“It won’t be so bad.”
The nurse was holding up a padded white bowl-like thing crossed with straps and ties. “In honor of your first class,” she said, helping Nicholas up from the floor. “The Sympathy Belly.”
“For God’s sake,” he said.
“Now, Paige has been toting this around for seven months,” the nurse scolded. “Surely you can make do for thirty minutes.”
Nicholas shrugged into the armholes, glaring at the nurse. It was a thirty-four-pound contraption, a soft false belly whose insides sloshed from side to side unpredictably. When Nicholas shifted, a large ball bearing dug into his bladder. The nurse fastened the straps around his waist and shoulders. “Why don’t you take a walk,” she said.
Nicholas knew she was waiting for him to fall. He carefully raised and lowered his feet, undaunted by the shifting weight and the strain in his back. He turned back to the crowd, to Paige, triumphant. The nurse’s voice came from behind him. “Run,” she said.
Nicholas spread his legs wide and tried to move faster, half jogging, half hopping. Some of the women began to laugh, but Paige’s face remained still. The nurse tossed a pen onto the floor. “Nicholas,” she said, “if you wouldn’t mind?”
Nicholas tried to ease toward the ground by bending his knees, but the liquid in the Sympathy Belly swished to the left, knocking off his sense of balance. He fell to the floor on his hands and knees, and he bowed his head.
Around him, laughter swelled, vibrating against his knees and ringing in his ears. He lifted his chin and rolled his eyes. He scanned the other husbands and wives, who were clapping now in response to his performance, and then his gaze fell on his wife.
Paige was sitting very quietly, not smiling, not clapping. A thin silver streak ran the length of her face, and even as he watched, her palm came up to wipe away the tear. She rocked until she was on her knees, then she heaved herself up to a standing position and came to Nicholas’s side. “Nicholas has had a very long day,” she said. “I think we’ve got to go.”
Nicholas watched Paige unfasten the Sympathy Belly and slide it over his shoulders. The nurse took it from her before she could support the full weight. Nicholas smiled at ghtns smiled the others as he followed Paige out the door, and followed her to her car. She wedged herself behind the steering wheel and closed her eyes as if she was in pain. “I hate seeing you like that,” she whispered, and when she opened her eyes, clear and cerulean blue, she was staring right through her husband.
chapter 13
I gave birth in the middle of a class four hurricane. I was just at the end of my eighth month. All day long I had sat on the couch, weary from the sluggish heat, and listened to news reports of the coming storm. It was a freak weather pattern, a string of odd monsoon rains across the Northeast, coming three months too early. The weatherman told me to tape my windows and store water in the bathtub. Ordinarily I might have, but I did not have the energy.
Nicholas did not come home until midnight. The wind had already picked up, howling through the streets like a child in pain. He undressed in the bathroom and slipped into bed quietly so he wouldn’t wake me, but I had been sleeping fitfully. I had a low, moaning backache, and I’d gotten up to pee three times. “I’m sorry,” Nicholas said, seeing me stir.
“Don’t worry,” I told him, rolling myself into a sitting position. “I might as well hit the bathroom again.”
As I stood, I felt drops of water at my feet, and I stupidly assumed it was the rain, somehow come inside.
Two hours later, I knew something was not quite right. My water had not broken, not the way they’d said it would in Lamaze class, but a thin trickle of fluid ran down my legs every time I sat up. “Nicholas,” I said, my voice trembling, “I’m leaking.”
Nicholas rolled over and pulled his pillow over his head. “It’s probably a tear in the amniotic sac,” he murmured. “You’re a whole month early. Go back to sleep, Paige.”
I grabbed the pillow and threw it across the room, fear ripping through me like the violence of winter. “I am not a patient, goddammit,” I said. “I am your wife.” And I leaned forward, starting to cry.
As I padded toward the bathroom again, a slow burn crept from my back around my belly and settled deep under my skin. It didn’t hurt, not really, not yet, but I knew this was the thing the nurse at Lamaze could not describe-a contraction. I held on to the Corian counter and stared into the bathroom mirror. Another gripping knot shook me, hands deep inside me that seemed to be clutching from the inside, as if they would surely pull me into myself. It made me think of a science trick Sister Bertrice had done when I was in eleventh grade-she’d blown smoke into a Pepsi can until none of the oxygen was left and then capped the top with a rubber stopper, and when she lightly touched the side of the can it crumpled, collapsing just like that. “Nicholas,” I whispered, “I need help.”
While Nicholas was on the phone with my doctor’s answering service, I started to pack a bag. It
Lamaze class had taught me that early labor lasted for six to twelve hours; that contractions started irregularly and happened hours apart. Lamaze had taught me that if I breathed the right way,
Nicholas stuffed my bathrobe, two T-shirts, my shampoo, and his toothbrush into a brown paper grocery bag. He knelt beside me on the bathroom floor. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “you’re only three minutes apart.”
Oh, it hurt, and I couldn’t get comfortable in the car, and I had started bleeding, and with every grasp of the fist inside me I gripped Nicholas’s hand. The rain whipped around the car, screaming as loud as I did. Nicholas turned on the radio and sang to me, making up words to the songs he did not know. He leaned out the window at the empty intersections, yelling, “My wife’s in labor!” and drove like a madman through the blinking red lights.
At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he parked in a fire zone and helped me out of the car. He was cursing about the weather, the condition of the roads, the fact that Mass General had no maternity ward. The rain was a sheet, soaking through my clothes and plastering them to me, so that I could clearly see every tightening of my belly. He pulled me into the emergency admitting area, where a fat black woman sat picking her teeth. “She’s preregistered,” he barked. “Prescott. Paige.”
I could not see the woman. I twisted in a plastic seat, wrapping my arms around my abdomen. Suddenly a face loomed-hers-round and dark, with yellow tiger eyes. “Honey,” she said, “do you have to push?”
I couldn’t speak, so I nodded my head, and she jumped to attention, demanding a wheelchair and an orderly. Nicholas seemed to relax. I was brought into one of the older labor and delivery suites. “What about those modern rooms,” Nicholas demanded. “The ones with nice drapes and bedspreads and all that?”
I could have given birth in a cave on a bed of pine needles; I did not care. “I’m sorry, Doctor,” the orderly said, “we’re full up. Something about the atmospheric pressure of a hurricane makes women’s waters break.”
Within minutes, Nicholas stood to the right of me, a labor nurse to my left. Her name was Noreen, and I trusted her more than my own husband, who had saved the lives of hundreds. She rustled the sheet between my legs. “You’re ten centimeters,” she said. “It’s show time.”
She stepped out of the room, leaving me alone with Nicholas. My eyes followed the door. “It’s okay, Paige. She’s going to get Dr. Thayer.” Nicholas put his hand on my knee and gently massaged the muscles. I could hear the steady rasp of my breathing, the hot pulse of my blood. I turned to Nicholas, and with the clarity and clairvoyance that pain brings, I realized I did not know this man at all and that the worst was yet to come. “Don’t you touch me,” I whispees.?€ I red.
Nicholas jumped away, and I looked into his eyes. They were ringed gray, surprised and hurt. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking,
