Folded sheets and towels Ramola found in a linen closet are draped over Natalie’s chest and her legs, edges tucked under her hips and thighs. The two remaining towels are folded on top of a kitchen chair Ramola dragged into the room, a cushioned platform upon which she’ll inspect the baby.
Ramola cannot perform the surgery while standing on the floor. Her reach isn’t long enough. She hovers at the foot of the bed and watches the slight rise and fall of Natalie’s covered chest. What if she stays there, does nothing, and simply watches until there is no more rise and fall? No one would know she didn’t try.
She can’t do this. She stands and she watches. The house makes creaking and rattling noises, the kinds it saves for when someone is alone.
Her mental whiteboard is a mess of cross-outs, circles, arrows, smudges, and the order of instructions is almost impossible to follow.
Ramola climbs over the foot of the bed. As she settles onto her knees, she sinks into the mattress. Natalie’s belly pitches slightly forward. The angle for surgery is not ideal and the weight pressure is surely squeezing the child forward. Ramola’s every movement sends quakes through the mattress and jostles Natalie’s body. She should’ve found a way to get Natalie to the hard floor. It’s too late to do so now.
On the bed, between the mattress’s edge and Natalie’s left leg, is a rectangular plastic container. Inside are hand towels and knives. She picks up the hunting knife. It feels top-heavy. The brutish instrument is not an extension of her hand.
She whispers, “I’m sorry, but—” then stops before uttering, I can’t do this.
“All right,” she says instead, then leans forward and allows the quivering mattress to settle. She anchors her left hand halfway up the belly and pushes it away from her. The baby reacts to the sudden force and pressure. Ramola says, “All right” again, this one not meant for Natalie, and she shakily inserts the fearsome knife tip into Natalie’s skin at the start of the planned incision line. Blood beads instantly. As Ramola slowly drags the knife to her right, a muffled low moan, one that could be wind outside until it cannot be, builds into a jagged scream from Natalie, and her body flinches and spasms.
Ramola retracts the knife, scrabbles backward, her lower back ramming into the edge of the footboard. She screams, “I’m sorry!” and throws the knife at the wall to her right. It bounces off and clatters on the hardwood.
“Please don’t make me do this.”
Ramola paces at the foot of the bed.
“Never leave me and I will never leave you. Neither now, nor ever.”
Ramola climbs back onto the bed. She places one hand on the belly, the other holding the hunting knife. Natalie’s breathing is nearly imperceptible.
As Ramola finishes the initial incision, Natalie’s earlier groans and screams ring so clear in her head as to be happening now.
The light in the room is terrible. The clouded overhead fixture, the extra lamps, the flashlight on her phone do not illuminate enough. There is so much blood. Ramola switches out the knives. She switches them again and again and again.
Her mental whiteboard goes blank. The blankness expands, becomes an infinite void of whiteness, one in which she might be lost willingly.
She’s through to the thick, fibrous muscle of the uterus. With the mattress shaking, it’s impossible to see any rise and fall of Natalie’s chest. Has she stopped breathing even though her moans and screams continue in Ramola’s head?
How long has Natalie been dead? How long has she been gone?
How long has the four-minute clock been ticking?
Ramola works as quickly as she can. The knives fight against their usage. Her fingers tremor and cramp up.
The last of the cutting is done.The knives are away.
She reaches inside and pulls the baby out.
The baby is a girl. Her skin is ghostly gray.
Neither Ramola nor the baby is breathing.
She cries.
Postlude
No Care and No Sorrow
This is not a fairy tale. Certainly it is not one that has been sanitized, homogenized, or Disneyfied, bloodless in every possible sense of the word, beasts and human monsters defanged and claws clipped, the children safe and the children saved, the hard truths harvested from hard lives if not lost then obscured, and purposefully so.
This
