Inside my room, above the door frame, the necklace with the elongated diamonds dangled. This is what I was touching when the Rending changed everything and so this is what came with me. Ida had Sylvia and Marjorie had Sven. I ran my fingertips over those points each time I left my room, a reminder that I shouldn’t have anyone else.
CHAPTER SIX
We walked during the first part of Lana’s labor as Sylvia had suggested. We walked the path that ran around the outskirts of Zion, wary of going farther since we were uncertain about when the labor might change, when Lana’s body might rear into a higher gear. We walked single file and we walked holding hands. We talked about the Before. About the early days after the Rending, how creeped out we’d been by seeing Ida and Sylvia stretched out like American Girl dolls in the back of the Volvo station wagon. How different they looked now, Sylvia whittled to a point, skin stretched tight over her face, hair always wound into a twist and contained with her silver dragon clasp. And Ida wider, softer, her hair in short fuzzy waves over her forehead, the tips of her ears, and the back of her neck—a permanent halo. Ida’s speech was like excess throw pillows and Sylvia’s sparse like Hansel’s pebbles. The perimeter was a fifteen-minute walk; after four loops we’d check in with Sylvia and Ida and then set off again. Sometimes Sylvia had Lana lie on the table, legs spread, so that Sylvia could examine her and declare a number. Two and a half centimeters. Then three. At four centimeters Ida held out a glass of water.
“I like the straw,” said Lana. It was blue and loopy. A roller coaster. I imagined Bim, shrunk and sliding inside the thin tube, his face a soft sapphire under the glow of the plastic.
“I found it and saved it for you. For today,” said Ida. We sat there quietly for a long time, watching the water snake up and down the straw.
“Can you still talk through the contractions?” asked Sylvia.
“I can even drink through them,” said Lana, jazz hands dancing on either side of the straw, her eyes open wide as she sucked.
Sylvia turned to me. “When she can’t talk through them anymore, bring her back.”
I nodded. We went back to walking.
We were quieter then. We passed the Piles and the Center, the fields that shrouded potatoes and parsnips, carrots and rutabagas below the surface and proffered an anemic, mud-green fuzz of stems above them. When Lana stopped for a contraction I wrote in the back of my notebook: ferns, edamame, lima beans, limes. We walked by the orchard, past Sven and Marjorie filling a straw beach bag and a plastic garbage can with ghost fruit. We stopped so that Marjorie could place a swollen mother-of-pearl-colored ball on Lana’s palm. We watched as it deflated, the air pulled from the center so suddenly that the skin of the fruit writhed slightly, as if it were alive. Lana placed it on her tongue.
Marjorie nibbled one from her basket that had already deflated. Undone, the fruits looked like prunes or dried apricots without the thick, leathery skin. Over time the deflated fruits also lost some of their flavor; the trick was to move the fruit to a holding vessel before the warmth of one’s skin caused the fruit to deflate. Picking ghost fruit required both agility and monotonous persistence.
“Doesn’t it drive you crazy,” Lana asked, “to have to pay such close attention to each one?”
“They’re our babies,” said Marjorie, patting Lana’s arm.
I’d been so busy being jealous that Sven and Marjorie had each other that I’d never thought about whether they’d left others behind. Kids or grandkids. Since they had each other I hadn’t permitted them any other grief.
From a distance we waved to Cal and Tenzin, perched on the side of Curly, the starburst puff of Cal’s hair beside the slick black helmet of Tenzin’s. At the Sorting Stations Deborah was trying on a tight, fleece-lined canvas jacket that showed off a roll of her white belly. “I could just wear it unzipped, right?” she asked as we passed.
“Tenzin’s not going to care,” said Lana.
“He’s smitten,” I said.
“Twitterpated,” added Lana.
“Whipped,” said Cassie flatly.
Deborah blushed. “I just want to look nice,” she said.
“For who? The paparazzi?” Cassie threw Deborah a hibiscus-covered muumuu. “Take this. It’ll really complement your shape.”
Deborah held it up, completely immune to Cassie’s dripping sarcasm. “Really? I think it’s a little big. What do you guys think?” She looked at Lana and me. Her face, as always, had the look of dough that’s been punched down repeatedly.
“Ooooooohhhh … contraction,” said Lana, pointing at her belly. “Gotta keep moving.” She tugged my sleeve emphatically.
“I hope you’re better at faking orgasms than you are contractions,” I said after we’d walked another twenty yards.
“Real one,” she said in response. She put her hands on my shoulders and touched her forehead lightly to mine. Over her shoulder I could see Asher grinding a handsaw through a lacquered table and Rodney fiddling with what looked like a car engine. Lana blew long breaths through rounded lips and swayed her hips gently from side to side.
“That’s a sexy slow dance you guys have going on,” said Asher as he sauntered over.
Lana expelled the rest of the breath and looked up. “She’s all mine,” she said, linking her arm through mine and looking pointedly at Rodney.
“Is that so?” he asked. The left corner of his lip curved up slightly, making the branch on his skin quiver. He’d cut his hair recently and there was an almost-bald patch above his right eye that I very much wanted to touch.
Asher held up his hand to Lana for a high five.
“Looking good, Lana,” said Rodney.
“Why is it that when men don’t know how to support a woman they simply go into sporting event mode?” Lana mumbled when we were out of hearing distance.
“Maybe they’ll dump a cooler of Gatorade on you when the baby’s born,” I said.
“Mmm,” she said, standing still and closing her eyes, “Gatorade.”
We stopped to see Chester and he offered Lana a slip of paper and a stone. “I knew I could count on you for something mystical,” she said. But she tucked the paper into her bra and carried the stone in her hand while we walked.
We waded in the river below oak and maple, snapped twigs from branches that refused to bud, then threw the twigs toward the deeper water and watched the current helicopter the wood away. We scanned the bottom of Larry and Moe for other baby trinkets and ate more ghost fruit from Marjorie and Sven.
The sky turned from goose gray to cinder gray. Lana began to pause more often for the contractions. She closed her eyes and rocked against me or leaned into a wall. We stopped back at the Clinic. Six centimeters.
“Why don’t you take a break,” said Ida. “I’ll walk with her.”
Lana had been leaning over the massage table, her face pressed into her crossed arms while she huffed through a contraction. “I’d like to take a break too,” she said.
“You know I’d give you one if I could,” said Ida, rubbing a warm circle into Lana’s lower back.
“I know,” said Lana. She gave Ida a kiss on her pillowy cheek.
While Lana and Ida walked, I lay down on the massage table in the examining room and watched Sylvia. Her hands hovered over a row of instruments on the counter, ones she’d kept covered with a towel while Lana was in the room. Scalpel, black thread, pincushion with spine of needles, kitchen tongs, scissors. Sylvia’s hands moved back and forth, sometimes straightening an object but mostly just hovering.
“You look like either you’re a magician or you have OCD,” I said.
“I’m just making sure I have everything,” said Sylvia without turning.
“You can say you’re afraid,” I said.
“Most births are perfectly normal.”
“Were perfectly normal. In the Before.”
“The body is made to do the work of birth.”
“I know,” I said.
She let her hands fall to
her sides, then circled them so I could hear her wrists crack. She pulled the straight silver pin out of her hair, let it fall, combed her fingers through it, rewound. Then she placed the dragon clip neatly over the coil, pierced it with the silver pin, and turned to me. “I’ll act like I know what to do. That’s what the book says: patient confidence in the doctor has a huge effect on outcomes. That’s about all I can really do.”
“It’s more than I could do. No one expects you to do more.”
“Of course they do. You do. All of you expect Ida and me to be doctors. Because we had the names of bones on flash cards in our pockets when the Rending occurred we somehow got elected to do this work.”
I’d never seen Sylvia angry before. Color filled her usually pale face. The extra blood made her looser, fuller.
I sat up. “You’re good at this work, Sylvia.” I took her hand. It was thin. I remembered watching my father fillet a salmon. The xylophone of bones. “You’re like a robot,” I said.
She jerked her hand away. “No!” I grabbed her hand again. “I mean that in the best way possible. That you’re able to look at the blood and the mess and people crying and whining and somehow see beyond all that. You see what needs to be done.” I took her hand again. She let me keep it. “You see what needs to be done and you do it,” I said.
We were quiet for a couple long seconds. She looked at her hand in my hand. Let hers grow heavier, let me hold more and more of her. Then she began to talk.
“We had a cat named Sourpuss. I didn’t like him but Ida loved him, he’d even let her push him around in a baby carriage. We would walk with our mother to the grocery store. To Lunds. Mom had a little metal cart she pushed from home. All the other mothers drove, even if they lived only a few blocks away, but our mom grew up in New York and she was proud of the cart. She and Ida always walked ahead; there wasn’t room for the three of us abreast since Mother had the cart and Ida had the baby carriage. Sourpuss would look back at me spitefully. I thought they looked ridiculous, but I hate walking slowly and I didn’t want to trail behind them. I didn’t want to look like the person who came second. So I brought my father’s mountaineering compass and a little notebook. I’d stop and pretend to make note of our coordinates every few minutes. Once they were a half block ahead I’d walk very quickly and purposefully to catch up.”
I nodded. “That makes sense.”
“No. You don’t understand. I didn’t want to be in front either. I have a terrible sense of direction. I didn’t want the burden of having other people follow me. Ida has a horrible sense of direction too. But she’d reach a corner and start to make a wrong turn and Mother would grab the edge of the carriage, pull her the right way. ‘This way, sweet pea,’ she’d say. And Ida would giggle. Ida was the sweet one. I was the smart one. As I’m sure you’ve gathered. What I’m saying is that I figured out early on how to cover up the things I didn’t know with something that looked like knowledge.”
She took her hand out of my grip, but gently this time.
“I guess I thought this was what you wanted, Sylvia.”
“Who’s allowed to want anything?
“I think we’re allowed to want. Within reason.”
“Reasonable wants. Yes.” She walked over to the basin at the far end of the room. Pressed the pedal that tipped a container on the other side of the wall and spilled water down a tube and into the sink. She placed her hands under the thin stream. “I didn’t have water in the Clinic a month ago and now I do. Reasonable. Fulfillable.” She turned toward me again. Beads of water dripped from the ends of her fingertips. “What do you want, Mira?”
I didn’t like Sylvia much but I almost said it. Her eyes were so clear and direct, like she could absorb a confession without becoming sentimental about it. “I want to be with Rodney. And I want the Before back again,” I almost said, the desires so banal and predictable that I felt like a kid asking for a pony. But before I could say anything we heard a groan from outside the door. A groan like time turning in on itself. Then the chipper voice of Ida declaring, “I think she’s ready!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sylvia was everything she said she’d be: authoritative, clear, brusque. Busy when movement was necessary, a static, fixed point of reason when Lana’s eyes turned animal and she muttered “I can’t do this” again and again.
There were no stirrups so Ida and I each held a thigh open as Lana’s whole body went tight one minute, loose and jittery the next. She closed her eyes, moving her head back and forth as though trying to burrow back to the Before or out of the pain or maybe into death.
The pain seemed to come from outside of her and to split her open. I’d heard talk about babies crowning and I’d even watched a video in health class: the blue bruise of a head coming through, scrimmed in a layer of blood. But it was the moments before that fascinated me, the dark opening the pain made in Lana before anything appeared to move through it.
We called the event the Rending after the moment when Jesus died. The curtain torn. The moment of big death, life on the other side not yet known. And we called it the Rending for the way it made us feel afterward: torn, frayed, broken.
But watching Lana I saw that birth was the first Rending, a splitting and tearing of the fibers of life and death. The body itself inhabited by forces beyond the body.
Maybe Lana’s body was a version of the tomb. Maybe when this life emerged, when we held it, things would be better. Maybe the birth of this baby would feel like a kind of resurrection. I forgot, seeing her body so alive and inhabited with the pain, what Sylvia and I had intuited a long time ago.
The doll was covered in vernix the way a baby would have been. Arms straight against its sides. Naked plastic. Hair braided. Tiny rubber bands, the kind kids used to attach to their braces, kept the braids from unraveling. Part perfectly straight. Eyelids closed. Dots for nipples. Fingers fixed together into a curved paw. Toes pointed straight ahead, feet at perfect right angles with the body.
Lana let out a long sigh after the Baby emerged, then propped herself up on her forearms. “It’s dead, isn’t it? Why isn’t it crying?” Lana’s eyes searched mine. She refused to look down. Refused to see what was there.
“She’s not dead,” said Sylvia matter-of-factly. She raised the doll gently, passed it between Lana’s knees, and placed it on the plane of her chest.
“What the fuck is this? Is this some kind of joke? Give me my baby, Sylvia.”
Sylvia took her eyes off Lana’s, sat back down, began to check her for tears. Dabbed at her thighs with a washcloth.
“Look at me, Sylvia,” screamed Lana. She threw the doll off her, and the skittering sound it made on the floor was too light, insubstantial. Sylvia kept dabbing. “Look at me, goddamn it!” Lana kicked Sylvia’s chest with surprising force and Sylvia toppled backward. Ida turned away, tears streaming down her cheeks. She picked up the doll and took it to the sink.
The flame between my ribs flared. Playing doctor, that’s what we were doing: there was the doll, the instruments that weren’t really instruments.
“Mira!” Lana’s hand was around my upper arm. She was sitting upright now. “Get my baby. Find my fucking baby.” An orbit of white showed around her irises. The knobs of her hair had become mussed during the birth, a few were fuzzed and one at the top had come unraveled completely. “You need to find the baby, Mir.” Her voice rocked back and forth, from anger to pleading.
I took her face between my palms. She was moving it back and forth slightly, side to side, not the burrowing she’d done while giving birth, but just her body denying, denying. “It’s not a baby, Lana. It’s not a baby. I don’t know why.”
Ida brought the doll back over to Lana then. She’d wrapped it in a strip of cloth with pink elephants parading on it and she’d opened the doll’s eyes. Two blue coals staring into nothing. Lana saw it then. Really saw it. And she started to laugh.
“This?” she said. Her index finger made a circle in the air as she pointed. “This is wha
t I’ve been making inside me.” Her laughter grew louder, hysterical. The room was small with a tin roof and the laughter came back to us, ricocheting off the stove, the sink, the needles, the blades.
Sylvia had righted her chair. Stationed herself again between Lana’s knees.
Lana, on her back again, shook with laughter. It was horrible, unstoppable, far worse than the sounds that had torn through her during the birth.
“Get her to stop,” Sylvia said to me in a low voice, “she’s bleeding too much.”
I leaned over Lana. Put my lips to the soft tunnel of her ear. “Shhhhhhhh,” I said, “shhhhhhhh.”
But she didn’t stop. The laugh was a hard, barking scrape. A stick against a barnacled hull.
“Now, Mira.” Sylvia’s face was still but her hands were quick and serious, moving between rags and gauze and thread.
The blood came in pulses with the laugh. I cupped my right hand under Lana’s jaw and my left on top of her head and I pushed. She squirmed but I held tight; I shut the sound up.
The quaking of her body grew more urgent. Then she started to breathe through her nostrils like a horse. Even after her body stopped shaking her eyes still roamed, wild. Keeping my hands on her head, I climbed onto the massage table. Knelt over her so all she could see was my face. My eyes on her eyes. “This is happening,” I said.
She shook her head. No, no, no.
“This is happening, Lana,” I said.
I don’t know how many times I said the words. I knelt until my calves cramped. Until her head stopped shaking. Until she fell asleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lana didn’t want to be near the doll. The Baby. Lana didn’t want to be near anyone besides Ida. She didn’t accept clients, didn’t trail me around the Piles, didn’t show up for community meetings.
I went to the meetings but couldn’t pay attention. The doll lay on an overturned apple crate beside the bookshelf in the Center. The spaces below her cupped hands, her legs, the arch of her back, made her look uncomfortable. While the others talked about what the doll meant, if it was a sign, if it was a warning, if we should treat Lana differently, if we should avoid eating ghost fruit, et cetera, I studied those empty spaces.
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