For the first few minutes of what he assumed to be impending labor, Barry was consumed by a fatherly panic. Sophie calmed him, assuring him that unlike the taxicab childbirth scenes of Hollywood movies, labor was hardly a speedy affair. We probably have hours ahead of us, she informed him, and on that score she was absolutely right.
Neither could make it back to the house very easily alone, between bad eyesight and severe contractions, so they hobbled arm in arm and helped each other home. Once there, Sophie settled onto the bamboo cot while Barry lit the oil lamps and started a fire in the stone oven, intending to boil as much sterile water as he could—he wasn’t sure precisely why, although it seemed like something a midwife ought to do. He also burrowed through the deflated rubber folds of the life raft, rummaging around until he found the first-aid kit. Upon locating it—next to a pack of decidedly stale Russian cigarettes that in his anxious state he longed to smoke—he removed all of the gauze and bandages contained within, leaving the cigarettes right where they lay.
“How are you doing, baby?” he shouted over his shoulder as he checked the water.
“I’m okay. I don’t think I want to be inside, though.”
“You don’t?”
Sophie, half-inclined on their bed, shook a sweaty brow. “Non. I want the baby to be born outside.”
After taking the water off the stove, he helped Sophie as best he could to shuffle across the palm-frond mat and out the door.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked, his feeble eyes useless in the inky dark.
“The beach. Where our old shelter was. There’s a large rock that’s tilted a little. Do you remember? That’s where we ate the octopus, and where we first kissed.”
“Okay, you lead the way, I’ll help you walk. I can’t see a thing.”
“Je t’aime.”
“Je t’aime aussi.”
The last part was said with fresh assurance in their voices, because it was the one and only thing that they could both be certain of.
After a painful half lap of the island, Sophie found the spot. She settled gingerly onto the flat stone, which Barry padded with a fresh bed of fronds. He made sure she was comfortable, then kissed her and stumbled his way back to the house, where he gathered up the bags of clean water, the first-aid supplies, and a freshly washed Charles Tyrwhitt cotton dress shirt minus one sleeve, so thin and brittle after three years of wear that it had become virtually translucent. His heart was racing. They had been waiting for months, and now the day had arrived.
Barry followed the sound of Sophie’s voice to locate her, and he knelt beside the wondrous blur of her body—she had removed her breechcloth and was utterly round and naked in the starlight. Her breathing had quickened, she was almost panting; he could feel the heat rising off of her in waves.
“What happens now?” he asked, sincerely ignorant of the answer.
“Now?” Sophie shrugged as best she could. “We wait.”