Chapter 47 Deliverance #2
After much wandering through the unfamiliar city, I reached Dave and Kevin’s art nouveau apartment building near Lake Geneva.
As I pressed the doorbell, I realised that the trousers of my overalls were completely soaked.
At first, I attributed that to likely having voided my bladder without noticing.
I became aware of the contractions shortly after Kevin opened the door.
I stumbled inside, collapsing onto a rug as a searing wire closed like a noose around my abdominal organs, pressing them impossibly close together, pulling them lower, the infernal coil stretching ever tighter.
Yet unwinding very suddenly, setting my innards free.
I let out a yelp that was disproportionately small for the pain that caused it and likely drowned out by the shriek of sirens coming from outside, reminding me of that distant night two years prior.
Much like then, these sirens sounded to impose a strict quarantine on all inhabitants of Lausanne until further notice, issuing an uncompromising warning in several languages that anyone to break the quarantine would be shot on sight.
“Oh thank Christ, Renny!” Dave and Kevin were on their knees, bumping into each other as they hugged me both at the same time. “How on earth did you manage to get out?”
“Were you bitten or scratched?” Dave asked, taking in my presumably ashen appearance.
“No, I ... aaargh,” I groaned, doubling over as the hot wire grasped my womb once more.
Underneath my hand, my belly turned impossibly hard before softening again.
“Renny ...?”
They both sprang back up with speed that belied their less-than-athletic figures. They took a few steps back.
“Damn it, you idiots,” I told them once I caught my breath, “I am not infected. You are doctors. I’m a heavily pregnant woman ... what do you think is happening?”
Comprehension dawned on Dave’s face, and he went pale. His eyes widened, eyebrows disappearing under the brown waves of his hair.
“Shit,” he said simply.
“Yeah,” I told him, already feeling the wave of the next contraction crashing through me. “That’s likely coming very soon.”
Sweaty and grunting with effort, all three of us, Dave and Kevin managed to transfer me to a bed in the guest room. They propped me up on the starched white pillows and closed the cream curtains on the arched windows for privacy. The whole apartment smelled faintly like very old people.
I lay on my back, convulsing, my body no longer my own.
“No exceptions to the quarantine? Not even for medics?” I asked as they both bent over me with concern in their faces.
They shook their heads in unison, and I clenched my jaws shut and closed my eyes, waiting for another contraction to pass.
“No way to get me to another hospital?”
“No, hun. I’m so sorry,” Dave answered softly, his hand on my clammy forehead.
Kevin said something about grabbing towels and hot water and scuttled away.
I took a deep, determined breath. As I had already established that day, it is a mother’s primal prerogative to sacrifice any other life for the lives of her children. Including her own.
“You know what you have to do.” Unsmiling, I looked deep into Dave’s eyes. “You are going to take a knife and you are going to cut me open.” I grabbed his collar and pulled his harmless round face closer to mine. “And you are going to save my babies.”
In truth, despite my bravado, I had not fully appreciated the gravity of my situation until I saw Dave hesitate for just a split second in consideration.
My heart skipped a few beats, and I let go of his collar.
“No, I’ll do no such thing,” he said carefully at last, a worried crease between his brows.
“Yes, yes you will,” I gasped, and suddenly I knew it to be inevitable.
“Dave, be reasonable. You know what the odds are of this going well for me. I am a small woman with a weak, patchwork uterus, pregnant not with one but two babies fathered by a very large man. You know what the chances are of my surviving this. You cannot save me. What you can do is save my children. You must cut me.”
It was getting dark outside, and with the curtains closed, the room was cast in shadows. Dave’s face became less and less visible to me from where I lay.
“Not yet, I won’t.”
A shiver ran through my body. Just as Einar’s tone changed to the master’s during our intimate moments, so did Dave’s then, transforming him from my best friend into a doctor.
As such, I was viscerally terrified of him, shirking away from his methodical gaze, his sterile voice, and his cold, assessing touch.
“Not while there’s a chance. We know from your scans that neither twin is in a breech position and that, due to being twins, they’re slightly undersized.
Your contractions are already seven minutes apart, and you’re showing no signs of uterine rupture.
Those are all promising signs. I think there is a strong possibility that you’ll be able to give birth naturally despite the contraindications. ”
“Dave, I don’t want a chance! Nor a strong possibility! I want certainty!”
But as he bent over me, his round face was a stranger’s grave visage, indifferent to my pleas.
Hours passed, and I gave myself over to the pain entirely, letting it rule over me, body and mind.
I was drenched in sweat and feverish. The whole act of labour seemed to be an act of withdrawing back inside my centre, of losing grasp on the outside world until my thoughts and the sensations of my tortured body seemed the only palpable thing in the universe.
Dave and Kevin became nothing but spectres, shadows existing without any objects casting them. I was lethargic and slow, as if I were submerged in a thick, sugary syrup.
“Don’t you bloody let up now, hun. You’re doing it! They’re coming, all you have to do is push.” Dave squeezed my hand, but mine rested feebly in his, disconnected from me, and I powerless to lift a single finger.
“Don’t let up now! Think of Einar. Imagine he’s here.”
That was no hard feat in the state I was in.
It was easier than paying attention to the two real men in the room.
Because nothing relevant seemed to happen outside of me anymore.
And Einar was no longer any more than a part of me, and as such, it was in his power to be close to me when the living could not.
At first, my mind conjured him up in front of me by my splayed feet.
“Hey, trouble.” The apparition smiled at me first.
Then, realising what he had seen, he covered his eyes and exclaimed, “Damn, my girl, did I really need to see that?!”
I chuckled faintly and closed my eyes, seized by another powerful contraction.
My organs solidified painfully. I turned into a rock. But a wave coursed through me, and I rode it with a mighty exhale of my breath.
The next time I opened my eyes, Einar was leaning over me, his face above mine. Strands of ash and gold hair were in his frosty eyes, their depth oblique and deceptive like the mirror quality of glaciers.
“And not a peep out of you, my brave girl,” he said with an affectionate smile.
“I wish you were here,” I told him, unsure whether only he could hear or whether I had spoken aloud. “Will you take me with you after?” I begged, unresisting as pain seized me anew, crashing through it. “Please ...”
“You know that’s not possible.” He shook his head with a sad smile.
“And no, not even if you die or kill yourself,’ he answered my unvoiced question.
“Death won’t bring you any closer to me, my love.
I now only exist in your mind, in your memories.
And to be with me there, you must go on living.
Besides, would you abandon them, have them share both our fates and never know either their mother or father? ”
“No,” I replied truthfully, even as I tried to formulate a reply to the extent of Dave and Kevin taking care of our sons as they would their own.
I shook with ugly sobs, my face melting, agony twisting me inside out. It seemed to go on forever until, at long last, I felt intense pressure threatening to split me open.
“That’s it, now call out my name!”
“Einar! Einar!” I obeyed, clenching my muscles, pushing hard against the barrier of my torment with all my might.
Not long after, my own screams ceased only to be replaced by those of my sons.
It was with an out-of-body detachment that I watched as Dave held them one after the other whilst Kevin cut the umbilical cords.
Swaddled in towels, they were so small and insignificant, so weightless the both of them as they were placed in my arms.
There are a few rare moments in life when time stands still, moments which exist outside temporal boundaries altogether, to forever stretch through the fabric of one’s life, connecting all unrelated, small incidents with the purposeful thread of profound meaning.
I knew that the birth of my sons was supposed to be one such moment.
A moment that I had dreamt of for years, longing for the grand transformation that becoming a mother promised.
The bottomless sense of awe such as I had never known, love like I couldn’t have imagined, the universe rearranging itself so that it would evermore revolve not around the sun, but around those that warmed my heart fiercer than any distant star ever could.
And yet, as I gazed upon the boys for the first time, their foreheads wrinkled and purple like plums in the folds of the towels, all I experienced was a sense of emptiness and loss.
A letdown. Nothing grand whatever had taken place.
No transformation. I was still only me. The universe was still dreary, and its inescapable trajectories woefully unchanged.
And as for love such as I had never known?
Well, as they say, lightning never strikes twice.
I wouldn’t take my eyes off them regardless.
Because I knew that affection would come.
Yes. And building on its solid foundation, adoration would follow suit.
Nothing short of what was their birthright.
Because if not given to me freely, I would fight for maternal devotion every single day.
I would defeat every doubt and slay any emotion that was undeserving of my children, I would be ruthless and relentless, unceasing in my private crusade, until I would win a love for them that would surpass even that which I would forever hold for their father.
My chest swelled with confidence, and I rested my head against the pillow, sure of my impending victory.
After all, this would be very far indeed from the hardest battle that I had ever waged.
When I finally looked up, Einar’s apparition was gone. But I could still feel some residue of him in the atmosphere. Like a smile. Like a kiss that lingered on my lips.