"We're going," Priya said.
"It's Braxton Hicks."
"Great. Then a nice nurse will tell you it's Braxton Hicks and we'll come home. Frank, get the car."
Her father drove. He drove the way he'd taught a thousand teenagers to drive, both hands on the wheel, full stops at every sign, and Nora lay across the back seat with her head in Priya's lap and watched the streetlights come on overhead, one after another, as they went up Freeport toward Sutter. She had her hand on her belly and she was talking to the baby without making any sound. Stay. Stay, stay, stay. It's not time. I've got you. Stay.
The baby kicked once, hard, right against her palm.
At the hospital, they put her in a triage room with a fetal monitor strapped around her, two flat discs on elastic bands, and the room filled with the sound of her daughter's heartbeat—fast, galloping, a little horse running somewhere far away. A nurse named Bev with reading glasses on a beaded chain looked at the strip coming out of the machine and said, "Well, she sounds just fine. Your uterus is a little irritable, that's all. Somebody had a big day."
Nora laughed. It came out of her like a sob and she couldn't stop it, and Bev looked at her over the glasses and then looked at Frank in the corner chair and Priya by the curtain and said, gently, "Bad day?"
"I caught my husband kissing my mother at my baby shower."
Bev was quiet for a second. Then she pulled the rolling stool over and sat down beside the bed. "Honey," she said, "I've been a labor and delivery nurse for twenty-six years, and that is genuinely a new one."
They gave her fluids and a dose of terbutaline that made her heart race and her hands shake, and the contractions slowed and spaced and finally stopped. They kept her four hours for observation. At one in the morning Bev unhooked the monitor and said, "She's staying put for now. Your job for the next eight weeks is to keep it that way. Do you have somewhere calm to go?"
"I have a house," Nora said. "It's mine."
Behind her, very quietly, Priya said, "We'll see about that."
* * *