She lets her legs relax as best she can, her muscles still taut and straining to handle the pain that her body is being dealt.
“Breathe,” Ione says. She returns to Birdie’s side and takes her hand.
Birdie looks at her friend and then back at Vanessa. It occurs to her how strange it is to trust someone who held a bloody rag against her lips only a day before. But her options are limited. She’s the only one who knows how to get her through this.
Vanessa speaks.
“Look at me,” she says, the normal timbre of her voice returning. She regains her composure and the control that she usually effortlessly exerts over every situation. She’s shaken, Birdie realizes. Tom is dying. She looks at him, a heap on the floor, the blood from his back still pooling beside him. She wonders how deeply the knife sunk in. If it cut his spinal cord. If he’s paralyzed. The thoughts are too much to contemplate now. She can only focus on the baby.
“Breathe,” Vanessa instructs. “And when you feel the next contraction, push.”
Birdie nods silently. She breathes steadily, finding a rhythm in the pain—a purpose. She has to get through this. She hasn’t survived this long, scrapped her way to the top, to die here. She nods more vigorously.
She breathes in, then out. Inhales. Exhales. Again, and again. Then the contraction comes.
“Push!” Vanessa shouts.
“You can do it, Birdie,” Ione says, close to her ear.
Birdie pushes with everything she’s got. The pain intensifies. She cries out into the darkness. As it comes to a close, she relaxes as best she can once more.
“Good! Good!” Vanessa says.
Unsure of how much time passes, Birdie goes through the process again and again until finally Vanessa shrieks.
“It’s crowning,” she says. “Push hard!”
Birdie follows the instructions, bearing down on the contraction with everything she’s got. She feels her thighs slick with the fluids of birth and perhaps blood, too. She can feel the baby coming. It’s almost here.
She doesn’t have time to consider it long, but the thought occurs to her that this is the last moment in her life when it will just be her. From this point forward, she’s responsible for another human being. Another heartbeat is depending on her to keep it going. The thought is overwhelmed by another contraction.
She pushes.
And the baby is born.
Ione laughs and Birdie looks at her. Tears snake down her cheeks, pale trails in the moonlight.
“Oh my God,” Ione says, turning from her friend to Vanessa.
Birdie looks up as the baby begins to cry.
And that’s when the three of them hear the explosion.
IONE
The baby screams just as an explosion rocks the walls of the little studio. I turn, Birdie’s hand still in mine. She gasps for air, catching her breath, readying herself the next part of the process. It’s not over yet, I know that. I turn back to Birdie.
“You’ve got this, girl,” I say with a smile.
Though she’s not out of the woods, I feel optimistic now. I know there’s the possibility that she could bleed to death passing the placenta. I heard a story about a girl that almost died from that when I was in high school. It was something of an urban legend. She’d given birth to the baby in a bathroom after concealing the entirety of her pregnancy from friends, family, and teachers.
At least the baby is crying, I think.
Birdie seems to relax as the final contraction before the child was born begins to pass. It’s like a wave of calm descends on her. She looks at me. Her eyes are clear like the sky over the ocean after a storm.
“You’re a mom,” I laugh.
She laughs back. There’s a hesitancy there. I wonder how she feels about it. In any other situation, I’d ask. We had that kind of relationship. But now is not the time or the place. There aren’t enough spare moments for emotions now. It’s up to Vanessa and me to get her and the child out of here to safety.
I look to Vanessa, hoping that she’s got instructions on what to do next. What we should expect. Instead, she’s looking at the baby. There’s an intensity in her gaze that unsettles me. It dawns on me that the woman just confronted her husband about a miscarriage and now she’s holding a child that he created with another person. I loosen my grip on Birdie’s hand.
For the first time since I rose up from the floor, I look over at Tom.
Glassy eyes stare into the distance, seeing only what the dead can see. He’s gone. His spinal cord severed and too much blood lost for recovery. That look in his eyes, I’ve seen it before. It’s the same look my father had in his eyes after he passed. Like he can see something that the rest of us can’t.
Something compels me to go to him.
I stand, releasing Birdie’s hand and walking past Vanessa and the baby. I kneel beside Tom and brush a wave of hair away from his face. His mouth is slack, opened in an unsaid remark, which seems fitting. The last word was always his.
I’m struck by the emotion that overwhelms me, and I’m ashamed of it.
Relief.
I stare down at him, at those doll’s eyes that look into the abyss, and I wonder how he ever thought this could end. I wonder what he had hoped for this place. And there’s a part of me that hates him for not including me in his mad vision.
This place is madness. Tom was madness personified. I loved him more fiercely than I ever loved Wes. I realize that. But Wes was safe, and I shunned the safety he offered. I wanted the fire. I wanted to burn the world to the ground with Tom at my side holding the kerosene.
I stand and my knees pop.
I turn back to Birdie and Vanessa.
“She has to pass the placenta,” Vanessa murmurs, holding the child.
I nod at Birdie, who nods back to me.
