Chapter 17
My last memory from before I gave birth was biting my own knuckles while lying on a moving gurney, with daylight in the high windows and a nurse running alongside, telling me that I needed to breathe or the baby wouldn’t have enough air.
I’d been holding my breath because the contractions felt like the porcupine was truly a porcupine, its quills undulating into my flesh.
Everyone knows about some women screaming bloody murder through labor, and here’s the reason: It hurts so much you think something’s gone wrong, that what you’re feeling is worse than any normal labor has ever felt, and that you must be dying.
When I could speak again, I asked the nurse how long it would take until I went into twilight.
I wanted out before the next contraction.
“Hold my hand,” she said. “We’ll count down from ten together.”
I don’t think we got to five.
I woke up alone in a hospital room, the window dark, the blinds down.
The only light came from a yellow lamp at the head of my bed, and my throat felt like I’d swallowed sand.
I wore a gray-checkered hospital gown and a cotton diaper, the crotch soaked with blood.
Mae’s suitcase stood in a corner, buckles still buckled, handle-up.
I tried to call out for someone, and found that I could only make a high-pitched, whispery sound. I didn’t trust myself to stand, so I waited.
“You’re still here,” I whispered. “It’s over, and you’re still alive.
” I was talking to myself now. The porcupine was no longer a porcupine, but a baby in another room, gone from me.
“You should be happy,” I added. Good try, but telling yourself to be happy when you aren’t is like telling your skin it shouldn’t itch.
Still, if someone would have come into that room and asked why I was crying, I wouldn’t have been able to say.
What did help was thinking that Carol had maybe been in this same room, and before her, Lucy, and before her, all the girls from the home who were already gone before I arrived.
And they’d all woken up with bloody diapers, too, and probably alone.
And they were likely fine now, back in their worlds, their regular lives.
Except Carol might have her baby with her.
I’d long finished crying when a nurse came in and gave me a friendly hello. I said hello back, and she said she could hear in my voice that I needed water. She went out and came back with a full cup, which she told me to drink. I drank half and then stopped.
“Is the baby okay?”
She smiled and nodded. She was checking my pulse.
“Boy or girl?”
She met my gaze. “Little girl,” she said. “Seven pounds, one ounce. Just fine.”
I smiled at this. I would have done the same for a boy. I just liked knowing. Daughter, I thought. Not a porcupine, but a little girl, separate from me. Breathing her own air, as I did.
The nurse helped me to the little bathroom, which was right in my room, and she brought in a new cotton diaper she helped me step into. My mouth felt strange, my lips rubbery. After the nurse helped me back to my bed, I thanked her.
She patted my shoulder and said, “You are most welcome, sweetheart.”
That gave me confidence. “Could I see her, please?”
She looked down at her watch. I didn’t know if she knew what I did: Miss Berry and I had decided that it would be better, easier, if I didn’t see the baby, if I trusted it was in good hands and drinking top-of-the-line formula so I could just focus on my future.
Miss Berry had said that was the smart option, and what most girls wanted.
Sitting in her office, eating one of her sawdust cookies, I agreed this would be the best plan.
But now I was curious. I wanted to see her face. I wanted to see and touch the feet I’d felt kicking inside me for months.
“It’s the middle of the night,” the nurse said. “You’re not in the maternity ward, you know. You’re on a different floor. Miss Berry asks that we put you girls somewhere else.”
I pushed my hair back and felt something crusty. I tugged out what I could with my nails, examining the flakes. Dried blood. “Why?”
“Because it’s quieter.” She looked at me like I was a little slow, and then I understood: Because of the babies. Because they would cry, and we would hear them.
She showed me where the call button was, but she told me not to use it to ask for the baby, as the nurses on my floor wouldn’t have time to go up to the nursery.
“I’m almost off shift,” she said. “I’ll tell someone from maternity to check on you in the morning. You can ask then.”
The nurse who came in the morning said she couldn’t bring the baby down because she was sleeping. The next time this nurse came in, I asked again, and the answer was the same.
“Can’t you just bring her in asleep? I won’t disturb her.” She’s my baby, I thought, though I knew not to say as much. But she was mine. I hadn’t signed anything yet. “I just want to make sure she’s okay.”
“She’s fine.” The nurse had me sit up so she could fluff my pillows. “I just saw her. And we don’t want to disturb her. Babies need their sleep.”
That’s when I got scared. For all I knew, the baby might not even be alive.
I worried that the nurses might think it a kindness not to tell me.
But it wouldn’t be a kindness. I wanted to know.
When this nurse turned away from me, I reached out fast and took hold of her arm.
I wasn’t squeezing it or anything, but I had a good hold.
“I just want to see her,” I said. “I want to see that she’s okay for myself. That’s all.”
She glanced at my hand and then looked back at my face in a way that encouraged me to let go.
“I told you. She’s just fine. You can talk to Miss Berry about seeing her tomorrow.” She said this in a soft way, like she felt bad for me. But she turned around and walked out.
The rest of the day, I drifted in and out of sleep.
I ate the chicken salad they brought in for lunch.
Sometime that afternoon, a girl around my age wheeled in a cart full of books and magazines and asked if I’d like to check anything out.
She wore a red-white-striped pinafore over a white dress, and she had a little Red Cross pin on her collar.
I thanked her and took a battered copy of Jane Eyre, though my head still hurt, and I didn’t think I could keep my eyes open for long.
“One of my favorites,” the girl said. She had a wide smile, all teeth. Her shoes were patent leather. “I’m a senior in high school, and it was assigned just last fall.”
I felt a little better, having her in there with me.
We had a friendly conversation about books, though I’m sure my side of it wasn’t exactly sparkling.
This girl had read a lot of things I hadn’t.
All the Jane Austens. Moby Dick. After a while, she asked where I was from.
I said, “Different places,” and she let it go at that.
“Do you go by the maternity ward?” I asked. “Have you seen the babies?”
She told me she usually went by maternity at the end of her shift. She said every volunteer wanted the maternity ward. You had to work your way up.
“My baby’s there,” I said. “I just had a baby.”
She put her palm to her chest, looking worried. “And you have cancer?”
“No,” I said. “They just put me here. Maybe you could take me to the maternity floor, to the nursery? I haven’t seen her yet.”
She fidgeted with the pinafore. “I’d have to get a wheelchair. I’m not supposed to leave the books.”
“Wouldn’t take long,” I said.
I almost had her, I think. But her gaze shifted to my left hand, and I could see in her eyes she was putting things together. Click click click. Before I could say anything else, she’d already wheeled her cart into the hall. She called out that she’d get a nurse for me.
“It’s not contagious,” I yelled. I don’t know if she heard me.
Once she was gone, I wasn’t embarrassed.
That surprised me. I’d gotten so used to feeling ashamed of myself, but this time, I thought this other girl was the one who should feel ashamed.
She’d seemed pretty impressed with herself, standing there in her striped pinafore and rattling off the names of all the books she’d read.
As if they’d taught her anything that mattered, or done her heart any good.
—
I read Jane Eyre to pass the time. I liked it okay.
But it made sense to me that the volunteer in the pinafore had liked it so much, as Jane also thought she was a little better than people who weren’t as morally upright as she was.
Still, the early part of the book helped me not to feel so sorry for myself, especially when Jane got to Lowood and the girls there started actually dying because the conditions were so bad.
Those poor English girls were half-starved and half-frozen, getting typhus and tuberculosis, but the people in charge were more interested in making them listen to sermons about heaven and hell than they were in truly helping them out in this world.
Jane’s best friend got sick and died in her arms. Reading all this, I told myself I should feel lucky to be warm in a hospital bed.
I had to admit the nurses all seemed pretty obsessed with making sure I was drinking enough water and eating something at every meal.