Andrew nodded and stepped into the hall to call Edith. When he came back, he was rubbing his eyes.
“Lie down,” Becky said, half hoping that he wouldn’t take her up on her offer. No such luck. Andrew made a beeline for the bed. “I’m just gonna close my eyes for a minute,” he said. Approximately ten seconds later, he was sound asleep, leaving Becky lonely in the dark. “Dammit,” she whispered. She’d forgotten that Andrew’s seven years of fourteen-hour days in hospitals had given him the uncanny ability to fall asleep at the drop of a hat in anything that even resembled a bed.
Another contraction started. “You know,” she gasped, “this hurts a lot more than Naomi Wolf would have had me believe.” Andrew snorted in his sleep. Becky clutched her belly, groaning, trying to breathe through it the way she’d practiced, feeling ashamed of herself. When she’d been in a room down the hall with Ayinde, a small secret part of her had believed that she’d be stronger than her friend, that no matter how bad the pain she wouldn’t scream or writhe or call on Jesus. Well, the joke was on her. Here she sat, screaming and writhing like a pro, and the only reason she hadn’t called on Jesus yet was on account of being Jewish. And Becky was sure that in another hour or so, given the intensity of her contractions, all bets would be off, and she’d be taking whatever divine intervention she could get.
A nurse poked her head into the room and picked up the clipboard next to the bed, where Becky’s birth plan was prominently displayed. “Okay, so we’re going to do this natural,” she said with a smile.
No,
Becky wanted to shout.
No, no! I was high when I wrote that! I didn’t know what I was talking about! Bring on the drugs!
But she kept her mouth shut and tried to hold still while the nurse found the baby’s heartbeat with a handheld Doppler device.
“Ow, ow, ow,” Becky moaned, shifting her weight from foot to foot as the contraction tore through her. Andrew’s cell phone started ringing.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Becky groaned, knowing instantly who their mystery caller was. “You’re not even supposed to use cell phones in here!”
“I’ll just be a minute,” he said, angling his body away from her, pressing the phone to his ear. Becky could hear every one of Mimi’s words.
“An-DREW? What’s going on? I haven’t heard from you in hours! I called your house, but someone—” Becky grimaced. For reasons she’d never understood, Mimi had taken an instant disliking to Becky’s mother, and refused to so much as utter her name. “—said you weren’t there. Where are you?”
“Andrew,” Becky whispered, “it’s the middle of the night and I’m in labor. Where does she think we are? Key West?”
“Well, Mom, we’re actually a little busy right now.”
No,
Becky mouthed frantically.
No!
“Shh,” Andrew whispered and turned toward the window, leaving Becky to pound fruitlessly on his plaid-shirted shoulder.
“Oh mah GAWD!” Mimi shrieked. “Is the baby comin’? Is this it? Oh, ANDREW! I’m gonna be a GRAND-ma!” There was a click, then silence. Andrew closed his eyes and banged his forehead against the wall.
“Just keep her in the waiting room,” Becky said. “Please. Seriously. If you love me at all, keep her in the waiting room.”
He bent down and squeezed her hands. “I promise,” he said.
“You’d better,” she said. “Because I’ve had about all I can take here.”
There was a knock on the door, and there was Sarah, in a sweatshirt and jeans, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, grinning at them with a brimming tote bag over her shoulder. “Hey, you two,” she said. Becky felt better just looking at her. She let Sarah lead her back to the rocking chair and told Andrew to go back to sleep. “Take a nap,” Sarah urged him. “We’ll need you later.”
Ten minutes later, Andrew was snoring again, arms outstretched, glasses askew on his face, and Becky was squatting on the birth ball, with Sarah crouching behind her, digging her knuckles into the small of Becky’s back. “Does that feel any better?”
“Yes. No. It’s still awful,” Becky said. She felt as limp as a wet washcloth, more tired than she’d been in her entire life. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurrrts,” she moaned, shaking her head back and forth, her sweaty hair sticking to her cheeks. “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.”
Sarah wrapped her arms around her shoulders and rocked with her. “You’re doing fine,” she said. Becky wasn’t so sure. Maybe this was the great equalizer she’d been hoping for—not pregnancy itself, but birth that put all women, large and small, black and white, rich and poor and in between, on the same playing field, battered by fear, begging for drugs, wanting nothing except for the pain to stop and the baby to arrive.
“Shh,” Sarah soothed, as the contractions rose and fell, rose and fell. She flipped open to the page Becky had bookmarked in
Birthing from Within.
“Visualize your cervix. See it opening like a flower.” Sarah set the book down. “I can’t believe I just said that out loud.”
“FUCK my cervix,” Becky wept, leaning against Sarah’s shoulder. “How do women do this?”
“Fucked if I know,” said her friend. “Want me to call a nurse?”
Becky shook her head, feeling sweaty tendrils sticking to her cheeks as Sarah helped her to stand up and lean against the wall. “This cannot get any worse.”
The door to her room opened, and a triangular wedge of light spilled into the darkness, followed by a familiar voice. “Hahyahhh.” Which was Mimi’s approximation of “Hi.”
“Oh, shit,” Becky whispered into Sarah’s shoulder. “Wrong again.”
Mimi narrowed her eyes and squinted past Sarah, toward the nurse who’d just walked through the door. “What is SHE doing here?” she demanded. Her voice was its standard two or three decibels too loud for the room. “I was told nobody was allowed!”
Becky bit her lip. Maybe lying had been a mistake.
The nurse glanced at the chart, then at Sarah. “She’s Becky’s doula,” she said.
“Well, that’s my son, who is a surgeon in this hospital, and that,” she said, gesturing toward Becky’s abdomen, “is my grandchild.”
And what am I?
Becky thought.
Tupperware?
Mimi extended her trembling finger toward Sarah. “If SHE gets to stay, then I do, too!”
Andrew sat up in the bed. “Mom?”
“Mimi,” Becky whispered, “Andrew and I really wanted our privacy for this.”
“Oh, don’t worry! You won’t even notice I’m here!” She kicked the birth ball into the corner, sat down on the rocking chair, and pulled a video recorder out of her purse.
Unbelievable,
Becky thought. “Smile pretty,” Mimi said, flicking on the overhead lights and pointing the lens at her daughter-in-law. “Oh, dear. You could use a little lipstick.”
“Mimi, I do not want lipstick! Please turn the light off, and…oh, God,” Becky groaned as another contraction started up.
“Well, there’s no need to be dramatic,” Mimi announced and moved closer with the camera, speaking into its recorder. “Hah there, this is me, Mimi, your grandmother, and we’re in the hospital on Saturday morning…”
“MiMIIIIIII!”
“Okay, Mom,” Andrew said. He grabbed his mother’s elbow with one hand, her handbag with the other, and began propelling her toward the door. “Let’s go sit in the waiting room.”
“What?” Mimi shrieked. “Why? I have every right to be here, Andrew. This is MY grandbaby, and I don’t understand why you’d want some…some doo-doo or whatever she is in there with you while your own mother gets left in the cold…”
The door blessedly swung closed behind them. Sarah raised her eyebrows. “Don’t even ask,” Becky panted. The contractions went on and on, unspooling over the hours. Andrew and Sarah took turns walking with her, rubbing her feet and her back until the sun came up, and then they started spacing out, dwindling to one every five minutes…then one every seven…then one every ten.
Dr. Mendlow’s normally cheerful face was grave, his high forehead wrinkled as he finished his exam.
“Still three centimeters,” he said. Andrew held one of her hands, and Sarah held the other. Becky started to cry.
“That’s the bad news,” the doctor continued. “The good news is, the heartbeat still sounds strong. But for whatever reason—and it might be the size of the baby, which, as you know, we’ve been keeping an eye on—the baby’s head is just not descending enough to get the cervix to really dilate.” He sat down on the edge of Becky’s bed. “We could try some Pitocin to see if that’ll start the contractions again.”
“Or?” Becky asked.
“Or we could have a C-section. Which, given that we’re right up against forty-two weeks, and given what we suspect about the size of this baby’s head, is what I’d recommend.”
“Let’s do it,” Becky said instantly. Andrew looked shocked.
“Becky, are you sure?”
“I don’t want Pitocin,” she said. She gathered her damp curls off her cheeks. “Because then the contractions will kill me, and I’ll need an epidural anyhow, and I could still wind up needing a C-section after all that, so I might as well get one now. Let’s do it.”
“Why don’t you take some time to talk about it,” said Dr. Mendlow.
“We don’t need any time,” said Becky. “I just want a C-section. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
It wound up taking two hours. Because Becky refused an IV earlier that night, they hooked one up to get her hydrated. The anesthesiologist’s arrival didn’t improve things. He introduced himself as Dr. Bergeron, and he looked like a dissolute French poet, skinny and pale, with long hair and a goatee, the kind of guy who made his own absinthe on weekends and might have a body or two stashed in his basement. There was a splatter of blood on the cuff of his scrubs. “Do you think he’s on heroin?” Becky whispered to Andrew, who took a long look at the doctor before shaking his head.
Then she was in the operating room, with a half dozen new faces introducing themselves—Dr. Marcus, one of the residents…Carrie, the nurse-anesthesiologist…I’m Janet, and I’ll be assisting Dr. Mendlow.
Why did the doctors get last names and the nurses just first ones?
Becky wondered. One of the nurses helped her to sit up and drape herself over Carrie’s shoulders while the goth-looking anesthesiologist swabbed her back with something icy. “You’ll feel a little pinch, then some burning,” he said. She could smell rubbing alcohol, and the room suddenly seemed too bright, too cold, and her entire body was shivering.
“I’ve never had surgery before,” she tried to tell Carrie. “Not even a broken bone!” Carrie eased her back down onto the table.
“Hi, Becky.” Finally, Andrew was there, gowned and be-hatted, with a surgical mask on inside out. It made Becky laugh as they lifted a sheet at her waist level. He must be so nervous, she thought, to get that wrong.
“Hey, hon,” said Dr. Mendlow. Becky couldn’t see his face, but his eyes were warm and reassuring over his mask.
“You okay?” Andrew whispered, and she nodded, feeling tears sliding down her cheeks and pooling in her ears.
“Just a little scared,” she whispered. “Hey, if I can feel them cutting, you’ll make them stop, right?”
“Time of incision, 10:48.”
Incision? “They started already?” Becky asked.
Andrew nodded. She could see the action reflected in his glasses. There was a lot of red. She closed her eyes. “Is the baby out yet?”
Laughter. “Not yet,” said Dr. Mendlow. “You’re going to feel a lot of pressure.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
Baby,
she thought,
hang in there, baby.
“Suction,” called Dr. Mendlow. “Ooh, she’s wedged in there tight.”
And then she heard someone say, “Oh, there she is!” and there was a scream—not a little, puny baby scream, either, but a gusting, furious
What are you DOING to me?
kind of scream.
“Look up,” said Dr. Mendlow. “There’s your baby!”
And there she was, her skin the pink of the inside of a seashell, in a coat of blood and white vernix, eyes squinched shut, head perfectly bald, tongue vibrating as she wailed.
“What’s her name, Mom?” one the nurses asked.
Mom,
Becky thought wonderingly. “Ava,” she said. “Ava Rae.”
“Dad, you want to come over here?”
Andrew slipped away from her side. She watched as he went over to the scales and to the table where they wiped Ava’s flailing arms and legs, weighed her, wrapped her in a blanket, and pulled a striped cap over her head. “She’s perfect, Becky,” he said, and he was crying, too. “She’s perfect.”
The next few hours were a blur. Becky remembered Dr. Mendlow asking Andrew if he wanted to look at her uterus and ovaries—“See, right here, very healthy!”—and thinking that he sounded like a used-car salesman trying to talk a customer into making a purchase. She remembered Andrew telling her that their mothers were outside and that a nurse had wheeled Ava by to show them. She remembered being pushed into Recovery, which was nothing more than a curtained-off section of the labor and delivery floor. She remembered lying on the too-narrow gurney, shivering from her head to her feet. Every so often she’d run her hands over her belly, reaching for the hard rise of her stomach, feeling instead something that felt like a warm, deflated inner tube. And her toes…she could see them for the first time in weeks. “Hi, guys!” she said and tried to wiggle them. It didn’t work. Becky wondered whether that was something to worry about.
Another nurse bustled into her curtained cubicle, bearing a bundle wrapped in a blue-and-pink-striped blanket. “Baby’s here!” she announced. And there was Ava, with a perfectly round pink face and one of her ears sticking out at a funny angle from underneath her cap.
“Hi,” Becky said, running one finger along her cheek. “Hi, baby!”
They let her hold the baby for a minute. Becky pressed her against her chest. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. She offered the baby her breast, but Ava wasn’t interested…she just blinked and looked around, looking somewhere between thoughtful and disgruntled, like someone who’s fallen asleep reading a really great book and is still trying to figure out which world they’re in, the real one or the one they imagined while they read. “Sweetheart,” Becky whispered, before the nurse whisked the baby away.