“There is no reason why you wouldn’t be able to deliver vag-inally. If everything goes well with the pregnancy, the kidneys shouldn’t be a problem. They will not be in the way of the birth canal.” He pulls a measuring tape across my belly to assess its growth, then stops and rolls the tape back up in his hand to make sure we’re clear on one thing:
“But if something happens, and I tell you that you’ll need a C-section, then you will have a C-section. That is not up for debate.” He pulls the measuring tape over me again, and I laugh when I look down and cannot see my feet.
One night, I dream that I am standing at the top of the stairs in our tiny row house with my bare feet on the hardwood floor. I peer down the steps and, just under the living room window, there is a bird. It is tiny and pale blue, with furry white wings, and it is busy picking at a floorboard in the living room. When I see it, I immediately yell for Charlie: “Charlie! Charlie!” I scream. “Come quick! There’s a bird in the house. There is a bird in the house!” Charlie slides past me in his socks and comes sweeping down the steps in his pajamas. He swings around the banister and stops in front of the little bird. It looks up at him, too frightened to move. Charlie cups it in his hands and holds it up for me to see. I peer at it from a safe distance.
When I tell my mother about my weird dream, she giggles and shakes her head. “Anak,” she says, “that bird in your dream is your baby.”
The dream haunts me for days, or rather, my reaction does. It plays over and over in my head. The scream that came out of me when I saw that bird. And here’s what bothers me most: I can’t figure out if I was calling out in worry or delight or utter terror.
Chapter Thirteen
The Woman who Swallows Fire and Exhales Angels
I am not well-versed in chili cook-off etiquette, so I just stand in a corner counting the bowls in other people’s hands. There are three conference tables laid out end to end in the fourth-floor hallway of my office. I have finished six bowls of chili, and I could have eaten seven or eight. The employees have been asked to try all of them before submitting their votes. I am the only one in the office willing to admit that this is nearly impossible. But by the fifth one, I’m certain I know which one my winner will be. The one with the chocolate in it. The base is thick and dark, and the chocolate gives richness to the tomatoes. There were two I sampled that were hot, hot, hot; afterward, the little bird inside me pushed hard against my uterine wall. She stretched her legs gradually into my ribs after I spooned in the one with chocolate, so I knew I had a winner.
I notice on the drive to work that the steering wheel is slowly inching its way closer and closer to me. I admit that I am feeling particularly loaded today, thick around my ankles and around my face.
Over the weekend, I was worried about my face, which seemed particularly thick in the mirror. “Well, your name is Moonface, right?” Charlie’d said. Looking in the mirror, I was unsure if I was worrying too much. I went for a blood test first thing on Monday morning just to be sure.
It is April and the sun comes through the windows and makes large yellow squares on the patterned carpet. A co-worker sits down next to me with a bowl of chili (not my pick). “So, how much longer you got?”
“Two months. Can you believe it?” I raise my pant leg to show him my elephant-like ankles.
“Man,” a woman beside us interjects, “don’t you wish you could just get the darn thing over with? I was pregnant with my first two all through summer, and my thighs were so thick it felt like they were glued together the whole time.”
“June,” I say, trying desperately to get that image out of my head. “But I’m not complaining.”
If I do say so myself, pregnancy has changed me. I’ve lived my whole life in a body that looks like it belongs to a prepubes-cent boy. Charlie and I even used to have a character based on it. I’d stuff my hair into a baseball cap, put on a flannel button-down and jeans, and walk around smacking gum and throwing a baseball into a mitt. “Hey, Ricky,” Charlie used to call me as we walked beside each other down the street. It was funny to us for a while until Charlie started worrying that people in the neighborhood would think he was a pedophile.
But now, that gangly body has been replaced by hips I can rest my arms on and breasts that actually protrude. And with a belly that has just begun to fill out my maternity jeans, there’s no denying that I am a woman. I can see other people noticing it, too. They look at me like they are watching something beautiful happen, like they’re standing behind a street artist as he paints a view of the city. They can’t take their eyes away.
Someone is taking pictures for the company website, and as she passes by me, she says, “Wait! I’ve got to take a picture of the pregnant woman!” So I stand up for her, with my belly in full effect, holding my number-one chili pick.
With my stomach full, I take a slow duck walk back to my desk to find my voicemail light flickering. There are two messages. The first is from my nephrologist, who tells me that my lab results indicate that I have pre-eclampsia, and with my blood pressure so high, the baby’s health is in danger. I should come into the hospital now, she says. The second call is from the Silver Fox, who says the same thing, but with urgency. “I will not be there when you arrive, but my partner will be waiting for you,” he says. “This is what I talked about. Go now.”
I hang up the phone. I reach for my belly, thinking that I should be able to feel a heartbeat or something, right? Even though I haven’t been able to feel one through this whole pregnancy without my doctor holding one of those microphones to my stomach. I should be able to feel her, right? Or at least she should be able to tell me she’s all right.
Melissa, my boss, is a mother of two, and I think only a mother can drive me to the hospital the way she does, her wheels screeching as she slides under the labor and delivery entrance sign, a Dukes of Hazzard moment if ever I had been in one. She goes from running a tractor-trailer off of I-83 with her lightning-fast Honda to gently putting a comforting hand on my back as she walks me to the front desk. Her heels click and clack in the lobby, and when a receptionist tells me they’ve been waiting for me, Melissa holds my hand for several seconds before click-clacking away. Now it’s just a matter of getting Charlie there, too. This morning he rode his bike to work, and the nurses are telling me that Charlie should come now, find a way to get from downtown to beyond the county line within the hour. “He should ditch the bike,” she says.
I call Charlie at work and I tell him what is happening, and he answers with a series of breathless “okays,” as if he’s going to jump off the phone call and into a race. That’s exactly what this feels like: a race. How to get everyone in place—the delivery team, Charlie, and the baby—all in the same room before it’s too late.
A female doctor, who is Silver Fox’s partner and resembles Carrie Fisher with warm brown eyes, sits on a couch in my hospital room and says, “I think you’re going to deliver this baby before Friday.” It is Wednesday, eleven weeks before the baby’s due date. I keep trying to remember in the books I’ve read what hasn’t yet formed. Lungs? Fingers? Will my baby have feet? The lady doctor goes through my chart and rereads my history. “Two transplants,” she says. “You’re not going to make this easy for me. Order another set of labs for her,” she says to the nurse.
Fifteen minutes later Princess Leia says that I will probably deliver tonight. Fifteen minutes after that, she tells me I will probably deliver within the hour and where the hell is my husband?
It is too fast to worry about the baby or me. Clearly these people know what they are doing—more than I know what is happening to me. As they run the ultrasound probe over me again, I give Charlie another try on his cell phone, though I am unsure he knows completely how to use it, since he was a self-proclaimed Luddite before I told him he needed to get a cell phone for this pregnancy. Freakin” Luddites, I think now. Where is he? I’m beginning to sense the urgency of the situation as the doctor orders a test to examine the physical health of th
e baby.
I’m chewing on the edge of the bed sheet, gnawing over all my worries, when a nurse comes in and says, “How’s your pubic hair situation?”
And I know I should be thinking something serious right then. But I look at her holding the electric razor and I just bust out laughing and so does she. Is this for real? Maybe it isn’t as bad as I think. Just then, my husband comes in, running through the threshold as if he had just finished a marathon, his pale face now red and sweaty.
“Charlie!” I say, throwing my arms open toward him.
“You’ve got to go get ready,” says the nurse and, before he has a chance to speak, she spins him around by his shoulders and says, “Go prep!”
“Okay!” Charlie says, running out the door.
The next time I see Charlie, my pubic hairs are shaved and Charlie is in a souffle-like yellow hat and yellow gown, and he’s sitting on a stool next to my head.
The anesthesiologist introduces himself while I am splayed out on the operating table being prepped for the C-section. During pleasantries and introductions, we discover that I spent part of my childhood in the same Pennsylvania town where his wife grew up. As we wait for the doctor to arrive, he starts naming people I might know. I know none of them. I’m thinking he got the town name wrong.
“Tina Beckman,” he says.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“John Beckman?”
“Where’s the doctor?” I ask nervously, wanting to get the surgery going.
“She’s coming,” the anesthesiologist assures me.
Charlie sits on a stool staring up at a wall of medical supplies: gauze, long plastic tubes, steely scissors. He rubs my forearm and mumbles to himself, “I will not look past the curtain; I do not want to look past the curtain.” His brother has already taught him how to handle a C-section so he will not faint: “Don’t look past the curtain,” Wes drilled into him. “Do not stand up from the stool.”
When Princess Leia arrives, she’s ready to operate. She holds a scalpel up in the air, and I can see the sharp end peeking out just above the curtain. She says, “Okay, here we go,” and dives in like I’m a salad.
“Do you know Ellen Casperato?” the anesthesiologist says, as he looks at the monitor over my head.
“No.”
“Where did you say you went to high school?” Despite his preoccupation with our finding a common acquaintance, he seems to be doing his job, because I don’t feel a thing as Princess Leia dictates to her team.
“Okay, we’re gonna get her now,” she says.
Charlie and I lock eyes; he’s staring deeply at me, sending me telepathic signals and saying everything is going okay. The anesthesiologist stops his name game for a second and leans down close to Charlie: “Um, sir, perhaps you’ll want to look up now.
Your baby girl is being born.” Charlie cranes his head above the curtain, lifting his body only a few inches off the stool. He is silent. The room is silent. I am just waiting to hear the cry. One cry. One sound. Let me hear that bird. I can’t see anything beyond the curtain, no matter how much I lift my head.
“Oh, dear! Look at her,” Charlie calls out.
“What?” I ask. “How is she?”
Another nurse says, “Oh, my.”
“What?” I say. I still don’t hear a cry. There is the ruffling of paper linens. There is metal clanging against metal.
Charlie lets go of my hand, bounds off his stool, and follows a nurse who is carrying our baby to a corner on the other side of the room.
“Charlie? Where is she?” I call out.
“We’re just giving her some tests, Mrs. O”Doyle,” a male voice beyond the curtain says.
From the corner, Charlie begins giving me the play-by-play. Though I can’t see him—I can’t see anyone—I can tell by his voice that he is smiling. “Oh, she’s kicking. Oh, look at her arms. She’s a knockout, Moonface.”
Then: “Waaaaaaaah!”
“Oh! She’s yelling!” he screeches, his giddiness rising up over the blue curtain. “Oh, she’s pissed, Moonface, she’s pissed!”
“Waah! Waah!”
“She’s good!” a doctor from the corner says. “She passes!” Charlie says.
Another doctor brings her near my head, and I see her for the first time. She is brilliant. A loud, crying baby doll, annoyed by the bright lights. She is a tiny, dark bundle with shiny skin, an eggplant enveloped in a pink and blue blanket. I give a kiss on the littlest nose I have ever seen.
“She’ll be upstairs in the NICU when you’re ready,” he says, and they take her up to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
Charlie tries to inhale deeply but clenches his chest and wheezes. He wipes the sweat off his brow with his sleeve. “Whew!” he says, “Whew!” He sits down again and grabs my hand.
Princess Leia and her staff close me up. I can’t move anything but my arms, but as I lie there, I think that if I try hard enough, I can get up from this table all by myself and I can go to my baby before she opens her eyes and spots someone else while she’s looking for me.
Chapter Fourteen
The Learned Bird and the Brief Return of the Disappearing Bear
She is just like the bird in the dream, with her soft skin over the smallest bones, her lashless eyelids. My baby’s hair is a luscious black. Damp with sweat and waxed against her delicate skull, it emerges from the center in a perfect swirl. And what movements she makes already, at two days old, at two pounds! She drops her jaw open in slow motion like remote-controlled dinosaurs in the movies. She sticks out her tongue to pesky onlookers. She sculpts imaginary clay with her fingers, twisting and turning her hands with deliberate ease.
I thought it would come naturally, but when I go to hold her or touch her in her isolette, the plastic enclosed crib that keeps her warm, I don’t know what to do. One of the neonatal nurses, a woman who is younger than I am but surprisingly maternal, shows me how to touch my preemie: “Put a hand on her back and keep it still. If you move it back and forth across her body, it’s too startling for her,” she says.
Holding her is even more awkward. She’s so small, I’m afraid that she will slip through my arms. “Put her head against your chest, so she can feel your heart beating. It reminds her of the womb,” she says.
Charlie, whom I thought might be afraid of her tiny frame, does not miss his opportunity to hold her.
“My turn,” he says, after I have her for most of that evening. He pulls up one of the NICU rocking chairs and sings her an old folk song. He sings of an ocean full of storms, and a heaven that may not exist. “The world may lose its motion, love,” he sings, “if I prove false to thee.” Every time she stirs, he stops, holding his hand like a cap on the top of her head to reassure her. And there they sit—Charlie O”Doyle and his little bird, rocking the night away.
When Charlie fills out the application for the birth certificate, he writes the name we’ve decided on: Nico Carmen. It rings off his tongue when he says it. But when I see her, that name does not yet spring easily from my lips. Maybe because I’ve been afraid to utter it for so long, thinking that calling out her name before she was born might jinx her. When I look at her now in the flesh, I keep thinking of the baby bird Charlie held in my dream. “She’s Birdie,” I tell Charlie.
Over the next few days, I should be resting and recovering after all the excitement of the delivery, but I can’t stand being away from Birdie for too long. Charlie wheels me up to her during the day and we take turns rocking her in her chair, brushing our fingers against her face. Just after visiting hours are over, or even in the middle of the night, I walk up to the NICU myself in a robe and slippers just to hold her and to feel her head against my chest. She is tethered to her isolette by narrow tubes—a feed tube that goes through her nose, a tube that helps her breathe, and the tiniest blood pressure cuff I have ever seen that wraps around her leg. I cradle her in my arms, and we sit in the subdued light of the ward.
“Your baby is so beautiful!” the Sil
ver Fox says when he comes into my room one morning. His mild, exotic cologne fills the air. “And she seems to be progressing nicely, no?”
He asks to see my wound, and I hold my gown up to my chin. In order to avoid running into the transplanted kidneys that flank my uterus, Princess Leia made a vertical C-section cut instead of the usual horizontal. Underneath some bloody gauze, there is a straight line from my belly button down to my pelvis.
“Hurt?” Silver Fox says as he presses around the outsides of my midriff, which is still bloated from the pregnancy and the surgery.
“No,” I say. “I can barely feel the wound at all.”
“Now, your creatinine is still high,” he says, “but that will take a few days to come down.” He nods his head and taps my leg lightly, dismissing any worry I might have. Not that I am too worried to begin with. The delivery was a circus, and for a while I didn’t think we would make it. But now that the little bird is breathing and moving around outside of me, I know that everything is going to work out.
One night, on my way to the NICU, a nurse from my ward stops me in the hall and asks me if I want a wheelchair. I tell her I’ll walk, but she insists that I use the chair, so I indulge her and relax as she pushes me upstairs. It’s sometime past midnight when I put Birdie back in her isolette, but I don’t bother to call the nurse for the return ride. As I make my way out of the NICU toward the elevator, the hall suddenly narrows and dark bubbles form around my line of vision. I feel faint and grab at the walls, feeling my way slowly back to my room.
“Are you all right?” the same nurse asks, as she rushes into my room and helps me into bed.
“I just got lightheaded for a second,” I tell her.
“It’s no wonder,” she says, throwing her hands in the air. “Your hematocrit is low. You’re anemic. I’m surprised you have the energy to walk.”
The anemia doesn’t get better. It’s so bad that the doctor orders me to have two blood transfusions, hoping that they will give my red blood cells a boost. I should be feeling tired and weak, but, at times, I feel like I am ready to run up to Birdie’s bed and talk to her all night.
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