I had to get through this. “Continue.”
“Dr. Reynolds lifted the baby fully out, clamped and cut the umbilical cord, and held her up. And the baby slipped,” Nurse Breck said. She looked straight at my frozen face. “She slipped from one of the doctor’s hands, and he barely hung on with the other. But then he dropped the baby to the floor as he tightened his grip on her ankles.”
I gasped, my hand at my mouth. I lost vision for several seconds, seeing only red and yellow spots propelling in front of my sunglasses.
“It was too late for us to do anything. Her little head hit the tiles, and then he pulled her back up by her ankles. He thought she was fine. He held her close to his chest like one of his own. Then he saw what I saw.”
“He dropped her?” I said in scarcely a whisper. “You’re saying he dropped her.” Nurse Breck nodded. The doctor had done this to my baby. Had my baby’s lungs let out a blood-curdling wail?
I bent over and retched in the grass with a hot, uncontrollable force. My glasses fell to the ground. I sat back up and smeared my mouth with the back of my hand—and then I bent over again, lower this time, and vomited until I choked only spit.
“Oh dear. What have I done?” Nurse Breck said all the while. She handed me a hanky now, and I wiped my mouth and cheeks on it, red lipstick marring its colorful embroidered butterflies, the taste of acid sharp on my tongue. “I should never have told you,” she said.
She opened her large handbag and pulled out a short thermos of iced water and two small cups. She poured and handed one to me.
In the distance, old men continued playing horseshoes, and I shivered at the clang of iron on the stakes, their heavy thrust of metal on metal, the unrelenting ringing of it though far away from me, and the men’s laughter, their joy, oblivious to my whole world crumbling.
Why had I selected this public place? But then, where was the right place to learn about the day your baby died? To learn of how a worthless drunkard of a doctor had killed her?
I needed my pills. And for the first time I needed more than one.
What the nurse and doctor had seen was what Dennis had later seen, what my husband had called an inflamed, swollen spot on Kathy’s head. So the spot had not been part of a soft, misshapen head that occurred naturally as with other babies—our baby hadn’t even squeezed through the birth canal. Nor was Kathy’s spot the result of forceps.
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me the rest, and then I’ll go.” I would find my way back to the gazebo somehow, in time to meet Pauline. I needed to hold Janie. I really needed pills.
Nurse Breck drank from her thermos cup, her hand shaking. “I took her,” she said, “the baby. Nurse Tibbers helped Dr. Reynolds get you back together. He seemed sober again, maybe from the shock. He finished the operation fine.”
“My baby was still alive.”
“Yes. She was beautiful. I washed her with the softest terry cloth and patted her tiny belly and arms and legs dry.”
This woman got to do what I never got to do—wash my baby’s skin, pat her dry. Hearing this was as hard as learning of the drop. I’d been robbed of my maternal rights over and over. But oddly, I didn’t begrudge this woman. It gave me comfort that Kathy had received a kind touch. If only it had been mine.
“I wrapped her in one receiving blanket and then another,” Nurse Breck said. “She wasn’t hurting. She didn’t cry for long.”
Not for long?
“I let your husband hold her, you know, though it was against hospital rules. It was after I told you the baby was gone, and you’d been sedated in order to sleep.”
No, no, no, I did not know that. Dennis hadn’t told me he’d held her. My anguish was palpable, but I wouldn’t humiliate myself by admitting I hadn’t known.
“Afterward,” she went on, “I went to the head nurse and said that Dr. Reynolds had been drunk. It didn’t matter if I lost my job. I was riddled with guilt over not stopping him when he first arrived on shift. I hoped my supervisor would take it to the administration. But she called in Nurse Tibbers, who denied everything. Denied the alcohol, the drop, denied everything. She had her own children to support. She needed the job. She backed the doctor entirely.”
I was incapable of speech. The pulsing red and yellow spots reappeared and blinded me for a moment.
Nurse Breck straightened her back, made her voice firm, and said, “In the medical profession, doctors are gods.”
“It was all Dr. Reynolds’s fault.” My voice was little more than a squeak. “It was all Dr. Reynolds’s fault.”
Nurse Breck replaced the lid on the thermos and said, “I’m sorry. You requested I tell you everything.”
“Yes,” I said, my ears pricking. I now knew what she’d meant about “disabusing me of my misconceptions.”
She’d known Kathleen’s condition wasn’t my fault and had felt compelled to tell me. Much as this woman hated coming here and reliving it all herself, she wouldn’t let me go the rest of my life thinking it had been me—thinking it had been my fault. How could I thank her? Under different circumstances, I could see we might’ve been friends.
Why, then, did I suspect she was holding something back?
“There’s one more thing,” she said, as a breeze blew the blades of grass at our feet.
2015
Kelsey and I wore our jackets and wandered into the grassy rear yard among the dwindling sprays of fall wildflowers—white and yellow asters, dainty white snakeroots, and prickly purple thistles. The goldenrods were already gone. Jane’s rescheduled biopsy was two days off, and she was finally ready to get together. Kelsey had banked a bunch of vacation days, and while she hated being away from her work at the moment, she’d said we were more important. My level of apprehension in waiting for Jane to arrive was equal to that of awaiting Nurse Breck in the Eden Park gazebo years before.
It was my time to pass my story down.
Nurse Breck had had the advantage of knowing fairly well how I’d react. Not so with me and my audience. It was the great unknown that sent a rush through my legs when the screen door to the enclosed rear porch squeaked open and clapped shut.
Jane was here. Kelsey and I turned from the flowerbeds and waved tentatively.
Could I gauge from this distance—a distance of about as far as from a handicap parking space to the entrance of a grocery—my daughter’s demeanor? Her strides were long but slow, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her jeans. Cane in hand, I began the trek to meet her in the middle, and Kelsey was one step behind. Jane wore a plaid flannel shirt and navy Nordic vest and looked from side to side as she strode, directing a glance at Kelsey and me only once. She might not have been as nervous as I, but this was no cakewalk for her either.
Kelsey welcomed Jane with open arms first. I believed it was her way of breaking the ice—and her way of establishing for her elders how this gathering would go. I was cognizant of the mix of smile and worry clouding my face as Jane turned to me. I reached my lonely arms out, and she leaned into a loose hug with two pats on my back. It brought a memory of when she’d granted me a long embrace the day she returned to Ohio. I hadn’t foreseen how I would come to miss that.
“I see you’ve still got the old tire swing,” Jane said, tilting her head toward the sugar maple.
“Yes,” I said. “Kelsey and I were just reminiscing about that.”
“My all-time fave tree,” Kelsey said.
“Should we go in? Get some tea?” I said. It was filler. Space-and-time filler talk.
“Nah,” Jane said. “I’m getting used to crisp air again. I think I’d rather talk. Or listen, I should say.”
The phrase eat and run popped into my head. She wanted to hear and run. I would rather have not been rushed.
“Grandma,” Kelsey said, “that day in your basement, you said there was more. More we should hear.” She laughed. “I guess I speak for both of us when I say we’re ready to hear it now.”
It sounded scripted and rehearsed. I motioned for
them to join me in the garden chairs back out by the flowers at the rear.
“Ooh! That’s cold on the butt,” Jane said. The chairs were painted white, ornamental cast iron.
“And hard and pointy,” Kelsey said.
“Not too late to go in,” I said. They shook their heads as if to say, “Get on with it.”
I began with the letter from the hospital and what I’d learned at the library. How I believed I’d done something wrong—caught a virus, not eaten well, worked too hard—to cause the baby’s problem. Kelsey listened with the attentive ear of a historian. I thought she would’ve loved her laptop to take notes. And Jane listened with the stern brow and keen ear of a legal prosecutor. Though interestingly, neither asked a question. It was as if Kelsey had given Jane marching orders before they arrived: Hear her out. She’s your mother. She deserves it. That would be just like her.
I touched on the strain that the loss had put on Jane’s father and me, but how we had cared for Janie throughout. “I was glad you got to enjoy your childhood without remembering the tragedy.” That’d been my view when Jane was a toddler, and that view was the same now.
Jane said, “But I spent a lot of time with Pauline and Tommy, didn’t I? A lot of time with Grandma Glenn, growing up, too. Not sure how normal that was.”
I felt a jab. Did she think I’d pawned her off? Did she resent that? Or was I being paranoid? I preferred to believe her time spent with friends and family enriched her life.
My story continued to the Labor Day outing at Graeter’s. I held the collar of my jacket closed with one hand at my neck as a damp fall wind blew through.
“That’s when I encountered the labor-and-delivery nurse. The woman with a beauty mark above her top lip . . .”
Kelsey said, “I can see where this is going. You would meet her on the side.”
“Though Daddy was dead set against it,” Jane said.
“Sometimes we do what we must,” I said firmly. Jane looked down and back up. “If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “I eventually told him. We didn’t keep things from each other, your father and I, at least not for long.”
Jane scooted back in her chair. I’d mollified her.
Kelsey said, “Sorry, but I need to stretch my back.”
We walked the perimeter of the yard. I might have felt overtaxed, but no, I was up for this. The adrenaline in my body pushed me forward—and so did the fact that no one had gone running, screaming away from me yet. I took one step at a time, my cane ahead of each foot. I picked Nurse Breck’s story back up.
“‘I could smell the alcohol on him from two feet away.’”
Kelsey gasped. “Your OB was drunk?” I nodded.
We three girls had settled our walk near the center of the yard by then. “Mom,” Jane said. “This is hard on me to hear. Worse than I thought. No matter what happens next, we know it’s not good. I can’t imagine how hard it was for you, sitting there, waiting.”
“Right,” I said, feeling vindicated. “Every minute I was waiting to hear how my child had died.”
We stood in a huddle, immune to the cold or to children playing in yards down the way or someone outside the neighborhood burning leaves. I was getting to the worst part.
“The doctor dropped her. Dropped your sister, and she hit her head. She was perfect until that. Nurse Breck saw it all.”
“That’s horrible,” Jane said. “This is absolutely horrible.” Her contorted face matched her words.
Looking at her, I now knew how my face appeared when Nurse Breck told me. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed Jane to know. We had this experience in common now: the hearing of these words.
“It is horrible,” Kelsey said. “I don’t know how you and Papaw survived it.”
“So unfair.” Jane spoke again.
Kelsey put her arms around me. She whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I hate this for you.”
I suddenly recalled again the time a boy had pushed me down in the street. Gravel and dirt got in my scrapes, but I didn’t cry. I ran home and up the stairs to the third floor and barged into the flat and there was my opa. “What happened?” he’d asked. And as the story of the mean boy poured out, so did my tears. It wasn’t until I shared my pain with someone who loved me that I let it out.
I cried softly on Kelsey’s shoulder, not hard the way I’d wept on Mother Glenn’s the day I returned from the hospital with empty arms. But I cried for having told her. I felt another hand stroking my back. It felt warm. I lifted my wet face and turned. Jane was there for me, too. Thank you, God.
Kelsey and I dislodged, and Jane and I embraced—a true embrace. “That’s what happened to your sister,” I said. “See why it was inconceivable for me to tell you when you were five? Or nine?”
She pulled back. “Yes.”
We were all quiet for the longest time, listening only to the mounting wail of a siren in the distance. Jane squatted down to pick up some large twigs that had fallen from a tree.
After a spell, she spoke. “I’ve been trying to get my brain to sort through all this since the day in the basement. I understand the tragedy more now. I get the reasons you held off telling me when I was a kid. But I can’t figure out one thing.” She straightened.
“What?” I said.
“Why didn’t you tell me before now? That I had a sister, I mean, even if you didn’t reveal this part about how she’d died? Why did you wait so long? You could have told me standing there in Ashbury Street in San Francisco. Or when I had a toddler of my own toddling around. Why did you wait?”
She assumed the story ended here. That it was over. But it wasn’t. There were more reasons why it was harder on her father and me. Reasons that made it harder to tell.
“Mom,” Kelsey said to Jane, picking up on my distress. “Maybe Grandma just couldn’t.”
“But I feel kinda like I’ve been lied to all my life,” Jane said, tossing aside the twigs she’d been carrying. Her voice rose. “Remember, Mom, how you almost washed my mouth out with soap one time for lying?”
I hung my head. I was ashamed for my granddaughter to witness me being accused. To make a point that day, I had threatened to swish a wet bar of Ivory around in Janie’s mouth to wash out a child’s lie—just as my mother had done to me. Had really done to me, that is. But I had abstained with Janie.
But Jane was right about one thing: I’d lied. Or, at least I’d lived a lie, and let her live a lie, too. Or I had committed the sin of a lie of omission.
Jane pressed on. “Grandma Glenn never mentioned it. No one in the entire family ever talked about it? And here I was left with the fallout.”
What fallout did she mean? My taking pills? My coddling her?
We girls had stopped walking now. We stood in the center of my yard. If only life could be as carefree as when Kelsey swung on the tire with Dennis pushing her. Now Kelsey’s eyes shot between her mother and me. I needed to prevent this day from spiraling out of control.
“I do understand how you suffered,” Jane said. Her eyes were big and sad. “It’s the most horrific thing I’ve ever heard. No woman should go through that. What I don’t get, though, is how or why you kept this covered—”
“Mom,” Kelsey said in a low voice, “I think you need to chill.”
“I just don’t get it,” Jane said loudly.
I scanned the neighbors’ yards on either side, concerned that others might hear us. Concerned that others might know my shame—the shame of my secret, the shame of my family disintegrating.
“Janie—I’m sorry—I mean, Jane,” I said. “You have every right to be disappointed in me. I tried telling you years ago, back during Roe v. Wade.” She jerked. Did she remember? “I tried telling you and Kelsey a week ago at our sleepover. But something always stopped me. I was going to tell you when we got done in the basement the other day, but I was too late. You’d found the album by then. I’m so sorry.” I motioned for us to move back toward the house, but not one of them budged.
/> Jane glared.
Did she blame me for something specific? Was her childhood less idyllic than my biased eyes remembered? Yes, there was something in her teen years. It had driven her to run away. What had it been? Or maybe Jane was going through the early stages of grief right now, even though she’d never met the sister she lost. First denial, followed by anger. Anger with the doctors. Anger with me.
Or the stress over her own health was making her snap. Of course it would.
“And Daddy,” she said, her palms up and her fingers spread wide. “I can’t believe he deceived me. He of all people.”
What had we done to poor Jane? Was it irreversible?
“Mom, really,” Kelsey said before I could ask. She pushed up her fake blue eyeglasses. “I get why you’re upset. I mean, circumstances deprived you of your only sibling. It’s effing unreal.” Jane glared at Kelsey now, too, though it was clear from Kelsey’s demeanor that she was coming from a place of sympathy and unity. “But you don’t get to freak out on Grandma. I mean, look at her. Do you think she kept this all bottled up her entire life just to hurt you? I don’t think so.”
Poor Kelsey. She’d always had to be the go-between.
“Girls, girls, let’s take this inside.” I stamped with my cane through the lawn in the direction of my house.
I turned back to see Jane had stood firm with the corners of her tight lips tucked in, the way Dennis’s used to when he got upset. I had to do something. I had to bring us together. But I was flummoxed. The stress of everything had mounted in me, too. I didn’t know how to fix us.
“Can’t we go inside? Please?” I said. Kelsey followed.
“Mom, it’s a simple question,” Jane persisted, trailing us with an exaggerated, mock-calm tone. “Why was this all a big secret?”
Inside my screened-in porch, Kelsey must have snapped, too, or else her hormones came clawing out, because she said something as I closed the door I never dreamed I’d hear.
“Seriously, Mom. Like you’re any better? Try looking in the mirror.”
Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel Page 21