Chapter 9
KATHY
Ihad a three-to-eleven that Tuesday that turned into a two-in-the-morning, and I'm glad of it, because I needed a night where the thing in front of me was bigger than the thing in me.
She came in at six-forty. Thirty-one years old, first baby, forty weeks and four days, gestational diabetes managed, a big baby on the last scan, and a mother who'd been told about that last part by three different people in three different tones.
Her husband was carrying a pillow from home. They always bring the pillow.
She was fine until eight, then a resident who was having a bad month put the epidural in badly and it had to be redone. By ten she was complete and pushing. By ten-forty the head was out.
And stopped.
There's a sound a room makes when it changes, and nobody in the bed can hear it. It's the monitor line, the doctor's voice going one degree flatter, the number of feet moving at once. Dr. Osei said, "Kathy," once, and I was already at the bed.
Shoulder.
There's a checklist. We ran it. My job inside it was her.
"Look at me," I said. "Only me."
"What's wrong?—"
"Look at my face. I need you to stop pushing for a second. Ten seconds. Not one push."
"Why is nobody?—"
"Ten seconds, honey. Count with me. One."
She was screaming. Her husband had the pillow clamped against his chest with both arms like a man in a life raft, saying okay okay okay. Fran came in without being called and got him into the corner chair with a hand on his shoulder — no talking, just the hand.
"Two," I said. "Three. Eyes on me. You're not going anywhere."
We got her legs back. We changed the angle. There was a minute and about fifty seconds in there, and I've been doing this twenty-two years, so I know exactly what a minute fifty costs.
Then the shoulder came. The rest of the baby came the way the rest always comes, all at once and absurdly fast, and Dr. Osei said, "Okay," in the voice, the one that means it. Nine pounds, eleven ounces. Nuchal cord, one loop, not tight. Arm working, tone good by two minutes, Apgars eight and nine.
The girl was shaking hard enough that the bed rail was going, and for a second she didn't look at the baby at all. She looked at me with her mouth open and said, "Don't leave."
"I'm not leaving."
"Don't — please?—"
"I'm right here. I'm going to be right here. Take him, put him on your chest, I've got your arm."
I stayed until twelve-forty and charted until one-fifteen. Somebody had brought cookies in for the night shift, the awful pink ones, which is how you know somebody else's rough shift ended well earlier in the day.
Fran and I ended up in the soiled utility room, which is where the shift ends. She peeled her gloves off with one hand, dropped them in the bin, and said it without looking at me.
"You're the one everybody wants in the room when it counts. Always have been."
"Osei got the shoulder."
"Osei got the shoulder." Fran squeezed sanitizer into her palm and rubbed it in past her wrists. "You kept that girl breathing at a rate a human being can breathe at. That's the whole game. She doesn't know who Osei is. She'll be telling her sister about you for forty years."
"Fran."
"I'm not being nice. I don't have the energy to be nice at one in the morning." She looked at me then, over the glasses that were, again, up in her hair. "Something's going on with you. Two weeks now. I'm not asking."
"Thank you."
"I'm just saying the floor knows." She pushed the door open with her hip. "Go home. Eat a real thing, not a pink cookie."
I sat in row F a while with the engine running.
I worked the number out once for a continuing-ed thing and it embarrassed me: more than four hundred.
Four hundred of the biggest hours of four hundred lives, and not one of those women had to ask anybody's permission for me to be in the room.
An hour ago a stranger had my wrist in her fist telling me not to leave before she'd looked at her own child.
My family decided I wasn't up to my daughter's.
I sat with that under the light that flickers in row F, and then I drove home.
Rhonda came Wednesday morning at nine with two coffees, because I'd texted her four words the night before and my sister is not a woman who answers four words with four words. We sat in the living room. She took the chair Neil sits in, which she does on purpose.
"Start with Sunday," she said. "Because I've heard three versions already and two of them came from people who weren't there."
So I told her. The dish, the ribbon, the radio going off, Neil getting the first word of it wrong, Monica out in the yard in a cardigan pulling dead stalks out of a pot with her bare hands.
"Good," Rhonda said.
"It wasn't good."
"It was overdue." She put her coffee down on the side table without a coaster, which in this house is a statement. "Twenty years overdue."
"Lauren cried in her aunt's kitchen because of me."
"Because of Neil."
"Because of me, Rhonda. She asked me how long I'd known and I said a month." I had the cup in both hands and I wasn't drinking it. "I sat at my own table and let my daughter tell me her aunt had the whole thing handled, and I said mm. She's going to remember that I did that."
"She's twenty-six. She'll survive a mm."
"There's a worse one," I said. "I'm going to say it to you and then I'm not saying it to anybody else in this family, because in that house it would turn into an exhibit."
"Go."
"For about a week in August I was glad." I held the coffee with both hands.
"Monica started picking things up and I remember thinking, thank God somebody's on this.
I never said I wanted the dress day. I never said put me on the list. There's something in me that can't ask for one thing for myself without feeling like I'm handing somebody a bill. "
"So that's yours," Rhonda said.
I looked up.
"What? You want me to say it isn't? It is.
" She shrugged, and it wasn't a kind shrug.
"You've been doing that since you were fifteen.
You go quiet, you wait, you decide it's easier to carry than to make a room uncomfortable.
Then it gets worse. Then it's a whole thing.
That part's you, Kath. Nobody put that in you. "
"I know that."
"Then stop telling me like it's a confession."
I sat there with the cup going cold in my hands. I'd spent half the night planning to hand my sister the shameful part so she could lift it off me, and she wasn't going to lift it.
"Here's what you do," Rhonda said. She sat forward, and that's where it went wrong. "You don't go."
"To the shower?"
"You don't go. You're busy. You pick up a shift. Let her stand in that beautiful room on the fifteenth of November with ninety people and no mother of the bride. Let her explain it."
"Rhonda."
"I'm serious."
"You're not."
"I am absolutely serious. One afternoon.
Let her feel it one time." My sister had gone pink across the chest. "And I'll tell you something else I've been sitting on since 2006.
I've never liked the way that family says ours.
They took that baby and put her in the pot, and everybody stood around congratulating themselves?—"
"Stop it." It came out of me loud enough that the cup jumped on the side table.
"You don't get to do that. That family loved my daughter.
Monica put her name on a stocking in 2006 and spelled it wrong, and I still have it in a box in my basement.
You want me to be angry about the one thing in my life that worked? "
"I want you to be angry about something."
"I'm angry about the right thing."
"You're being so careful about it."
"Because it's my marriage. Because she's my daughter's aunt. Because on the fifteenth that girl is going to walk into a room your way or my way, and your way she doesn't get a shower."
My sister sat back, and we looked at each other a while, two women in their fifties in a living room at nine-forty in the morning, neither of us giving an inch.
"Fine," she said eventually.
"Don't call her."
"I wasn't going to call her."
"Rhonda."
"I was going to think about calling her," she said, which is as close to a concession as she gets, and we let it go.
She stayed another forty minutes and we fixed nothing. Near the end she said, looking out the window, "You know what I keep thinking about? The radiator."
"Don't."
"That apartment. You on the floor with her between your knees doing the braid, and that radiator banging like somebody was in the wall with a hammer.
You did that braid every day for a year.
I used to think, that poor kid's going to hate her mother touching her head by Christmas.
" Rhonda shook her head. "She never once got up.
Not once. I was there. Nobody else in that family was. "
"She was six."
"She was six, and you were twenty-seven years old with four hundred dollars a month, and you made Sunday into a place." Then, because she can't help herself: "Monica can book any room in this state. She can't have that."
"It's not a competition."
"Everything's a competition."
"Not that," I said. "Rhonda, I swear to God, if you turn that into a scoreboard I'll never tell you anything again."
She put her hands up. She has never agreed with me about that, and I expect she never will.
At the car she said, "Call me after." I asked after what. She said, "I don't know. After," and drove off still annoyed with me.
I stood in my driveway with two cold coffees in my hands. Four weeks of waiting for somebody to rule on which part was mine, and nobody was coming.
What I had was a daughter who hadn't texted me since Sunday.
I got my keys.
Lauren and Sam live in the top half of a house on Ferris with a porch that isn't theirs.
I didn't text first, which is not something I do.
Sam wasn't home. She opened the door in a sweatshirt with her hair wet, saw my face, and stood there a second longer than she needed to before she stepped back to let me in.
"I'm not mad at you," she said, which meant she was still a little mad at me.
"You're allowed to be."
"I know I'm allowed. That's not the problem." She went and sat on the ottoman. "The problem is I keep doing the math on that Friday with the chargers and it comes out the same every time."
"Then let it come out the same," I said. "I did that. I'm not going to argue you out of it."
I sat on the couch across from her, close, our knees almost touching.
"Okay," she said. "Say the thing you came to say."
"I'm not here to say anything about your aunt."
"Mom—"
"Lauren." I took a breath. "I'm here because I've got one question I've never asked you in my life. I want you to answer it honestly, even if the honest answer hurts my feelings. You're allowed to hurt my feelings today."
Her eyes went red immediately, which is her father's face, and which I mean kindly.
"Ask me," she said.
"First tell me something true. What did you think was happening? All fall. In your head, what was the story?"
She pulled her sleeves down over her hands, which she's done since she was eight.
"That you were drowning."
"Okay."
"That Grandma was a lot, and work was a lot, and you were doing both, and every time I saw you your eyes were — Mom, you fell asleep sitting up at my birthday.
" She shrugged, miserable. "And Aunt Mon kept saying, let me take it, your mom's got enough.
And Dad said the same thing. So I thought — I honestly thought I was being a good daughter.
I thought not asking you was the nice thing. "
"I know you did."
"And then Sunday." She pressed her thumb into her eye. "Standing in her kitchen I found out I've been going around all fall telling people my mother didn't want to come to her own?—"
"You never said that."
"I let people say it."
"You were twenty-six and everybody you trust told you the same sentence," I said. "That's not a crime. That's arithmetic."
"Don't be nice to me about it."
"I'm not being nice. I'm being accurate."
She laughed, wetly, once.
"What do you want?" I said. "Not what's fair. Not what's nice for everybody. Not what Aunt Mon's already paid a deposit on. Between you and me — the wedding, the shower, all of it — what do you actually want? Where do you want me?"
"That's three questions."
"It's one question. I put it badly."
My daughter opened her mouth, closed it, then cried for about fifteen seconds with her hand over her face, and I didn't touch her, because sometimes you let a person have that. The refrigerator on their porch — they keep a refrigerator on the porch, for reasons — kicked on through the wall.
Then she wiped her face with her sleeve and looked at me.
"Mom," she said. "Will you come with me to get the dress? Just us?"