good boundaries.

She puts a cool cloth on Elisa’s neck and yells at a resident before he has the chance to make a mistake.

“I told them to put an extra blanket in the warmer because it’s Christmas and I’m not a monster,” she says to Elisa, then to me, “Breathing with her, not at her, Nico. You look like you’re trying to hypnotize a train.”

I adjust.

I learn fast when the stakes are this high.

The choir outside the door misses their cue on “O Holy Night” and somehow, it helps.

The radiators clank like old saints knocking on pipes.

Snow feathers against the window and melts into the city that always eats its weather.

Dr. Conte checks and nods and says, “We’re doing this.”

Elisa grabs my wrist, harder than I thought possible for hands that hold babies and bread.

“Don’t leave,” she says, as if I would.

“Not even if the building catches fire,” I tell her. “And if it does, I’ll carry you and the building.”

“Bossy,” she says, breathless, and then grits her teeth and pushes like she’s mad at gravity.

There is no poetry here and also nothing but.

It’s work and breath and numbers and a sound from her I have never heard that turns me inside out and makes me want to build a wall around the world.

I get her water, I count, I shut up, I say her name like a rope she can pull on.

She does.

God, does she.

“Good,” Dr. Conte says, calm as a metronome. “Again.”