The woman frowns. “Have you even read her file?” And the two of them glare at each other for a moment.
“A stillborn,” Mama says, and the air vanishes from Ella’s lungs. This is new. She has never been here before. She’d walked through so many of Mama’s memories that she could describe them down to the chipping on the walls: Mama leaving abusive partners, Mama at church, Mama at the club with girlfriends, Mama praying by her bed at their home in South Central, Mama as a kid running through Mississippi backyards. How deep Ella must have gone to get here. But she doesn’t try to leave, doesn’t try to force herself out of the memory. The current brought her here. Mama brought her here.
“The demise was last year?”
Mama stiffens at the word.
The woman touches the doctor’s arm and says, “May I speak to you outside?”
After a moment, Ella follows them, passing through the door as though it were a curtain, and she watches the woman tell the doctor to please make a note in Mama’s chart about the stillbirth, how every time she has to recite her trauma, Mama’s mind goes back to that place of anxiety and fear and heartbreak.
“She’s having a high-risk delivery,” the woman says. “I would hope that her care team would thoroughly review her chart before walking into her room.”
For a moment, the doctor is silent. Then he says, “You doulas shouldn’t even be here. You’re lucky I don’t call security.”
Ella follows the doula back into Mama’s room, and it’s as though time stretches like a rubber band before snapping in place, because now there are tired lines on Mama’s face and she groans like she hasn’t had a drop of water in hours.
“Can I get an epidural?” Mama murmurs to the anesthesiologist nearby, who shoots the doula a look that gets the doula out of the room.
Ella stays, then watches the white woman administer a spinal dose of anesthesia. Ella’s fists tighten at her sides when she watches her mother clench her own fists and grit her teeth. When the doula returns, Mama’s head shoots up from her pillow, and there’s rage in her eyes.
“I can’t feel my legs,” she hisses. Then her head falls back. “And my head.” That last comes out as a moan.
“What did you give her?” the doula asks the anesthesiologist.
Mama’s blood pressure rises. Ella can feel it like heat rising in her own face. She looks at the numbers on the screen, another heart rate, the baby’s heart rate. It’s dropping.
The doula crouches at Mama’s side and grips her hand in both of hers. “What happened was wrong,” she says in a whisper, “but for the sake of the baby, it’s time to let it go.”
Mama grits her teeth. She’s not ready to let it go.
“Close your eyes,” the doula tells her in the softest voice Ella has ever heard. “What’s the color of your stress?”
“Red.”
“What color relaxes you?”
Mama takes several mountainous breaths. “Lavender.”
The beeping stabilizes. Mama’s blood pressure drops. Ella’s fists unclench.
A team of three young female residents hurry into the room with the delivery nurse behind them, a flurry of white, then a man who looks like the attending physician, and he introduces himself briefly before plunging his hands between Mama’s legs, and the question shines bright in Mama’s eyes, through reflexive tears, and the doula sees it and says, “What happened to Dr. Rosenbaum? He was supposed to be here.” But the doctor doesn’t explain the switch, instead pulling his hands out and snapping off his gloves and saying, “She’s ready. Time to push.”
And they all get to work, a small hurricane of white while the doula, the only other black woman in the room, leans by Mama’s side and says, “You’re a rock star. You can do it. This is it. You can do it. You’re doing amazing. Push! You can do it!”
And Mama pushes and pushes, not taking her eyes off the doula. And Ella watches her own head appear, a slick cluster of black curls. And Mama pushes again, and the young resident takes baby Ella’s head and eases the slippery body out, and the residents all take turns between Mama’s legs, but when Ella looks up, the attending physician is gone, almost like he wasn’t here, and it’s only the young white women and the doula and Mama sobbing shaking laughing as she watches her baby girl, purple and wrinkled and stone-still, touch air for the first time.
A resident lays the baby on Mama’s chest. “Is she all right? She’s not moving. Is she okay?” Then, a second later, the baby’s tiny arms and legs tense, and she opens her mouth and lets out a cry.
“She’s perfect,” the doula tells Mama.
“I did it,” Mama breathes. “Oh, Ella,” she says, looking to the baby, as she touches a back slick with blood and amniotic fluid. “I did it.”
Ella blinks, and the room is empty. The residents have vanished. So has the doula. So has the baby.
Mama is older. She’s back to now.
Mama’s eyes flutter open. “Baby, why you crying?”
Ella dashes away the tears. She blubbers an apology.
“Oh, baby. It’s going to be all right.”
“I almost killed you.”
Mama puts her hand over Ella’s. “Baby, you ain’t never do no such thing.”
A few moments later, Ella calms her sobs enough to ask, “How come you never told me about… about the stillbirth?”
Pain glints in Mama’s eyes, but it’s gone the next instant. “That was a long time ago. And—” Headaches and light sensitivity bleed from Mama, through their intertwined hands, into Ella. She sees the argument with the boyfriend and him grabbing the knife and her screaming, “Back up! I have a baby,” and the police arriving. Feels the swollen hands and feet and face and the doctors telling her just to take some Tylenol, always more Tylenol, then the day before the baby shower when her aches had become too much and a doctor scribbling 143/86 in a chart during her appointment. And her doctor telling her to lie down then telling her that he was going on vacation and she could deliver the baby by C-section that day if she wanted, six weeks early, then the car ride a few days later on the way to her boyfriend’s and the wetness between her legs which is not water like she expects but blood. In the rush afterward, someone saying that elevated blood pressure had separated her placenta from her uterine wall, then haziness and Mama asking over and over again, “Is he all right? Is he all right?” Then the silence of the delivery room. The most deafening silence Ella has ever heard in her life.
It’s gone the next instant.
“It was so long ago,” Mama whispers. “I’d hoped to keep that from you.”
“But why, Mama?”
Mama looks to the ceiling. “You’re always so angry. I… I didn’t wanna add to your burden.”
“Just like you weren’t gonna tell me about your cancer?”
Mama flinches. Just enough for Ella to notice. “I don’t wanna fight it. I just—” Then she allows herself a moment of release, of bitterness. “These doctors ain’t gonna help me with that anyway.” Then she’s back. She pats Ella’s hand. “It’s just enough that you’re here.”
When Mama slips back into slumber, Ella slides her hand out from beneath her mother’s. It’s not until she exits the hospital, leaving behind a double to watch for any change in condition, that she realizes the gift Mama has just given her.
Mama had seen the look in Ella’s eyes when Ella had said “I almost killed you,” then she had let Ella see what she saw.
“They almost killed you.”
Mama’s only moment of bitterness. Of rage, of malice, of hurt. The only moment of truth into which she had let her daughter.
And it’s enough to set Ella free.
They don’t tell me why I finally got out of solitary, but I’m pretty sure it’s because there’s not enough space in the jail, and I gotta make room for another guy.