Zee simmered but said nothing. It wasn’t appropriate; this girl was suffering. Noelle crouched down and opened Shara’s coat, which was something that Zee hadn’t thought to do. The guidance counselor gently unzipped it and parted the two halves, revealing Shara Pick’s full abdomen, astonishingly round beneath her sweater. With the coat off it was impossible to miss.
“May I raise your sweater?” Noelle asked, and Shara nodded. The skin of her abdomen was stretched and shining, the navel asserting itself like a pencil eraser, and below that was a bisecting dark stripe of skin, something called linea nigra, Zee would learn later when she sat at her computer and looked up every single thing, every single moment, locked in studiousness the way Greer would have been if she’d been there for this.
But armed with no knowledge yet, only instinct, in that moment in the nurse’s office Zee and the guidance counselor looked at each other, alarmed, across Shara Pick, and then Noelle said to Shara in a soft voice, “Sweet pea, did you know you were going to have a baby?”
“I thought, yeah, maybe I was.”
“Well, you are, and Miss Eisenhower and I are going to help you.”
Zee didn’t correct her. Everything happened so fast from that moment on. 911 was called; Shara made deep sounds in her throat, and she braced her legs and arched her back.
“I’ll look up what to do,” said Noelle, and while Zee encouraged Shara not to push, to keep her legs together, to wait, Noelle sat at the nurse’s desk—the nurse, Jean, why wasn’t she back yet? On the old gum-colored Dell desktop computer Noelle punched in a password, and then success. She Googled the sparest and most economical collection of words she could think of. She was an excellent Googler, it would turn out.
Now, swiftly, Noelle located an online visual guide to delivering a baby in emergency circumstances with no training and no equipment. “Okay, I’ve got instructions here,” she said. In a quiet and controlled voice, Noelle read, “‘What should I do to help someone in labor?’”
Somehow they managed to hold Shara off, to keep her from delivering a baby into their unschooled hands. Finally Jean returned, followed immediately by the EMS team, a man and a woman, both young and competent, who raced in and took over. “Push, Shara,” they told her after they had assessed the situation.
And then the head emerged, the face emerged; and once that explicit sense of humanness appeared, it was as if everything else stopped. As soon as there was a face, everyone marveled. Same as a death. Everyone knew death existed, Zee thought; most people had known since childhood. The newspapers were filled with the tiny print of paid death notices and real obituaries, and sometimes one of Zee’s parents looked up from the paper while they drank their breakfast smoothies before heading to the courthouse, and mildly said to the other something like, “Oh, did you see that Carl Sagan died?”
Zee thought of Cory Pinto’s little brother—gone. She thought of the faces of everyone she knew, trembling in the gelatin of their own temporariness. We’re overwhelmed by faces, Zee knew, the ones that leave and the ones that come, and she was overwhelmed by this one now.
Suddenly Zee realized that something thick was wrapped around the baby’s neck. It was the umbilical cord, looking like the bicycle cable with which Zee had tied up her Schwinn all over the Ryland campus. She watched the paramedics carefully get it off. It was as if they were unlocking that bicycle chain in the rain, working the slippery thing, with its intimations of something complex beneath the surface, out from among the spokes. The baby’s head was sprung.
“There we go, Shara,” said the male paramedic tenderly.
“One more, Shara,” echoed Jean the nurse.
“You can do it,” said Zee.
And then Noelle said, “You’re doing great!”
Shara pushed heroically, and eventually there was a sound like a boot pressing into mud as the baby’s shoulders rushed out, late for an important meeting, and the human face was revealed to be attached to a human body, genitals swollen and full and declaring: girl.
* * *
? ? ?
Though they did not like each other, they were both in desperate, shaky need of decompression, so Noelle Williams and Zee Eisenstat found themselves sitting together for a very early dinner in a nearby restaurant after the workday, which ended for both of them immediately after Shara’s grandmother arrived and everything was revealed to be stable, at least medically. Zee tried to go to the hospital with her frightened student, but Jean the nurse said no, she would go instead. There was nothing more for Zee and Noelle to do.
Noelle chose a small soul-food restaurant called Miss Marie’s with wood paneling and an excellent soundtrack featuring Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. A tin bowl of pickled green tomatoes was placed on the table, and Zee sliced one hard, feeling the give of the skin, knowing that even though her knife was dull, she could cut this. She had nearly delivered a baby today, after all. The baby of a baby.
Poor Shara Pick, she thought. Poor Baby Girl Pick. There was nothing she could do for her students but buy toothbrushes and tube socks and assist at a delivery, and feel a constant sadness or anger or fear. “What’s going to happen?” she asked. “Her family is such a mess.”
“Oh, I know. It’s as sad as it gets,” said Noelle. “Her parents came to school once and they could barely stand up. I don’t know what they’re like now. The social worker is heading over to the hospital tonight, and we’ll follow up tomorrow, but it’s all very bleak.”
“Will she be allowed to come back to school?”
“Sure, there are various options. But I have no idea what she’s going to do. We have a program for mothers, but honestly it all kills me. Why did no one see that that girl was pregnant? Oh, that was a rhetorical question. It’s a question that will be put to the entire faculty and staff when we meet next. And I’m going to suggest we have an emergency meeting, because none of us noticed it. We can’t just say, ‘She was carrying small,’ though clearly she was. That baby was like a hand puppet. And yet the EMS team said she was fine. Small but fine. Her lungs sounded good.”
“I feel terrible that I missed it. But I couldn’t see anything. Shara wore a parka to class every day,” said Zee.
“That in itself was a warning sign.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
At which point Zee wondered how much shit she was meant to take from the guidance counselor. Why did Noelle dislike her with such ferocity, even after everything they had done together today, and the raw drama of it?
“What did I ever do to you, Noelle?” she asked.
The waitress appeared then, cutting off the confrontation, so they ordered dully from the menu. Chicken for Noelle, a vegetable medley for Zee. When you were a vegetarian your restaurant meals were heavy on medleys.
Then Noelle looked up at her with an expression that was surprisingly not hostile. “Zee,” she said. “It’s not you. Well, it is you. It’s your trusting nature. Your idealism.”
“I wasn’t under the impression that those were bad qualities.” Zee swirled the beer in her glass, and suddenly had a surge of desire to be drinking beers with Greer instead of with this unfriendly woman. Everyone said Chicago was such a great city. “The Art Institute,” they exclaimed. “The nightlife. The music. The lake.”
But Zee had seen very little and done very little, because it was hard to love a city when you were entirely alone in it. Or at least hard for Zee. Maybe she could convince Greer to come visit some weekend. Together they could go down to the edge of the shining lake and throw stones and talk about what was painful in their lives, and what was hopeful. But the unfriendly woman here had a command over Zee. It wasn’t deserved, but it was real. Noelle, she noted, had a sexy throat.
“They aren’t bad qualities, in a vacuum,” Noelle conceded. “But when my kids get used, I consider those qualities less than helpful.”
“Your kids?” said Zee. “They’re not my kids now too?”