Jane nodded. “It’s time.”
Jimmy swallowed and said, “Yikes.” He spoke for both of them, really.
* * *
—
Jane stood by the front door and peered out the narrow sidelight, watching for Aggie. She held her cell phone in her hand in case Duncan called.
“Is she here yet?” Jimmy asked, coming up behind her.
“No,” Jane said, “but—”
She stopped speaking when she turned and saw Jimmy standing there with his own bag, a terrible orange-and-yellow flowered nylon suitcase that must have belonged to his mother. She had not meant for Jimmy to come with her. She didn’t want to have to worry about him or explain things to him. She wanted him to stay here. She would call him when the baby was born. She would promise that he would be absolutely the first call she made—
“Here she is!” Jimmy said, as headlights lit up the window and then Aggie’s SUV rolled into the driveway. “Now, you just hang on to my arm and don’t slip.”
How could she tell him to stay home? And as they stepped outside and down the snow-coated steps, she was glad to have someone helping her. Anyway, Aggie could easily bring him home again.
Aggie was driving and Gary sat in the passenger seat, so Jane pulled open the rear door, and a wave of heat and car smells puffed out. She felt she could pick out the individual components of that odor: upholstery, lemon air freshener, coffee, very faint aftershave. Aggie’s car was her office, and she was devoted to maintaining it.
“I’ve spread a beach towel back there, Jane,” she said. “Make sure you sit on it.”
Jimmy helped Jane in and put their bags in back and then climbed into the seat next to her. Aggie pulled out carefully, the SUV’s wheels crunching on the snow. It was clear that Aggie had been forced to leave her house without prepping Gary because he was full of questions.
“How long is this going to take?” he asked Aggie.
“I don’t know,” Aggie said, leaning forward to peer through the blowing whiteness. “It will take as long as it takes.”
“Will we be home in time for cocoa?”
“I can’t promise you that,” Aggie said. “But I can promise you that whenever we get home, I’ll make cocoa then.”
Jane, frantic for distraction, wanted to hear more about the cocoa ritual. What all did it involve? Was it a euphemism for something more interesting? But then Gary said, “Where’s Duncan, anyway?”
“He’s in Kalamazoo,” Aggie answered. “But he’s driving here just as fast as he can.”
“Are you sure he’s coming?” Gary asked. “He hasn’t run off ?”
It was a good thing that Jane was sitting behind Aggie and not Gary because otherwise she might have leaned forward and strangled him.
“Duncan will be here,” Aggie said firmly, and Jane felt a little better. Aggie almost always got what she wanted; if she decided Duncan should be at the hospital, he would be there.
The tugging pain came again, a little longer this time. The radio was on, and a man with a deep, lugubrious voice began to sing:
The engine’s running smooth and the moon is overhead.
We got hours before your back will find a bed…
“Could you turn off the radio?” Jane asked, and then she sat back in her seat as another pain came. This pain seemed a little bolder, as though testing Jane: Can you take this? What about this?
The windshield wipers slapped back and forth on the fastest setting. The headlights lit up the falling snow in front of them, and the wet black roads with fat white fingers of snowdrifts poking across them. Jane closed her eyes. She could feel each time the SUV hit an icy patch, the small buoyant sensation before the tires regained their grip.
Just outside Petoskey, the tires seemed to lose touch with the road completely. For a brief moment they were all swaying weightlessly, and then there was a lurch and a grinding sound as the SUV struck a snowbank.
Aggie let out a small cry and Jane moaned in spite of herself. Would she have to have the baby in a car by the roadside?
Aggie opened the door and stepped out, instantly becoming little more than a colorful blur in the swirling whiteness. She was back almost at once and slid behind the wheel, snowflakes shaggy on her red wool coat. “We’re not stuck. I can just back out.”
She put the SUV in reverse, whispering, “Come on, come on,” under her breath, and the SUV slid obediently backward, and they were on the road again.
Aggie dropped them off at the hospital’s main entrance and went to park the car. “You just go on with Jane and Jimmy,” she said to Gary. “I’ll be right there.”
Jimmy helped Jane out of the car, and Gary carried her suitcase, and Jimmy’s. They took the elevator to the maternity ward and went to the nurse’s station. An older man wearing scrubs was tapping at a computer keyboard.
“Hello,” Jane said. “I’m Jane Wilkes, Dr. Skyberger’s patient, and I’m in labor.”
“Just a minute.” The man didn’t look up. He was squinting at the computer screen through his bifocals. He was not the warm, matronly nurse Jane had wanted—she had hoped for a sort of Ma Ingalls with more up-to-date medical knowledge. He typed another minute and then pushed back his roller chair to look at the three of them. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me your name again.”
“Jane Wilkes.”
He looked at Jimmy. “Are you the baby’s father?”
“No,” Jimmy said proudly. “I’m the baby’s brother.”
Jane’s heart twisted; for a moment, heartache blotted out labor pain.
The nurse looked at Gary. “Are you—”
“No,” Jane said. “No.”
“Okay.” The nurse rattled his keyboard some more, and then said, “Follow me. Your friends can wait here.”
He led Jane down the hall to an unrelentingly beige room with a hospital bed and a lot of round-cornered vinyl-cushioned wooden furniture. It was a room that had seen infinite joy and immeasurable tragedy, and yet it retained none of either. On the bed was a folded hospital gown and a pair of orange nonskid socks.
“You can get changed, and your nurse will be right in,” the man said. Evidently that meant the nurse would be someone other than him. Good.
Jane changed into the gown in the bathroom and hung her clothes and coat in the closet. Then she sat down on the bed to wait.
A redheaded girl of about twelve came into the room. “Hi, Jane!” she said. “I’m Melody, and I’m a labor and delivery nurse. I’ll be your point person from here on.”
Wait, she was a nurse? They let preteens become nurses?
“Just lean back and let me examine you,” Melody said.
Jane lay back on the bed. Melody moved closer, and Jane could see tiny lines by Melody’s mouth and the kind of dense smattering of freckles that could only be accumulated after decades. So maybe Melody was Jane’s age, but she had a youthful, perky-cupcake energy that didn’t inspire confidence.
Jane sighed. Apparently, Ma Ingalls was busy elsewhere tonight.
* * *
—
Jane heard Freida out in the hall, saying, “Where is she? We came just as soon as we could!” A moment later, Freida and Mr. Hutchinson burst through the door, with Aggie and Gary and Jimmy behind them.
“Jane!” Freida cried dramatically.
“Hello,” Jane said.
“How long have you been in labor?” Freida asked. “I was so scared we’d miss the birth!”
“I don’t think there’s much danger of that,” Jane said. “I’m only four centimeters dilated.”
Jane had assumed that once Freida was here, Aggie and Gary would leave, taking Mr. Hutchinson and Jimmy with them, but instead they all draped themselves around the room, some on the vinyl furniture, some leaning against the walls, and took on the postures of travelers whose flig
hts have been delayed and who know they’re in for the long haul. Aggie asked Freida what she’d had for dinner, and Freida said that she’d had fettuccine Alfredo and Mr. Hutchinson had had the baked cod because he didn’t like pasta. Freida said that it was so unusual, really, for someone not to like pasta—just one of the many, many fascinating details about Mr. Hutchinson. (Honestly, newlyweds talked such rubbish, Jane thought; they should all be put in quarantine for at least the first year of married life.) Aggie said she’d always felt that fettuccine Alfredo was the SPAM of Italian food, and that she personally went out of her way never to order it. Mr. Hutchinson asked Jimmy if he liked to watch basketball. Jimmy somehow interpreted this as Mr. Hutchinson asking what basketball was and launched into a rambling explanation. Gary watched the fetal heart monitor in a rapt sort of way.
Nobody was paying much attention to Jane, who sat on the bed with the sheet and blanket over her and wondered where Duncan was. She wanted to check her cell phone, but it was in her coat pocket. She looked out the window. Snowflakes were falling past like fluffy white spiders. The tugging pain came again, stronger.
“Now, you get three points for a basket from behind the three-point line,” Jimmy said to Mr. Hutchinson. “And two points from anywhere inside the three-point line. Free throws are worth one point, and the team with the most points at the end wins, unless it goes into overtime…”
Jane was just thankful that Freida didn’t have her mandolin.
“If only I had my mandolin!” Freida said at that moment. “Then we could at least have some music.”
“I have my recorder in the car,” Mr. Hutchinson said.
Fortunately, Dr. Skywalker arrived then, his beard wild from the wind outside, and shooed everyone out while he examined Jane. His hand probed and withdrew just as Melody’s had done.
“Six centimeters,” he announced in his revivalist’s voice. “You’re doing just fine. You’re still determined to do this naturally?”
He looked so fierce that Jane felt timid. “Yes,” she said.
“You can always change your mind,” Dr. Skywalker said. “Now, do you really want all those people around? You’re the one in labor, and that means you get to make the rules. I can tell them to go home.”
Jane smiled at him gratefully. “That would be wonderful. I just want Freida to stay.”
“Which one is Freida?” Dr. Skywalker asked, and Jane remembered that he was a stranger to them.
“The one—” She paused as the pain came again. She let it have its way. “The one with the curly hair.”
Dr. Skywalker went out in the hall, and it turned out he wasn’t a complete stranger, because right away Aggie said, “Now, I seem to remember that you and your wife nearly put a bid in on a house way out on Lakeshore Drive a couple years ago.”
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Skywalker said thoughtfully. “I believe so. Big blue house with white shutters?”
“That’s the one.” Aggie sounded vigorous. “Your wife acted all interested at the open house, but I could never get a straight answer out of her. I dislike it intensely when buyers drag their feet.”
“Oh,” Dr. Skywalker said. There was a little pause, as there often was after Aggie spoke to someone. “Well, anyway, Jane’s in labor and she’s going to need to focus, so if I could ask you folks to get going now, everyone but Flora.”
“Freida,” Jane called.
“Yes, everyone but Freida,” Dr. Skywalker said. “You all should be heading home anyway, on account of the storm.”
There was a little murmur of conversation, and then Aggie poked her head into Jane’s room. “We’re on our way,” she said. “I’m driving Mr. Hutchinson so he can leave his car for Freida.”
The pain was making it hard for Jane to concentrate. “What about Jimmy?”
“Jimmy went off to look for the cafeteria and hasn’t come back,” Aggie said. “Good luck! Have Duncan call me with the news.”
Wait for Jimmy, Jane wanted to say. Take him with you. But the pain came, stronger than ever this time, and literally took her breath away.
* * *
—
At first the pain was low down in Jane’s abdomen, like menstrual cramps. Then it was like severe menstrual cramps. And then it was nothing at all like menstrual cramps, but a hard, gripping pain that wrapped around her pelvis and lower back and squeezed for long, merciless minutes. If only she could have a break and catch her breath. If only they could call off labor for a little while, just until Jane felt stronger.
“Hold my hand,” Freida said, and Jane nodded.
With each contraction, she gripped Freida’s hand tighter. Freida smoothed Jane’s hair back from her forehead with her free hand and sang to her. Only it wasn’t singing, exactly; it was closer to humming. A lovely, molten, effortless sound rising and falling, carrying Jane along.
Jane waited for a contraction to finish. “What is that song?”
“It’s ‘Ode to Joy’ by Beethoven.”
It was so odd that Jane had never realized how beautiful Freida was. Freida sat in a chair beside the bed, her face level with Jane’s, and Jane could see that the irises of Freida’s hazel eyes were edged with a darker brown circle, that her eyelashes were thick as toothbrush bristles, that each of her ten thousand ringlets was a different shade of brown, from auburn to bronze to chestnut to mahogany. Freida’s hands were beautiful, too, though she had often told Jane that a musician’s hands should be ugly, proudly ugly—wide and sturdy, thick with muscle. And this was true of Freida’s hands, but Jane thought they were beautiful in their usefulness, strong and comforting in their grip.
The pain came again, a savage twisting that went on longer than Jane thought she could stand. When it was over, she looked at Freida. “I want an epidural.”
Freida nodded and pressed the button for the nurse. Jane closed her eyes against the pain, and when she opened them, Melody was next to Freida, saying, “Jane, I’m sorry but the anesthesiologist has been called to the ER because of a multiperson car accident. It’s going to be a while.”
Car accidents, always car accidents. Jane turned her head away, unable to answer.
After that, the pain changed. Pain flooded the room like water and rose until Jane could feel it lapping at her face, like when you put your head back in the bath to shampoo your hair. Then she sank beneath it. She looked up at Dr. Skywalker and Freida and Melody from below the surface of the pain; their faces were wobbly and distorted, their voices muffled. She could no longer hear Freida humming. Dr. Skywalker boomed words down at her, his fierce eyes blazing, but Jane couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Sometimes the pain would pause, and Jane would rise to the surface, but never long enough to say anything. What was there to say anyway?
“Jane?” Freida said. “Jane! Why is she gasping like that? Is she getting enough oxygen?”
Dr. Skywalker answered, but Jane couldn’t hear him. She had gone under again.
She stayed under a long time. She didn’t know how long. Hours? Days? The world was so far away, so muted. She forgot about the storm, about “Ode to Joy,” about her breathing. It didn’t seem to matter anymore that Duncan was not there, that he was missing this. Nothing mattered except this pain that would not let up. She was losing strength, but the pain was getting stronger, ready to push itself out of her. No baby would be born, only pain was being born here tonight. Pain would leap out of her and leave her lying on the delivery table, split open.
Then Freida’s strong arm was under Jane’s shoulder, lifting her until her head was above the surface and she could breathe again. Melody was on her other side, supporting her. Jane took a deep, shuddering breath. The two of them would carry her out of the pain, carry her to some shore. All she had to do was rest. But Dr. Skywalker would not allow that.
“Jane, you need to push,” he ordered. “Jane, open your eyes! I mean i
t! Pull her knee back, Freida, just like Melody’s doing. Push, Jane, push to ten. One, two, three…”
Jane pushed, but it didn’t feel like a push—it felt like she was being turned inside out, like her interior flesh was being pulled out along with the baby. She screamed, and then it was over.
“It’s a girl!” Dr. Skywalker and Freida and Melody all said at once, but not quite in synch, so to Jane it sounded like an echo. A girl…girl…girl…
Dr. Skywalker held the baby up. She was blood-smeared and white-flecked, her hair wet spikes, her froggy arms waving.
“Ten fingers, ten toes,” Dr. Skywalker said. “Would you like to hold her?”
Jane tried to say yes, but just then fluid gushed from between her legs like water out of a culvert. The pain came back, only this time she didn’t sink beneath it. This time, the pain grabbed Jane by the hair and yanked her under. It pulled her down deep into water that was not green or blue, but an inky black where specks of light floated, drifted, and then blinked out.
* * *
—
A soft tapping woke Jane. She opened her eyes. “Duncan?”
It was Jimmy, patting the back of her hand. “Jane, wake up, they’re going to bring the baby soon!”
His touch was soft, but his voice was urgent. Jane’s gaze went past him to the window where snow fell with blurry speed, so fast and thick that it made the window look like a TV screen filled with static. Jane had lived in northern Michigan long enough to recognize a true blizzard. Duncan wouldn’t be getting there that day. The hospital had the hushed, insulated feel that comes from a heavy snowfall, and although no sunshine came through the window, the room glowed with creamy yellow light. Jane realized it was a different room from the earlier one, but just as bland and impersonal.
She tried to pull herself into a sitting position, and pain flared through her pelvis like a thin rope of fire. She remembered she was in a hospital bed and groped for the remote. The bed whirred her slowly into a seated position.
Early Morning Riser Page 20