The story comes out, whispered, in the middle of the night, when Eliza has stalled at seven centimeters dilated, and George has gone to get to a snack from the cafeteria. Labor is like that—a shared trauma bond, an accelerant that makes relationships stronger. And so even though I am little more than a stranger to Eliza, she pours out her soul to me, as if she has fallen overboard and I am the only glimpse of land on the horizon. She was on a business trip, celebrating the close of a deal with an important, elusive client. The client invited her out to dinner with some others and bought her a drink, and the next thing Eliza remembered was waking up in his hotel room, and feeling sore all over.
When she finishes, we both sit, letting the words settle. “I couldn’t tell George,” Eliza says, her hands bunched on the rough hospital linens. “He would have gone to my boss, and believe me, they wouldn’t risk losing this deal just because of something that happened to me. The best-case scenario is that I would have been given a severance package to keep my mouth shut.”
“So nobody knows?”
“You do,” she says. Eliza looks at me. “What if I can’t love the baby? What if every time I look at her, I see what happened?”
“Maybe you should get DNA testing,” I tell her.
“What good would it do?”
“Well,” I say, “you’d know.”
She shakes her head. “And then what?”
It is a good question, one that I feel all the way to my own core. Is it better not knowing the ugly truth, and pretending it doesn’t exist? Or is it better to confront it, even though that knowledge may be a weight you carry around forever?
I am about to give her my opinion when Eliza is seized by another contraction. Suddenly, we are both in the trenches again, fighting for a life.
It takes three hours, and then Eliza pushes her daughter into the world. Eliza starts crying, like many new mothers do, but I know it’s not for the same reasons. The OB hands the newborn to me, and I stare down into the angry ocean of that baby’s eyes. It doesn’t matter how she was conceived. It just matters that she made it here.
“Eliza,” I say, settling the baby on her chest, “here’s your daughter.”
Even as George reaches over his wife’s shoulder to stroke the newborn’s mottled thigh, Eliza won’t look at the baby. I lift the baby up, hold her closer to Eliza’s face. “Eliza,” I say, more firmly. “Your daughter.”
She drags her gaze toward the baby in my hands. Sees what I see: the blue eyes of her husband. The identical nose. The cleft that matches the one in his chin. This baby might as well be a tiny clone of George.
All the tension fades from Eliza’s shoulders. Her arms close around her daughter, holding the child so close there is no room for but what if. “Hello, baby,” she whispers.
This family, they’ll make their own reality.
I just wish it were that easy for the rest of us.
—
BY NINE THE next morning, it feels like the entirety of New Haven has come to the hospital to give birth. I have been mainlining coffee, running back and forth among three postpartum patients, and praying fervently in between that we don’t get another woman in active labor before I leave here at eleven. In addition to Eliza’s delivery, I had two more patients last night—a G3 P3 who, truth be told, could have had that baby on her own and nearly did—and a G4 P1 who had an emergency C-section. Her baby, only twenty-seven weeks, is in the NICU.
When Corinne comes on duty at seven, I’m in the OR with the emergency C-section, so we don’t cross paths until it’s 9:00 A.M. and I’m in the nursery. “I heard you pulled a double,” she says, wheeling a bassinet into the room. “What are you doing in here?”
The nursery used to be where the babies were kept while mothers got a decent night’s sleep, before they stayed twenty-four/seven in their mothers’ hospital rooms. So now, it’s used mostly for storage, and for routine procedures like circumcisions, which no parent wants to watch. “Hiding,” I tell Corinne, pulling a granola bar out of my pocket and devouring it in two bites.
She laughs. “What the hell is going on today? Did I miss the memo for the Apocalypse or something?”
“Tell me about it.” I glance at the infant for the first time, and feel a shudder run down my spine. BABY BOY BAUER, the card on the bassinet reads. Without even meaning to, I take a step backward.
“How’s he doing?” I ask. “Is he eating any better?”
“His sugar’s up but he’s still logy,” Corinne answers. “He hasn’t nursed for the past two hours because Atkins is going to do the circ.”
As if Corinne has conjured the pediatrician, Dr. Atkins comes into the nursery. “Right on schedule,” she says, seeing the bassinet. “The anesthesia’s had enough time to kick in and I’ve already talked to the parents. Ruth, did you give the baby sweeties?”
Sweeties are a little bit of sugar water, rubbed on the babies’ gums to soothe and distract them from the discomfort. I would have given the baby sweeties before a circ, if I were his nurse.
“I’m not taking care of this patient anymore,” I say stiffly.
Dr. Atkins raises a brow and opens the patient file. I see the Post-it note, and as she reads it, an uncomfortable silence swells, sucking up all the air in the room.
Corinne clears her throat. “I gave him sweeties about five minutes ago.”