“You’re suffering from hypothermia. Think you could give me your hands?”
Grace grabs both his outstretched hands and tries to stand as he pulls. He manages to get her upright, but as soon as he lets go, she falls onto the sand, her frozen legs not working as they should. He urges her upright again and tells her to put her hands on his head for support. He whips off his blue cloth jacket and rubs her legs with the flannel lining. He is rough with her to get the circulation going again.
He stands, puts the jacket on Grace, and tells her to hook her arm into his.
“Let’s give it another go,” he says.
She is taken into the truck with many hands helping her. They coax her to lie on her side on blankets. She can hear Claire, from somewhere above her, crooning, “Mamamamama.”
“Hi, sweetie. You’re a good girl. We’re all right now.”
The truck lurches forward.
Grace thinks, I did it. I saved my children.
Cinders
But, no, she didn’t.
The bleeding begins in the truck. Exhausted, Grace drifts in and out of consciousness until she is woken by a pain low in her abdomen. She opens the blanket to see blood on her nightgown and the thin blanket.
“No!” she cries.
She has had these pains before. She knows what they are. She holds her legs tight together and pushes the blanket between them.
“Hold on,” the woman says.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Grace cries.
She shuts her eyes and prays. She knows by heart only one prayer. She thinks the words as best she can until she is squeezed from within. At each contraction, Grace grabs for the woman’s hand. She holds her breath.
Baby baby baby stay inside me stay inside.
Between contractions, she nods off. She can’t help herself, even though she knows she must stay awake to keep the child.
The driver races ahead. When the truck stops, the back door is opened by a man in a white coat.
“How many months?” he asks.
“Five.”
“Contractions?”
“Yes.”
“Intervals?”
“I don’t know.”
Something in Grace’s face must alarm the doctor, because he yells for a cot. While they wait, the doctor takes her pulse.
He frowns.
“What?” Grace asks.
“Racing,” he pronounces.
Two men help her out of the truck and onto a gurney. They wheel her to the double doors of a brick building. The driver of the truck bends over her to say, “Your children will be well taken care of. We’ll be back to see you.”
Inside the hospital, Grace is dizzy with swimming overhead lights. She hears deep coughing, yelps of pain, bouts of screaming. Patients lie on cots in the hallway, while others, grimacing, stand against the white tiles. She hopes someone has covered her bloody nightgown. A contraction takes her by surprise with its intensity, and she pushes against the rails of the bed.
“Don’t push,” the nurse behind her says.
But Grace can’t control her body. Once inside a room, she is led off the cot to the bathroom, where her nightgown is removed. She is washed, given a new nightgown, and ordered to empty her bowels. Her body shudders with pain.
She is helped back onto the gurney and a nurse takes her information.
“Grace Holland.”
“Eugene Holland.”
“Hunts Beach.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t exist anymore.”
“My mother. Marjorie Tate. Her house might not exist either.”
“Two. A girl, two, and a boy, nine months.”
The nurse looks up at her.
“You’ll give birth to this baby today,” a doctor, not the same one as before, announces.
“It’s not time!” Grace insists.
A mask is clamped over her nose and mouth. Twilight sleep. Scopolamine. She has been here before.
Grace comes to with grinding pain she remembers from less than a year ago. She wants to sit up, to push.
“You can now,” the doctor says.
She braces her legs and arms, and with a nurse lifting her torso from behind, pushes blindly, going with the pain, pushing, pushing, pushing.
For the second time, a mask is clamped over her nose and mouth.
She dreams the ocean has overtaken her.
She dreams she is fumbling beneath the skirts of her nightgown, searching for her children.
She wakes to an image of fresh blood on a blanket.
Nooooooo, she cries silently.
A doctor stands at the door. Grace wills him not to enter the room. To enter the room is to deliver information she doesn’t want, information she already knows.
“I’m sorry,” says the doctor as he stands at her bedside. “The child was born dead.”
Her eyes fill, even though it’s not yet sadness that overcomes her. She’s stunned.
“It was a boy,” the doctor says. “He never drew breath.”
She closes her eyes and nods.
“The woman caring for your son and daughter stopped by to give you her address and to tell you that both are fine.”
The doctor doesn’t offer Grace a chance to see the thing that she expelled, which only confirms her understanding of the event.
“You need to rest away from the mothers, for at least a week. You nearly died that night on the beach.”
She wants to say, No, I didn’t. Instead, she asks about her husband.
“I haven’t seen a patient by that name. I’ll check our records.”
Alone, Grace turns her back to the door, rolls herself into a fetal position, and cries for her dead baby, a son. He would have been such a little thing, and she would have loved him to death. To death. She tries to speak to him, to tell him how sorry she is, but she can’t find a way to envision a being to talk to.
And what will Gene say when he hears? Will he blame Grace, castigate her? She would prefer that to what she guesses will be his reaction. Silence. Perhaps a word. Maybe two words.
She imagines that Gene made his way back to Hunts Beach, to the cinders that cover the village acreage. Were any houses saved? Is there no one to tell Gene where his wife is? Will he have somehow found his children?
An icy thought slices through her. It’s not that he might be dead; no, it’s that he might have walked away from his family. He might have seen the fire as an excellent portal to another life. A life in which he would never have to talk to his wife, in which he would never again have to go home.
Grace’s shoulders, back, and arms hurt. Her pelvis is heavy and sore. Her legs have needles in them. Having rolled into a fetal position, she thinks she might have to stay that way for days. Curving into herself is bearable. Sitting up is not.
When did she give birth? This morning? Last night? When was she lying on the beach, her legs in the ocean? Has she lost a day? Maybe, as she burrowed into the sand, the fetus wanted to go back to the sea, to squiggle through her legs and swim away, knowing it could never be born.
She will not have another baby. She will not make love again. Her womb will never heal from the injury she has done it.
When Grace thinks about her children, she feels calm: A kind woman said she would take care of them. Grace must send someone to the address that awaits her at the front desk to make sure the children are all right. Perhaps the woman will bring Claire and Tom to the window so that Grace can look down at them and wave.
How easy it is in this white cubicle, the lights dimmed. Has the fire burned itself out yet?
She sleeps a deep sleep with no dreams.
Grace is wakened by a nurse who wants to check the bleeding, take her temperature, listen to her heart. The nurse is abrupt in her commands, a little rough with Grace’s body. Does she blame Grace for her current situation, or is this a mannerism left over from the war? The nurse makes Dr. Franklin, by comparison, seem like a lamb.
A lamb. A lamb on the cover of a children’s book. Gone.
The entire contents of Grace’s house, gone. Even the papers and the children’s clothes. Transformed into ashes.
Will an insurance company honor a policy if the insured has no way to prove he or she was insured? She can’t remember the name of the company or the man who sold the policy to them. Gene will know. But, then again, where’s Gene?