She went back into the bedroom. She washed her face in the basin Rosa brought, so Clara would not see she had been crying. She took Clara's hand again as the next contraction built, and counted her through it, and the one after it, and the one after that, until the sky beyond the shutters began, very faintly, to change — and Clara, exhausted, gripping her hand with astonishing strength, gasped, "Don't go. Whatever happens next. Gia — don't go."
"I am not going anywhere," Gia said, and meant, for the first time in her life about anything, exactly and only what she said. "We are going to hospital together as soon as the road allows. You have my word."
Chapter 23: The Road to the Hospital
They left the house at first light, in rain that had thinned from a battering to a steady, treacherous fall, because the doctor, reached at last on a clear line, had listened to Frank's careful list of timings and said, without any softening at all, "Bring her now. Not when it is convenient. Now."
The lane from the Valenti house to the main road was partly flooded and strewn with branches. Twice in the night Enzo's men had cleared it in the dark, knowing this journey was coming, and twice the storm had thrown more down behind them. So the journey was planned like something other than a journey. The big car in the middle, Clara in the back seat built up with pillows and blankets, Gia beside her holding her hand and a bowl she prayed would not be needed, Rosa in the front with the bag of Clara's documents and the clinic cards and a thermos no one would drink. A car ahead to test every stretch of water and call back its depth. A car behind, because Enzo trusted nothing that night, not even a road behind them already travelled. Enzo himself rode in the lead car for the first mile and in the rear car for the last, as if he could personally argue with the weather from either direction.
Clara endured the drive the way she had endured the night: one contraction at a time, and a terror between them that was worse than the pain. The contractions had not stopped. If anything, the movement of the car coaxed them closer, and Gia, timing them on her telephone with a hand that no longer shook — fear burns itself out, in time, and leaves competence standing in its place — counted six minutes, then five and a half, and reported each figure forward to Rosa in a level voice, for Frank, who was following the whole convoy by telephone from the house he would not leave unguarded.
"Tell her she is doing beautifully," said the driver, a man named Sal who had driven Tommy Bennett to work in the gardens in another, simpler year, and who had asked, that morning, to be the one to drive this car. "Tell her my wife had ours in forty minutes in a taxi. Tell her hospitals are — Miss Bennett, hospital's just — "
"Sal," Gia said gently, "drive."
"Yes, Miss Romano."
The worst moment came at the low bridge where the creek crossed under the road to the highway. The lead car stopped. The water was running over the bridge itself, brown and fast and full of debris, not deep by the look of it, but depth, as every Staten Islander knows, is exactly what floodwater lies about best. The lead driver got out in the rain and waded it with a pole, chained at the waist to his own door by a tow rope, while Clara, in the back seat, gripped Gia's hand through a contraction and whispered, over and over, "Please. Please. Please," to no one either of them could name. The man reached the far side. He raised his arm. Six inches, running fast, passable slow. Sal took the car over at a walking pace with the water hissing at the sills and every person in it holding their breath except Clara, who had been taught all night to do the opposite, and who breathed, heroically, in and out, in and out, while the creek tried the doors.
On the far side, Rosa crossed herself. Gia discovered she was crying, silently, without any drama, and wiped her face on her borrowed sleeve before Clara could see.
They met no other danger that Aldo had made. Whether Aldo's remaining men had been called off, or had taken one look at a three-car convoy in floodwater and reported Clara already beyond reach, no one ever learned. What Enzo's men on the road did learn, and reported, was a dark car parked above the bridge with its lights off, which left, unhurriedly, when the lead car turned its full beams upon it — left, and did not follow. Gia heard Rosa relay this and closed her eyes. She chose to believe it was her father's last look at the situation, and that the situation, for once, had looked back.
The hospital received them the way good hospitals do, as if a soaked, frightened convoy arriving out of a storm with a girl in early labour at eight and a half months were a problem with procedures attached, which, blessedly, it was. There were lights that did not flicker. There was a wheelchair, and a lift, and a midwife with a calm, broad face who took Clara's particulars from Gia — who astonished herself by knowing all of them: the dates, the clinic, the blood group card in the bag, the timings since midnight — and said, "Well done. You have done very well, all of you. Now let us take over, and you can fall apart in the corridor like everyone else."
Clara caught Gia's sleeve as they wheeled her through the double doors. "The baby," she said. Her face was exhausted beyond fear, into something clearer. "Whatever they say — come and tell me yourself. Not a stranger. You."
"I will," Gia promised. "I am not going anywhere. I told you on the road and I am telling you here. I will be exactly where you left me."
It was nearly two hours before anyone was allowed to fall apart, because there were examinations and monitors and a doctor who did not waste reassurance. Then, at last, the doctor herself came to the small waiting room where Gia sat in a plastic chair with Rosa asleep upright beside her, and Enzo, arrived and rain-dried and forbidding in a borrowed hospital corridor, standing at the window.