Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [67]
Carmen sat in the hospital lobby trying to calculate. The timing was bad on almost every front. Grandma Carmen, Christina’s mother, was still in Puerto Rico with her aunt. Everybody, David included, was getting travel engagements out of the way in time for when the baby arrived. But the baby apparently had little consideration for anyone else’s plans. Carmen was beginning to wonder if this baby was going to have a few things in common with its big sister.
Carmen couldn’t leave her mother alone while she got David. It could take a while. Her mother was not yet in labor, true, but who wanted to sit in the hospital without someone who loved you?
The thing to do was call one of the people Carmen trusted most in the world. Of those three, Bee was out of town, and Carmen had misgivings about Tibby and hospitals. She called Lena. Lena didn’t answer her regular phone or her cell. Not surprising, since she often didn’t carry the cell. Carmen didn’t feel like leaving another crazy-girl message. She called Tibby. By some act of fate, Tibby picked up after the first ring.
“Can you come to the hospital?” Carmen begged, her voice runny with tears. “My mom’s water broke, and David is out of town, and I have to find him before my mom’s doctor gives her medicine to get the labor going. Can you keep her company until I get back?”
“Yes,” Tibby said instantly. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Keep your cell with you, okay? I’ll call.”
“Okay.”
They both hung up.
Carmen’s call came not long after Tibby woke up. It had been a long night. It was tiring, after all, staying up till dawn watching a tree, climbing down that tree, and then getting locked out of your house for a few hours and not getting into bed until after seven in the morning. It was. Ask anybody.
And it was surreal sitting in a chair next to Carmen’s mother on a bed in a labor room at the hospital listening to the fetal monitor bleep. It was made even more so on three and a half hours of sleep.
Tibby wondered at the mountain that was Christina’s belly. She remembered pretty well her own mother’s pregnancies with Nicky and then Katherine. She was thirteen for the first and almost fifteen for the second. She hadn’t found the whole thing at all amusing at the time.
But fear not, she reminded herself and, silently, Christina. We at the Tibby Corporation have a new policy toward younger siblings and even babies generally. We like them and like for them to be safe. We even admit that we love them, though not more often than is necessary.
“How are you feeling?” Tibby asked. She somehow felt that, much as she cared about Christina, she wasn’t the best person for this job.
“Just fine,” Christina said, through a mouth that was tense. Her eyes were distracted.
“Are you sure?” Suddenly Christina was doubled over.
“I think so,” Christina said grittily, clenching her jaw.
Tibby was on her feet and fluttering nervously. “Should I…get the midwife, do you think?”
“I—I don’t…”
Christina couldn’t talk, which said to Tibby she should get the midwife.
The midwife, Lauren was her name, was filling out papers at the nurses’ station. “Uh, Lauren? I think Christina is maybe having some trouble.”
Lauren looked up. “What kind of trouble?”
Tibby raised her palms skyward. She was not a doctor. She was not a nurse. She wasn’t a mother or anybody’s husband. She couldn’t even vote yet. “I don’t know,” she said.
Lauren followed her into Christina’s room. “Are you having contractions?” she asked Christina.
Christina sat up holding her stomach. “I’m not sure.”
Lauren looked at the paper spooling out of the monitor. “You, my dear, are having contractions.”
“But I’m not in labor.” Christina said it half as a statement and half as a question.
“I would say you are in labor.”
“But it’s too early,” Christina said. Her eyes weren’t focusing quite right. “I thought tonight—”
“Tonight we’d induce if you didn’t go into labor naturally. You are going into labor naturally from what I can see.”
“But David and