“Ooooooo… Neil.”

He opens his eyes, and at once he remembers: he has fallen asleep in the hospital, his head rocked back in a chair pulled close to Mary’s bed; he understands that he is in the hospital, and also why. Mary is on her side, facing away, and the ridges of her backbone are exposed where the sides of her gown have opened. It is O’Neil’s job to press his hands against this place when her contractions come. He has dozed only a moment.

“Jesus, O’Neil, what’s going on back there?”

O’Neil rises on his toes and leans in. The memory of his dream, of darkness and flight, flits over his consciousness, like the shadow of a bird crossing a field. Was it his parents? He and Mary? He remembers terror, and the sound of water below. His arms feel like rubber, his eyes like little balls of lead. He has been pressing Mary’s back for three hours, first in the front hallway of their house, again in the backseat of the car where it was parked in the driveway, and so on, right until this moment.

“I’m sorry,” O’Neil manages. “It’s your body. You have to tell me.”

Mary groans, her breath catching in her chest like a hiccup. “Is that what you think?”

The nurse, whose name is Rachel, brings in some extra pillows to prop up Mary’s knees. She has brown hair and a pleasant smile; on the lapel of her white jacket is a button that says, We Deliver. As she slides the pillows under Mary, she asks them if they know the sex of the baby.

They do. The baby is a girl. When Mary doesn’t answer, O’Neil tells Rachel they’re not sure.

“I think it’s better like that,” Rachel says. “You can be happy either way.”

Rachel leaves again. Outside the sun is rising, and O’Neil knows he won’t sleep again until after the baby is born. He would like to leave the room, the building even, to take a quick walk in fresh outdoor air, just once around the hospital. But he knows he can’t, that this desire is selfish and can’t even be mentioned, like the wish to buy a sports car or spend a summer in France.

Mary’s obstetrician arrives a little after seven. She is a pretty woman, very small, who always dresses nicely; this morning she is wearing a blue chalk-stripe suit under her white coat, and a pair of gray flats. O’Neil would like to call her by her first name, which is Amy, but since she’s never invited them to do it, he has always called her Dr. Sullivan.

She reaches under Mary’s gown to examine her. She feels around inside her, her eyes pointed upward and away, like someone cracking a safe. She finishes the exam and removes her gloves.

“Five centimeters.”

On the bed Mary groans. “God. That’s all?”

Doctor Sullivan lifts her tiny shoulders in a shrug. “Five is pretty good. It could be eight an hour from now.”

Mary lets her head fall back onto the pillows. “I feel like I’ve carried a piano up the stairs.”

But at ten o’clock Mary is still at five, and she is still at five at noon, when Dr. Sullivan examines her again. The baby is in a good position, she tells O’Neil, but Mary’s cervix won’t dilate. She speaks in a low voice, and uses the word stubborn. Mary has been in labor now for ten hours, fifteen if they count it from the Home Depot. Her face is damp and flushed from exertion, and golden strands of hair cling to her neck and cheeks-the long, rich hair of pregnancy. Mary’s contractions come just two minutes apart now, and between them she has little to say, to him or anyone. She seems to doze, although O’Neil knows she is actually concentrating, putting her mind in a state of readiness to ride out each contraction like a surfer paddling in front of a wave. It is a lonely feeling, he realizes, watching your wife have a baby. With each passing hour she moves farther away from him, into a place where all her strength comes from.

“I know it seems like days, but technically, it’s not all that long for a first labor,” Dr. Sullivan says. The pager clipped to her waist begins to beep, and her hand darts to her waist to shut it off. She peeks at it quickly, frowning. “Well. I have to take this.” She lifts her eyes once more to O’Neil. “Her blood pressure is fine. The baby’s in great shape. But without the epidural, as I said, this could get hard. She could run out of gas.”

All along, Mary has been saying that she wants nothing, no Demerol, no epidural, not even an aspirin. It is history she is thinking of, and O’Neil has seen the pictures: faded black-and-whites of the women of her family, a lineage of stern Germanic matriarchs who bore their children in covered wagons in the middle of blizzards on the Minnesota plain. O’Neil knows that having her baby without painkillers is part of Mary’s conversation with these women, with the past itself. But all along he has hoped that, when it came time, Mary would opt for something to make it easier.

“No epidural,” Mary says from the bed. “Are you kidding? I’ve seen that needle. It’s like something designed by the Pentagon.”

Dr. Sullivan leaves to take her page, and Mary and O’Neil are alone again. O’Neil hasn’t set foot from the room since dawn; somewhere in the late morning his body turned a corner, leaving exhaustion behind and taking him into some new state where night and day have lost their meaning and nothing else will happen until Mary has their baby. The way his body feels reminds O’Neil of the night his parents died, when O’Neil was just nineteen. They had just been up to visit him at college, and on the trip home their car missed a turn and went over an embankment. This is the memory he often returns to. O’Neil was coming back from a party, and when he opened the door to his room and saw the college chaplain there, and his roommate, Stephen, and then noticed behind them his track coach, talking in a low voice to the dormitory’s resident advisor, and their eyes, a luminous chorus of compassion, rose all at once to meet his own where he stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand, he knew something awful had happened, and also what it was; before anyone could speak, a hole appeared in O’Neil’s heart where his parents had once been. Though he has gone on to live his life, to choose a profession and marry and start a family, he is not certain he has ever left it, this pause-a gap in his life like the valley of rocks and trees where his parents’ car, upside down and wheels spinning, came at last to rest. It was three days before he slept again. This is the way he feels now-suspended, like a balloon that will neither rise nor fall-and he wonders if there are other men in the building who feel the way he does.

The doctor has suggested that Mary walk, and O’Neil helps her out of bed and into her robe. He is uncertain how much weight he should bear, and he settles for letting her take his arm, like a couple walking down the aisle. For four hours more they shuffle the short hallway of the hospital’s labor and delivery unit, from the empty operating room where cesareans are performed to the front doors and back again, pausing whenever Mary has a contraction so she can brace herself against the wall. Most of the other rooms are empty, though as they pass one door they hear a woman’s deep, throaty moans, and a man’s voice telling her to push. When they pass it the next time they hear a baby crying.

When Mary can walk no more, Dr. Sullivan examines her again. Mary’s contractions are so tightly spaced that it is hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. The day has turned to late afternoon, and someone has drawn the drapes in Mary’s room to shield her face from the low, sharp light streaming in. O’Neil misses his wife, who seems to have gone far, far away from him.

“Have you eaten anything?” Dr. Sullivan asks him.

O’Neil can’t remember. He guesses he hasn’t. He is holding Mary’s damp hand and wiping her face with a cloth he has moistened in the pitcher on the table by her bed.

“Well, you better get something if you’re going to.” Dr. Sullivan snaps off her gloves and speaks in a bright, loud voice. “Ten centimeters, Mary. I think we’re off to the races here.”