12th of Never

was squeezing me into the shape of a meal.
    I was scared, and it wasn’t all about the pain.
    Babies got strangled by umbilical cords. Women died in childbirth. Elderly primigravidas were more at risk than younger women, and old babes like me weren’t supposed to do childbirth by themselves. What if there were complications?
    Claire Washburn is my best friend. She is San Francisco’s chief medical examiner—a forensic pathologist, not an obstetrician, but hell. She’d had three babies. I knew she could talk me through this. At least she could try.
    I dialed and Claire answered with a groggy “Dr. Wazjjjbrn.”
    “Claire. It’s too soon to go to the hospital, I know, but
yow
. I think I can feel the baby’s head down there. What should I do?”
    “Don’t push!” my best friend shouted at me. “I’m calling nine-one-one right now.”
    I shouted back at her, “Call a private ambulance service so I can go to the Women’s Hospital! Claire, do you read me?”
    Claire didn’t answer.
    My phone was dead.

Three
    MY RAGING RIVER of hormones was sending a single, unambiguous message.
    Push
.
    Claire had said, “Don’t push,” and that sounded both insane and impossible, but I got her drift. The baby was safe inside me until help arrived.
    It must have taken me ten minutes to ease my throbbing, hurting self into bed.
    I knew that Claire wouldn’t let me down, that she had probably thrown the weight of her office behind the 911 call. I put my birthing instincts in park and thought with my entire being,
I’m in God’s hands now. All I can do is make the best of this and hope that the baby is safe. That’s all I can do.
    Martha got up on the bed and curled up next to me. I put my hand on her head and I resisted my contractions. I heard noises, someone calling “Helloooo”—sounds that were far outside my tunnel of pain. I put my hands up against blinding flashlight beams and then, like a force of nature, all the lights went on.
    The power was back
.
    My bedroom was filled with strapping men standing shoulder to shoulder in a line that stretched from the door to the bed and ran along both sides of it. There had to be at least twelve of them, all with stricken, smoke-smudged faces, all in full turnout gear. I remember staring at the reflective tape on their jackets, wondering why a dozen fire-fighters were crowding in on me.
    I shouted, “Where’s the fire?”
    A large young man came toward me. He was at least six four, with a buzz cut, a still-bleeding gash on his cheek, and a look of deep concern in his eyes.
    He said, “I’m Deputy Chief Robert Wilson. I’m called Robbie. Take it easy. Everything is going to be okay.”
    Really? Then, I realized that a fire rig had been closer to the apartment than an ambulance and so firefighters had answered the 911 call.
    I said, “This is embarrassing. My place is a mess.”
    I was thinking about my clothes strewn all over the place, dog hair on the bed, somehow forgetting that I was completely naked with my legs spread apart.
    Robbie Wilson said, “How are you doing, Sergeant?”
    “I’m having a baby,” I said.
    “I know. You take it easy now.”
    He fitted an oxygen mask to my face, but I pushed it away.
    “I don’t need that.”
    “It’s for the baby,” he said. He turned to the gang of firemen and shouted, “I need boiling water. I need towels. A lot of them.”
    Did I have any clean towels? I didn’t even know. I pushed the mask away again and grunted at Robbie, “Have you ever delivered a baby?”
    He paused for a long moment. “A couple of times,” he lied.
    I liked him. I trusted him. But I didn’t believe him.
    He said, “You can push now, Sergeant. Go ahead and try.”
    I did it. I pushed and grunted and I lost track of the time. Had an hour passed?
    It felt as though the baby were grabbing my rib cage from the inside and holding on with both fists. The pain was agonizing and it seemed that I would never get Baby Molinari out of my body and into the world. Just when I thought I had spent my last breath, my baby slid out of my body into Robbie’s baseball-glove-size hands.
    I heard a little cry. It was a sweet sound that had the special effect of putting the pain behind me, hugging me around the heart.
    “Oh, wow. She’s
perfect
,” said Big Robbie.
    I peered into the light and said, “Give her to me.”
    I wiggled my fingers in the air as someone cut the cord and cleaned up her little face. And then my baby was in my