At Home With The Templetons by Monica McInerney

excitement and happiness, letting everyone know that this first baby was going to arrive on time, and was on its way already. He’d just started calling the rest of the people on their phone list - aunts, uncles, cousins, friends - when she gently reminded him that perhaps they should think about getting her to the hospital.
    He drove more slowly than she’d ever seen him do, one hand on the wheel, the other tightly holding her hand, until she told him it really would be okay if he went faster than twenty kilo metres an hour. He refused to let her walk into the hospital, stopping the car outside the front door, running into reception, begging the use of a wheelchair, despite her insistence she was fine to walk.
    ‘We’re having a baby,’ he said to anyone they passed in the corridor. ‘My wife is having a baby.’
    ‘Good thing you’re in a maternity hospital, then,’ an amused nurse replied.
    Nina had just settled into her room and was lying back on her bed breathing deeply as she’d been taught, Nick doing the breathing alongside her a little too enthusiastically, when she remembered in all the fuss they’d left her suitcase at home. Nick checked with the doctor. Was there time for him to go back and get it?
    Time to go there and back two or three times, the doctor assured them. ‘Your baby’s just letting us know he or she’s on the way. We’ve a long wait yet.’ ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ Nick said, kissing her forehead. ‘I love you.’ They were his last words to her.
    She was in full labour when she was told the news. She’d been scared by the sudden arrival and intensity of the pain, she needed Nick there, now, beside her, now. She couldn’t understand where he was. She called his name, shouted it, began screaming it, asking the nurses to get him, shouting at her obstetrician, her mother, her father, anyone, begging them to find him. It was her mother who eventually came into the labour ward, her face ashen, her hands clenched. It was her hands Nina noticed, even through her own pain. Her mother never clenched her hands like that.
    Later, she learnt there had been passionate arguments outside the delivery room about whether to tell her or not, and when to tell her. She reacted badly when she heard that. ‘You were just going to pretend Nick wasn’t dead? That he’d gone out for a coffee while his child was being born? Taken a wrong turn and got lost?’ She became hysterical, shouting at the doctor, at her parents, at her sister, at anyone who came into her room who wasn’t Nick.
    Three hours later, Tom was born, a strong, healthy baby. A beautiful baby. She learnt from Hilary much later that there was fear in the family she would reject Tom. That her shock about Nick’s death would overwhelm any love she might feel for her son. It didn’t happen like that. Her grief for Nick was the worst pain she’d ever felt - sharp, raw, frightening - yet her love for her baby son was as immediate and overwhelming. He was the only thing that was good in her life. He was now, suddenly, shockingly, the person she loved most in the world.
    She managed three days in hospital before she discharged herself, against everyone’s advice. ‘I know what I need to do,’ she said. It was a phrase she’d repeat many times over the next few weeks, the next few years, as too many people tried to tell her how to feel, what to do, how she should be behaving.
    If it had been hard in the hospital, it was worse outside. Every moment of every day she missed Nick so much it was a physical pain. Each day she was confronted with the horrible, constant reality of his absence. She walked the streets they’d walked together, pushed the pram they’d chosen together, drove the roads they’d travelled together. After Tom went to sleep each night, she sat alone in their living room, slept alone in their bed. If she went to visit her mother and father, she had to drive through the intersection where Nick was