“All right then,” said the smoking woman. She cocked an eye at me, dropped her cigarette butt, and ground it under her heel. “You’ll never see that coat again,” she observed, then walked away, her shoulders squared in the manner of someone whose job is done.
I brushed my hands together, then thought to check my watch; only five minutes remained until I was to see my first patient. I broke into a jog, but immediately skidded and pitched forward. The loose, churned snow covered a layer of ice that had been laid down during the rains of one day earlier, before the temperature fell below freezing. I slowed my pace. I was freezing without my coat, but knew that I should take care, take my time; everyone would be late today, even the patients. Emergency was the only part of the hospital certain to be busy, filling up with ankle sprains and whiplashes.
I reached the hospital, walked up the main stairs, then surprised myself by turning to the right, toward Emergency, instead of left, toward Radiology. I scanned the crowded waiting areas and the busy corridors in which occupied gurneys lined both walls, like two trains, side by side, come to a halt at a broken switch. I saw no sign of the sidewalk girl.
I tried for a while to get the attention of one of the harried admitting nurses or rushing orderlies, but none of them would allow their ear or eye to be caught. A passing doctor recognized me, but she knew nothing about a homeless girl. Finally I caught the ward social worker, a pink, plump man of thirty or so, who had not heard of the girl either, but he accepted my name and extension number and promised to let me know if he came across her. He stuffed the scrap of paper that I passed to him into the inner pocket of his jacket, which was already bulging with pink memo slips and other small notes, and then turned and scurried away.
I made my way along the hallways to my own office, where three patients were sitting, waiting uncomplainingly in the dark. No one had come to turn on the lights or tell them what to do. I reached behind the reception desk, snapped on the lights, and smiled at them. It wasn’t until I turned on my caregiver smile that I realized how deeply my face had been set into anxious lines. The act of smiling felt painful, as though my worried expression had been covered by a thin layer of ice that needed a strong tap to break it apart. I blinked and smiled more broadly.
“I can’t wait to hear how on earth you got here through the snow,” I said. “Who’s first? You can tell me your story while I get things set up.”
Bedroom
Because of the late start, and because so many of the patients were delayed, and because one of the other technicians didn’t make it in from Surrey, that day ended very late, after seven, and I did not have time to eat either lunch or dinner. I kept going, seeing woman after woman, breast after breast, fueled by cups of milky tea that Ramona, the receptionist for our department, kept pressing into my hands, and by the last two cookies that I found in the package of digestives in a drawer in my desk. I was writing up my last report when the telephone rang, an internal line.
“This is Brian Hinton?” The caller had one of those rare male voices in which each sentence glides a feminine, upward, questioning trajectory. “You asked me to call you? If I had any news about Oriah Burke?”
“Oriah?”
“Your friend? The one you brought into emergency?”
“She’s not actually a friend. I didn’t even know her name. I found her on the street this morning on my way to work. She seemed very unwell. Is she all right?”
“She was transferred. About three this afternoon? They sent her over to Women’s. They would have kept her here, but, where to put her, eh? You saw this place today, kind of a zoo?”
“What did she . . . ?”
“Miscarriage. She had lost a lot of blood? Ectopic, they said. Women’s had a bed open, can you believe it, miracle of miracles, despite the cutbacks, so they gave her a quick transfusion here, then sent her over there. Probably keep her for a few days.” He paused. “Look, is there anything else?”
“No. No. You have been very kind. You must be on your way home. Thanks for letting me know.”
“No problem. It’s my job, eh? Keeping people connected? I was thinking though. It’s been a long day. Ummm, if you are free, perhaps we could go for a beer? Or, ummm, a coffee? Share war stories, sort of.”
The downward ratcheted shift in the social worker’s tone provided a window, or something smaller and more constricted, a keyhole or pinprick aperture into his life. I heard in his vocal hesitancy a man easily intimate with the sorrow of others, at the ready with advice and solutions, but unable to define or resolve or even recognize and acknowledge his own predicament: how to obtain and sustain a passionate life as a man of middle years, median height, unremarkable appearance, no more than standard skill, perhaps substandard wit. He was certain to have some aspect about himself or his life that was a secret source of delight to himself, and would be to someone else, could he find her and show it to her quickly before she looked away. I was certain, however, that I was not this person, and so made an excuse and put down the phone, regretful that I might have hurt him, certain that neither his hurt nor my regret would last too long.
After hanging up, I sat at the desk for a moment. I felt too emptied by the day’s labors and demands even to move. On the message pad beside the phone, I had written the words “Oriah Burke? Brooke?” and beside these, I had doodled a rough sketch of the soprano from the choir: plate-shaped face, pastry chin, soft parentheses of hair, mild eyes, round singing mouth. When finally I stood up, my legs tingled and my head felt heavy and echoing, like a cleared-out bank safe. My eyes and mouth were dry, and my stomach moaned and contracted. The phone rang again. I let it ring six times before I sighed and picked it up.
“Hello?” My voice echoed the social worker’s hesitant quaver.
“Maggie! It’s Janet. You’re still at work?”
“Yes, I’m just wrapping up.” I cradled the phone under my chin and reached to tear the top sheet of paper from the pad on my desk. I balled it up and dropped it in the garbage. With my other hand, I reached behind my chair for my coat to shrug it over my shoulders. It wasn’t there. I couldn’t think where I could have left it. I suppressed a sigh of annoyance and deep fatigue and reached forward instead to turn off my glowing computer.
“Can you stay put? Ryan is bringing in Lucy. She’s gone into early labor.”
Nursery
After Lucy and Ryan had been assigned a labor room and had settled in, Janet and my parents and I found our way to a room marked “Families” at the far end of the ward. The room was painted pale green, with a frieze of storks carrying blue and pink bundles in their beaks. Several posters, faded or bright, depending on how long they had been taped in place, promoted the merits of breastfeeding and inoculations and warned of household hazards to babies and toddlers. Someone had distributed small baskets throughout the room and filled them with balls of wool and knitting needles. Beside them were notices that the Rip and Stitch Club would sew completed squares into blankets for “Newborns in Need.”
Both of my parents settled down and started to knit. My father took up a ball of pink wool. His stitches were even and straight and furled from his fingers at a regular pace. My mother chose yellow yarn, but she did not progress. Every half hour, she unraveled most of her work to pick up a dropped stitch.
Janet moved from chair to chair, from window to poster to magazines to doorway. She sat in front of a sprawling jigsaw puzzle for a few minutes, studying the areas that someone else had put together. The box was propped nearby. It showed a picture of the completed puzzle, an English cottage and bucolic fields, complete with lambs and shepherds. Her hand hovered for a while over the tumble of loose pieces. Finally she selected a fragment of blue sky, and turned it round and round for a while, but she let the piece fall back onto the pile without fitting it into place. Several times she strode down the hall to the labor room to check for updates. “Nothing,” she reported each time, with increasing irritation. After her fourth trip she announced that things were goi
ng slowly and that, since she was certain there would be no change for hours yet, she was going to go home, get the children into bed, and come back later.
“I never came to the hospital until the last minute,” she said. She twined a silk scarf around her neck and reached for her coat and purse. “Trust Lucy to dash to the hospital at the first twitch. They’re probably just Braxton-Hicks—practice contractions. She’s not due for weeks yet anyway.” She sniffed and left.
“All right, dear,” said my mother, without looking up. She had given up the knitting and had moved to the orange plastic bucket chair that Janet had just vacated. She began to scrutinize the puzzle. My father had finished casting off a neat, pink square. He took up a ball of blue wool and began to cast on, using the method he had learned from his father, who had learned it in the war, with one needle and the fingers of his right hand. His darting fingers looked as if they might be forming the letters in a language for the deaf or casting an incantation using the single needle he held in his left hand as a wand.
My father is tall and dark, with a prominent, lightly cleft chin, a roman nose, broad shoulders, and large hands and feet. He looks strong and a bit exaggerated, like a casting agent’s notion of a football team coach, or a senator or newscaster. My mother, who is not beautiful, is noticed far more when she is near him. When she is apart from my father, even an arm’s-length away, she is easily overlooked. She is short, just over five feet tall, and has drab, peahen coloring and the figure of a skinny thirteen-year-old boy. My parents buy most of their clothes in thrift stores, but my mother chooses clothes in beige and pale pink and light blue, made from frankly synthetic fabrics, the kind that pill and stretch out and go limp and thin, while my father has a knack for the find—wide-wale corduroy trousers in burgundy, black, or deep brown, well-made shirts, and good woolen sweaters. When they stand or sit or lean together, some of my father’s beauty reflects onto my mother, and she takes on a dim gleam, like mother-of-pearl, or a turtledove’s effulgent breast feathers, or battered hand-me-down silver plate.
“I don’t like this waiting,” Mother said after another hour had crept by. She had finished the English pastoral and had started on a second puzzle, a farmyard scene with ducks and hens and geese. “I had you girls at home, where we could be comfortable. Your father kept running upstairs with cups of tea for the midwife and me.”
“Can you just imagine Lucy having a baby at home?” I asked her. “Janet said she was demanding an epidural within five minutes of getting here. Lucy’s far happier here, with all the latest technology at her beck and call.”
At ten o’clock, after Ryan dropped in to report that Lucy was still only five centimeters dilated, my father went out to fetch vegetarian pizza to share with my mother, and a pepperoni one for Ryan and me. By midnight Lucy was still not progressing, so my parents agreed to go home to sleep and wait for me to telephone. I stayed behind and read pages 81 to 114 of Swann’s Way, which I found on a shelf among the books and magazines, mostly Reader’s Digests and spy novels. Nothing happened, either in Swann’s Way or in the hospital. At three o’clock, Ryan came in, haggard and exhilarated, to tell me that Lucy had been started on a hormone drip to get things moving along more swiftly. He got a can of cola from a machine in the hall and went back to suffer through Lucy’s next contraction.
I got up, stretched, and worked my way clockwise around the room, reading the admonitory posters on the walls. One, which featured a skull and crossbones and line drawings of unconscious toddlers, warned about the dangers of household poisons, including, to my surprise, several common houseplants. Another illustrated the many ways in which a small child can strangle (drawstrings on hooded sweat shirts, cords dangling from slatted blinds, those looped hand towels in gas station washrooms), suffocate (plastic mattresses, grocery bags, dry-cleaning bags), or choke (hot dogs, popcorn, carrots, ordinary bread).
I sank into one of the ugly orange chairs. What, I wondered, did Lucy imagine she was doing? How would she manage? What hope could there be for the child of such a self-absorbed mother? How did any child survive? Clearly there were dangers in the world against which infants had to be protected. I felt a growing panic at the images the posters cast up on the movie screen of my mind. Harrowing thoughts caught my breath like a fish on a hook inside my chest. Lucy’s little baby dangling blue by its neck from the end of a curtain pull. A small shattered body on the pavement at the foot of a brick building, a torn screen flapping blandly high above, as though to make it clear that it couldn’t be blamed, an inanimate object, for the tiny tragedy. An infant, dead of crib death or smothered, white and still in its little smocked nightgown, face down on a mattress.
I felt suddenly, intensely, that I had to act, that only I could save this about-to-be child, still only part way through this messy, stormy process of being born. There came to my mind, urgently, a conviction that saving Lucy’s child might be the means to save myself as well.
I rose from the chair and stepped purposefully toward the door, then recoiled, horrified, when confronted with an ashen-faced woman, her hair crazily askew, who stuck her head into the waiting room through an opening in the wall. The woman looked worried, urgent, as if she were searching for someone. I put a hand out toward her, and she reached for me in the same instant, for she was, of course, my own reflection in a mirror. I looked around the room. Mum and Dad had gone, and Janet too. I was alone and had fallen asleep. The hands of the clock stood at 4:45.
Outside the windows, I could see a flurry of soft, light, spinning, wheeling movement. The snow had begun again. The driven flakes made pinwheels and spirals and raced in a disordered craze against the black night sky. The sight of the silent, swirling snow calmed me. I breathed in deeply, then out again slowly. The snow would hold the city, and the world, at bay while Lucy and her baby labored through the night.
There were, for some reason, no other anxiously waiting families, and when I reached the hall, I saw the nimbus glow from only one of the birthing rooms, which must be where Lucy and Ryan had been placed. Was no one else being born tonight? I made my way silently down the hall toward the slender thread of light under Lucy’s labor room door.
When I reached the room, I could hear on the other side of the door a complicated skein of noise, voices and hissing and electronic humming, tangled together and overlapping. A woman wearing pale green scrubs and soft white shoes padded past me and pushed through the doorway into the room. The heavy door swung noiselessly back into place, its arc controlled by some hidden, slowing mechanism. I pushed against it and went into the room, which was dark except for a pool of light around a bed. A half-dozen people were gathered around a tent of sheets supported by Lucy’s knees. Her calves and thighs shivered, blue-white, in the vivid glare of a light suspended from the ceiling and aimed at the mound of her belly. Lucy groaned deeply and panted. Ryan crouched beside her head, his lips close to her ear, murmuring encouragement.
“You’re doing great, Lucy. We’re getting there. Not much longer now.”
“I want to go home,” Lucy moaned. “I’m hungry. I can’t do this. I can’t do it.”
Two women in scrubs exchanged terse bits of information with the woman who had come in ahead of me. Another woman clattered metal on metal at the sink, an ugly noise. I could hear, faintly, in the background, the shrill string crescendo of violins. Mozart. Yet another woman crouched between Lucy’s legs holding a cotton sheet in her hands. Everyone except me and Lucy wore latex gloves and green scrubs. No one noticed me and I wondered if I might still be dreaming, or if it were possible that the part of me that could observe and think had walked away from my sleeping body in the waiting room. The woman with the sheet issued sharp, short directions to Lucy. She sounded pitiless, although I expected that this must be her job—to direct events according to a familiar script, however unwilling the actors.
“Stop pushing! Shallow breathing now, Lucy. Pant! Like this: huh, huh, huh, huh. Good girl. Don’t push. No. Don’t push. You will feel a bi
t of discomfort now, a burning sensation, like a ring of fire, right now, right here. Don’t worry. You are doing perfectly. I am going to ease the skin around . . . do you feel that? That’s the baby’s head. Your baby’s coming now. I can see the top of the baby’s head. OK, I want one more gentle push. Don’t overdo it. Now! Gentle. Easy. Again. Don’t push! Short, shallow breaths. Like this: huh, huh, huh. Good girl. Here it is! It’s coming. The head is out now, Lucy. I can see dark curling hair, lots of it. And now one shoulder. Can you feel it? Now the other. You will feel a tug now. Keep breathing. Don’t stop now. Pant: huh, huh, huh. Good girl! Good girl!”
And then, in the same instant, like the moments before a symphony, when the instruments are giving themselves a shakeout and testing their scales, the noises all came together.
Lucy, screamed, a sound that came from low in her stomach. “Noooooo,” she said.
Ryan said: “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
One of the women cried out, “Good for you!”
Another said, “Here we go.”
“That’s it, then,” said someone else in a tone that reminded me of something, but I couldn’t focus to follow the thread of memory.
Someone clattered metal on metal over against the wall.
A young man I hadn’t noticed before rushed up with a stack of blankets.
Someone said, “Ooof.”
Someone announced, shaky, giddy, triumphant: “It’s a boy!”
A dark shape, slippery and black-red with blood and fluid, and sinuous as a fish, but bony, helpless, and uncoordinated as a newborn lamb slipped out from Lucy’s legs and was caught in the waiting sheet. I leaned back against the door, felt it give way behind me, and fell backward, sliding against its weight right down to the floor. “Oh!” I said. I landed on my bottom. My head slammed into the door. I sat there and watched while the baby, Lucy’s baby, was taken over to a table and examined, carelessly it seemed to me. Its little limbs were pulled and measured, its head felt all over, its skinny legs rotated in its hips. It cried and cried, as well it might, but finally was wrapped up in a light green blanket and brought back to Lucy.
The Sad Truth About Happiness Page 15