Bed Rest

by Sarah Bilston

  The second conclusion was rather different. My father would start talking to me, discover how adult I had become, and feel horrified at the thought of everything he’d missed, not to mention impressed with my new poise and maturity. He’d admit that I was the daughter he’d always felt closest to. Then he’d ask me to come down and stay with them in Brighton—he’d actually mean it this time—but I’d stand up and say something like, you’ve got to be kidding! You think you can walk out on me, on all of us, and that I’m just going to forgive you? Don’t you realize how much you hurt us? Dad, you are selfish and immature. Mum has her faults, but at least she understood her responsibilities. She’s been supporting us emotionally and financially all these years. You think I’m going to start a relationship with you now? No way! Forget it! And everyone in the carriage would stare, impressed by my verbal skills and moved by my passion, then they’d turn to look disapprovingly at my father, and finally I’d walk away leaving him with his mouth hanging open, totally crushed.

  But I never met him on a train. In fact, apart from a few brief awkward meals at McDonald’s in the first year after he left, I never saw him again. One morning, at the end of my first term at university, I got a phone call. It was six o’clock, so before I even picked up the receiver I knew something was seriously wrong. “Q, it’s Mum here. I’m sorry to call you at this time, dear, but I’ve got terrible news.” He’d had a heart attack—apparently he’d had lung cancer, not that we knew anything about it—and died in Julie’s arms late the previous night.

  So that was that; I never got the opportunity to play out either scenario with him. Julie wrote to me about a month after he died (she wrote to all three of us) to make a last rather desperate attempt to persuade us that our father really cared—“He often talked of you, he was just too embarrassed to get in touch, he knew he’d let you down”—and I wish she hadn’t, it threw me for years. Should I have made the first move? Was it my fault we never saw each other? Was I in the wrong after all? But eventually I realized (to be perfectly honest, my therapist helped me realize) that he was the grown-up, he was the dad, he was the one who left. It wasn’t my fault.

  How does that Larkin poem go?

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  The misery deepens like a coastal shelf…And so, Larkin advises sagely at the end, Don’t have any kids yourself. Well, I’m about to break that rule. But how, how to stop the misery from deepening?

  66

  Tuesday 9 P.M.

  I have another nonstress test, ultrasound, and fetal growth check scheduled for tomorrow morning. I think everything’s going well in there, though; Mum has been filling me with good food all day, and the baby’s been kicking crazily in response to the sugar. I doubt I’m going to get any sleep tonight, partly because of the small Scottish dancer in my stomach, partly because I can’t stop thinking about the letter I read, illicitly, this morning.

  Tom is definitely not coming home tonight. He called half an hour ago to say he’s got to work straight through to tomorrow. I asked if there was anything I could do for him, if I could order dinner to be delivered to his desk, and there was a long, surprised pause. “I can do that for myself, thanks Q,” he said finally, cool and reserved. “Just go to bed. I’ll see you when I get home tomorrow evening. We need to talk.”

  I swallowed hard. Four words that fill a wife with horror: “We need to talk.” I fear, I fear I know what that means.

  67

  Wednesday Midday

  Where’s a paper bag when you need one? I’m in the hospital again, on the edge of a panic attack.

  The fluid seems to have gone. Poof! All gone. Vanished. Who knows where. I’m bewildered. “Did you have a leak?” Dr. Weinberg asked me; it made me sound like a frozen pipe.

  I’m hooked up to a monitor, it’s bleeping at me, numbers chasing one another up and down. 135, 142, 127, 132. Here we are again. So familiar.

  Where is Tom? He’s coming, he’s on his way, he told me, a touch of hysteria in his voice, in my voice, when I called him from the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Come quickly, they’re going to cut me open in a few hours. They’ll wait for you, not much longer. Please hurry. I need you.

  An hour ago, in the darkness of the sonography room, Cherise slid her probe across the convex arc of my taut stretched tummy through the usual dollop of blue gunge. This way, that way. Searching for black pockets. I stare at a screen above my head; I can see the long column of vertebrae, a tiny dinosaur curved around my belly button. No black here; a tiny patch here, something here, but there’s a hand in the middle, it doesn’t count, she tells me. I have to call Weinberg.

  The doctor bustles in, businesslike, then slides onto the stool, picks up the probe, and stares intently at the screen. She mutters to herself (“one point two, one point three, nothing here, wait—no; one point zero here”); she pauses, starts again, sliding the probe deep down into my pelvis, pushing hard against the baby’s shape. He moves away, indignant; my stomach undulates as he turns his shoulder on her. She smiles wryly.

  My mother, sitting beside me, holds my hand tight, tight. “How big is he?”

  Dr. Weinberg hits some buttons, wrinkles her forehead. “About six pounds, two ounces, I think,” she says, with a shrug. “Hard to say.”

  I turn to smile at my mother, relieved. That’s not a bad birth weight, I tell her, and he has nearly a week of growing to do still! My cesarean is booked for Monday.

  Do Dr. Weinberg and my mother exchange a look?

  A few more minutes of hard pushing, and Dr. Weinberg quietly, deliberately lays down the probe. She turns to face me; her face is oddly lit by the gray light of the screen. Her nose seems extraordinarily long, her cheeks high and angular. “It’s time to call it quits, bubeleh,” she tells me, tenderly. “I want you to go straight into the hospital and have this child. Your pregnancy is over.”

  And air seems to be rushing too quickly into my lungs, and I’m shaking—“Over?” I gasp; “It can’t be, I’m not due for surgery for another five days, and he might turn on his own by then, I’ve been doing my pelvic tilts religiously,” I tell her. Because suddenly I realize I’ve been hoping against hope that he would turn, that I’d be able to give birth “normally,” like other women, like women do in films, with lots of grunting and shouting and pushing, followed by a moment of triumph and accomplishment.

  But she tells me that she doesn’t think he can wait for five more days; he needs to come out now, he’s in immediate danger of compressing the cord and depriving himself of oxygen. “I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next hour, I’m happy to leave you on a monitor until your husband arrives. But if there is a problem while you’re waiting, it’ll be an emergency C, you understand? Put on your coat, I’m calling an ambulance to get you to the delivery suite. You’re having a baby today.”

  Lights flash, they hook me up to a monitor straightaway, a dash through traffic—

  I’m in a wheelchair racing down beige corridors, blue floors rushing toward me, pink doors opening—“Weinberg called about this one, she’s here for a cesarean”—a plastic bracelet clipped to my wrist—“Take off your clothes”—the slitted robe again, my ungainly figure spilling out the back, my skin has never seemed whiter, those purple marks more apparent, soon to be joined by another, a slash across my pelvis—

  Please, Tom, please come quickly, I can’t imagine doing this without you. Please come!

  11 P.M.

  My son, Samuel Quincy, lies beside me. A new page for a new life.

  68

  Thursday 1 P.M.

  Last night I was allowed out of bed for the first time in eleven weeks.

  After the anesthesia wore off, the nurses helped me get up, and I walked on my own to the bathroom. The pain in my stomach is intense—I feel like I used to imagine a magician’s assistant mus
t feel after being put in a sparkly box and sliced in two—but the knowledge that bed rest is over keeps me going. They gave me morphine at first, now they’ve switched to some nice little white pills that go down easy and numb the worst of the incision’s pain.

  My son is sleeping; he seems exhausted by the last few days, as am I. He has his father’s nose—and mouth, and chin. His eyes are unreadably dark.

  They pushed him out twenty minutes after Tom arrived at my bedside. I was already being prepped for surgery beneath a hot green light when he surged through the doors, dressed in a paper suit that made him look like a henchman from one of those Bond movies set in the bowels of the earth. “Thank God I’m here,” he kept saying, again and again. My mother quietly withdrew.

  As they cut, he sat holding my hand, staring deep into my eyes. “Does it hurt? How do you feel? Are you sick?—Here, somebody, she’s sick! She needs medicine! Is that better?” he asked, tenderly. I could feel the surgeon pushing beneath my sternum on the baby’s head.

  “I have the legs, and I’m pulling him out—out—out—and—here he is!” the surgeon called at last, and then, an upward lilt in his voice, “a healthy little boy!”

  A pause, a brief moment of silence, and then a cry to make a mother’s heart dissolve.

  The doctors from the neonatal intensive care unit assess him and then leave, pushing their trolley, their instruments, their incubator, to another delivery room, another woman, another baby. I watch them go. They are not needed here. Our son is handed to Tom, whose expression fractures. Samuel Quincy gazes at his father in some surprise.

  The three of us sit and stare at one another for the twenty minutes it takes the surgeon to stitch and staple me back together again. Tom and I ponder his resemblance to his grandparents. The baby keeps his counsel.

  There is no sign of damage, they tell us, although he is smaller than we had hoped, at five pounds, eight ounces. But he is healthy, and his cry is loud and determined. (“I’m telling you, you’ll have fun with this one,” Dr. Weinberg says with a grin when she comes to visit us a few hours after the birth. She strokes his forehead with a crooked finger, and we say polite and grateful things to her, but she seems out of place in our room somehow, a vestige of another world, another life, already an ocean away.)

  We slept a little last night, the three of us in one room together, my husband and I with a new sense of intimacy. Samuel owes his being to our love; his tiny body reasserts its existence.

  Then, this morning, while Samuel slept in my arms, Tom came and sat on the bed beside us. He took my hand and looked at me over our baby son’s head. “Q, I need to tell you something,” he whispered, his blue-green eyes fixed on mine.

  And my intestines froze. “Tom, please, don’t,” I whispered back; “don’t tell me today, if you’re going to leave me, don’t tell me today, of all days.” As I stroked our son’s fine curly hair with my free hand, I felt a hot tear run a course along the side of my nose.

  My husband squeezed my hand hard. “Christ, Q, it’s not that, look at me please, okay? Look at me! I want to tell you about a conversation I was having with Phil, the senior partner, yesterday morning, when you called from the ambulance.”

  I sighed wearily. “Oh I see—he told you when you’re going up for partner, I suppose. The time frame, the practicalities, all that stuff. You can tell me all about it another time, Tom, really. We’ll talk it through when I get home.”

  “Q, listen to me,” Tom said, slowly and deliberately, “that’s not what happened. What he told me is this: they’re not going to recommend me for partner. It’s over, Q. I didn’t make it. I’m not going to make partner at Crimpson.”

  In my arms, baby Samuel snuffled, then opened his tiny mouth in a cat’s yawn. He sighed and settled deeper into my breast.

  I stared at my sleeping son, then at my husband. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “They’re not recommending you? But you’ve been working so hard, you’ve been doing so well, it’s unbelievable, Tom, surely—” I said, astonished.

  “No,” he said, wearily. “It’s not. Maybe it’s because of these last few months—I’ll be honest, I’ve been pretty distracted because of everything to do with you and the baby—but maybe that had nothing to do with it. I don’t think I ever lived down those disasters of last year, and I didn’t help my case by being ‘self-righteous’ (Phil’s words) about Randalls these past couple weeks. The firm just wants to draw a veil over what’s been going on, protect the client, do whatever it takes. Whereas I—well. You know, right, Q? Because you wouldn’t do it either. It’s one of the things I love most about you” (aiming a warm kiss at my ear). “Those guys deserve to be exposed, and I refuse to stop that from happening. Anyway, truthfully I think I’ve been dead in the water a while now at work; Phil said—he was pretty clear about it—that they don’t feel I’m Crimpson partner ‘material.’ So I need to start looking for another job. Your husband is all but unemployed, what do you think of that?” His eyes were bright with tears. But it came to me suddenly that he wasn’t nearly as sad as I would’ve expected.

  “Things have been so bad between us, honey, these past few months; I should explain, I guess. I sort of knew my chances were slipping away at Crimpson. I was going crazy trying to stay on top of things at work, to make my case look stronger. And when things started going wrong I couldn’t cope—”

  Gently I reached over Samuel’s head and cupped Tom’s face in one hand. “I failed, Q,” he said, a throb in his voice, “but I think the person I really failed was you.”

  Maybe he didn’t actually say that, maybe I sort of wish he’d said it, but still, I’m sure that’s what he meant. Or something close to it, anyway. I felt a sudden rush of tenderness.

  Time—if ever there was a time—for Q’s confession.

  “Tom”—very hesitantly—“I did something ba—ad.” I chewed my lip. Samuel was lying between us, how awful could his reaction be? “Pretty bad, actually. Tom, I was giving the Randalls’s residents some advice these last few months, I felt so terrible for them, and the other morning I—er—I looked in your big black box file,” I said, all in a rush, “the one you accidentally left at home. I found a copy of the letter you wrote to Phil about Randalls and I—I read it.” He gasped. “You did what?” he said—Samuel’s little body shifted slightly. He repeated himself, in a whisper this time. “You did what?”

  He sat staring at me, his mouth open in astonishment. I investigated the cards in my hand and pondered which one to play. There’s the joker—I’m a silly girl, I did a bad thing, but give me a kiss, bad boy, and let’s forget all about it. Then there’s the queen. Imperious, cool. Don’t try the ethical thing with me, my friend, you’re on pretty shaky ground yourself.

  In the end I hedged my bets. It seemed to work. “Madness, Q, madness, but I guess you were going off your head on your own all day, and that’s my fault,” he offered when I was done. “And to be frank”—a ghost of a smile on his lips—“I kind of thought you might have something to do with all those red-hot letters from Schuster that started dropping through the mail.” I grinned back and, when he turned away to pick up a glass of water, released a deep sigh of relief. His sense of loyalty to Crimpson was clearly passing; he kept referring to his firm as “them,” not “us,” I noticed, in the quick, warm, low-voiced conversation that ensued.

  We couldn’t do any of the fierce kissing we wanted to do because our son was fast asleep between us, and so, when the moment for words had passed, we sat and stared at each other over his tiny body and held hands very, very tightly.

  Tom’s back at our place right now, fetching baby clothes, toiletries for me, and my mother—she slept there last night. She has been extraordinarily good since the baby was born, quiet, unobtrusive, full of grandmotherly pride. “He is beautiful, Q,” she told me, when I put my son into her arms for the first time. “Just beautiful. You’ve done a tremendous job. Really, a tremendous job.”

  69

  6 P.M.r />
  A visit this afternoon from Brianna and Mark.

  “He is very cute,” Brianna said, peering into the bassinet, “um, right numbers of fingers and toes, all that stuff, yeah?”

  Everyone seems vaguely astonished that he doesn’t have two heads. Clearly they’ve all been prognosticating dire consequences of the oligo for the last three months.

  Mark carefully picked up Samuel out of the bassinet, then lifted him over his shoulder with a father’s easy assurance. “He’s a great-looking kid,” he said, turning to Tom with a smile. “I’m so pleased everything worked out okay for you.” He punched Tom’s shoulder in a manly way, kissed my cheek, then produced a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck. We drank lukewarm champagne out of paper cups with graham crackers from the hospitality station in the corridor.

  “So what do you think, guys?” Mark asked, with a hint of a smile. “Was it worth it, all that bed resting?” Tom and I looked at each other, then at Samuel, lying in Mark’s arms. Was it worth it? Of course—“Although (and Q, I never said this to you, I thought it might knock your confidence) I’m not convinced it was necessary,” Tom said, seriously. “Seems to me that when things go wrong in a pregnancy, and they don’t know what to do, they send the woman to bed. All a bit Victorian, if you ask me. Still, you have to do what you can for your kids, right?” He smiled down at Samuel, who gamely threw his right arm in the air and biffed Mark on the chin. I nodded. You do what you can.