17. Dulcie
DULCIE
“If you say breathe again,” I tell Mom, “I’m going to become very unpleasant.”
“I was going to ask whether you wanted the cloth.”
“Yes. Please.”
She holds it against the back of my neck. I lean forward, gripping the edge of the bed, and wait for my body to let me have the rest of the sentence.
It doesn’t. Another contraction gathers before I can decide what to say. The room narrows to the pressure, my hands, Mom’s hand steady between my shoulders. Someone speaks quietly nearby. I nod because I can hear her, though I couldn’t repeat the words afterward.
When it eases, I open my eyes.
“I was quite pleasant before this.”
“You were.”
“People liked me.”
Mom smiles. Her hair has come loose on one side, and I feel an absurd gratitude for that small disorder. She has been awake with me through the night. She isn’t sitting somewhere waiting for the result.
I am thirty-nine weeks and two days pregnant. I say that to myself sometimes between contractions, as if it explains why my body has become a place where every ordinary rule has been suspended.
Earlier, at home, I made her wait while I changed the pillowcase on my bed. I knew it was ridiculous. I wanted to come back to something clean. She stood in the doorway with my bag and said nothing until I tried to change the other one.
“Your father can manage a pillowcase.”
“He’ll put it on inside out.”
“Then the baby will have to forgive him.”
Now the bag stands by the chair. My own shirt is inside it. I think of the one I took out nine days ago, and for a moment the hurt is so familiar that it seems to belong to another room.
I wanted Magnus here once. I wanted to reach for him without wondering what he would decide while I couldn’t argue.
I press my face against Mom’s shoulder.
“I know,” she says, although I haven’t spoken.
Then the next contraction takes me, and there is only the work in front of me.
At some point I stop caring what anybody thinks of the sounds I make.
The woman helping me says my name. She waits until I look at her before she tells me what she needs me to do. That small act makes me cry more than the pain does. I can still be spoken to. I am still here inside all of this.
“I’m scared,” I say.
“I’m right here,” Mom tells me.
Her fingers are damp in mine. I hold on hard enough that I apologize, and she tells me to stop wasting a perfectly good grip.
I laugh once. It turns into something else.
The minutes stop having edges. There is effort, then rest too brief to feel like rest. A sip of water. A hand moving hair off my cheek. I think I can’t do the next part, and then I am doing it because my son is coming and there is no other way to meet him.
When they put him against me, I don’t understand at first that the weight is his.
He is warm and slippery and furious. His mouth opens wide. One hand catches against my skin with all five fingers spread, as though he has an urgent complaint about the journey.
“Hello,” I say.
It is too small a word. I say it again.
Mom makes a sound beside me, half laugh and half sob. I turn my head enough to see her face, and she is looking at him with her hand over her mouth.
“He’s here,” I tell her.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
The baby’s cheek presses against me. I have felt his feet under my ribs, his back turning beneath my palm, the odd hard shape of an elbow. None of that prepared me for the tiny crease beside his nose.
I touch it with one fingertip.
“There you are.”
Someone asks if he has a name.
I look at him. I have practiced the sound alone in the rental, tried it when he kicked and when I couldn’t sleep. Now there is a person to answer it, though he has his eyes shut.
“Kit,” I say. “His name is Kit.”
Mom’s hand comes to rest beside his back. She doesn’t touch him until I move my own hand enough to make room.
“Your dad,” I whisper.
Her face changes. The joy stays, but grief moves through it too, gentle and old.
“He would have made such a fuss of you,” she tells the baby.
“He’d have taught him terrible jokes.”
“Immediately.”
I laugh, and Kit objects to the movement. His whole face wrinkles.
“Sorry,” I tell him. “You’ll need to get used to that family problem.”
Mom bends and kisses my forehead. She stays there a moment, breathing against my hair.
No one says Benedict. No one asks whether another person has approved. His name belongs in this room as easily as his small hand belongs against my chest.
Later, the light at the window has changed, and I am wearing the clean shirt from my bag.
Kit lies in the bassinet beside the bed. I keep looking at him, then looking away to see whether I can manage it, then looking back. Each time there is some new thing to inspect. The curve of an ear. The way his mouth works in his sleep. The astonishing seriousness of his eyebrows.
I ask whether I can hold him again before there is any particular reason.
Mom helps me settle, then moves the blanket so I can see his hand.
His fingers open and close against mine.
I count them even though I watched someone else check him, even though there is no reason to think a finger has gone missing in the last hour.
“What are you looking for?” she asks.
“Everything.”
She smiles.
I study the fine hair at his temple. I had expected to search his face for Magnus. There may be something there, a shape I will recognize later. Right now he looks overwhelmingly like himself. I didn’t know that could be enough to astonish me.
When my arms begin to tire, I say so. Mom helps me put him back beside the bed. I don’t have to prove I can do every part at once.
“You can rest,” Mom says.
“I’m watching.”
“I noticed.”
She has spoken to Dad. He cried, she says, then denied it loudly enough that she held the phone away from her ear. There are clean pillowcases on my bed. Both the right way out, according to his report.
“Did you tell him the name?”
“I let him hear you say it.”
I remember now. A brief call, my voice thick, Dad saying hello to Kit through the phone.
I reach for my own phone.
There is a message from Magnus asking whether there is any news. I haven’t opened the earlier ones. Mom has kept the day clear of people who want answers I can’t give them while I am doing something else.
I take a photograph. Kit turns his head just as I touch the screen, so the picture is mostly cheek and blanket. I keep it anyway.
He’s here. His name is Kit. We’re both well.
I attach the photograph and send it.
The reply comes while the screen is still in my hand.
I’m coming now.
My fingers go cold.
Mom sees my face. “What is it?”
I show her. She doesn’t take the phone away or tell me what to write.
I look at the distance between my bed and the bassinet. I have been up with help. I am sore and shaky and tired enough that the thought of another conversation makes my throat close. I picture Magnus holding our son, telling me he only needs another moment while I am trying to get to my feet.
“I want to be able to take him back,” I say.
Mom pulls her chair closer.
“Then tell him.”
I write slowly.
Not today. You can meet him when he’s ten days old. I need to be able to get up and take Kit back without help before you hold him. I’ll send updates before then.
It looks stark on the screen. I remember standing in Dorothea’s dining room, telling Magnus not to touch me, and the way he kept talking as though I would eventually sit down.
I leave the message as it is.
He reads it. No answer appears.
I put the phone on the table beyond the water jug. I will not sit here watching three dots while my son sleeps beside me.
“Could you bring him to me?” I ask Mom.
She lifts him carefully, supporting his head, and places him in my arms. His weight settles along me. He opens his eyes for a few seconds, dark and unfocused, and I feel something inside my chest loosen so sharply that I have to breathe through it.
“Hello, Kit.”
His mouth searches against my shirt. I adjust him with help, clumsy and intent. There is so much I don’t know how to do yet. He wants what he wants and gives me every chance to learn it.
Mom moves the water close enough for me to reach.
I look down at the little hand pressed against me. One finger is hooked into the fabric of my shirt.
For the first time all day, I stop waiting for something else to happen.
He is here. I am holding him.
This part is ours.