CLEAN [Dramatic Personae: The Cedars of Lebanon]
Deliverance
ReeRee
bled on the eve of the Daydream Believers shoot. Tom-Tom poked her head in the room, groggily clocked the paramedics, & went back to sleep. Rikki borrowed Dr Phil’s old VW & followed the ambulance down. The winds were furious. The city below was bright & its landmarks brilliantly identifiable, like a city in a dream. He felt like he was slaloming down an xmas tree. 3AM.
They admitted her right away. Who should he call? Rikki didn’t ask Reeyonna because he knew she wouldn’t want him to call anyone. He didn’t want to wake his parents either, no need, so he waited til 730. They were there by 9.
The 3 of them — Dawn, Jim & Ree’s mom — had cellphone-strategized the best way for Jacquie to make her entrance but in the end she just strode in a minute or so after the fosters. When Reeyonna at 1st saw her, her features broke lose from their tenuous corral and spasmscattered, roving mountainscapes parched & dead. Mother Jacquie imperturbably rounded them up. At bedside, thankfully, mercifully, unpredictably, the child in Jerilynn, in Reeyonna (still so much child in her!), couldn’t bear it any longer & held out its arms. They cried together. Everything — embrace, misery, love — was primordial, in full knowledge the ooze & ahhhs of babydom approached at cosmic velocity. Rikki and his parents left them to their unexpurgated I’m sorrys duet, the melody flooded the bone-dry hills and made creeks again, it fed the grasses & herded the lambs, the mother touched her daughter’s wet face — its features finally come home, and safely fenced — Mother’s hands palmed over innocent flesh like a witch warming its hands at a fire it never thought it could ignite, remorseful crone who’d lost faith in her powers, but now had conjured this. The bewitched daughter letting herself be touched. The cosmic velocity of it.
. .
At last, the claque, perfectly imperfectly reunited: Rikki and Reeyonna, Jim and Dawn, Jacquie and Jerilynn. An overwhelming sense of relief — group exhalation (Rikki&ReeRee exempt). Fear, yes, for the baby — as they wheeled her off, a nurse said something that made them fearful — but relief at the dismantling of a monumental impasse. Hopefulness, despite Jacquie occasionally (quietly) projecting forward to the days after the baby’s birth, roughly sketching the destructive return of
. .
In labor now.
Jacquie’s naked freefloating fear for the baby returns, like when you wonder if you left home with candles still burning, were they too close to curtains, did you leave the bathwater on or inadvertently cover the vents on delicate machinery, was the handle not removed from the discarded refrigerator, did you leave your child or someone else’s in the car.
Rikki’s just relieved to have the focus off.
He was going to drive Dr Phil’s car back home but guesses he should probably stay. He only has roxies & weed. He wonders now that everyone’s here if he should go back for sum yayo.
. .
Jacquie & Dawn in the delivery room.
The gentlemen were invited, but abstained.
The gentlemen wait…
One hour, 2 hours — Rikki says he needs to get something from home, leaves—3 hours — shift change — Jim asks what’s happening — stonewalled. Why doesn’t Dawn come out? I can understand why Jacquie wouldn’t but come on, Dawn, what the hell’s the matter? don’t you think I’m going a little crazy out here? Cellphones do not work in hospital zones. But he even steps outside the building to see if Dawn texted him: nothing. The engineer is nothing if not logical. An unwelcome voice bubbles up: She probably hasn’t had any decent prenatal care, to speak of. He does not like the voice but does not silence it. He hopes that she did. Decent prenatal care. Or more decent than he thought. Engineer Jim takes deep breaths — Dawn calls them yoga breaths, she learned when she was in treatment for depression — just now it’s the only way he can cope, the only way to forestall hyperventilation.
To dispel the unnecessary from his head.
A fresh nurse comes.
She says:
She’s in critical care.
But did she have the baby?
She says:
She’s in critical care.
. .
The nurse says Jim can’t go back, she says there’s already 2 (Jacquie, Dawn) in there with her. So he waits in a family lounge outside the CCU. He wonders, Where the hell is that kid? Where the hell is Rikki? He starts to call Rikki’s cell, but doesn’t have it in him. Something in him is tired & broken.
Jacquie sits in a vinyl chair at Jerilynn’s bedside.
Jerilynn looks bleached, beached, fattened, flattened; her mother looks the same. She got so heavy, I never got this heavy. When I had her, I think I gained even less, I weighed more when I had Jerry. But that was just 10 lbs, not even. Jerilynn has tubes in each arm (one backed up w/blood), a see-thru celery green one in her nose (O2), bright yellow one under the bed (cath). The urine shot through with sunshine, but some blood in it now is that blood in it. The machine monitoring her heart beats time in brash strident tones that almost seem threatening. Angry harbingers… the thousands of forgettable scenes from television & movies where an aberrant rhythm breaks from the pack like a dark horse, shrill, screechy, sped-up, doctors nurses & crashcarts come flying, then: the flatlining. Forgettable scenes too with teens going from delivery room to CCU, though much less of those. Right?
Jerilynn in quiet delirium, Jacquie tamped down, crazed, benumbed, Dawn stroking the girl’s sweaty crown of hair, Dawn’s eyes involuntarily sweeping what she can see of the bedsheet for black-maroon blood, (Rikki’s) black amour blackamoor blood — praying not to see a stain appear then spread like those helicopter shots of land-devouring blackwater tsunami — and the folly of Dawn’s rage & offendedness return with galling sting, her rejection by the Buddhists, the vanity of it, the daily shame she experiences upon re-creating her impotence at the hospice program’s snub, her lonely preening pitiful entitlement burns her throat as it regurgitates… she cannot let go. That was the lesson to learn, how to let go, but she cannot, she learned nothing, she got a 2-week stay in the hospital for her trouble, of course they were right, she wasn’t fit to keep vigil with the living let alone the dying, she had learned nothing. Only now does it come to her, only now can she see what a great gift it was, how it came in disguise at the only time she could have accepted it, the only time she could hold the gift in her arms even though she was not ready to open it — but now she was.