Summer People (40 page)

O
ne person dying is like a single drop rejoining the ocean. If Arch could tell his wife and children—and the grandchild who is about to emerge into the world—anything, it would be this:
It’s all going to be okay, even in death, especially in death
. But he lacks the power to communicate; he isn’t a ghost, only energy crackling in the air.

At a quarter to three on the morning of March twenty-fourth, he is in a delivery room of Nantucket Cottage Hospital. Piper Ronan is in the birthing chair, Peyton Ronan is moving a wooden rolling pin over Piper’s lower back, David Ronan is sitting in a straight-backed chair borrowed from the cafeteria with his hands covering his eyes because Piper has forbidden him from watching. Carla Hughes, labor and delivery nurse, has been on this ward for twenty-one years and has helped to deliver twelve hundred babies, though this is her first second-generation child. She helped deliver Piper nearly eighteen years ago. Carla isn’t one to pass judgment on the mess kids get themselves into. She has three teenaged sons herself—one of whom makes honor roll every report card, one of whom was arrested for taking a baseball bat to their neighbor’s mailbox, and one of whom has yet to distinguish himself as saint or sinner. Carla will say that this particular seventeen-year-old girl is a model patient. She doesn’t complain, and doesn’t make demands, although she did send her mother out of the room, but this is to be expected from even the most seasoned patient. So far the delivery is going smoothly. Carla imagines it has something to do with the youth of Piper’s body—the muscles are loose and flexible. A teenager’s tolerance for pain is high; just look, for example, at her pierced nose.

The doctor monitors Piper’s progress.

“Three more pushes,” he says to everyone in the room.

Outside the door wait Beth, Rosie Ronan and a barely conscious Garrett. Arch focuses on his son. If he had a body, he would give Garrett a hug. The birth of this baby is confusing him; he doesn’t know how to cope with it. Despite all of his conflicting emotions, Garrett is looking forward to holding his child, if only for a few minutes. Arch remembers holding his own children for the first time. What he remembers most vividly is how grateful he was that God gave him two arms: one for a baby boy, one for a baby girl.

Beth and Rosie Ronan are doing everything in their power to suppress their eagerness. Both are afraid to even poke their heads in. They can hear through the crack in the door the sounds of Piper struggling: the breathing, the moaning. Rosie is ashamed that she has been banished from the room, but that, she figures, is the price she pays for leaving the girls to their father. It will take a while for either of the girls to trust her again, to trust her and David together.

Beth is afraid to enter the room because David waits on the other side. Arch understands the complexity of her feelings. Another thing he would like to tell her is this:
Every man, woman and child
is
entitled to one secret
. Arch’s secret is that he knew about Beth’s first marriage from the beginning. During their engagement, Arch clerked for a judge and one day during a lull he checked to see if his future wife had ever appeared on public record. In death, all is forgiven, but in this case, Arch forgave Beth long ago. He hopes that someday she will forgive herself.

Piper bears down, remembering the first time she laid eyes on Garrett Newton, when she went to his house last June for a cookout. He’d looked so sad. Handsome and sad—an irresistible combination. Now she’s the one who’s sad, because twenty-four hours after the birth, this child will be handed into the waiting arms of a couple from South Hadley, Massachusetts, a philosophy professor and her husband. Her own baby whom she’s felt kick and squirm inside of her every hour for months, who stepped on her bladder last week, causing her to leak in her maternity overalls during calculus class. Her baby—for nobody knows this baby yet but Piper—will be carried out the front door of this hospital, leaving Piper alone with an aching body and bleeding psyche. She imagines meeting the child again someday and being asked to explain:
Why did you give me up?

I am so very young,
Piper thinks.

Another contraction on the horizon, like a Mack truck, and Piper knows it’s headed right for her.

Peyton is proud of the job she’s doing as birthing coach. She’s the only family member who hasn’t made Piper cross. But Peyton is tired. It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning and she’s starving. Her parents promised her a huge Downyflake breakfast as soon as Piper and the baby went into recovery, and so that’s what Peyton thinks about: blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup, a plate of crisp bacon, a glass of fresh OJ.

“Here comes the head,” the doctor says. “Give me one more big push.”

Piper grits her teeth. The epidural has all but worn off. Nothing in the world prepared her for how this feels.

“One more,” the doctor says.

“I can’t!” she screams.

“I have the baby’s head,” the doctor says. “I need one more big push.”

Arch sends her a surge of energy. This is, after all, his grandchild.

Piper takes a deep breath and thinks, though she’s not sure why, of Nantucket as a baby, floating in an amniotic ocean. Then, even stranger, of Nantucket as her mother.

She hears her baby cry. Feels a hot, wet weight on her belly.

Piper grasps for the child and it is brought up to her, close, where she can smell the tang of blood and fluids from her own body.

“It’s a boy,” the doctor says.

A boy, Arch thinks.

A boy? Piper is confused. She’d been so sure …

“A boy!” David cries. He kisses Piper’s forehead and hugs Peyton. He has never been so proud of his daughters. Then he’s out the door and nearly knocks over Beth and Rosie and Garrett. “It’s a boy!” he proclaims, so elated by the news that he doesn’t have time to wonder if Beth knows that he and Rosie are back together and that he has finally let what’s passed be the past. He kisses both women.

There is laughter and crying. Beth hurries down the hall to wake Winnie and Marcus. Garrett slides down the wall until his ass hits the floor.
A boy
. A son of his own, just like he always thought he wanted.

They name the baby Archer Newton. The adoptive parents will add their own last name—they may even change his first and middle names—but for the next twenty-four hours when the baby is in the arms of the people around him, the people who loved him first, he will be Archer Newton.

No one is surprised by the name except, perhaps, Arch himself. The way that life continues, the way that human beings persevere, regenerate,
keep going,
summer after summer, season after season, generation after generation, amazes him. Even now.

Thank you—

To the professionals: Michael Carlisle, Jennifer Weis, Jennifer Reeve, Sally Richardson, George Witte.

To Becca Evans, Lauren and Mara Rosenwald, Julia Chumak, Amanda Congdon, Margie Holahan and Sally Hilderbrand, life-savers all.

To Clarissa!

To Congdon & Coleman Insurance, Wendy Hudson at Book-works, Roberta White at Mitchell’s Book Corner—and Wendy Rouillard of
Barnaby
fame, because everyone should have a friend in the business.

To my inner, inner circle—Eric, Randy, Heather, and Doug— and to Judith Hilderbrand Thurman, for keeping the spirit of our shared childhood with Dad alive.

Finally, a big hug and kiss to my steadfast cheering section, my source of endless sunshine and encouragement and love, my very own “boys’ club”: my husband, Chip Cunningham, and our sons, Max and Dawson.