So We Look to the Sky

by Misumi Kubo

  Until now, Mr. Wakabayashi had kept deathly quiet but suddenly, as we were waiting for the ambulance, he broke his silence.

  “I told you we should have gone to a hospital! But you insisted on coming here! What if something happens to the baby now?”

  Mrs. Wakabayashi stayed staring up at the ceiling as if dazed, not even looking in her husband’s direction.

  “I can totally understand why you’re feeling upset, Mr. Wakabayashi,” I said, placing my hands on his arms as I spoke. “But for now, let’s just concentrate on prioritizing the safety of your wife and child. Okay?” As I finished speaking, I heard a siren in the distance.

  We piled into the ambulance and went racing down the wide main road. It was the middle of the night, and there was barely anyone else around. It must have rained at some point, because the asphalt was glistening, its dark, glossy surface mirroring the green of the traffic lights. We were headed for the general hospital, where I used to work.

  Mrs. Wakabayashi was lying on her side on a stretcher, her eyes closed. Occasionally, her face would distort with a spasm of pain. I rubbed her lower back, saying, “When the pain comes, make sure you don’t stop breathing. Open your eyes and exhale slowly.” I demonstrated like I was blowing out a candle.

  Sitting next to me, Mr. Wakabayashi wasn’t even looking at his wife. He stayed silent, a deep frown etched into his face.

  “Not long to go now,” I said, turning to him. “We’re nearly at the hospital.”

  At this, Mr. Wakabayashi looked down and began rummaging around in his backpack with an air of panic, then held a plastic bag up to his mouth and vomited violently. In the cramped interior of the vehicle, the smell was unbearable, and I felt as if I might be sick, too. Mrs. Wakabayashi had her eyes firmly closed, clearly trying to bear the situation as best she could.

  “A lot of people get carsick in ambulances, you know,” the middle-aged paramedic sitting across from me said, and smiled.

  We reached the hospital in fifteen minutes and wheeled Mrs. Wakabayashi into one of the consultation rooms. I told a young male doctor and a female nurse with dark bags under their eyes about the course the delivery had taken. I was pretty relieved that neither of them were people I knew; however, midway through my explanation, the head nurse, whom I had worked for, entered the room. I bowed my head at her, but she ignored me. She took the clipboard with the medical notes from the young nurse, put on her glasses, and passed her eyes across them.

  “All this garbage about the benefits of natural birth! What’s the point, when they all end up in the hospital like everyone else?”

  “Yes!”

  Apparently stirred by the head nurse’s words, Mr. Wakabayashi began brandishing a finger at me. Before the head nurse had even finished speaking, he was shouting with such ear-splitting force that it was impossible to believe this was the same person as the hunched, green-faced figure in the ambulance just minutes ago.

  “If anything happens to my baby, it’ll be all your fault! You hear?”

  His words rang out around the room. As if to cut him off, the young doctor addressed him directly: “We’ll take her in for surgery immediately.”

  I gave him a deep bow.

  “Not long now until you can see your baby!” I said to Mrs. Wakabayashi, who was clutching at a pink towel, her eyes squeezed tight shut.

  “I was useless, wasn’t I?” she said as she clenched my hand tightly, her voice so weak it seemed it could cut out at any minute. “I couldn’t manage it. I’m a bad mother. I can’t believe that after all this, I have to have a C-section.”

  “What are you saying? You did a great job. Nobody knows if they’ve been a good mother or a bad one, not as long as they live.”

  I felt Mrs. Wakabayashi’s hot tears splashing down one after another onto my hand that was holding hers.

  “Thank you,” I said to the head nurse, bowing my head. “I’m sorry it’s come to this.”

  But she wouldn’t so much as meet my gaze. Dragging the stretcher with Mrs. Wakabayashi on it, she exited into the long corridor.

  In fact, neither what Mr. Wakabayashi nor what the head nurse had said was entirely mistaken. Because I’m a midwife, people often assume I have a strong preference for natural births. In fact, I don’t believe it matters if it’s a natural birth or a medicated one or a C-section or whatever, so long as the mom and baby both come out of it alive and well. I don’t stake my pride or my reputation on the number of babies I manage to deliver “naturally,” and I’m not interested in getting into a competition over the mistakes each respective side might make. Insofar as they forgo their sleep and rest to deal with births all day every day in a way that grinds down both body and soul, doctors and midwives are exactly the same. However hard you try, there are sometimes things that happen as a midwife that you have no control over, and at those times you ask for the doctors’ help in order to save the lives of the mother and baby. Can someone tell me what’s so messed up about that?

  It was around the beginning of fall last year that those weird, grainy photographs began turning up in the Saito Maternity Clinic inbox. Our email address is up on our website, and so, being a maternity clinic, we’d received the occasional obscene emails and photographs. In the past Mitchan had always dealt with them, deleting any unwanted correspondence. But suddenly, they were arriving in such numbers and with such frequency that weeding them out was becoming quite a job. It wasn’t just via email, either—the same photographs turned up in our mailbox, laid out in rows like commercially produced flyers. When they came, Mitchan and I would take one look at them then scrunch them up and toss them in the trash. I tried not to let it bother me at all, but when it had gone on for a while, I started to suspect we might have a real weirdo on our case and began worrying about what I’d do if something ever happened to one of our patients. It was just around that time that Mitchan approached me with a piece of paper in her hand, saying: “I think you should take a look at this.”

  The person in the photo was looking directly at the camera. I saw immediately that it was Takumi, dressed up in some strange costume. He was with a girl, her white thighs exposed. Instinctively I closed my eyes, then forced them to open again and looked at the photo properly. I felt the anger and disgust rear up from the pit of my stomach.

  “You’re too young for this shit,” I spat out. The vehemence of my own reaction took me by surprise.

  Mitchan was looking down at the photos I was holding.

  “Takumi, of all people,” she said, shooting me a this means trouble look, then averted her eyes.

  Since Takumi had started high school, I’d been vaguely aware he’d gone and got himself a love life of some kind.

  One day, totally out of the blue, he stopped going in to his summer job, and when term time began, he started skipping school. I figured he was just having girlfriend troubles, so in the beginning I would peel off his duvet, rouse him, and send him in. But as fall wore on, Takumi started refusing to leave his room at all. I found his cell phone in the wastebasket, the screen bashed in. Once again, just like when his dad had left us, the sound of his crying would travel down the stairs and blend with the babies’ wailing.

  “Is that your son?” asked a woman who was up breastfeeding in the middle of the night. “He sounds like he might be crying.”

  “Yes . . . He’s just had his heart broken,” I told her. “I’m sorry, I know it’s not nice to listen to.”

  “I remember what that was like,” the woman smiled fondly. “Oh, the trials of adolescence!”

  If only it had been as simple and innocent a thing as she and I had imagined.

  But no. Somehow, even people of my generation got wind of what Takumi had been up to. At meetings of the neighborhood council (many of whose members had disapproved of my opening the clinic to begin with), there was no longer a single person who would speak to me. I started to get emails from people I’d never met, sent to both the clinic’s account and my private one.

  Mostly
they were variations on YOUR SON’S A FUCKING PERVERT—which I could just about handle. The one that got me the most was a single line that said, WHAT DO U EXPECT WHEN U BRING HIM UP IN A MATERNITY CLINIC? Someone else wrote, NO WONDER HE’S TURNED OUT THIS WAY IF YOU MAKE HIM HELP OUT WITH THE BIRTHS! Heaven only knew where they’d gotten their information.

  From a very young age, whenever Takumi saw babies who wouldn’t stop crying or women in great pain, he would start crying in sympathy. When the mothers went to the living room to eat and the babies left behind in the bedrooms burst into tears, Takumi would crawl onto the futon alongside them and start gently rubbing their backs to soothe them. When he got slightly older, he began to help the women who, for whatever reason, had to give birth on their own without a partner—wiping their sweat and giving them water.

  As I went without sleep and the women in labor suffered for days on end, Takumi had been there, taking it all in. He saw it and he felt it, and he wound up knowing it like the back of his hand. That was why, when he reached out those little hands in a bid to help, I found it was beyond me to brush him away. But maybe that had been a misjudgment on my part. Maybe that was why he’d grown up to be the kind of kid to have an affair with an older married woman and get off on dressing up like that.

  “Boy, do the blows just keep on coming,” Mitchan said as she went through deleting the emails that arrived one by one, chin propped up on her fist. I sat beside her, folding the piles of laundry I’d brought in from outside. “They’re all just so fucking pathetic!” When she was really angry, Mitchan often got all potty-mouthed. “Have none of these people ever fallen for the wrong person, or what?”

  She lifted one of her knees so her foot was resting on the chair.

  “Hey! No feet!”

  “Sorry,” she said meekly, restoring her foot to the floor and taking a gulp of the green tea in her cup.

  As far as possible, I tried not to look at the flood of emails, but in among the nasty ones were inquiries from people thinking of giving birth here, so on Mitchan’s days off I had no choice but to pass my eyes over them. Once, hidden away right at the end of an email masquerading as a booking inquiry, I found the line: LIKE MOTHER, LIKE SON! IT SEEMS LIKE INFIDELITY RUNS IN THE FAMILY. So it looked like I wasn’t going to be let off for my sins even of twenty years ago. As the thought ran through my mind, I felt a great sigh leak from my body.

  With a pile of folded laundry held to my chest, I stood in front of the mirror over the bathroom sink and stared at the haggard face reflected in it. There was a small scar underneath my right eye, a reminder of doing what Mitchan had called “falling for the wrong person.” The first place I’d worked after nursing college was the general hospital where I now sent my patients in emergencies. When word got out that I was involved with the deputy director, who was a good few years older than I was, his wife never once insulted or badmouthed me. I don’t think she had the guts for that. Probably, her good upbringing got in the way. Instead, she chose to punish us— her husband and me together—by having us stand in opposite corners of her living room for a whole day, holding a bucket full of water in each hand. It was the same punishment they’d given kids who forgot their homework back when I was at school.

  Then she ignored us. She pretended that we quite literally didn’t exist, drinking her tea leisurely at the table and turning the pages of her book. Very occasionally she would raise her head and contemplate us in turn, as though we were pictures hanging on a museum wall.

  When it was time for lunch, the wife took an apple over to the table, peeled it very slowly with a silver knife, cut it into small pieces, and ate it. At the smell, my mouth filled with saliva. Little by little, the sunlight filtering in through the large window shifted angle. My arms tingled and throbbed with pain. At some point I realized my body was slumped over forward, the water sloshing around in the buckets.

  Yet the deputy director and I endured the punishment without resistance.

  Thinking of it now, I imagine the sense of solidarity born between us at being given the same punishment must have enraged the wife even more. I managed to withstand the hunger, but she also prevented us from using the bathroom. With each tiny movement of my body, I felt my bladder wobble and my field of vision grow dark. At some point I remember deciding to give up and just go, unclenching the lower half of my body, but no urine came out. My bloated stomach had grown hard as a stone.

  The wife was sitting on the sofa with her back to us. I looked at her delicate back, clothed in a white cardigan. Her glossy, chestnut-colored hair curled up where it brushed her shoulders. It was winter, and dusk had come earlier than I’d expected. Suddenly the wife stood up and walked over to stand beside me. Her slippers made a ridiculous squeaking sound as she moved across the shag pile rug. She stopped right in front of me, a head shorter than I was, and looked me right in the eyes. I noticed a little frown line forming between her eyebrows, then she reached out an arm, pinched my right cheek between her thumb and forefinger, and twisted it. My face distorted with the pain, and tears rose to the corners of my eyes.

  “Aren’t you going to say sorry?”

  “I’m shorry.”

  With my mouth wrenched out of shape, the words came out all funny. The wife pinched harder, driving her nails into my face. I heard the noise of my skin ripping apart. It wasn’t pain I felt spreading across my body but a strange heat.

  “Stop it!” The deputy director set his bucket down and made to run over, stumbling over my bucket on the way so its contents went flying across the floor. He stood behind his wife and grabbed the wrist of the hand that was twisting my cheek. As the wife let out a scream, I felt the liquid go gushing out from between my legs, making its way toward where she was crouching beside me. The deputy director didn’t make so much as a sound, just stared vacantly down at the floor. Try as I might, I couldn’t move my body an inch. I just stood there, stock still, until my bladder was completely empty. Then I set my buckets down, took out a towel from my bag in the corner of the room, and began wiping the floor.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  It was the first apology I’d uttered that day that I actually meant. I put the towel, now stained a faint yellow, back into my bag, and rushed from the house. The wife’s long, trailing sobs followed me out the door.

  After the hospital let me go, only the director of the one private maternity clinic in town would agree to take me on.

  “Show me your hands,” said the director, who was already nearing seventy, at our first meeting. She put on her glasses, placed my hands on top of her palms, then proceeded to examine them with great care. I watched her silver-haired head bob up and down. Before I could start asking myself what palm reading had to do with midwifery, she spoke.

  “You’ve got nice, round fingers. These are hands that can protect the most important parts of a woman in labor. Yes, these are a midwife’s hands all right. I’ll be expecting you tomorrow.”

  With those words, I found myself employed once again. On my way home, I scrutinized my hands for a long time. It was the first time I’d ever been told my hands or my fingers were suited for assisting births.

  The director had a pretty unique take on things and in magazine articles and conferences would come out with statements like: “People who are good in bed are good at giving birth,” or, “If childbirth goes well, it feels amazing. It’s better than any sex,” or, “You must make sure not to turn your back on eroticism after having kids.” This line went down very well with a certain kind of person but was met with fervent opposition from others. When another midwife working at the clinic asked the director gently if she could tone down her remarks, she cackled and said, “What’s wrong with telling the truth? It’s not wartime anymore.”

  I heard other midwives at the clinic speak of the director’s “magic touch,” and it wasn’t long before I observed it myself. I can’t count the number of times she would turn around deliveries that seemed to be going nowhere fast, despite all our most fervent ef
forts. The moment we passed the baton over to her, cervices that had previously been clamped shut would dilate like flowers magically springing into bloom, and babies would come slithering out into her hands.

  There were certainly times when the discrepancy between my abilities and those of the director made me feel tempted to pack it all in, but I also knew that, now that my marriage had bitten the dust, I needed to be able to get by on my own. I had neither the courage nor the financial legroom to take Takumi and leave town. Yet every time I witnessed the director performing one of her superhuman feats, a huge iron ball would form inside my stomach. It was no good carrying on like that—I had to learn to keep up with her. Once I’d made that decision, things became easier. I stopped scanning the small print making up the newspaper’s Help Wanted section.

  As I ran up the stairs of the old building in front of the station, I could hear the sound of merry laughter pealing down from above. I prized open the door of the clinic to see Dr. Liu in a white shirt, thin black necktie, and pristine doctor’s gown, surrounded by a flock of elderly women. Noticing me, he clapped his hands together and said, in a loud, crystal-clear voice: “Okay, my next patient has arrived, ladies. Let us call it a day, shall we?”

  As they put away their folding chairs with a great clatter, several of the women snuck a glance in my direction.

  The Chinese pharmacy had been in the building for five years. I’d discovered it a while back, when I’d mentioned to a colleague of mine that I was interested in seeing whether the chills, constipation, and other mild ailments that often afflicted pregnant women could be cured with alternative treatments such as traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and moxibustion, and she’d introduced me to Dr. Liu. Things had gone from there, and now Dr. Liu came into my clinic to speak to the pregnant mothers as part of the prenatal courses we offered. We provided four sessions, both in the first stage of pregnancy and before entering the final month, covering the things women should be doing during pregnancy and the course that births take. One of these sessions was run by Dr. Liu, who spoke about self-care as a means of preventing health problems.