Read Walk like a Man for Free Online Page B

oxytocin to induce labor.
    Nothing happened.
    I stayed with her until visiting hours were over. We were waiting for a sign. We were waiting for our new life to start. It was right there, so close we could almost see it.
    And nothing happened.
    I went home alone. After calling her parents and mine, I sat out on the porch with a cigar and a bourbon and the cordless phone. It didn’t ring.
    I found out the next morning, when I arrived at the hospital shortly past dawn, that her water had broken, and the first of the contractions had hit at about three am. Nothing more than twinges, though. No reason to wake me up.
    Things started happening around ten with the first major contraction. Moments later the kidney stone, disturbed from whatever precarious perch it had been painlessly occupying, lodged itself painfully and undeniably smack in the middle of our birth story.
    Cori vaulted out of the bed, stumbling in blind pain toward the bathroom. She almost made it, but she ended up barfing in the sink.
    The rest of the day unfolds like a battle: shards of memory and confusion.
    I remember sitting at the edge of the bed, Cori hooked up to equipment to monitor the strength of her contractions, watching as each wave of pain hit and peaked and passed, completely unnoticed by Cori, who was sweating and borderline delirious from the kidney stone pain.
    I remember arguing with the nurses, none of whom believed that Cori was having a kidney stone episode, ascribing the situation with derisive glances and clucking of tongues to another first-time mother not being prepared.
    I remember being told, over and over again, to wait for the doctor, who would decide if a specialist should be called in. And when would the doctor be there? “Later,” they said. I have never felt more violent toward a group of women in my life. Didn’t they see what was going on?
    Finally a doctor coming in, a stranger. He took one look at Cori and asked, “You’ve had kidney stones before?”
    She nodded and gasped, “Yes.”
    â€œRight. Then you know exactly what this is. Nurse?” The nurse leapt to attention.
    The next hour or so exists only in fragments. Watching Cori get an epidural, turning away as the needle slipped into her lower back. An assessment, with stirrups, and a quick decision that, no, this wasn’t going to happen on its own. The rush to an operating theatre. Scrubbing up. Putting on surgical greens.
    And then I was at the head of Cori’s bed, perched on a stool behind the wires and tubes, stroking her forehead as the anesthetic rushed into her.
    The one thing the doctor told me, our doctor, who had finally arrived, was “Don’t look over the curtain.” He pointed at the institutional green sheet drawn up taut as a trampoline between Cori’s head and the rest of her body. I kept hunched low, watching Cori breathe, listening to the doctors and nurses joke casually back and forth about their weekends as they cut into my wife’s body.
    An endless moment seemed to hang in suspension, a moment I feel like I’ve never truly escaped.
    And then our doctor, Doctor Dave, said, “It’s a boy.”
    I almost wept.
    â€œDo you have a name?”
    â€œAlexander,” I said, without hesitation. “Alexander James.”
    I don’t know where it came from. 7 I don’t know why it burst out of my mouth so fully formed. Cori and I had a list of possible names for boys and girls, and Alexander James was nowhere on it. James was my grandfather’s name, and there were several Jameses and Jims in the generations since, so we hadn’t even considered it.
    And yet . . .
    Alexander James. Xander. 8
    It stuck.
    â€œDo you want to see him?”
    I’m not good with kids. I don’t know how to hold them, or what to do if they cry. Xander was crying, but there was nothing I wanted more, right then, than to see him and hold him.
    The anesthetist lifted the wild nest of tubes