I frowned with pride. “That’s the hormones.”
I was good at this. I was a good mother. I wanted to tell Ruth-Anne—it was agonizing that she didn’t know. But maybe she did. Maybe I was still under her gaze somehow. I tucked my hair behind my ears and smiled at the computer.
“Go to Grobaby.com,” said Clee.
I fingered Embryogenesis. “We should get through the musculoskeletal system. Wouldn’t want to skimp on that.” But she was due in three weeks. Even with no guidance her body could probably finish it off from here. I clicked on Grobaby.com. “ ‘Talking, singing, or humming to your baby is a fun way to bond during pregnancy. So warm up those pipes and get your Broadway on!’ ”
“What if you don’t want to bond with the baby?” she said, staring at the TV.
I hummed a little, clearing my throat. “Do you mind if I give it a try?”
She changed the channel on the remote and lifted her shirt.
It was really huge. There was a disturbing dark line coming down from her belly button. I put my lips close enough to feel its radiant heat, and she flinched a little.
I hummed high and I hummed low. I hummed long, sustained notes like a wise person from another country who knew something ancient. After a while my deep tone seemed to split and harmonize with itself and I thought for a moment that I was doing that beautiful throat singing the people of Tuva do.
Her eyes were on the TV, but her lips were pressed together and she seemed to be trying to match my pitch. And she was scared, that was suddenly obvious. She was twenty-one and any day now she would give birth, in this house, probably on this couch. I tried to hum reassuringly. Everything will be fine, I hummed, nothing to worry about. Clee’s stomach lurched against my lips—a kick; we raised our volume in surprised unison. I wondered if there would be an awkward confusion about how to end this but the hum simply grew fainter, as if it were leaving on its own, like a train.
IN BIRTH CLASS WE LEARNED that her face would swell up when the time was near. Or she might begin scrubbing the walls with a fierce nesting instinct. That one was hard for me to picture—how would she know where I kept the sponges?
She rose at dawn, certain a cat had pissed in the house.
“Smell over here,” she said, sniffing my bookshelves. I couldn’t smell it. She followed the invader’s invisible tracks around the house. “It must have come in, peed, and left.” She whipped aside the shower curtain. “All we can do is look for the hole it came in through.” So we spent the earliest hour of the day searching for the hole, until she suddenly sat down on the couch with a gasp. She put both hands under her stomach and looked up at me with amazement. A contraction.
“Maybe there’s no cat?” I said.
“Yeah, no cat,” she said quickly, as if I was way behind.
I called the midwife immediately, describing the cat pee, the hole, and now the contractions. All the information was valuable, not to a doctor, but certainly to our wise midwife, who had fifteen years of experience. “Do you think it’s time to come over?” I tried not to sound too desperate. “Or is it too early?”
“I’m in Idaho,” she said. “But don’t worry, I’m coming back immediately. I’ll drive as fast as I can.”
“Drive?”
“I’m bringing a friend’s car back to Los Angeles for her.” Before making a snap judgment, I tried for a moment to put myself in her position. What was she supposed to do, not drive the car back? What kind of friend would that be? The kind of friend who is a midwife.
“I guess we’ll go to the hospital.”
She laughed. “Don’t worry, everyone always thinks the baby is about to come out. That baby isn’t going anywhere for at least twelve hours. The good news is, you can call me as much as you want. I’m completely available by phone.”
I told Clee not worry, the baby wasn’t coming for twelve more hours.
“I can’t do this for that long,” she groaned. She was scraping the couch with her fingernails. “We should call Carrie from PFS, she has to tell the parents.” A weird low noise came out of her chest and her eyes bulged.
“Maybe we should call your parents?” I suggested.
“Are you kidding?”
The contractions seemed closer together and longer than they should be, but I wasn’t sure we were measuring them right. And you weren’t supposed to time them in the beginning anyway; the blue handout from class suggested having friends over, going to a movie or dancing. It would be the first time we’d ever done any of those things, but I mentioned them to Clee.
“Do any of those sound good?”
She shook her head and moaned in a terrifying way. I skipped ahead to the pink handouts. We tried one of the visualizations from class—each contraction was a mountain. “Picture the mountain, you’re halfway up, now you’re at the top, now you’re coming down the other side and it’s easier, almost over.”
“I can’t hold it in my mind,” she whispered. “I’m not a visual thinker.”
I tried to make it more real, describing the craggy peak, its majesty. “Think of the picture on the one-dollar bill, the mountain.” I got out my purse. There was no mountain on the one-dollar bill—it was a pyramid. “Focus on this, you’re at the base of it,” I said, holding the dirty money in front of her face.
“Okay.” She glued her eyes to the tiny pyramid. “It’s starting.” I used a bobby pin to trace her progress up the steep side. “Too fast,” she said. The pyramid was so tiny that it was hard, at first, to go slow enough. But soon we had it down and each time a new one came she would pick up the dollar and thrust it at me and we’d make our way up to the floating eye. It was a tool the government gave out for women in labor; it could be spent again and again but only to buy a contraction.
At seven o’clock Rick let himself in with his key. We were in the middle of the pyramid so I ignored him. He used the bathroom and watched us from the doorway. Once Clee was down the other side she told me to tell him to leave.
“I’ll just be in the yard,” he said, trying to slip back out.
“I don’t want him to hear me,” Clee whined. “Or see me through the windows.”
Rick crumpled and shuffled away. My cell phone rang.
“It’s me,” said the midwife. “How’s she doing?”
“Okay. We’re using visualization.”
“That’s good, that’s perfect. The flower opening?”
“No, the mountain.”
“There’s a lot of great mountains around here. Have you ever been to Idaho?”
“You’re still in Idaho?”
“It’s beautiful but not in an obvious way, you know?” It sounded like she was trying to open a package of chips with her teeth. “I once had a boyfriend who lived out here. Much too rural for me. I wonder what ever happened to him.”
She was bored. She was calling because she was bored.
Clee thrust the dollar at me and I hung up. The journey was getting slower and harder.
“I can’t do it anymore,” she said.
“Just make it to the eye. See what it says at the top? ‘Annuit Coeptis.’ ”
“What’s that?”
“ ‘He favors our undertaking.’ God does.”
She breathed out fiercely. “I’m not kidding, I really can’t.”
Her face looked crazy and swollen. Her blond hair had darkened with sweat and was sticking to her face. She clumsily pulled off her shorts; I looked away and spied Rick tiptoeing into the bedroom. Why was he still here? I skipped through the pink handout to the white ones.
“You’re in transition,” I said. The teacher had told us about this—it was a good sign.
“What do you mean?” It was almost like she hadn’t attended the class with me.
“This is the worst you’ll ever feel.”
“Ever?”
“Well, maybe not ever in your whole life. We don’t know how you’re going to die—that might be worse.” I had veered off course. I put my face right in front of hers. “You can do this,” I said. She looked at me like I knew everything. She was hanging on my every word.
“Okay,” she said, suddenly clamping her hands to my forearms. “It’s starting.”
Now the dollar was cast aside, spent. For the length of each contraction she lived in my eyes, never blinking, never looking away, gripping my arms like they were steel supports. I wasn’t strong enough for this but that was a problem for later.
“Shouldn’t she be here?” Clee wheezed. I had been telling her the midwife was on her way, which wasn’t untrue. I was waiting for a break, during which I would explain the situation, we would calmly discuss the options, and then we’d go back to having the baby.
“She’s driving her friend’s car from Idaho to California. She won’t make it in time. We have to go to the hospital.”
“Really? Is that really true?”
I nodded.