Chapter Text
She’s in restraints—cuffed to the gurney, steel gnawing into her wrists, when the contractions begin in earnest.
The closest hospital to the jail is twenty minutes out. Comparatively, the ride there isn’t so bad—it’s the wait in the parking lot as they’re turned away by the understaffed and overcrowded facility and the subsequent trip to the next nearest hospital that ends up getting to her.
The ambulance manages to hit every pot hole and speed bump as they go, each jolt a lash. She thrashes, and the cuffs dig in some more. It seems to take much longer than it actually does to get where they’re going, or so she’ll remember afterwards.
She throws her head back with near neck breaking force when another contraction hits. They come quicker now, crashing on top of one another; telling her in no uncertain terms her child is coming into this world, ready or not.
The shackles are so tight.
She tries fighting it, grits her teeth and grinds her back molars ‘til they ache, fails to listen to the EMT calmly telling her to breathe, when she’d rather be telling him to fuck off.
Until finally—finally—she’s wheeled into a delivery room, restraints and all.
She’s not really aware of the doctor’s shouting as he tells off her guards about things like “stress to the baby” and “mother’s blood pressure”, but she dimly notices when the cuffs are removed.
And then the real work begins.
* * *
Emma’s Spanish is barely above remedial, but she’s learned what embarazada means, so she knows its common knowledge in the block now. She doesn’t know what’s worst, the fact that Neal managed to knock her up before making her his fall gal, or how the rest of the inmates are treating her now that they know. Emma tells her cellmate as much, switching between incoherent mumbles and incoherent babbling.
“…I want to die, Araceli.” Big watery unshed tears hang on her eyelashes. She knows she’s being dramatic, but she doesn’t care—she’s pregnant, in prison, and god, she’s only eight-fucking-teen.
Araceli stops picking at the bits of ash on the palm of her hands, and pins Emma with an exasperated stare reserved for occasions when she thinks she’s grown particularly obnoxious. Araceli sighs, before impatiently intoning in a course and accented voice, “Pobrecita, un dia se quedaras como una pajarito…which is better than most of us will get. But not this time.”
The silence after hangs between them like a sour note, and Emma realizes no translation is forth coming. Shamefaced, she starts contemplating the dust bunny rolling about the cell floor. Araceli isn’t a friend, not really. She’s Emma’s cellie. Nothing more.
“Ven pa’ca.” Araceli gestures Emma over with a movement so sharp she doesn’t question it. She curls up on her lap, and soon Araceli’s elegant piano-hands are sifting through Emma’s blond curls.
“Setenta y dos.”
“What?”
“That’s how long you’ll have with your baby. Seventy-two hours. After that…”
Emma could finish the rest herself. “She goes in the foster system.” No. “I won’t let that happen.”
“Hm. What choice do you have?”
* * *
She’s never been needed. But here she is, her arms wrapped around this tiny, vulnerable miniature person, who needs her. And maybe, in another time, another world, she’d could be that person (in every way). But here and now…?
Here and now it’s not a decision she’ll have to make, because, somewhere, a clock is ticking.
Seventy-two hours.
All the time she has—all the time she’ll ever have to get to know her son.
God. Her son.
In the first hour the nurse helps get her started breastfeeding. She can’t believe how tiny he is. Not unhealthily, just…small.
They take him away in the second hour, so they can both rest. And the guard places her shackles back on.
In the twenty-ninth hour they notice a slight yellowing in his skin and they have to take him away again to place him under white light. It’s during this time the adoption lawyer appears out of nowhere. She doesn’t question it nearly as much as she should, doesn’t ask this mysterious man the question that should be on her lips before he even has a chance to introduce himself: “Why me?” not when the inevitable answer is, “why does it matter?”
In the thirty-sixth hour they bring her son back and she feeds him again, rocks him against her breast. She thinks then, given the chance, that maybe, just maybe, she could be ready for this. But then her mind wanders back to memories of a childhood filled with heartache and broken dreams and she wonders just what she could offer that would be any better.
In the forty-second hour the lawyer returns with the paperwork despite her never having agreed to anything.
Desperation sweetens even the sourest of Faustian bargains, but in the sixty-eighth hour she’s still undecided. And every minute now is precious. She hums to her boy a bit desperately as he cries, unsure of what else to do. Her guard just glares at her. She manages to calm him down an hour later, and as he sleeps she makes her choice, such as it is.
In the seventy-first hour, the papers are signed. A closed adoption. That was the price. But if it means keeping her beautiful boy out of a life she knows all too well—shunted from family to so-called family—she’ll pay it. She’s only known him for three days, but she can at least give him that.
It’s the seventy-second hour and their time is up. Emma’s lips linger on her son’s forehead as she kisses him one last time, whispering in his ear even as she hands him away:
“…I have to give you your best chance.”