Chapter 29
SIX YEARS LEFT
I was listening to Linda Martell’s “Color Him Father” on the record player when my contractions started. That first pain rolled through, and I thought, Here we go.
I didn’t say anything to Hess at first. She’d never seen a baby get born, so I knew she’d be flying off the handle and rushing us out the door. But I’d seen plenty of births, and it took hours. I wanted to spend as little time at the hospital as possible.
I’d wanted to give birth at the house, but Hess had insisted on a hospital, and she’d eventually worn me down.
She’d heard horror stories from friends about complications that only a doctor could fix.
Even though I’d left the holler behind, I’d imagined myself giving birth at home with the old granny witch catching it.
I’d watched her put her hands on my aunt and sense the geological shifts happening inside, responding in kind.
She treated women with animal tenderness.
I couldn’t imagine anything better than that.
I switched the player to an album by a band called the Runaways that Martha had given me. The guitar chopped rhythmically through the air, and the pain pulsed with it. The women screamed from the speaker, and my body screamed with them. I rode the waves from song to song, willing myself to hold on.
When the contractions got so quick and intense that I was having a hard time breathing, I hollered for Hess. She took one look at me and knew what I’d done, but she hid her anger as she helped me into the Gran Torino.
I made it to the hospital intact. The nurses did not share our sense of urgency. I wanted to scream as they casually found my chart, put me in a wheelchair, and rolled me into the delivery room. It was cold and smelled like a factory floor. I felt like I was about to be plucked and stripped.
A nurse came into the room and checked me out, then left without a word.
No one would tell us anything. I’d decided to have him without drugs because of my past, but the nurse kept pushing them on me anyway.
Are you sure? Do you understand the pain in store?
As if I was a child who couldn’t make decisions for herself.
I knew pain. I knew it better than she could comprehend.
Sometime later, as the pain took over, I thought back to her words and wondered if I’d let my own pride get the better of me.
It was truly remarkable.
The waves of pain crested higher and higher, while the relief in between got shorter.
The nurse kept telling me to breathe, but how the hell was I supposed to breathe through something like that?
I kept getting out of bed, looking for some way to escape the pain.
But the nurse kept forcing me back down, making me lie still like a child at nap time.
Hess was there for every moment, humming some new melody in my ear, and I clung to it like a raft.
When it was time to push, I felt something leave me, and I looked woozily over at my hand hanging there alone with the gold wedding band digging into my bloated finger.
It was Hess’s idea to tell people I’d been married to Tate; that way the doctors and nurses would treat me well, and the new baby wouldn’t be shunned for being a bastard.
My head swiveled to the other side of the room, where they were trying to force Hess out the door.
A panic rose at the thought of not having her there.
I just knew I’d fade away and the baby would fade with me if she left.
I tried to cry out in objection, but the pain strangled the sound from my throat. It came out as an animal grunt.
Hess said something to the nurse I couldn’t make out, and the nurse’s face drained of color. She backed away from Hess and came back over to me with her rubber gloves, ready to assist the doctor.
Hess returned to her spot by my head and gripped my hand. She said I could squeeze as hard as I needed to.
At the other end of me, a harsh voice told me to stop pushing. I could feel it. Something was wrong. His hands were probing inside me and creating sharp, pinching pains where before the pain had been more global, like tectonic plates moving.
Then they were wheeling me down the hallway, and Hess refused once again to leave me.
No one told us what was going on. In the operating room, I was strapped down like a mental patient and administered drugs without anyone asking me.
As I tried to struggle against it, I fell back into a familiar oblivion.
I’d have thought it would be a relief to finally return to that place.
But the nothingness felt wrong. I couldn’t see or hear very well, like a glaze had been applied to my perception, and my thoughts came slow and syrupy. When I tried to move my body, it was no longer under my control.
A panic seized me, but I was locked in, unable to articulate this to even Hess. Not even able to squeeze her hand.
I sank into the panic, and at some point I was lost to a deeper nothing.
Next thing I remember was hearing a little melody in my head, and for a moment, I thought music had returned to me. I lay there, trying to soak it in. There was something familiar about it that I couldn’t place yet.
I opened my eyes, and I saw a fuzzy Hess pacing in front of the bed with a bundle cradled in her arms. That new melody hummed from her throat.
She saw that I was awake, and she smiled at me. Everything was softer about her, like God had rounded her edges and mixed light with her colors. The bundle gurgled, and I saw that it was the baby. Small and red and swaddled in white cotton.
Hess swayed toward the side of the bed, and I could see the baby better now, covered in fine, dark hair and sleeping peacefully in the nest of his mother’s arms.
“Meet our daughter, Rhea. Named for the Greek goddess.” She smiled shyly. “Only if you like it, of course, but it feels so perfect—”
“You mean our son.”
“No, darling, she’s a girl.”
“No. I had a boy.”
“Lou—”
“It’s a mistake. It has to be. They gave you the wrong baby.” My face was cold, and I couldn’t get enough air.
Hess frowned softly. “I saw them pull her out of you with my own eyes.” She folded back the blanket to reveal a dark-purple birthmark reaching across the baby’s collarbone like the devil’s gnarled finger. “She’s hard to miss.”
My stomach churned, and my mouth filled with saliva. I leaned over and vomited onto the linoleum.
Hess jumped back and clutched the baby to her chest. “Oh, honey, let me get you a nurse.”
I lay back on the bed. Cold sweat beaded on my cheeks.
How had I let this happen?
Shame oozed into my hollow stomach, and I thought I might be sick again.
Another demon child. Another soul brought into this world, cursed from the start.
Hess, still holding the baby, returned with a nurse, and she cleaned me up and gave me fluids. She said it was perfectly normal, but I doubted most mothers got sick at the sight of their own babies.
When the nurse left, Hess tried to put the baby in my arms. “She’s hungry, darling. She needs to be fed.”
But I couldn’t look at either of them. I turned over and pretended to fall asleep, and Hess gave up.
Later, I woke to a room blue with dusk. Hess was gone, but the baby was there, sleeping in a bassinet next to my bed.
She stirred and wriggled. Then she opened her black eyes and stared hard into mine. An understanding passed between us like electricity, crackling through my insides and filling me with charged love.
She was such fragile magic. It felt wrong that she should be outside me now, where she was vulnerable to the elements. The cold, abrasive air. The stinging smell of the hospital. The intrusion of its noises. It had been so much easier to protect her when she was inside of me.
I thought of my own mother, never given the opportunity to hold her baby. She wasn’t there to protect me once I was out.
I reached into the bassinet, and I took the baby into my arms, resting her head on my chest. Her mouth opened like a baby bird, searching for my tit, and I pulled it out and helped her latch on to the nipple. She sucked, and this wave of feeling rose and washed over me.
I was here. I could protect her.
I imagined my body hardening and expanding, growing beyond the confines of the room, reaching up into the air until it towered above the hospital and the city beyond. I would hold her in my giant hand, shielding her from the evils of the world.
A grand, heroic music entered my vision, surrounding my towering body and ringing out over the mountains in the distance like God’s choir. I realized it was the sound I’d been searching for since I got clean.
I would become so large and imposing, so unstoppable, that the devil couldn’t slide me down his gullet, no matter the curse. I would be five thousand feet tall, one mile high, my wig puncturing the sky.
I would defy time and space, and Rhea would be safe.