“You’re not supposed to do that,” she said. “Somebody already did that.”
We’re all supposed to do it, he said. We were always supposed to do it. We all have to do it, now. Are you ready?
“No.”
Well, that’s no excuse, he said. That doesn’t change a thing about how things are. That doesn’t delay things but for a second. We’re almost there. Don’t you see it? He pointed out over the dark ocean. Thick low clouds hid the stars and the moon, but she thought she could see a different kind of darkness thrown up against the horizon where he pointed.
“It’s not for you,” she said. “You don’t have to do it.”
Ready or not, he said, lifting the knife and twirling it just like she had always imagined Calvin must have, though who knew if he made a flourish, or just got on with it? She only had the coroner’s report to go by, its solemn tones seeming somehow reverential of this extraordinary living dissection, mentioning the bell and the candle and the iron brick and the chain but not guessing at their meaning. Rob brought down the knife and cut swiftly into his belly. Jemma was ready to watch the whole thing — she’d seen it in her head so many times, already — but no sooner had he cut himself then he disappeared. The ghosts went out and she felt the pain, different from the endless false contractions of the past weeks, it started in her back and seemed to push her to her knees before she even felt it, a knife in her belly, and she knew she was alone on the roof except for Ishmael, still wailing and wailing under the tree.
89
She had everything she needed: two clamps, sterile scissors, a bulb suction, a defibrillator, many towels folded inside a picnic basket turned battery-powered blanket-warmer, hauled up on a cart in between contractions. She was trying to prepare for the worst — meconium aspiration or cord prolapse or respiratory arrest or some other nasty surprise that she was too unskilled to pick up with the ultrasound. She felt powerful enough, sitting on the roof in the middle of the soccer field, to put out the moon by poking it with her thumb, but she didn’t trust herself to be able to fix her baby, if he came out all fucked up.
The new OR, or in her room, or in the lobby, or in a special room the angel might have unfolded for her, an actual delivery room, these might all have been places more appropriate to give birth, but none of them were better than the roof. She liked it up there, and it was harder for the angel to talk to her — the closest visible speakers were ten yards away, under the grass, and there was always a nice breeze to carry away the icky smells that she remembered too well from her days in OB — blood and shit and the weird, alien-fish smell of the placenta, and the ever-more-curious odors she’d encountered wafting from a vagina in distress. Up here she could keep an eye on the looming bulk on the horizon, still just a huge smudge, five hours after the contractions had started, but in a moment of Vivianish perspicacity she had concluded that the smudge was the barometer of her labor, and that the closer they came to it, the closer she’d come to being done.
She’d read a story when she was little about a dog hidden in labor underneath the porch, squeezing out a litter to surprise her family (a collection of imbeciles who’d not known her very long, and thought she was a fat boy), and Jemma thought there was something doglike, or creaturelike, in the way she prepared a place on the soccer field, flattening the grass with her feet until it was smoothed down in a circle twice as broad as she was tall, laying down her blankets and placing her tools close at hand. Just when she had the blankets perfectly straight, and secured at every corner with a flat stone from a fountain, her water broke and made a stain in the shape of a huge teacup. She sat down, right in center of the wet spot, overcome suddenly with a suffocating sense of finality not associated with the worsening contractions or the fuzzy mountains on the eastern horizon.
“Go on, crybaby,” said Ishmael. “Cry for me.”
“You’re not invited,” she said, not lifting her face from her hands. She felt him in her head, all of a sudden, an ugly canker, painful in a way that was distinct from the contractions and this new weighty sadness. “Go away. I don’t want you here.”
“You need me here,” he said. “I’m going to help you.”
“Just get away,” she said, but he was standing quietly a few yards off, when she opened her eyes. He walked off, but returned at regular intervals to offer up another insult or taunt, like a bad doula. She wished they would both shut the fuck up. She was used to Ishmael’s accusations — you are the whore of the world, you are the sickness that ruins, you are corruption itself — though they were getting harder to ignore, and every so often one of them would sting terribly. The nervous, fluttery ejaculations of the angel were simply annoying. Any of the ghosts would have been preferable. Can’t you even give birth right? Dr. Tiller would ask, and Dr. Chandra would somehow make her excruciating pain a subsidiary of and commentary on his lonely sadness. Rob would have been best. She was supposed to be lying back against him while he counted out breaths and Vivian stood between her legs, pounding her fist impatiently into a catcher’s mitt. “Rob,” she said softly, and Ishmael heard, clear across the roof.
“You killed him,” he called out. “Don’t forget! You killed everybody!”
“Let me comfort you,” said the angel, her voice muffled and soft. “Put your hand in me and I will bring you fentanyl.” There was a stirring in the ground beyond the blanket; a capped needle poked up through the grass, seemed to sniff at the air, and then withdrew.
“No thanks,” Jemma said, standing to turn her back on Ishmael, then squatting, then lying down, then kneeling with her legs opened toward the water. She found it was a comfort to rock back and forth, but it did not keep her from imagining once again a series of looming obstetric disasters.
Common and obscure complications, difficult to remember during her OB exam, presented themselves for her to obsess over. She had looked with the ultrasound while she was gathering up her supplies and was nearly certain she’d seen the head down and the feet up, but who could say the baby wouldn’t wiggle and turn at the last moment, to make himself a footling? It was an image she could describe to herself in detail, her body, dead of her failure, lying in the middle of the field, one little leg poking out from between her legs, the rest of the baby dead inside, crushed to death by her uterus. And there were a dozen other reasons for it not to get out, shoulder dystocia and cephalopelvic disproportion — still something she worried about though Vivian had already given her pelvis a good name: platypelloid, which made Jemma think she’d be better suited for laying eggs, but Vivian only smiled and said she could squeeze a watermelon though her pelvic outlet — and all the varieties of vertex malpresentation: face and brow and persistent occiput posterior, not to mention the chance that the baby would raise his hand in salute to the new world and catch the cord against his arm. Only the arm would get out and she would pull at it frantically until it popped off in her hand, and that would be all she would ever see of her baby.
She tried to practice saving maneuvers in her head, trying to remember the names. She thought of Vivian helping her study, telling her to imagine a man named McRoberts on top of her, pushing her legs back to her ears while he grunted and thrust. That one, at least, she remembered.
“Lie back against me,” the angel said. “Let me take you in my arms.”