backhand of universal misfortune.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Gwen said. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.” She laid it on, but only because she could do so in good conscience. This kind of hemorrhaging was not unusual; the Pitocin would kick in momentarily, the uterus would contract, the mysterious bundle of the placenta, that doomed and transient organ, would complete its brief sojourn, and that would be that.
“I mean, well,” Garth said. He appeared to consider and decide against speaking the words that had entered his mind, so as not to cause alarm, then said them anyway: “It’s just that it looks kind of bad.”
Gwen’s eyes snapped onto the little girl, but Arcadia seemed to have decided not to know anything except the baby sucking at her mother’s left breast and the feel of her mother’s hand in hers.
“That’s mostly just lochia,” Gwen said. “Lining, mucus, all that good stuff. It’s normal.”
“Mostly,” Garth repeated, his tone both flat and accusatory.
“How about you run get us some towels, Dad,” Aviva suggested. “And lots of them.”
“Towels,” Garth repeated, clinging to the rope of his desire to be useful.
“Definitely,” Gwen said. “Go on, honey. Go on and get us like every damn towel you got. Also, yeah, some sanitary pads.”
Gwen had a more than adequate supply of pads in her bag, but she wanted to give him a concrete mystery to grow entangled in, hoping that might keep him busy for a few minutes. Whenever she asked Archy to bring her a Tampax, he always got this look on his face, somewhere between intimidation, as by an advanced concept of cosmic theory, and dread, as if mere contact with a tampon might cause him spontaneously to grow a vagina.
Garth went away muttering, “Towels and sanitary pads.”
Aviva called Aryeh Bernstein. “Sorry to bother you,” she said. She gave him the essentials, then listened to what their backup OB had to say about Lydia Frankenthaler’s placenta. “We did. Yep. Okay. All right, thanks, Aryeh. I hope I won’t have to.”
“What did he say?”
“He said more Pitocin and massage.”
“On it,” Gwen said.
As Aviva prepped another push, Gwen laid her hands on Lydia’s belly and felt, blindly and surely, for the hard shuddering uterus. She sank her fingers into the crepey flesh of Lydia’s abdomen and kneaded with dispassion and no more tenderness than a baker. She disbelieved in the mystical power of visualization according to strictures of her 97 percent rule, but that did not prevent her from imagining with every flexion of her fingers that Lydia’s womb was clenching, sealing itself up, condensing like a lump of coal in Superman’s fist to a hard bright healthy diamond.
They heard cabinets slamming in a bathroom somewhere with a panicked air of comedy, and then a glass broke, and the girl jumped. It was not impossible that Gwen jumped, too. Aviva held steady, guiding the second needle into Lydia’s vein.
“Hey, there, Arcadia,” Gwen said. “How you doing?”
“Good.”
“You got a nice strong grip on your mom’s hand, there?” The girl nodded, slow and watchful. Gwen winced at the false tone of cheeriness she could hear creeping into her voice. “Know what I’m doing? I’m massaging your mom’s uterus. Now, I know you know what a uterus is.”
“Yes.”
“Duh. Of course you do, smart as you are.”
“Oh, uh, Gwen, um,” Lydia said, and she sank back deeper against the plaid bolster, her head lolling like a flower on a broken stem. Her left arm with the baby curled in its crook subsided, and there was a loud smack as the small mouth popped loose. “Oh, man, you guys, I don’t know.”
“Any change?” Aviva said.
“Some.”
Gwen tried not to look at her partner as Aviva went over to her flight bag, a gaudy pleather thing blazoned with the obscurely ironic legend SULACO, and broke out the bags, barbs, and tubing of an IV kit. Gwen crouched, up to her elbows in the dough of the woman’s life, knowing that everything was going to be all right, that it was a matter of hormones and massage and a husband judiciously sent to find Kotex and bath towels. She also knew that she suffered from or had been blessed with a kind of reverse clairvoyance, the natural counterpart to her partner’s predictive pessimism. Gwen was resistant to if not proof against clear signs of danger or failure. Not because she was an optimist (not at all) but because she took failure, any failure, whether her own or the universe’s, so personally. If a bridge gave way outside of Bangalore, India, and a bus full of children plunged to their deaths, Gwen felt an atom-sized but detectable blip of culpability. She had been taught firmly that you could not take credit for success if you were unprepared to accept blame for failure, and one useful expedient she had evolved over the years for avoiding having to do the latter was to refuse—not consciously so much as through a reflexive stubbornness—to acknowledge even the possibility of failure. And that was what she would have to accept if she looked up from her wildly bread-making hands and saw Aviva, with that grim measuring gaze of hers, holding up the bag of intravenous saline to catch the sunshine, her mouth drawn into a thin defeated line.
“Don’t fall asleep, Mommy,” Arcadia said. “Here comes Daddy with the towels.”
Gwen hurried along the corridor, bleeding from a fresh cut on her left cheek, trussing her belly with one arm, trying to keep up with Aviva, who was trying to keep up with the single-masted gurney on which Lydia Frankenthaler was being sailed toward one of the emergency-room ORs by a crew of two nurses and the EMT who had accidentally slammed the ambulance door on Gwen’s face. The EMT hit the doors ass-first and banged on through, and the nurse who was not steering the IV pole turned and faced down the midwives as the doors swung shut behind her. She was about Gwen’s age, mid-thirties, a skinny ash-eyed blonde with her hair in a rubber-band ponytail, wearing scrubs patterned with the logo of the Oakland A’s. “I’m really sorry,” she said. She looked very faintly sorry. “You’ll have to wait out here.”
This was a sentence being passed on them, a condemnation and a banishment, but at first Aviva seemed not to catch on, or rather, she pretended not to catch on. As the Alice Waters of Midwives, she had been contending successfully and in frustration with hospitals for a long time, and though, by nature, she was one of the most candid and forthright people Gwen had ever known, if you sent her into battle with another nurse, an intake clerk, or most of all an OB, she revealed herself to be skilled in every manner of wheedlings and wiles. It was a skill that was called upon to one degree or another almost every time they went up against hospitals and insurance companies, and Gwen relied upon and was grateful to Aviva for shouldering the politics of the job so ably. She envied the way it seemed to cost Aviva nothing to eat shit, kiss up, make nice. Catching babies was the only thing Aviva cared about, and she would surrender anything except her spotless record for catching them safe and sound. She had, Gwen felt, that luxury.
“No, no, of course, we’ll wait,” Aviva said in a chipper voice. She made a great show of gazing down at herself, at her white shirt with its chart of blood islands, at the chipped polish on her big toenail. With the same partly feigned air of disapproval, she surveyed Gwen’s cheek, her played-out saggy-kneed CP Shades. Then Aviva nodded, granting with a smile the whole vibe of dirt and disorder that the partners were giving off. “But after we clean up and scrub in, right? then it’s no problem, right”—leaning in to read the nurse’s badge—“Kirsten? If you want to check with Dr. Bernstein, I’m sure…”
Gwen could see the nurse trying to determine whose responsibility it was in this situation to be the Asshole, which was of course the purpose of Aviva’s gambit. Sometimes that awful responsibility turned out to be endlessly deferrable, and other times you got lucky and ended up in the hands of someone too tired or busy to give a damn.
“Bernstein’s stuck in traffic,” Kirsten said. “The attending’s Dr. Lazar. I’ll check with him. In the meantime, why don’t you two ladies go ahead and have a seat.” She told Gwen, “You’re going to want to have a seat.”
“No, thank you,” Gwen said. “I prefer to stand.”
Her relations toward authority, toward its wielders and tools, were—had to be—more complicated than her partner’s. She could not as blithely subordinate her pride and self-respect to the dictates of hospital politics, distill her practice of midwifery, the way Aviva did, to the fundamental business of the Catch. But Gwen knew, the way a violinist knew tonewood, how to work it. She had grown up in a family of doctors, lawyers, teachers, cops. For many
