Tobias has grown out of it now, but it’s still too big for her. Life goes so quickly.
“Piece of shit team,” Ana declares so firmly that Hannah suddenly flares up:
“Watch what you say! That’s my kids’ team!”
“It’s not your kids’ fault you let them play on a piece of shit team,” Ana replies, completely nonplussed.
The midwife stares at her. Then she smiles reluctantly.
“So you like hockey?”
“I hate hockey, but I hate Hed more,” Ana replies.
“Our A-team’s probably going to beat yours this season,” the midwife says hopefully, grateful to have something to talk about to distract herself.
Ana snorts and slows down for a few seconds as she tries to get her bearings in the darkness.
“Your team couldn’t even beat a carpet. You’d need a calendar to measure the time it takes your backs to move from zone to zone…,” she mutters, squinting through the windshield.
The midwife rolls her eyes.
“My husband was right, there really isn’t anything as smug as Beartown smugness. It’s not that long since the whole club was on the brink of bankruptcy, but now you’re suddenly full of it? And you were only good last season because you found that guy Amat? Without him you probably won’t find winning so easy…”
“We’ve still got Amat,” Ana snorts, and lets the pickup roll forward slowly.
“He’s in the USA, isn’t he? Playing in the NHL? It felt like the local paper didn’t write about anything else all spring. How superior Beartown’s youth setup is, the talented players you’re producing, saying that you’re the new style of hockey and we’re the old…”
The midwife can hear her husband’s bitterness in her own voice, which surprises her, but that’s what life in Hed is like these days: you take everything personally. Every success for Beartown is a defeat on the other side of the town boundary.
“Amat never got drafted. He’s home again. I think he’s just injured…,” Ana begins, but falls silent when she spots what she’s been looking for: a narrow track through the trees, possibly not quite wide enough for a truck.
“For someone who doesn’t like hockey, you seem to know a lot about it.” The midwife smiles.
Ana brings the pickup to a halt, measures the gap with her eyes, then takes a deep breath. Then she says:
“It doesn’t matter if Amat plays or not, we’re still going to beat you. You know why?”
“No?”
Ana bites her bottom lip and slowly releases the clutch.
“Because you’re a shit team. HOLD TIGHT!”
Then she leaves the road fast enough not to get stuck in the ditch, and veers in among the trees. The gap is wide enough, but only just, and she can hear the trunks scrape the paintwork. The midwife loses her breath and stops babbling as they jolt over the uneven ground. She hits her head on the windshield, and it seems to go on and on for hours until Ana stops abruptly. She winds down the window and sticks her head out, then reverses a few yards so that they’re reasonably safe if a tree should happen to fall.
“Here!” she declares, nodding toward the midwife’s map, then out of the window.
The midwife can’t see her hand in front of her when they get out of the pickup, but Ana gestures with her jacket and the midwife grabs hold of it, and the girl leads her the last bit of the way through the forest, huddled up against the wind. It’s astonishing that she knows where she is, it’s as if she’s sniffing her way, then suddenly they reach the car and hear the woman inside screaming, then the man calling:
“THERE’S SOMEONE COMING NOW, DARLING! THE AMBULANCE IS HERE!”
He’s furious when he realizes that there isn’t an ambulance, fear turns some people into heroes but most of us only reveal our worst sides when we’re caught in its shadow. The midwife can’t help getting the distinct impression that the man probably isn’t just irritated by the nature of the vehicle they arrived in, but would above all have preferred male paramedics.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he demands as Hannah climbs into the backseat and starts whispering to the woman.
“What’s your job?” the midwife asks in a controlled voice.
“Painter,” he replies, clearing his throat.
“How about I decide how we help your wife give birth, then you can make the decisions next time we paint a wall?” she says, nudging him gently out of the way.
Ana gets in the front seat, her eyes flitting about manically.
“What can I do?” she pants.
“Talk to her,” the midwife says.
“About what?”
“Anything.”
Ana nods, confused, then peers over the seat at the woman in labor and says:
“Hi!”
The woman manages to smile between contractions.
“H-hello… are you a midwife as well?”
The man interrupts in exasperation.
“Are you kidding darling? She’s, like, twelve years old!”
“So go and paint something, idiot!” Ana snaps back, and the midwife laughs out loud.
For a moment the man is so insulted that he gets out of the car and tries to slam the door behind him, but the wind spoils his dramatic gesture. He can barely manage to stand upright out there, but with the wind in his eyes it’s probably easier to persuade himself that the tears in his eyes are tears of fear.
“What’s your name?” the woman in the backseat pants.
“Ana.”
“Thanks… thanks for coming, Ana. I’m sorry my husband…”
“He’s just angry because he loves you and he thinks you and the baby are going to die and he can’t do anything about it,” Ana blurts out.
The midwife glares at her disapprovingly, so Ana mutters defensively:
“You told me to talk!”
The woman in the backseat smiles wearily.
“You know a lot about men for someone so young.”
“They just think we want them to protect us the whole goddamn time, as if we need their fucking protection,” Ana snorts.
The midwife and woman in the backseat both laugh quietly at this.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” the woman asks.
“No. Well, sort of. But he died!”
The woman stares at her. Ana lets out a regretful cough and adds:
“But look, I’m sure you’re not going to die!”
Then the midwife says, in a friendly but firm way, that perhaps a bit of silence wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. Then the woman screams and her husband races back into the car and takes hold of her hand, and then he starts screaming too when she almost breaks his fingers.
* * *
Johnny spends all night sitting by the kitchen window. It’s an unbearable position for a fireman to be in. All four children are asleep on mattresses on the floor around him. Ture, the youngest, in the arms of Tess, the eldest. Tobias and Ted, the two middle boys, start off farther away, but soon end up as close to the others as they can get. In a crisis we instinctively seek out the only thing that really matters, even in our sleep: the breath of others, a pulse for our own to keep time with. Every now and then their dad gently puts one hand on his sons’ and daughter’s backs, one at a time, to make sure they’re still breathing. There’s no good reason to suspect that they aren’t, but there’s nothing reasonable about being a parent. The only thing everyone said when he was about to become a father was: “Don’t worry.” What a meaningless thing to say. There’s an immensity of love that bursts from your chest the first time you hear your child cry, every emotion you’ve ever felt is amplified to the point of absurdity, children open floodgates inside us, upward as well as down. You’ve never felt so happy, and never felt so scared. Don’t say “don’t worry” to someone in that position. You can’t love someone like this without worrying about everything, forever. It hurts your chest at times, a real, physical pain that makes Johnny bend over and gasp for breath. His skeleton creaks, his body aches, love never has enough space. He should have known better than to have four children, he should have thought about it, but everyone said “don’t worry,” and he’s always been an easily persuaded idiot. Thank goodness. We fool ourselves that we can protect the people we love, because if we accepted the truth we’d never let them out of our sight.