Harvesting the Heart (29 page)

While
Nicholas was on the phone with my doctor's answering service, I
started to pack a bag. It
was
an
entire month before my due date. But even if it had been May, I knew
I wouldn't have had a bag packed. That would have been admitting the
inevitable, and right up till the last minute I did not truly believe
that I was destined to be a mother.

Lamaze
class had taught me that early labor lasted for six to twelve hours;
that contractions started irregularly and happened hours apart.
Lamaze had taught me that if I breathed the right way,
in-two-three-four, out-two-three-four, and pictured a clean white
beach, I could surely control the pain. But my labor had come out of
nowhere. My contractions were less than five minutes apart. And
nothing, not even the previous contraction, could prepare me for the
pain of the next one.

Nicholas
stuffed my bathrobe, two T-shirts, my shampoo, and his toothbrush
into a brown paper grocery bag. He knelt beside me on the bathroom
floor. "Jesus Christ," he said, "you're only three
minutes apart."

Oh,
it hurt, and I couldn't get comfortable in the car, and I had started
bleeding, and with every grasp of the fist inside me I gripped
Nicholas's hand. The rain whipped around the car, screaming as loud
as I did. Nicholas turned on the radio and sang to me, making up
words to the songs he did not know. He leaned out the window at the
empty intersections, yelling, "My wife's in labor!" and
drove like a madman through the blinking red lights.

At
Brigham and Women's Hospital, he parked in a fire zone and helped me
out of the car. He was cursing about the weather, the condition of
the roads, the fact that Mass General had no maternity ward. The rain
was a sheet, soaking through my clothes and plastering them to me, so
that I could clearly see every tightening of my belly. He pulled me
into the emergency admitting area, where a fat black woman sat
picking her teeth. "She's preregistered," he barked.
"Prescott. Paige."

I
could not see the woman. I twisted in a plastic seat, wrapping my
arms around my abdomen. Suddenly a face loomed—hers—round
and dark, with yellow tiger eyes. "Honey," she said, "do
you have to push?"

I
couldn't speak, so I nodded my head, and she jumped to attention,
demanding a wheelchair and an orderly. Nicholas seemed to relax. I
was brought into one of the older labor and delivery suites. "What
about those modern rooms," Nicholas demanded. "The ones
with nice drapes and bedspreads and all that?"

I
could have given birth in a cave on a bed of pine needles; I did not
care. "I'm sorry, Doctor," the orderly said, "we're
full up. Something about the atmospheric pressure of a hurricane
makes women's waters break."

Within
minutes, Nicholas stood to the right of me, a labor nurse to my left.
Her name was Noreen, and I trusted her more than my own husband, who
had saved the lives of hundreds. She rustled the sheet between my
legs. "You're ten centimeters," she said. "It's show
time."

She
stepped out of the room, leaving me alone with Nicholas. My eyes
followed the door. "It's okay, Paige. She's going to get Dr.
Thayer." Nicholas put his hand on my knee and gently massaged
the muscles. I could hear the steady rasp of my breathing, the hot
pulse of my blood. I turned to Nicholas, and with the clarity and
clairvoyance that pain brings, I realized I did not know this
man at all and that the worst was yet to come. "Don't you touch
me," I whispered.

Nicholas
jumped away, and I looked into his eyes. They were ringed gray,
surprised and hurt. For the first time in my life, I found myself
thinking,
Well,
good.

Dr.
Thayer blustered into the room, her scrubs flying untied behind
her. "So you couldn't wait another month, Paige, eh?"

She
squatted down in front of me, and I was vaguely aware of her fingers
probing and flattening and stretching. I wanted to tell her I
could
wait,
that I had been willing to wait the rest of my life rather than
actually face this child, but suddenly that was not the truth.
Suddenly I just wanted to be free of the throbbing weight, the
splitting pain.

Nicholas
braced one of my legs and Noreen braced the other while I pushed. I
felt for sure I would crack in two. Noreen held a mirror between my
legs. "Here's the head, Paige," she said. "Do you want
to feel it?"

She
took my hand and stretched it downward, but I pulled away. "I
want you to get it out of me," I cried.

I
pushed and pushed, knowing all the blood in my body was flooding my
face, burning behind my eyes and my cheeks. Finally, I sank back
against the raised table. "I can't," I whimpered. "I
really can't do this."

Nicholas
leaned close to me to whisper something, but what I heard was the
muffled conversation between Noreen and Dr. Thayer.

Something
about a special care team, about the baby not coming fast enough now.
Then I remembered the books I had read when I was first pregnant. The
lungs. At the end of the eighth month, the lungs have just finished
development.

Even
if he ever got here, my baby might not be able to breathe.

"One
more time," Dr. Thayer said, and I struggled up and bore down
with all the energy I could summon. Quite clearly I could feel the
nose, a tiny pointed nose, pressed against the tight seal of my own
flesh.
Get
out,
I
thought, and Dr. Thayer smiled up at me. "We've got the head,"
she said.

After
that it all came easily: the shoulders and the thick purple umbilical
cord, the long skinny creature that lay, howling, between my legs. It
was a boy. In spite of what I knew, I had hoped till this last moment
that I would be having a girl. For some reason it still came as a
shock. I stared at him, unfolded, wondering how he had ever fit
inside. Doctors took him away from me, and Nicholas, who was one of
them, followed.

It
was at least a half hour before I got to touch my son. His lungs were
pronounced perfect. He was thin but healthy. He had the familiar
newborn features: flattened Indian face, dark rat hair, obsidian
eyes. His toes curled under, plump like early peas. On his belly was
a red birthmark that looked like a funky scribbling of the number
twenty-two. "Must be the stamp of the guy who inspected him,"
Nicholas said.

Nicholas
kissed my forehead, staring at me with his wide-sky eyes, making me
regret what I'd said before. "Four hours," he said. "How
considerate of you to finish all the hard work in time for me to do
my morning rotations."

"Well,
you know," I said, "we aim to please."

Nicholas
touched the baby's open palm, and the fingers curled together like a
daisy at sunset. "Four hours is damn fast for a first delivery,"
he said.

The
question died on my lips:
Was
this my first?
Staring
into the demanding face of this son, I thought that maybe, right now,
it didn't matter.

Nearby,
Dr. Thayer was completing the medical record. "Last name,
Prescott," she verified. "Have you picked a first name?"

I
thought of my mother, May O'Toole, and wondered if she knew in her
corner of the world that she had a grandchild. I wondered if the baby
might have her eyes, her smile, or her sorrow.

I
turned my face up to Nicholas. "Max," I said. "His
name is Max."

Nicholas
went to Mass General to round his patients, and I was left alone with
my baby. I held him awkwardly in my arms as he screamed and thrashed
and kicked. I felt beaten from the inside; I couldn't move very well,
and I wondered if I was the best person for Max right then.

When
I turned on the TV above the bed, Max quieted down. Together we
listened to the wind shake the walls of the hospital as the reporters
described a world that was falling apart.

At
one point I found Max looking up at me, as if he'd seen the face
before but couldn't place it. I inspected him, his wrinkled neck and
blotchy cheeks, the bruised color of his eyes. I did not know how
this child could possibly have come out of me. I kept waiting to feel
that surge of mother love that was supposed to come naturally, the
bond that meant nothing could keep me from my baby. But I was looking
at a stranger. My throat seemed to swell up with a pain more raw than
childbirth, and I recognized it immediately: I just wasn't ready. I
could love him, but I had expected another month to prepare. I needed
time. And that was the one thing I would not have. "You should
know," I whispered, "I don't think I'll be very good at
this." He placed his fist against my heart. "You have the
upper hand," I told him. "I'm more afraid of you than you
are of me."

At
Brigham and Women's, one of the options for new mothers was partial
rooming-in. The baby could stay with you all day, and at night when
you were ready to go to sleep, a nurse would roll the

cabinet
over the fridge, into the never-used ice bucket that held her
forbidden packs of cigarettes. My father did not know she smoked—
I realized this even though I was a baby, since she went to great
pains to hide the cigarettes and she acted guilty when she lit one
and she sprayed the air with cinnamon freshener after she'd flushed
the ashes and the butt down the toilet. I don't know why she hid her
smoking from him; maybe, like most other things, it was a game for
her to play.

She
pulled one from the wrinkled pack and lit it, drawing in deeply. When
she exhaled she stared at me, sitting on the linoleum with my blocks
and my favorite doll. It was a cloth one, with practice snaps and
zippers and buttons, strategically placed through ten wrappings
of bright cotton clothes. I could do everything but the shoelaces.
Cigarette ashes dropped on my doll. I looked up and saw a perfect red
ring left by my mother's lipstick, just above the V of her fingers.
"Two weeks," she said, nodding at the orange tree. "That
thing'll be dead in two weeks." She stubbed the cigarette out in
the sink and sighed, and then she pulled me up by the hands. "See
here, Paige-boy," she said, using her pet name for me. She
settled me on her hip. "I'm no good at taking care of things,"
she whispered confidentially, and then she began to hum.
"Supercalifragilisticexpiali-docious," she sang, whirling
me around and around in a fast, stomping polka. I giggled as we
flushed the evidence away. I wondered just how much I knew about
my mother that my father never would have guessed.

The
wheels of the bassinet throbbed in my head, and I knew Max was coming
long before the night nurse arrived. He was screaming. "Hard to
believe they were worried about his lungs," she said, holding
him out to me. For a moment I did not reach for him. I stared angrily
at this greedy thing, who had twice in one night taken me away from
all I had left of my mother.

^chapter
14

Paige