Chapter Twenty-Four
The first pain comes suddenly, jolting Mary Beth from a dead sleep.
She sits up with a gasp.
The room is dark. Hearing soft, steady breathing from the adjacent twin bed, she thinks for a moment that it’s Caroline. That she’s home.
But she hears a train rattling through the night, and there are none in Mulberry Bay.
Here, she often sits in the window and watches the freight cars fly along the elevated tracks across the street. They never stop. If one ever did, she’d hop on and stow away, allowing herself to be transported to some other, distant place.
The destination doesn’t matter. Just somewhere, anywhere but here.
Six months ago, she thought anything would be better than spending another moment under her parents’ roof.
Even jail. The Baxters must have figured that out after meeting them on that awful night she was arrested, because they dropped the charges.
She was a juvenile offender, so her name was never made public, and her records were sealed. No one would ever have to know.
She spent the rest of May and half of June grounded in Eve and Joanna’s old bedroom, homeschooled for what was left of her junior year. Her parents told Caroline, and the school, and presumably anyone else who asked, that she was quarantined with mono.
Then her parents figured out that she was pregnant and sent her here—blindsiding her, leaving her no choice whatsoever.
The name Midwest Golden Bridge Maternity Home might conjure a sunlit farmhouse beside a babbling brook, but the reality is a converted warehouse in a Rust Belt city where the sky is overcast even when it’s not raining, or snowing—which it usually is.
It’s a depressing place run by oppressive women overseen by oppressive men, populated by oppressed, depressed, repressed teenage girls in various stages of pregnancy.
At first, Mary Beth made friends easily, as she tends to do in the real world, gravitating toward the ones who are older and more seasoned—thus, later in their pregnancies. One by one, they disappeared into the basement “birthing suite” to have their babies, never to return.
Mary Beth learned to keep to herself, focused on her high school coursework, college essay, and applications. The one good thing about being here is an incentive program for paid college tuition, and her grades are well within range.
Last month, she earned her diploma. Phone calls are forbidden, but letters are allowed. She never receives any, even from Caroline, but she writes to her from time to time.
Hey, guess what? I’m a graduate! And I didn’t even have to wear that dopey cap and gown and listen to speeches! Guess there’s one good thing about being stuck here . . .
No reply.
Then, when she got her early-decision letter, she sent a postcard:
I got in! Syracuse University, here I come!
Again, no acknowledgment.
She sent Caroline a Christmas card, though she’s beginning to suspect that her parents are intercepting the mail. But would they really do something illegal?
Maybe it’s just that her sister is as disappointed in her as they are. They’ve probably brainwashed her into thinking Mary Beth is a sinful loser.
Whatever. She’s never going back there. She doesn’t need any of them anymore.
The home is preparing her for her baby with classes focused on healthy pregnancy and delivery. Some are geared toward what happens afterward, with a strong focus on adoption options.
Attendance is mandatory to all classes, and to the weekly “mixers” where the girls mingle with childless couples. At every one of them, Mary Beth presents her surliest self, and the staff reprimands her for her “attitude problem.”
“I don’t see why I have to meet all these people if I’m going to keep my baby,” she frequently complains to anyone who will listen. It seems as though nobody ever does.
She attends optional workshops for girls who intend to go the single motherhood route. So far, they’ve made it seem like a daunting and perhaps insurmountable challenge—physically, emotionally, and financially.
Maybe it is, for some people. But Mary Beth has it all figured out. She still has a big wad of cash hidden in her doll in the secret cubby. It will pay for rent and diapers and food while she goes to college, and she’ll get a part-time job. She has it all planned out.
Even labor.
But she thought she had another couple of weeks, at least. First babies are often late, Astrid warned her.
She’s Mary Beth’s “guidance counselor,” like in high school—only the women assigned to you at Golden Bridge aren’t trying to help you with schedules and SAT prep and college applications.
“I’m here to answer any questions you have about anything at all,” Astrid told Mary Beth on her first day. “Really, you can ask me anything, okay?”
“Okay. Why do round pizzas come in square boxes?”
“I’ll get right on that,” Astrid replied, straight faced, but Mary Beth saw a twinkle in her eye.
Astrid, too, is from upstate New York, only a few years older than Mary Beth. She attends a nearby college, majoring in nursing, and volunteers at the home. In another setting, they might have been friends.
Seized by another stabbing pain deep in her womb, Mary Beth cries out.
In the next bed, the snoring stops. “Leigh, go get someone.”
Her roommate props herself up with a groggy “Huh? What?”
“Get help! Hurry!”
There’s no need.
On Christmas morning, thirty excruciating hours after that first contraction, a sweating, freezing, sobbing Mary Beth bears down with every ounce of energy and courage she has left.
She expected the pain to be more significant than the “discomfort” they described in her childbirth class, but it’s far worse than anything she ever imagined.
Astrid promised Mary Beth she’d find out about pain medication, an epidural. When the time came, she said, she’d see to it that Mary Beth got something to ease her labor.
But Astrid isn’t here. She’s home with her family through New Year’s.
And none of the scrubs-clad strangers in the room have offered anything more than coaching and prayers, even when she begged.
“That’s right,” one of them says, perched between her legs at the foot of the bed. “Come on, Mary.”
“I’m . . . not . . . freaking . . . Mary!” she bites out. They keep calling her that—why? Because it’s Christmas and she reminds them of the Blessed Virgin?
Yeah, she doubts Jesus’s mother cursed up a blue streak in the manger as she has, eliciting admonishments from everyone in the vicinity.
“You need to calm yourself down right now, young lady! You’re hysterical!”
“I am not hyst—aaaaahhhhh!” she screams.
“Push. You can do it.”
Hell yes, she can. She can set herself free. She can walk out of here with her baby and never see any of them, or this hellhole, ever again.
She pushes with an unearthly grunt that becomes a screech before giving way to a high-pitched wail and collapses, panting. But the wail continues, and she realizes it’s coming from a goo-covered thing the doctor is holding, still tethered to her by a bloody gelatinous cord.
Her child.
I did it.
We did it.
I love you so much.
Swept by an overpowering urge to take her child into her arms and never let go, she chokes out words. “I . . . want . . .”
But she’s too weak to say it, too weak to reach for the baby, too weak to do anything but watch, helpless, as a latex-gloved hand comes at her with enormous scissors.
The cord is severed.
The baby is gone.
“Wait . . . I want . . .”
“Hush. You need to deliver the placenta, and then we have a lot of repairs to do.”
“But . . . my . . . baby . . .”
A nurse in bloody scrubs and glasses hands a metal pan to the doctor, still positioned between her legs, and says, “The baby’s fine. Beautiful and healthy, getting cleaned up and ready to meet Mom and Dad.”
“No, there’s no dad. It’s just . . . me.”
She sees the confusion register in the nurse’s eyes.
A man’s voice says, “She hasn’t decided yet.”
She turns to see Mr. Kendall, the school’s president, standing in the doorway.
It’s wrong, him being here, wearing a suit with a green-and-red plaid tie, while she’s completely exposed, blood-smeared legs splayed. She attempts to adjust her gown, but the doctor barks at her to lie still.
Her hands clench into fists, because there are still contractions, and because Mr. Kendall is dead wrong.
She has decided.
She isn’t giving up her baby, and there’s nothing anyone here can do or say that will change her mind about that.