I was dreaming rememberless melodies, wonderful songs such as the world has never heard before, and will never hear again, when Tooncie, our cat, woke me up. He was scratching the bedside table on Amy's side, and I stirred and opened my eyes. I wet down the roof of my mouth with my tongue and closed my eyes again to go back to sleep when Amy said, in an ordinary, middle-of-the-day voice, "I'm glad you're awake. I think this is it."

I sat up in bed, blinking my eyes. "You do?"

"I've been having them for about half an hour. They're pretty intense."

"Well," I said. What was that melody? It would make me a million dollars if I could remember it. But it was gone already. "Let's wait here a few minutes. Maybe through three more. Then we'll call the doctor."

"God, it's only three-thirty. What if I'm wrong? I'll have woken him up in the middle of the night for nothing."

"He gets false alarms all the time, I'm sure." I myself was convinced it was a false alarm. After all, we'd had a few of those ourselves, with Abby.

We waited. She had one more. Then another. Then another. I walked downstairs and got the phone, brought it up, and Amy called her doctor. He told her to go to the hospital-don't panic, no emergency-so they could hook her up to a monitor. He'd meet her there later in the morning. We lay there in bed for a few more minutes, spooning. "This is really happening," Amy said.

We each took a shower, got dressed. I woke Abby up: she smiled up at me, seemed excited by the break in routine. I called my parents, put them on alert. (They had agreed to come and watch Abby during the labor, so I could focus all my attention on Amy.) Then we were off, carrying the bags Amy had already carefully packed a couple of weeks earlier out to the car.

We entered the hospital through the emergency room. A volunteer made Amy get in a wheelchair, and Abby sat on her lap for the ride up to labor and delivery, which didn't seem like a great idea to me, but Amy said it was okay.

They took us into a monitoring room, hooked Amy up to a belt that measured her contractions. "What people doing to my mommy?" Abby asked me, worried, pointing over at the young, freckle-faced nurse working on Amy.

"She's helping her to see when Olivia is going to come."

"Olibiba in Mommy's tummy?"

The nurse took out a small white stick and used it to see if Amy's water had broken. She said if the stick turned purple the test was positive. When she brought the stick up we all gasped: it was a dark, dark purple. "Yep, you've ruptured, alright. Did you feel any wetness during the night?"

"Well, yeah, but just a little." Sheepishly she admitted, "I thought I had just peed or something."

"Nope. We're having us a baby today! I imagine if you haven't dilated anymore in the next couple of hours the doctor will want to induce. Once the water has broken you need to deliver pretty quickly."

Using the phone by Amy's bed I called my parents. Then I left a voice-mail message with my boss, giving him a few details about things I was working on, calls I was expecting, the market report that still needed to be done. I'd be out for the next week, I told him.

The nurse came back in and told Amy to walk up and down the hallways for awhile. That usually sped the contractions up, she said. So we all three started walking the halls together through the "birthing center," as they called it. Abby hopped "like Rabbie" (from Winnie the Pooh) while holding our hands, myself on one side, Amy on the other. We walked and walked. Amy started getting tired. Abby asked me to pick her up. I sat her up on my shoulders. We walked some more. My back started hurting from carrying Abby's weight but I figured that if Amy had to endure labor pains I could at least endure this.

I started regarding Amy in a way that I remembered well from when she had Abby. I think it can only be called worship. I'm not worthy. Any woman who has had a baby is a hero, my hero, we should all be kneeling at her feet. I told her I was proud of her. "You did it," I said. "You recognized when you were in labor and needed to call the doctor."

"I did, didn't I? Huh. I'm proud of me, too."

With Abby, she had never really experienced that certainty. The doctor back in Kentucky had simply induced her when she got to be a certain number of days past her due date and hadn't gone into labor yet on her own.

Finally my parents came, and we reluctantly said goodbye to Abby. Mom said they'd keep checking in with us.

Amy's dad and sister and niece came soon after they admitted Amy to the labor-delivery-recovery room, a very nice suite with dark-wood furniture, hardwood floors, a breakfast nook, a large private bathroom, a recliner that folded out into a sort of cot for me: our home for the next three days.

The doctor came in and chatted with Amy. Amy told him she didn't want to be induced unless it was absolutely necessary, and he told her to walk some more, maybe that would cause her to dilate on her own. He'd check back at around eleven, and if she hadn't dilated more by then he'd have to induce.

After a couple of hours Amy talked me into going downstairs to the cafeteria with her dad and Julie and Emily for some lunch. I went down and, low-carb boy that I am, ate a tossed salad from the salad bar. We sat at a table and chatted about, of all things, the movie Bowfinger. None of us did a very good imitation of Eddie Murphy, but we all tried. Amy's dad seemed preoccupied, even a little sad. "Let's get on back up there," he suggested after a few minutes. We put our trays on the conveyor belt and went back up to the room.

"I won't be able to stay in there if she's suffering," he said to me on the way up. "I can't handle it."

Waiting. It was a long day. I called the brake repair place and told them I wouldn't make it until later in the week. He told me that he had already ordered the parts, they were in. I told him, a little more firmly this time, that he'd have to wait a few more days.

The doctor induced Amy, and before long the contractions became quite painful. The new nurse on duty, Sharon, attended to Amy quite closely, and over the course of the afternoon and into the evening she became like another family member to us, indispensable both as a nurse and a means of emotional support.

Amy decided to get the epidural. The pain she was experiencing was intense and, as the nurse pointed out, unnecessary. "When can I get it?" she asked, between contractions.

"I can put your name in now."

"But it's still so early."

"It's on an IV, so it's just a steady drip. There's no too early, really."

"Put me down for one of those," she said.

We waited for the anesthesiologist. At three "Guiding Light" came on. It was the one soap opera Amy watched regularly. She had been watching it since she was a girl. It was something her mother used to watch, so Amy had practically grown up with it.

"I wish Mom were here for this," she said.

"I miss her, too," I said.

"She should be here for this."

"It isn't fair," I agreed.

I sat in a recliner next to her bed, trying to read from a collection of stories by Michael Chabon. I may have gotten two paragraphs read. At one point I looked up and asked Amy who a certain person was on TV. I recognized a lot of the characters from all my years of secondhand "Guiding Light" exposure, but I didn't recognize this one. "He's a Spanish mafia guy," Amy explained.

The anesthesiologist came in with his cart of tools and tubes and devices. He asked Amy's family to step out for a bit. I asked if I could stay, and I was surprised when he said yes. (Back in Kentucky they had made me leave the room for this part.)

I let Amy squeeze my hand during this painful, prolonged process. I tried not to look too hard at what the doctor was doing to Amy's spine, with his needles and syringes and swabs. Amy squeezed the shit out of my hand.

"Do you remember the name of the doctor who did your first epidural?" this doctor asked us.

"No, I'm sorry, I don't," Amy said. "I remember what she looked like, though."

I took his question to be a sort of ongoing lament of his: here he was, eradicating pain whereever he went, but did anyone remember his name? No, sir, they didn't. He was the Rodney Dangerfield of medical specialists. I made it a point to remember his name. But now I've forgotten it again.

Anyway, Amy's pain didn't get better after the epidural. It got worse. Much, much worse. She grabbed her hips and outer thighs, said it felt like the baby was popping out of the side of her body.

"The baby's all on this side," the nurse, Sharon, theorized. "Let's have you lie on your other side and get her shifted over a little."

But that wasn't it. She was still in pain. She was writhing. She was talking in tongues. She was curling up inside herself.

They called the anesthesiologist back in. He asked Amy if she could feel it when he poked at her skin with a toothpick-looking thing. Sometimes she said no, sometimes she said yes. "Hmm. That's the damnedest thing. And you're hurting where?"

Amy pointed at her side.

"Are you sure? I mean, of course you're sure but that's so…. I've never heard that before. This has never happened before. Hmm. Well, to tell you the truth I wasn't real happy with that first one. It took several tries for me to get it in, that's why it took so long. Let's just take it out and do it again?"

"Really?" Amy asked. She wasn't happy.

"Believe me, you'll be glad I did it when it's done."

So we went through the whole process again. "Ah, beautiful," the doctor said a few minutes. "Perfect. Sit back and wait for sweet relief," he said. He stood around for several minutes, monitoring her blood pressure, asking her how she felt.

Amy finally smiled, and I thought the doctor was going to ask me to join him in a dance. "See?" he said. "See there? That's the stuff, isn't it?"

Amy nodded off for a little nap, and when she woke up she had dilated a couple more centimeters, and her contractions were coming every three to four minutes. You could tell by looking at the peaks and valleys on the monitor. Amy said she personally wasn't feeling them at all, now.

At one point both of our families were in the room with us. Mom and Dad brought Abby, and Abby came up and hugged me and Amy. The nurse, who rarely left Amy's side, fell in love with Abby almost immediately. Abby was wearing a blue ribbon Amy had made her earlier that said "#1 Big Sister."

Amy enjoyed the company. She reigned supreme over the room.

At around five-thirty Amy became fully dilated. The nurse asked everyone else to leave the room. And we got down to business.

Every couple of minutes, during a contraction, the nurse would coach Amy through three long ten-second pushes, one right after the other, with a short pause in between for deep breaths. By the third or fourth such contraction I was doing the counting and the coaching, and Sharon was down there checking the cervix, feeling the baby's head to make sure it was coming down, shouting up encouragements at her.

It was the three of us in there, alone for over an hour and a half in this room that grew dimmer and dimmer as the sun set outside. Amy looked depleted from the effort, and yet the pressure to push was so great that when she had a contraction she knew she had to push, and she did. I don't know where she got her reserves. Her leg muscles started jerking and shaking from exhaustion.

"Dad, come over here and see Olivia's head," the nurse said to me during one contraction.

I tried to count but I looked down and saw Olivia's purplish-gray head slowly migrating down the birth canal and I lost track of my numbers and I think I cried and Amy was groaning between clenched teeth.

"Time to call the doctor," Sharon finally said. "Be right back."

She was gone for three contractions. I thought, Dear God she's left me alone here in this room and the baby's going to pop out! Amy was planning to cheat and skip pushing for one contraction, but the physical need to push was greater than the need to rest, and I gripped her hands and counted out to ten for her and told her I loved her and she was great and eight nine ten take a deep breath you're doing great and one two three four five six seven eight nine ten.

"You're so great," she said to me. "You're really helping. I love you so much. I feel so close to you."

I kissed her and held her hand and told her I couldn't believe how strong and brave she was.

The doctor came in with a fleet of other nurses. It was seven PM, and Sharon's shift was over, but she was staying over for this, she said she wouldn't miss it, and part of me didn't want the other nurses in here or even the doctor, the three of us had been doing just fine on our own, thank you very much. The doctor broke down the bed so he could put Amy's legs up in stirrups and he talked her through several more contractions, but the baby seemed to have come to a resting point and she wasn't budging.

Amy said "Ahhhhhhhhhhh" and her lips were dry and I got out the wet cloth and wiped at her forehead and gave her an ice chip and she said "Aahhhhhhhhhhh" again. "Get it out, get it out," she moaned. Then she sobbed, saying, "Oh my god, I called her an 'it.' I'm sorry. That was horrible. I'm a bad mother, I'm a bad mother."

The doctor said, "It's okay, Amy, it's alright. You're not a bad mother. You're doing great. We might have to use the vacuum extractor to get her out, though."

"I don't want to," she said, crying. "I don't want that."

But during her next contraction she said, "Ahhh, I don't, I don't care, I don't care what you use, just get her out of me, get her out. Gooooooddddddddd!"

And for the next contraction the nurse held one end of the machine while the doctor put the little cone over the baby's head and Olivia came out in one slippery gush and the doctor caught her and she looked like an ancient being wise beyond human capability and granite-gray and utterly at our mercy. The doctor clamped her cord and handed me the scissors, and I cut through the cord and released her into this world of problems and questions and yearning and dreams with unrecallable melodies and hopefully joy too, there's joy here, too, Olivia, and you are my joy and we have a lot to talk about, you and I.

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