A few more nurses came into the room and Izzy sucked on ice chips and let the pain wreck her and, though she could not have explained it, it felt like the contractions were turning into a bright light inside her. She would see her baby soon and she was not afraid. Two of the greatest things in the world would coincide, the discomfort would stop and her baby would be born. The doctor touched her thigh and paused and then told her to push, which she did, though it felt like nothing was happening. “Push,” the doctor said again, and Izzy shouted, “I’m trying,” and the Eastern European nurse was helping Izzy hold her legs in the right position and the doctor again said, “Push,” and Izzy did, two, three more times, though it all seemed futile and stupid and yet so necessary. She kept pushing and then not pushing and then pushing again, her body finally not her body, and then, a miracle, if they existed, every sound in the room became inaudible and everything in the room became a flare of light, and then, in the silence and whiteness, she heard the sound of her baby crying, the most ragged and paper-thin sound she had ever heard, a sound that was connected by an invisible wire to all of the receptors in her body.
She was exhausted and her teeth were chattering, and Dr. Starling put the baby on Izzy’s chest and she and the baby instinctively reached for each other and that was it. There was nothing that would ever be as important as this, Izzy was certain. She had made something and now it was hers and no one could ever tell her otherwise. She was not alone in the world. She had been so lonely, she understood now, and never would she be again. She held on to her baby and the baby held on to her, this wild, purple animal that she had made. “I did it,” Izzy said to Dr. Starling, pitched somewhere between a question and a statement, and the doctor merely nodded. “A beautiful and healthy baby boy, Isabel,” the nurse said to her. Izzy smiled and lay back against the bed and felt her body, so much stronger than she ever gave it credit for being, repair itself in preparation for whatever came next.
Izzy had trouble remembering the next day in the hospital; time became connected only to the baby’s actions. Occasionally, someone would enter the room to check on her, the nurses, Dr. Starling, a lactation consultant, a woman going over Izzy’s payment plan, a parade of people who affirmed that Izzy was a mother and this boy, swaddled so tightly, was hers. Izzy received a phone call from Dr. Kwon, who said that everyone was so happy and that Dr. Grind himself was on his way to see her. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she would come to the complex, and so Izzy saw her time in her little room, so clean and quiet and filled with reassuring medical equipment, as a kind of halfway house between her old life and her new one. She wanted to stay in this space for as long as possible, safe and protected from whatever lay outside those walls.
If her baby cried, she placed him on her breast and she felt proud that she could give him exactly what he needed. She changed his diapers and swaddled him and rocked him and kept taking pictures of him with her camera phone, blurry images of something that looked as much like an animal as it did a human.
Mr. Tannehill came into the room, his baseball cap in his hands. He had been in the waiting room until a nurse came out to tell him that the baby had been delivered, when he went back home, back to work, until he could make it back to her. He seemed slightly nervous to be in the room, though he admitted that it was because he’d left the new pit boy in charge and had no idea what to expect from him. He had a plastic shopping bag and he opened it to reveal ten perfect ball-in-cage carvings, the wood a rich, beautiful blond. “I figured it wouldn’t be right to give it to just your baby, seeing as how this project is supposed to work,” he told her, “so I made one for each baby. I hope they’ll like ’em. At the very least, it’ll keep those babies occupied.” Izzy thanked him profusely, shaking her head at the sheer work that had been involved.
“You made a beautiful little boy, Izzy,” he told her, and she held the baby out to him. She had thought he would politely refuse, but he took the baby into his arms and the baby readjusted and fell back to sleep. “You look like an old pro,” Izzy told him, and then she took a photo of the two of them with her phone.
“Are you doing okay?” he asked her and she nodded.
“I keep waiting to get tired but I feel pretty excited.”
“The tired will come, you can bet on that,” Mr. Tannehill said. “Enjoy this time while you have it.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, Mr. Tannehill studying the baby with what looked like great affection.
“What’s his name?” he suddenly asked her.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Izzy said, slightly chastened by the admission. For so long, she had imagined that she would name him Hal, though she now knew that she couldn’t do that. It would be a sad reminder of a life that didn’t happen, and she knew it would be a mistake. She had thought about Carson or Flannery, after Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, two of her favorite writers, but they didn’t seem to fit now, either. There were no family names that appealed to her, and it didn’t seem to make sense to use them anyway, as if they had mattered to her. She had the form next to her bed, but still couldn’t imagine filling it out.
“What’s your name?” she asked Mr. Tannehill.
“Izzy, you know my name,” he said.
“I don’t, actually. I’ve only ever known you as Mr. Tannehill. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone refer to you as anything other than that.”