“Smell woke me. You three get down to the trailer, lay a bunch of towels out on the bed, then put the tea on and start sobering up.” Peggy shoves Willy, Char, and Allie out of the way and in the direction of the trailer. “Missy Death Doula, you look like the straightest of the pack here,” she says, taking Wendy by the arm. “Help me get her to the trailer.”

“I’ll call an ambulance,” Allie says.

“Doubt they’ll make it in time. There’s only two, and they’re both on calls. And the hospital called a code census.” Leave it to Peggy, who went home for some quality time with her scanner, to know what’s what. “Besides, my mother had all eleven of us at home. It’s not rocket science.”

All of a sudden I’m kicking myself for not taking one of those damn breathing classes. For not slathering coconut oil on my perineum three times a day to make it more stretchy and supple. For not doing this when Mama was alive, so she could be here to say Quit sooking and get ’er done, child.

“Here,” Peggy says, placing my hands around her forearms. “Squeeze the bejesus outta me. This is what I been growin’ a goodly layer of fat for all these years. Just don’t push yet. I’ll not have your baby born in the woods like a g.d. wolf cub.”

By the time we make it to the trailer, my contractions are coming with barely a breather between them. The tea is made. Willy is pacing, Char is dancing, and Allie has already boiled a pot of water and torn up a bedsheet because that’s what they do on TV.

“All right, I better check your micker-twicker,” Peggy says as she and Wendy ease me onto the bed.

“Jesus, it’s a vagina!” I shriek. “And it is ripping in two right now!”

“Char, Allie, come grab a leg,” Peggy says, low and calm, as if there aren’t hundreds of frantic, panicked, lime-green light shards slashing and piercing the expansive ash-coloured cloud that looms above us.

“She’s not havin’ it right here? Right now?” Willy props himself up against the wall in the hallway, a soup of fire-­engine red and delicate cream swirling around him.

“This child’s not waiting.” Peggy has flecks of a carefully guided gold now tingeing her neon panic. “Bossy and impatient already. Wonder where that comes from?”

My spine instinctively curls around my screaming centre. Sensations I never dreamed of now come to nightmarish life in places I didn’t know existed. There is moaning. There is screaming. There is farting. The real miracle of childbirth is how nobody ever breathes a word about how revolting and surreal and hellish it all is, until it’s too late.

Wendy coaxes breath into and out of my body. Peggy tells me when to push, when to back off, when to bear down. I obey.

“Willy, get over here,” Peggy barks. “Your child is about to come into the world. A baby deserves to be greeted by its father.”