Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

— David Lehman

  39

  GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

  Grueling time passed on a stifling bus.

  Hannah de-boarded the Greyhound suffering terrible stomach cramps.

  She bee-lined for the bathroom of the Ann Arbor Greyhound station; her kidneys ached.

  There was blood in the toilet bowl afterward, but not much—not enough to worry over, she reassured herself. Not like after Richard. She’d call her doctor when she reached the apartment; she was already bracing for his lecture.

  Hannah walked from the bathroom, pale, a hand pressed to her belly. Then she saw the man in the black suit—slicked-back, graying, anthracite hair and an aquiline nose.

  She remembered seeing him one or twice around the lodge. Hannah turned and ran to the extent that she could do that. Hannah saw in a mirror the man was following her.

  ***

  The loft was stale and dusty from being shuttered for six weeks. Sneezing several times, Hannah struggled with a couple of the old, warped windows, propping them open with dowel rods. She turned on the ceiling fans, sneezing again at the dust they kicked up. She watched the dust motes spiraling in the shafts of late afternoon sunlight and thought about cleaning, then thought better of it.

  Never confuse movement for action, Papa had more than once lectured one or another of the younger women in his life. Why leave Richard a clean apartment? Better to pack for her move.

  Hannah’s sister Aggie, who never approved of Richard, had several times offered Hannah and her unborn baby a deal on an upstairs apartment over some rental property that she and her husband owned on South State Street, in the midst of the University of Michigan campus. Perhaps the offer still stood. Hannah was also promised a teaching assistant’s post in introductory literature, so there would be some money to augment whatever, if anything, she extracted from Richard. All in all, it didn’t shape up to be a hand-to-mouth existence for Hannah and her baby.

  Then she saw the man from the bus station, standing down there in his black suit, leaning against a phone booth and smoking a cigarette, staring up at her framed in her window.

  Donovan Creedy smiled and called up, “Why don’t you let me come up there and we’ll talk, Hannah. I want to talk to you about Mrs. Hemingway. About this writer you’ve been hanging with—this Lassiter.” He waited, licked his lips. Mrs. Paulson was a lucky one: Creedy’s cab had blown a tire. That cost Creedy a precious ten minutes as he tried to wave down another cab to continue pursuit of Hannah.

  Wild-eyed, Hannah shook her head. “I’m calling the police,” she shouted down at Creedy.

  Then it hit her.

  The pain dropped Hannah like blows to both kidneys.

  She squealed and was driven to her knees, clutching her belly. She gasped over and over, frantic to catch her breath.

  Just as the pain eased, another wave came that was much worse.

  A moment’s peace.

  Two more sharp pains.

  And another.

  Twice, Hannah vomited. She struggled up to look over the windowsill. The man was still there, staring up at her, but scowling now. She cried, “Please—I need help. Call me an ambulance, please?”

  The man standing by the phone booth chewed his lip, then shook his head. “Let me in, first.”

  “Please,” Hannah pleaded. “My baby…I think I’m…something’s wrong! Please—help me!”

  Creedy thought about it. He looked around; the street was quiet. No pedestrians. Something was going wrong with her pregnancy. Well, that was a fortuitous twist, wasn’t it?

  Creedy smiled a last time at Hannah, then turned, thrusting his hands in his overcoat pockets. He began walking, thinking to perhaps look for a good bookstore to browse through.

  Gasping, Hannah, watched him go, calling after Creedy when she could find the breath. Then she screamed and curled into a ball, rolling on the floor in agony, cursing herself and wishing Richard in hell. What had she been thinking—she who was so committed to fitness and the health of her own body? Months of careful dieting. Months spent walking on eggshells.

  Nearly a year of risked madness sans medication to carry her baby to term.

  All of it scuttled and made meaningless by six reckless, indefensible weeks without seeing her obstetrician, who must surely think her patient was dead or fully deranged to absent herself for so long. Six long weeks wasted trailing behind Richard Paulson through Papa’s old haunts preparatory to Sun Valley: Piggott, Arkansas; Kansas City and Billings, Montana. Six long weeks in which something could—in which something obviously did—go wrong inside her.

  The cord to the phone was just in reach. She pulled on it and the base and the receiver slid off the edge of the table, banging Hannah on the head.

  Hyperventilating, she dragged the receiver to herself by its cord and dialed.

  A dead line.

  Hannah instantly made a bitter, intuitive leap: Richard, knowing they would be gone for some time, had skimped and not paid the phone bill. Presumably, he had always intended for Hannah to give birth in Idaho. Richard had merely been paying lip service to his wife’s stated desire to have her baby born in Michigan, the birth overseen by her own doctors, with her sister and brother present. Still, there should have been phone company warnings, written threats and testy collection calls before service was terminated.

  And where was Richard now—now, in this single moment when she truly needed him? Probably dining drunk in some café while wifey screamed and bled her way through labor.

  Well, she had given Richard the boot. She saw now that she had insisted on moving to the bar for their last violent exchange because some part of her knew she was going to push Richard into a corner and throw all she had at him until he swung back—literally lashed out— with witnesses. More for her divorce attorney to use against him…along with whatever that Idaho PI might turn up.

  Hannah clicked the receiver button several more times, her hand shaking.

  Nothing.

  Hannah pounded on the wall with the dead receiver to alert the neighbors, then remembered that they—two students from Alabama—would be gone, bugged out like so many others in this college town emptied between semesters.

  The stench of the vomit on her clothes made Hannah sick again—hurting dry heaves now, green with stingy bile. She struggled onto her knees and tried to straighten up. Instant agony. She doubled over again, unable to catch her breath. Hannah screamed for help between catches of shortened breath, thinking that it was late and that there wouldn’t be foot traffic through campus at this hour.

  The pain eased. She thought of that man outside who refused to help her: Who was he? Why wouldn’t he get her help?

  She tried to stand now, and that got things started again. Hannah fell down, hard, her heart racing, trying once more to catch her breath between racking dry heaves. She could feel the blood vessels in her eyes rupture with each bout of sickness. She felt herself slipping away.

  Then, later, she glanced at the wall clock.

  She’d been on the floor for two hours. She must have blacked out a time or two.

  I’ll crawl, she thought. I’ll crawl right down the steps and out onto the street. She tried to roll over onto all fours and it felt like someone had a knife in her belly. She rolled onto her back, squealing in pain.

  She called for help several more times.

  Through the open windows that were now letting in a too-chilly breeze, Hannah could hear passing cars. She was propped up between an old bureau and Richard’s bookcase full of paperback critical studies of Papa’s work, as well as dog-eared, heavily annotated copies of Papa’s novels. Hannah began pulling books from the bookcase, tossing them hard over her shoulder through the closest open window. It was a short distance from the window to the sidewalk to the street. With any luck, she might bounce a book off a passing car’s windshield—anger someone enough to call the police.

  The pain was getting bad again, almost constant. Hannah called for help several more times, lobbing books o
ut the window between piercing contractions.

  And the pain, which was always right there now, changed. She knew now that it was truly beginning, and now there was no longer time to hope for a miraculous discovery; no time to waste wishing for rescue.

  Hannah knew she would have to prepare some things now.

  Squealing at the pain that came with the movement, Hannah manhandled a drawer from the bureau and emptied it of the neatly folded bed sheets and blankets inside. She tucked a blanket back into the drawer with shaking hands and positioned one of the sheets under herself. She pulled the laces from her hiking boots and laid them out next to her.

  Panting, Hannah paused to throw a few more books out the window, continuing to scream for someone to help her and hearing her voice dim and grow hoarse with each unanswered cry for help.

  She emptied a plastic wastepaper basket of the pages of Richard’s sundry, aborted manuscripts so she would have a container for the afterbirth, then she struggled out of her shorts and underwear, bunching them up with a few of the sheets behind her back. She groped around over her head and found a pair of nail scissors on top of the bureau. She cut her nails short since she had no gloves to wear; no water to wash in. There was also no possibility of boiling the scissors to sterilize them; instead, she ran the cutting edges over the blue flame of a Zippo lighter she had found next to the scissors.

  The lighter gave Hannah a new idea: Somewhere out there was a grassy median, its thin strip of grass grown brown and combustible from a spring drought. She might burn down the block, but at least she would draw emergency services. Hannah found the fattest book she could—a paperback copy of Richard’s single published novel…a work of fiction that sank without notice—and set its first thirty or so pages on fire. She pitched this out the window, followed by flaming copies of various scholars’ books and several volumes of The Review. A first edition of the hardback book on Papa’s Paris years that Richard had authored—now something of a minor collectable simply because it was about Papa—followed them out.

  Hannah felt the baby coming now, her convulsing body giving way to it, and now she knew for the first time with certainty what was ahead. Her legs began to shake as she realized what she must face alone and she was cowed and left desolated by the hopeless, bloody prospect of that which she had to try.

  No:

  What she must do.

  What she must do for herself and for her baby.

  One thing about fighting, Papa said, the only thing that counts if you fight, is that you must win. Everything else is shit.

  Shivering, she put her back to the wall—her discarded, vomit- and bile-stained clothes and the sheets providing scant padding—and planted her feet flat on the floor, her naked legs spread wide.

  Something else Papa was said to have said, perhaps apocryphal, suddenly occurred to Hannah. Asked what the shortest short story he had ever written was, Papa cited a mock classified ad: For Sale: A pair of baby shoes. Never used.

  Hannah tried hard to control her breathing, and to shut out the pain in her belly that was so much worse than she instinctively knew that it should be.

  She stared between her legs, her whole body bathed in sweat and quivering. Occasionally, she raggedly called out for help when she remembered to, tossing another book or two out the window while she waited to see the crown of her baby’s emerging head.

  Many times over the course of ten or twelve minutes she feared she would pass out from the pain. She really couldn’t take it anymore and she fleetingly wished she had a gun.

  No, she lashed out at herself. That’s the one thing I would never do.

  Ever.

  No matter how bad it ever gets.

  No matter how bad it ever gets. I will not do that.

  And then, when she truly knew she could take no more of it, even though it still hurt her terribly, the pain changed in a way that was like a new beginning—something she suddenly felt for the first time was finite, and therefore, endurable.

  And then she saw it: something bloody emerging from between her legs. She pushed with unfamiliar but already exhausted and trembling muscles to help it, her hips slipping a bit across the wooden floor that was wet through the sheet with her sweat and the broken water from her womb and with her own blood.

  She wrapped her trembling, tired arms around her thighs, instinctively pulling them back to shorten the birth canal.

  It was suddenly visible: the bloodied, red, wizened skin of her baby squeezing loose from between her sweaty, trembling, blood-stained thighs.

  But something was terribly wrong. What Hannah was seeing emerge from within herself was not her baby’s tiny, malleable head, but rather, its bloodied little ass.

  She screamed.

  Being here, like this, trying to deliver her own baby was nightmare enough. By rights, her husband should be walking seven times around the house sunwise or gathering rowan berries for her to squeeze to ease her agony. She shouldn’t have to do this by herself; shouldn’t have to face it alone.

  But she was alone, and now she could see that her baby was in breech—an almost certain death sentence for mother and child…for minny and bairn…killed during lighter.

  All that and now this, she thought and cursed herself for it: Thinking in goddamn country song titles while your baby dies inside you. What the hell is wrong with you?

  Hannah raged at the crush of it all—certain that she was well and truly and finally, fatally, doomed.

  Gasping, Hannah tried to remember what her baby’s upside down position meant and what might be done to give them both some slim chance for survival.

  Even with a doctor present, Hannah knew that a vaginal breech birth was typically treacherous. More often than not, it was necessary to execute a cesarean section—a procedure Hannah couldn’t possibly perform on herself even if she was equipped and trained to do it.

  There was another option: She could make more room for her emerging baby by severing the tissue between her own vagina and anus. Even if she had a knife, Hannah doubted she could cut into herself like that. And now her baby’s body was in the way.

  It would be easier to naturally deliver a breech vaginally if this baby were not Hannah’s first, but only a little.

  And it didn’t matter:

  The fact was this was Hannah’s first baby and she was alone and wrung out and her baby was inside her backwards. She and her baby were likely going to die bloody, protracted deaths.

  If the baby were only turned the right way, its head positioned correctly to ease through the birth canal, Hannah thought she just might possibly be able to do it on her own as she had always heard so many others for so many millennia had done it.

  But her baby was being born backwards.

  Her baby’s tiny, frail legs were pressed up tight against its little smashed face. Possibly—quite probably—the umbilical cord’s position was wrong, too.

  There was every chance the cord was wrapped around her baby’s fragile neck.

  Her maybe already dead baby’s neck.

  Dead.

  Death:

  The undiscovered country Papa seemed impelled almost from birth to explore. Hannah felt differently: certainly better to travel hopefully in this instance, than to arrive. Papa courted death with half-reticent ardor. Hannah wasn’t similarly enamored. She was terrified to die alone and in agony with her tiny dead baby half in, half out of its mother.

  And Jesus God and Mary, to have to hurt so much at the end.

  Perhaps it’s already dead and has been for some time.

  Hannah became steadily, freshly nauseous, and now distraught at the thought of her baby dead inside of her.

  Sure. Of course it is dead.

  Everything up to now has presaged that. I’ve done every single thing wrong that I could and everything up to now has been pointing to and preparing me for this—my baby being dead.

  Now it is all a thing of odds and dumb luck, Hannah told herself. Of small, pliable heads and big enough pelvic girdles�
�far bigger than fellow-Scot Catherine Barkley’s, or that of the Indian woman in Papa’s story whose cowardly husband cut his own throat in an upper bunk rather than hear his wife’s agonized screams as she gave birth.

  Hannah thought about these discomforting things, simultaneously saying choppy prayers and half-remembering procedures browsed over in manuals.

  She still hoarsely screamed for help now and then—her voice little more than a ragged whisper.

  She kept reminding herself to breathe and to push, to push quickly and efficiently to help her little baby through its strangling passage wrong ways down the birth canal. Get it out to breathe and to live—time the pushing to the racking arcs of pain that came with malevolent, mathematical precision.

  And now, instinctively, Hannah wedged her hand inside herself: She felt the skin she once thought of cutting tear and knew it would cost her later—this inadvertent, but God-willing, helpful episiotomy.

  Hannah shoved her hand up under her baby’s buttocks, cupped under its tiny thighs, and eased it out through her convulsing, grasping, mutilated vagina, simultaneously pressing down on her uterus with her other hand, easing her baby out of her own body.

  That’s it

  that’s it

  that’s it.

  It went on like this for how long Hannah couldn’t say, her screaming without any voice left, yet all the while so gently and carefully urging her baby’s frail body from inside its terrified, wrung-out mother.

  And now it remained only to get her maybe-dead baby’s head out—the most dangerous maneuver of the whole, hopeless, foredoomed proposition.

  Mary Hemingway had at least been granted the good grace to be unconscious throughout the worst of her own abortive ordeal in Wyoming.

  Hannah was forced to face her death alone and with open eyes, and she was left bitter and horrified at the prospect of it.

  There would come a time, in just a moment or two, when she would know whether her baby’s head could pass through its mother’s battered pelvic girdle.

  If it could not, Hannah could take the last bloody step to try and save herself: she could wedge her hand deep into her own vagina and crush her baby’s skull so that she could free her dead child from her body.