Chapter 14 The Albatross #8
On the lower floors, they pass ancient-looking men and women in wheelchairs.
Some of these patients are alert as babies; others barely stir.
“Excuse me—” says a different nurse, and Laurel sees an old woman on her own gurney, crying lustily, her frail hair matted with dirt.
There is dirt, too, in the folds of her face, which looks shocked as a just-picked vegetable.
Her arms and legs are covered in mud as if in the vernix of birth.
The old woman is gone, then, whisked to her own floor. After that, the ramp becomes quiet. The nurse leads them to the second-highest level.
When the door opens, Laurel hears the babies.
They cry every kind of cry: screaming, whimpering, wailing.
The frenzy galvanizes Silas, who adds his own voice to the chorus.
As Laurel glides down the hallway, she can distinguish individuals.
Behind most doors is a single baby, soothed by the nurses or parents.
From one larger room, though, comes a cacophony of voices.
With her senses heightened by hormones, Laurel perceives at least a dozen.
Where are their mothers? In her state, the atmosphere of that room—its forlornness and abandonment—is as intolerable as the fact that she cannot change it. For this, Laurel realizes, is no ordinary hospital. It has two purposes: beginning and end, nursery and morgue.
—
Her own room. Soft lighting, soft voices, soft hand on her arm.
A doctor and a delivery nurse, knowing what is coming, meet Laurel where her knowledge leaves off.
The nurse helps her into a gown. Laurel crawls onto the bed.
Eli watches, helpless in scrubs, as the doctor measures Laurel’s cervix with her fingers.
“You’re already dilated,” the doctor says, and Laurel begins to cry.
“Can I hold him?” she asks. “One more time?”
The nurse peels the gown back from her chest, so that Silas can lie skin-to-skin. His bellows turn to whimpers when her eyes meet his.
“Bigger than the world,” she whispers.
Eli climbs into the bed beside Laurel, and she shifts to spread Silas between them: Eli cradles his upper half, Laurel his tiny legs. Eli presses his lips to the soft, velvet head as Laurel holds Silas’s gaze.
We’ve done this before, you and I, she thinks. That means we can do it again.
Silas’s milky gray eyes move between Laurel and Eli. His sight stretches no farther than ten or twelve inches, but that’s all he needs to see them.
—
One nurse prepares Silas, bathing him, anointing him with lubricating gel. After that, she comes to stand by Laurel’s chest.
“Now, you have your husband here,” she says. “And me, and the doctor—we’re here, too. Not for a minute will you be alone.”
The woman’s voice is compassionate but firm, and this is what Laurel needs: pure empathy wouldn’t bear her up, she’d fall right through it.
“What happens now?” she asks. Her pelvis seems to be tearing in two.
The nurse takes Laurel’s hand.
“Now you pull,” she says.
—
Eli’s tears are silent and continuous. He stands at her side, one hand in Laurel’s free hand, the other one holding her knee.
In the bath, Silas fussed. When the nurse brings him to the entrance of her body, he seems to relax. Laurel looks at Eli, to see whether this is true.
“He looks peaceful,” Eli says.
Laurel nods. She will never be ready, but she believes that Silas is.
“Okay,” she says, granting her permission to begin.
—
As his feet go in, she gasps. For a moment, there is only the blast, searing and total.
Then she sees what it has ripped open.
A channel. A corridor, sacred as the aurora, stretches between her and Silas.
Cautiously she senses. She is not who she was.
As when cells fuse, their membranes merge, and the border between them dissolves.
Nature shows her what to do. Even though she was not born in this world, Laurel is subject to its rules: she bends to its laws like a stalk in the wind, she is pulled like a tide by the moon.
The revelation is blinding: she is a portal. (The pain was only a gate.) Her duty is to carry Silas to his final resting place. A cord will grow between them. (He will always be there.) His cells—his life force—will go on within Laurel, as she carries the strands of her ancestors.
Beneath her awareness, until now: the tangle.
She is many, not one.
Selves tucked inside selves like Russian dolls.
—
The nurse and doctor coach her: when to breathe, how to pull. There is no resisting now, no relief until it’s over, and the women work quickly to urge Silas inward.
“He’s almost there,” the doctor says. “He just needs one final pull. Eli, do you want to—?”
Eli looks to Laurel. “Is that okay?”
She nods. In her groin is a burning sensation. Her body is open, distended: she needs it to be finished.
Eli keeps one hand in hers as he walks to the foot of the bed. With the other, he guides Silas’s head.
Laurel convulses. Eli makes a sound she’s never heard. There is a feeling of suction, a plug.
—
In Silas travels, like spores into gills, like pollen back into a bud.