Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  “Thirty . . . maybe thirty-one?”

  Mom nods comfortably, but I see her smile tighten.

  “Have you practiced Lamaze breathing?”

  “I used to practice with Clay, before they got me.”

  “We’re going to review a few things. Cedar, you can practice too.”

  We huff and puff, do cleansing breaths, panting breaths, together, in a welter of pillows and sleeping bags and blankets. I get dizzy and I think that Tia hyperventilates, too, because all of a sudden we’re acting like a couple of six-year-olds. Tia sticks out her tongue and rolls back her eyes. I bare my teeth and cackle. Mom gets into it with this exaggerated “Hee, whoo” type breathing that you see in birth movies. She twists her head around, shuts her eyes. “Oh yeah, the natural high.” She gets Tia loosened up, even laughing, and it touches me to see my mom acting like this, so unlike herself, in order to take Tia’s mind off where we are.

  “Should we be making this much noise?” I ask.

  “Probably not,” says Sera. She mimes a big exaggerated hushy face, and Tia keeps on breathing noisily, laughing, snorting. Suddenly she quits and goes silent. Her eyes widen.

  “Ow!”

  She makes a ragged sound of surprise, but Sera coaxes her into a breathing pattern. For an hour, that’s how it goes. The contractions are becoming uncomfortable now, maybe painful. I can tell they’re absorbing Tia’s focus. She still talks between them, but her forehead squeezes up and her eyes swim with inwardness, stark and bewildered. Her face is so stripped and pure when she’s immersed in a contraction that I want to kiss her. I do kiss her on the crown of her head. I hold her against me and Mom crouches next to her.

  “Am I going to have my baby?” she asks in a normal voice, after one particularly hard contraction. Light beads of sweat have popped out on her forehead. “Is it coming now?”

  “No,” says Sera. “Not for a while. But it’s time for me to check you, see how far along you are.”

  Sera takes me aside while Tia is between contractions, limp and lost. She nearly goes unconscious when her contractions let up. “I have to see about sterilizing things, and make sure we’re safe here. I have to leave for a moment, find Shawn. Are you okay with her?”

  “I think so.”

  “Nothing’s out of the ordinary—just she’s not to term.”

  Then Sera leaves to get her bag. While she’s gone, I hold Tia’s hand. I spread her tapered fingers out and knead them, massage my energy into her palms.

  “That feels good.”

  Then a contraction starts and she wades into it with a hopeless bravery, deeper and deeper, until at its peak she’s all the way under. I take off her watch, strap it onto my wrist, and tell her when she’s halfway through. The stretch is tightest, the pain most intense, at thirty seconds, but after that she slowly surfaces.

  “That helps.”

  Four minutes apart, now, and less time for her to rest between contractions. Mom comes back with Shawn—his face is solemn with alarm. With his skinny body and flapping lambskin helmet he looks like a Minnesota Frankenstein, and I almost laugh. He’s got black industrial poured-plastic moon boots on, huge things, buckled to the knee. When he kneels next to Tia, he is incongruously gentle.

  “I’m going to carry you out of here,” he says. “We’re going out back between the container stacks, to the caves. We think there’s gonna be a raid in a few hours.”

  Out in back of the station, the ancient banks of the Mississippi, dry cliffs now, are riddled with empty caves left when the cliffs were mined for sand. The great banks are warrened with places that over the years have been used to store everything from Prohibition liquor to explosives to drugs. These were gangster hideouts, speakeasies, homeless people’s squats. The man who started St. Paul, Pig’s Eye Parrant, kept a tavern in one of the caves. Hermits and crazy people have made the caves their home. Children have been lost in the caves, died in the caves, and a coffee shop or two are still set into the grottolike foundation of the caves. One is a ballroom where high school proms are held. Some are wired up for heat and rented to stores—livable.

  “Won’t they look there?”

  “Well, maybe,” says Shawn. “But we’ve got caves behind the caves, you know? Those lead into a labyrinth of tunnels. St. Paul sits on top of a whole other world. This place, you’re sitting ducks. In the caves you’ve got little back doors, weird ways of getting in and out, belly-crawl passageways. Like the way we’re going,” he says, gathering Tia in his arms. “We’re going through the basement of a house set right against the base of the cliff.”

  He tenderly adjusts her in his arms and stands. I jam your notebook in the backpack and we go. Tia’s having a contraction, breathing hard, her eyes shut, leaning against Shawn’s oil-stained blue jacket. Sera and I carry all of the bedding, plus she’s got a black roller bag that she totes behind us. It is dark now, so if we skirt the big yard spotlight we are going to be okay. It’s hard keeping my balance with the sleeping bags, the blankets, my backpack, not to mention you. I take stiff little pregnant-lady steps, anxiety-laden steps, as we move down a dim trail past the hulking bales of cans, plastic, metal containers, boxcars, vast chewing and smashing equipment, all silent and dead still. The cool is lovely. Almost really cold. We go through several openings in four layers of link fencing—you can’t see these openings until you’re right at them—and when we squeeze through and close them they are again invisible. We wind around the base of the cliff, the massive old riverbed wall, until we come to some houses and broken-down businesses and little boarded-over shops. One of them, which looks abandoned like all of the others, has a side door. Sera pulls away a padlock and opens it. Shawn looks carefully all around us before he steps into the gloom. We stand for a moment in lightless, cold quiet. Then Sera lets us through another door, handing me a little pencil of an LED flashlight. Shawn carries Tia down a set of creaky stairs. In the basement, Mom sweeps her light at a wall of shelves and cabinets. She opens one of the doors and gently pries loose the wooden backing, which reveals a whitewashed wall. It takes a while to realize that it is actually a door set into the wall, one with a latch string left out down about a foot off the floor. Sera pulls the string, which lifts a bar on the other side, and Shawn ducks in with Tia.

  “I better get back,” he says. “She can walk from here?”

  “It’s common practice during labor,” says Mom. “It helps the baby come faster.”

  “I’ll be okay,” says Tia. “The contractions stopped. Maybe out of fear? I haven’t had one since we left the garage. Let’s get where we’re going.”

  Shawn retreats. We’re in here now with Tia until her baby comes. If anything goes wrong, there is no Plan B. No crash C-section.

  “We’re going to be all right, you’ll see,” says Sera. Her voice is almost blithe, but her assurance can’t be real. I follow her in. We slowly toddle single file down a skinny, rough-walled passageway. The way gets narrower, the ceiling buckles. We hunch lower and lower until we are crawling on our hands and knees—the gravel cuts into my kneecaps and palms. I try to drag our stuff with me and sometimes have to inch along on my side like a worm. I break out in a terror sweat. I am underneath tons and tons of rock—massive and senseless amounts of rock. I try to make my mind a blank, try to meditate, follow Mom without thinking. But then we come to a heavy wall with a black mouthlike aperture beneath. It looks like a medieval dungeon wall. We are supposed to slide underneath. Tears stream down my face.

  Mom edges under on her stomach, and pulls her stuff behind. Astonishingly, Tia rolls through quick as a cat.

  “Come on,” says Tia, panting, “push your stuff through.”

  “I can’t do it,” I whisper.

  “Do you need help?” says Mom.

  “I can’t do it. I’ll get stuck.” And I do get stuck. Mom gently torques me this way and that, rocks me along under the stone, pulls me through inch by inch. My heart is beating so fast I almost pass out. By the time I am on the other side
I’m sick. The two have to wait while I go to a corner, walking upright anyway, to puke. There is a shrine where I stop, a niche carved in the rock. In it, there’s a little plastic statue of Mary. Her blue cloak and peach-pale face are grimed with sooty dust. I say two Hail Marys and feel a little better. In her presence, I will be all right. Maybe she’s looking after me—she should be looking after me. It’s her job. I put a little pebble at her feet, an offering, among many other little stones. People like me put them there, grateful for her protection as they squeezed under that nightmare stone.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  The air is bad, stale and oxygen thin, mineral smelling, dank. It makes us sleepy. Mom says to breathe deeply, concentrate on breathing. I break into a clammy sweat and try to control my racing heartbeat.

  “Stop,” says Tia.

  We hold her as she gasps. Her breathing surges and she cries out. “It’s a bad one.”

  “A good one, a good one,” says Sera, and in the thin flashlight’s beam I see that Tia wants to belt her for saying that. I don’t blame her. But unless Sera is relentlessly cheerful about our situation, at some point we’ll probably just sit down and get hysterical and die. When Tia’s done I pat her back and help her stumble along. The passageways widen precipitously, then narrow alarmingly. We climb a tiny set of steps cut into the rock, a winding set of stairs. Then we pass through a dark esophageal tunnel.

  “There’s a domed room, warm, just ahead,” says Mom. “It’s wired for electricity and there’s even a tiny stove, vented to the outside. And Shawn put a drum of dried soups and stuff in there, too.”

  “Ramen?” I say.

  “Maybe.” Sera’s trying to cheer us along. “That’s how come I’ve got the roller bag. It’s filled with gallon jugs of water.”

  The news of water and hot soup seems to galvanize Tia and she tries to stride through the passageway. “I just want to be lying down when the next one comes,” she says. But she isn’t. It is the next one after that.

  Our little room, a real cave, has got limestone walls and lumpy stone jutting out all over. There are some ancient handwoven rag rugs on the floor, and a futon, chewed by rats. I stuff back handfuls of batting until the mattress is intact enough for Tia to lie down.

  “Put these down on top of the sleeping bags,” says Sera.

  She’s got a bunch of hospital pads in her roller bag. Plus antibacterial wipes, a surgical sewing kit, alcohol swabs, sterile latex gloves, and those eyedrops mandated by state law even though the last thing this baby’s got to worry about is an STD-induced eye infection. Still, I’m so relieved and impressed with my mom that I put my arms around her—you in between us. She holds my face and speaks, looking into my eyes.

  “We’re all going to be all right, especially Tia. Don’t you worry.”

  This sort of against-the-odds cheer used to drive me crazy. Now I suck it right up. I bury my face in the soft black scarf I knit for her. After everything, she’s somehow kept that, run away with it. I stroke it and want to cry. Then Tia yells and we’re back in her labor. I sit down with her and train my flashlight on the watch. She’s down to three minutes apart now. Sera passes her flashlight up and down the walls until she locates an industrial extension cord dangling against the stone. She plugs the stove in, finds a small lamp, and plugs that in too. She turns up the oven and opens it wide—in a few minutes the room seems a little warmer. There’s a heavy tarp rolled up over the doorway and Sera lets it down, to keep in the heat. There is a saucepan and a teakettle in the drawer beneath the oven. She fills the kettle with water and puts it on the top back burner. I hold Tia in my arms as she goes through five more contractions. Then five more. I think she must be ready to have the baby. Sera puts on a pair of the sterile gloves. Her hands look ghostly.

  “Right after the next contraction, I’m going to check you,” she says to Tia, and she does. Her face is remote and far away.

  “Pretty soon now, huh?” says Tia in a tough, scared little voice.

  “Well,” says Sera, “you’re dilated.”

  “How much?”

  Tia and I are prepared to hear that she’s ten centimeters, that she’s ready to have her baby.

  “Two,” says Sera.

  “Two? Two? Oh god! Oh shit!”

  Tia throws herself back against the rolled end of the futon, into the sleeping bags. I can feel the despair swirl out of her, the flailing fear. “No! Here comes another!” And Tia reaches out and grabs my hair so hard that she’s pulling it out and we both scream. She tears at my face with her screwdriver fingernails and manages at the same time to lash out with one leg and catch Mom’s jaw with her heel. Sera goes down, stunned, kneels on the floor and then tries to crawl forward to help me pin Tia. But Tia’s slim, strong legs kick too fast. She rakes out again with her talons, scoring down the other side of my face, drawing blood. I think maybe what the Slider said was true, or maybe it’s a curse for murdering Orielee—these babies can’t be born without medical intervention. Something terrible, unnatural, is taking place and we are doomed to die in a welter of bloody, agonized hysteria.

  Tia goes unconscious when the contraction stops. Her hands go limp. She shuts her eyes and begins to snore.

  “Is she going to die, Mom?” I whisper. “Is she trying to kill us? What’s the matter?”

  Sera rights herself. She’s already got Neosporin out for my scratches and is touching my face with the grease.

  “Oh, Tia just now? Honey, that’s normal.”

  * * *

  I feel funky, sour, and Sera gives me a couple of her antibacterial wipes, cautioning she’ll need the rest for the delivery. Tia is now making progress. I don’t know what else to call it. Progress, of course. Going through increased pain in order to get into even worse pain that will mean the end of pain. Clearly, once you’re in labor, you’re in. The only way out is through. By some handy miracle of utter denial, I don’t take Tia’s labor personally. Don’t feel the clutch of terror that I probably should, watching her struggle to climb out of each contraction. Her hands and legs move rhythmically. Like she is crawling up and down vast cliffs. She does not complain. She seems to have decided to obey the pain, not fight it. Her face is burnished with sweat. I offer sips of water. Sera touches her lips with her fingers, smears on beeswax lip balm. Tia doesn’t talk to us anymore, she just crawls into the pain, up and over the lip of the incline, and then crawls down into a little nest of sleep.

  Hours pass. I can’t believe I write this. Hours pass. I do not understand how her body doesn’t break. She stays whole, as far as I can see, but her eyes roll back to the whites. And she greets each oncoming contraction with a powerful sound, a growl that starts low in her ribs and rises in pitch until, at the ceiling of her contraction, it is a cougar’s scream. I heard that sound twice, once in my backyard and once out camping with my parents in Glacier Park. They closed around me in their sleeping bags and none of us slept again that whole night. Now the same sound from Tia rises in the little cave, until Sera says, checking her once again, “It’s time to push. Push!”

  Instantly, with the first push, Tia turns into a human being. Although her face swells, grotesque with blood, and her eyes bulge when she bears down, between the pushes she is weirdly animated. She’s herself somehow. She talks.

  “Am I going to see my baby soon?”

  “Soon,” says Sera, “soon. Ready? Now . . .”

  But this baby is stuck. There is no budging it. Hours pass. I really cannot believe that I have to write that again. Tia is still pushing, her lips drawn back. Her eyes bloody and a tiny vein broken on the crest of her cheekbone. Mom takes the old chair in the corner and knocks the seat out. Tia sits in the chair and pushes down, into gravity, into the rock, into the earth, straining her hips to break. In this way she begins to move her baby. I’ve got my hands ready, sterile-gloved, underneath. No baby. I don’t recognize Tia. Her face is twice the size it should be and her hair is needles. She’s pulsing electricity. She is magnificent. But sc
ary. Her eyes are sunken and her mouth drags at air. At one point, I think that she is dead. No motion. I freeze with her. She takes a huge groaning breath in and pushes again and there is the crown, the top of the head.

  “Easy now, easy. Let’s just let your baby slip out,” says Sera.

  Tia’s sound comes from the stone itself, the cave talking. With the next push the baby’s head is out, eyes shut, unmoving. I am cradling its face. And then another push and here is the rest of the baby and I’m on my stomach on the floor of the cave wrapping the baby as Sera, next to me, clamps off the cord and cuts it. Sera takes the baby. Tells me to catch Tia before she falls and to put her down on the bed. And then there is the first hint of fear in her voice, the first sign that Sera’s scared.

  Tia reels off the chair and I nearly drop her, but we manage to tumble down onto the bed. Mom is working on the baby. She’s hunched over and she sucks something from the baby’s mouth, spits, then puts her lips to its tiny face and puffs. Tia’s bleeding. She delivers the placenta, but keeps on bleeding. I squeeze her hands. Raise her hips.

  “Stop bleeding. Stop it right now. Stop bleeding.” I say this in a commanding voice, and I glare at Tia fiercely, as if it is her fault. And her eyes open. She looks at me very sweetly.

  “Okay,” she says, dutifully. “I will try. I will.”

  And she does it. The sudden flow quits.

  “That’s good, you’re doing well,” I hear myself say. That is all I’ve been saying for hours. But now there is a new thing to say. Only I’m not going to be the one to say it. I refuse. I have been through too much with Tia to be the one who has to tell her. Sera will have to do it, when Sera herself understands. When she stops the useless little puffing sounds over there by the chair. When she stops hunching over the little bundle in her arms. When she sits up. When she just fucking quits. Which doesn’t happen for a long, long time. So long that I think, Sera, say it. Say it, now. But she does not. That baby’s dead, but Sera doesn’t say that. Eventually, she crawls over to us and says something like Your baby didn’t make it, or Your baby is in the spirit world, or just Gone. I’m sorry. Gone.