Death 6 Exsanguination （Motherhood） #4
This was when they called Carmelo. He rushed Stella to the hospital, where there was more painful, sweaty waiting. The hospital was as uncomfortable as Stella had anticipated it would be, as was being handled by an English-speaking male doctor.
Miserable, boring hours passed in repetitive agony.
They laid her down on a paper-covered hospital bed and put her feet in stirrups.
Stella had not been prepared for that. She was horrified to have herself on display, but the humiliation was completely overwritten by the intensity of her pain.
The thought of her mother giving birth like an animal on her minty bed in Ievoli flashed through Stella’s mind.
She didn’t feel like an animal, she felt like a monster, a monster tearing her own self apart with her claws.
At least there were only strangers around her and no one she loved could see her this way.
The time dragged on, and the contractions, and the pain.
Stella had lost any sense of how long, how many, how much.
Being trampled by the pigs—it hadn’t been this bad, had it?
It couldn’t even hurt this much to die. The window on the far side of the paper curtain was dark.
It was night, and night would never end.
“You need to push, Stella,” the doctor said to her.
“I am push,” she said, scrabbling for English words that wouldn’t come out. “I doing push.”
This is the end of what Stella remembered.
LATER STELLA AND CARMELO’S CHILDREN would tell the story of what happened that night. The doctor left the surgery room to ask Carmelo whose life he wanted to save, his wife’s or his son’s.
“There is no choice,” Carmelo had answered. “I want them both.”
I REMEMBER HEARING THAT STORY when I was a kid, about how Grandpa had to pick between Grandma and the baby, and he told the doctor no way, give me both. And I remember thinking, Wow, Grandpa, he’s so tough and loyal, such a family man. A hero. No compromises.
Now I think about that story and I feel furious.
He risked my grandmother’s life for his stubbornness and pride; he valued a baby he knew nothing about over the woman he supposedly loved.
And my heart breaks for Stella, who had to live in that marriage.
How lucky I am that I can’t imagine being married to a man who wouldn’t immediately pick me.
STELLA DID NOT DIE THAT DAY, FOR THE SIXTH TIME.
WHEN SHE WOKE UP, she burned in that way a body burns after surgery, every capillary straining to reconnect, to seal, to fight infection.
The pain was familiar to her, but not its magnitude.
Her body had been exhausted by the hours of pushing, by the removal of so much matter, by the loss of so much blood.
The hospital room was pink and her mind was as fuzzy as yarn.
She saw her mother sleeping in a low chair with wooden arms. She turned her chin and saw the pink gown stretched over her own bosom.
She struggled to figure out why she was in the hospital, and then when she reached her answer she began to panic, her mind sharpening, because she was not pregnant anymore.
The feeling of the baby pulsing inside her was gone, a hole she now, abruptly, noticed.
Gripping her deflated abdomen, she lurched up in her bed, or tried to, but was blinded by a wave of pain so intense she lost the hospital room for a flash—maybe for minutes, or hours, who could know.
She opened her eyes again, eventually, and tried to call out to her mother, but her mouth was dry.
A tube ran into her arm; the skin around the needle prickled with bruise.
She focused on that tiny discomfort, tried to build a wall between herself and the rest of her body.
It was daylight; light came in pinkly through that damn paper curtain.
“Mamma,” she said. Her voice was the sound of a piece of paper being crumpled in a fist. But Assunta was awake this time, and there was Tina, too, standing beside the bed. “Mamma. Where is my baby? My baby.”
Tina helped Stella drink juice from a paper cup and Assunta sobbed, grasping Stella’s hand so tightly both of their knuckles were creased with red and white.
“Mamma,” Stella said again, but Assunta only had air for tears and for her circular prayer, thank you God thank you Madonna thank you God thank you Madonna.
Stella swallowed, and Tina helped her drink again. Her pelvis ached, an onion of ache. She tried her sister this time. “Tina,” she said. Her voice, was that her voice? It sounded strange. “Tina. Where is my baby? Did they take away my baby?”
Tina looked at their mother, but Assunta was sobbing into Stella’s hand. She was going to let Tina do this dirty work. Half of Stella’s mind understood before Tina could say it; the other half couldn’t understand it even after it had been said.
“Your baby’s with God, Stella,” Tina said. She had made it that far, and now she was no good anymore, because she had fallen to the linoleum floor to cry into her skirt.
Stella looked up at the ceiling. Her mother wept on her left and her sister on her right. She hoped a nurse would come along and take care of them because she couldn’t speak to them anymore, or maybe ever again. She closed her eyes and dove into her pain.
STELLA HAD CARRIED TO TERM a healthy baby boy whose corpse weighed ten pounds, four ounces.
He had been in a breech position going into the labor, and the doctor, a rookie, had tried to make the baby turn.
When the labor didn’t proceed as expected, the doctor used forceps to reach up into Stella and try to pull him out.
But the baby was just too big for the birth canal; his shoulders stuck.
As the scene in the hospital had modulated into panic, the doctor performed a proctoepisiotomy, making a surgical incision that would marvel later generations—where, exactly, did he think the baby was?
By the time they extracted the baby, he was dead, strangled with his own umbilical cord.
AGONY, DELIRIUM, DARKNESS, AGONY.
Had it been this bad when she was a child, being ripped apart? Was it just that there was more of her now, so she could feel more pain?
Stella had no control over whether she was asleep or awake.
At the worst moments, sweat itching in her raw stitches, when the weight of loss on her chest was so heavy she battled to pull enough air into her lungs—in those moments, when she wanted nothing more than to leave herself, when sleep would have been the greatest reprieve, she had no access to it.
She had to listen to the mourning and awkward bedside conversations of the terrible people who came to visit her. They were all terrible now.
Why did you let me live this time? she asked God, over and over. What was the point?
Sometimes she said it out loud, and if Assunta heard her she shushed her. That wasn’t how God worked.
TINA WIPED STELLA’S FOREHEAD WITH A COOL, damp towel. She plumped Stella’s pillow and dabbed water on her dry lips. “Good Stella, lucky Stella, lucky star,” she crooned, making a song out of Stella’s names. Brava Stella, Stella Fortuna, stella fortunata.
Stella waited until Assunta left the sickroom, then said, “You think I’m lucky?”
Tina was caught off guard by her sister’s voice after so many hours of uninterrupted silence. “Lucky to be alive,” she said, but it sounded like a question.
Stella felt the Eye on her. Her heartache compressed into a sickness she finally understood. “At least now neither of us has a baby,” she said.
Tina blanched. “Stella. No.”
“Admit it, get it off your chest so God can forgive you.” Stella was so exhausted she couldn’t put any fire into her words, but they didn’t need any fire. “You were jealous of my baby and now, deep in your heart, you’re happy that it’s dead.”
The expression on Tina’s face made Stella’s gut roil with hate—her big, stupid tears; Tina would try to cry her way out of this like she had every bad thing that had ever happened to her.
Stella hated her sister more intensely than she had ever hated anyone before, even Carmelo, even her father. Even her father hadn’t killed her baby.
“No, Stella, you’re wrong.” Tina wiped clear mucus from her chin. “I only wanted to love it. I wanted to love your baby and I am so sad for you.”
“There’s nothing you can say that would ever make me forgive you,” Stella said. She had used up all her energy. She turned her face away and closed her eyes.
“Why are you crying, Tina?” Assunta asked when she came back.
“I’m not,” Stella heard her sister say, then snuffling and nose-blowing.
Tina didn’t sing anymore, but she didn’t leave Stella’s bed, either.
MOSTLY WHEN STELLA’S EYES OPENED, there were Assunta and Tina, no matter what. But this time it was dark—the only light came from the hospital wing outside, and it was a man sitting next to her in the chair with the wooden arms.
“Carmelo?” she asked the darkness, because for a moment she wasn’t sure.
“Stella.” He was crying. She heard it in his voice—typical Carmelo, he made no effort to hide it from her.
“My Stella, my star. My precious Stella. I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry.” She realized he had been holding her hand when his grip tightened.
“Please come back to me. Please don’t leave me.
Let me take care of you. Let me make it better. ”
Maybe Stella was the weakest she had ever been in her life, because she felt her heart turn.
When she wondered how she would put all the bad things behind her, she realized that her mind did not even want to remember what they were, and the path was suddenly quite clear.
She would bury the first year of her marriage with her baby boy. That was how she would save herself.
Stella Maglieri squeezed her husband’s wet hand. “I’m here, Carmelo,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”