Between Husbands and Friends

by Thayer, Nancy

  Through the long dark winter nights I yearned for the coming summer. The men could sail. Kate and I would spend the warm afternoons reading storybooks to our children or idling through the sun-dappled streets, babies tucked on our backs, children holding our hands, to buy ice cream cones. We would watch Margaret and Matthew splash in the mild waters of the Jetties beach while on the shore we would lie beneath the shade of a beach umbrella, taking care to keep the new babies’ tender skin from the harsh rays of the sun. In the evenings while Matthew and Margaret played flashlight tag in the large backyard, Kate and I would lounge on recliners, the babies kicking in their playpens at our sides, and we would gaze up at such a high bright sky that it would seem we were looking up through time and space to all eternity.

  I went into labor in the middle of the night of May 11, three days past my due date.

  At three a fierce cramp awoke me, and at once I knew what was happening, as surely as if it was the hand bar of a roller-coaster car pressing against me: Things were in motion now, and there was no stopping this ride.

  I lay in bed for a while, timing the contractions—three minutes apart—by the green numbers on our digital clock until it became too uncomfortable for me to lie still. So I rose silently, knowing I wouldn’t wake Max; by now he was used to my slipping from bed at night to pee or sneak a snack in the kitchen.

  It was a warm night. The windows were open and no wind rustled outside. Our sleeping house had that atmosphere I’ve often sensed before, of its own peaceful vigilance and benevolent life. The rooms welcomed me, the four walls wrapping around me like a parent’s arms, the air a gentle breath of security and memory and, tonight, expectation.

  I stood for a moment in the baby’s room, just smiling. It was a beautiful room, a perfect room, with everything waiting: diapers piled on the changing table, a musical mobile over the crib. During Margaret’s infancy our lives had been so turbulent that while she didn’t quite sleep in a packing box, neither did she have a pretty room with everything pristine. We were just starting up the newspaper and had no time to devote to coordinating wallpaper with crib bumper pads. Margaret hadn’t suffered, hadn’t noticed, really, but I was looking forward to having it all just right for once. We hadn’t done amniocentesis, didn’t know whether the new child was a boy or girl, so the room was done in yellow and pale green. I hung on to the bar of the crib during a long contraction and touched the cloud-soft yellow blanket folded at the end of the bed. In just a few days our baby would be sleeping here.

  “Soon, baby,” I said.

  Then I went to my daughter’s room, looking in as she slept. Fascinated with the idea of pregnancy, Margaret had taken to mimicking me, binding a baby doll to her tummy with a scarf, waddling and sighing and sitting with her legs apart just as I did. She didn’t want to wear her pregnancy to school, for which I thanked the fates and gods, but she raced to her room when she got home to fasten it on and when she went to bed at night, she carefully positioned her own baby doll on top of her stomach, beneath her pink flowered nightgown.

  Now, in the warmth of the night, Margaret had kicked off her covers and lay sprawled on her flowered sheets, her slim arms extended out as if she were making snow angels in her dreams. Her baby had fallen to one side and lay with its little bald head and one arm hanging perilously over the edge of the bed. As quietly as I could I slipped into the room and moved the doll to a safer spot between Margaret and the wall. As I did, another contraction seized me, taking my breath away, paralyzing me for a moment.

  I’d been in labor for a long time with Margaret, but my Lamaze coach had told me to expect that, and Max had stayed with me every moment, spooning crushed ice between my chapped lips and rubbing my back so assiduously I was surprised to find I had any skin left there the next day. If I had felt distanced from my husband during pregnancy, I’d been reunited with him during labor. I had been very much aware that I was doing this for us, having this baby for us. Max wanted children, wanted my children, our children, and the birth of our first child was thrilling for him, and terrifying as well. I knew he would have seized the pain and endured it himself if only he could have. And the look on his face when Margaret came squawking out into the world, pink and flailing, a smear of brown hair like icing across her head, was something I would treasure all my life. The radiance of motherhood, the glow, the ecstasy, none of that compared with the look on my husband’s face when he held his daughter in his arms. I loved him so much then that I thought my heart would break with joy.

  Still, I reminded myself as I waddled slowly from Margaret’s room, still there was that pain to get through. My body had not forgotten that. Would never forget that. Over the past few years, during my menstrual period when I was swollen and bloated and then seized by a particularly ferocious cramp, I would close my eyes and sink deep within myself, shutting out all sounds and sensations from the outside world. Remember, I would think, with a kind of perverse pleasure. Just remember how this clenched power pulled me down into a cauldron of pain. Yet I had borne it, and oddly relished the thought of going through it all again.

  In the kitchen I leaned on the table for support, huffing and puffing, and then all at once I was quite pleased with myself, for my water broke, wetting the kitchen floor rather than one of our good carpets or the bed. Now the contractions were two minutes apart, and powerful. The second baby came more quickly than the first, that was the general rule.

  I woke Max. I phoned Nanette Berry, our dear friend and practically a third grandmother to Margaret. She lived next door and had insisted that we call her day or night. In only a few minutes she was at our house, her white hair still caught up in a hairnet.

  “We promised Margaret she doesn’t have to go to school the day we have the baby,” I told Nanette. “And she likes hot oatmeal for breakfast; I keep the brown sugar in a glass canister between the flour and white sugar, and I don’t know what she’ll do about having her baby, I hope she doesn’t shock you, I’ve been fairly explicit with her, but I’ve had to, there’s so much on television these days … but she can watch TV, you’ll have to be sure she’s got decent programs …”

  “We’ll be just fine,” Nanette said, patting my shoulder. “Just go. Go. And God bless.”

  By the time we got in the car I was caught in the grips of such remorseless agony that I couldn’t even speak to Max, except to pant, “Yes,” every time he asked, frantically, “Are you okay?” He had called ahead, and when we arrived at the hospital someone was waiting with a wheelchair. As I maneuvered my aching body into the wheelchair, a wave of nausea overcame me and I vomited hugely onto the pavement. That hadn’t happened with Margaret’s birth, and it left me weak.

  This birth was progressing much more quickly than the first. No sooner had the nurses gotten me out of my street clothes and into a Johnny than my entire body arched and I knew I was already in transition. Max suddenly appeared next to me, clad in green scrubs, his eyes brilliant and eager and young, a boy’s eyes, a child’s eyes just before Christmas.

  He took my hand. “I love you, Lucy. I love you.”

  I gripped it and squeezed. “Me, too.”

  The pain jumped to quantum force. My vision blurred. A nurse attached something to my abdomen.

  “I can’t find a heart tone,” she said, then a wave of pain rose up and washed her away from my senses.

  “Can you do something?” I heard Max ask.

  “The birth is progressing,” the doctor muttered.

  I had remembered the pain, but I had forgotten the urgency of childbirth. I, who could do five things at one time, was trapped in the immediacy of pain and could do just one thing: endure. I needed things to slow down. I had the terrifying sense of things being beyond my control. I could feel by the movement of the bed beneath me and those around me that I was being wheeled into the delivery room, but all I could see, really, was a dizzying blur of light and color.

  “The baby,” I called to Max.

  “He’ll be all right,” Max said
. “You’re almost there.”

  “I can’t do it this time.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “It hurts too much.”

  “No heart tone,” the nurse said.

  “The baby’s head is crowning,” the doctor said.

  I knew how lions felt when a net was flung over them, trapping them, I knew their murderous anger and their savage fear, and I arched my back and felt my jaw stretching as I bellowed in pain.

  Max was still holding my hand. His eyes were shining with tears. “You’re wonderful, Lucy, you’re my wonderful woman.”

  The doctor said, “One more push,” and taking an enormous breath, I clutched Max’s hand for strength, and gave another, final push.

  Relief swept over me like a white tide. Other sensations returned as the primal pain faded: My legs were trembling, my throat burned, my abdomen was heavy, sodden like a canvas bag.

  And there was an odd silence at the end of the table. A long moment, like a gasp in the room.

  Then there was low murmuring, and a kind of electric mist rose up, surrounding me, as Max turned toward the doctor and asked, “Boy or girl?”

  “It’s a boy,” the nurse said.

  But the doctor had left, had gone across the room and was bending over something on another table.

  Max left my side. Went toward the doctor. I couldn’t hear his words or the doctor’s, but I could detect in the very tone of their voices that something had gone wrong.

  “What’s happening?” I called.

  A nurse said, “Push. Let’s get the placenta out. You can do it, honey. Push for me. That’s a good girl.”

  Across the room Max made a noise from deep in his belly, a tortured groan not unlike the sound he made when climaxing.

  “Max? Where’s my baby?” I lifted myself up to lean on my elbows.

  A nurse approached and took my hand. “There’s a problem, dear.”

  “What? Tell me. My baby—” I tried to wrench myself off the table.

  The doctor stood next to me. He put his warm hand on my upper arm. “He had a knot in his umbilical cord. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t understand. I want my baby.”

  “You’ve lost the baby, dear,” the nurse said, touching my other arm, and the touch was one of control, not concern.

  “But this is a hospital, for Christ’s sake,” Max yelled. “You’re a doctor! You’re a nurse! Do something. You can do something, can’t you?”

  “The baby wasn’t breathing when he was born. We couldn’t resuscitate him.”

  I shrugged off the nurse’s hand. “Give me my baby.”

  And they did.

  They put in my arms a perfect child, a little boy with every finger and toe, with eyelashes, with a swirl of brown hair, with skin of dark blue.

  “We don’t know why it happens,” the doctor was saying. “It’s always something beyond our control.”

  “No,” I said. “Wait.” It could not have happened so fast.

  “Oh, God,” Max sobbed. Tears streamed down his face. He stood next to me, nearly bent double with grief.

  “Wait,” I said again. I looked down at my little boy, my perfect child. “He was moving last night. I felt him move last night.” I pressed my face against his, and wrapped my hand around the back of his tiny head.

  “Sometimes this happens,” the nurse said. “A knot in the cord.”

  “But why? Did I do something wrong?” I ran my hands over my baby, trying to warm him up, caressing his limp limbs.

  “No, dear, of course not.”

  “Should I have come to the hospital sooner?” That was it; I was so confident of my childbearing skills, so smug, waiting till the last moment, and had been struck down for my pride.

  “We never know why this happens.”

  I looked down at my son. “Baby,” I whispered to him. “Baby, please.”

  “I’m so sorry. This is the worst thing anyone ever has to bear,” the doctor said. “We’ll leave you and your husband alone with him for a few moments.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  His eyes dropped away from mine. “Then we’ll have to take him.”

  August 17, 1998

  Jeremy loves the fast boat. He can’t decide where to sit, in the posh lounge with its carpet and plush seats, or out on the deck where he can wave at the sailboats and fishing boats and ferries we speed past. The glittering turquoise water ruffles up sparkling white foam in a long wake behind us.

  We walk with Max to the lot where he keeps his van. He drives us to the airport where I pick up my rental car, a dark blue Taurus.

  “I’m sorry I can’t go with you,” Max says.

  “Hey, we’ll be fine,” I tell him, full of bravado in front of our son.

  We kiss good-bye in the parking lot and go our separate ways. Max drives faster than I do; he’ll be in Sussex before I’m in Boston, even though his distance is slightly longer.

  The day is a clear bright hot blue. Jeremy plays an electronic baseball game while I drive up Route 6 to the Sagamore Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal, and around the rotary to Route 3. The traffic moves steadily. We end up behind a huge U-Haul van that progresses at a constant sixty miles an hour. Good enough for me; I turn on the soft rock station. Near Braintree, we stop at a McDonald’s so Jeremy can pee, just in case traffic into Boston is congested. But we move right along, no breakdowns or road work slowing us, and before we know it, we’re turning onto Massachusetts Avenue and the roads to Boston’s Longwood medical complex.

  I steer the car into a ramp and stop to take a ticket from the machine.

  As we wind up and up through the vast, low-ceilinged parking garage, Jeremy whispers, “I’m scared, Mommy.”

  “Why, honey?” I reach over for his hand.

  “How will we find our way back to the car?”

  Relief blots a wide cold spot on my chest. He means he’s afraid of this particular space. We don’t have anything like it in Sussex, and it is kind of scary, so dark and full of echoes and shrieking brakes.

  “Each floor has a number. See?” I point one out as I maneuver into a tight parking spot. “We’re on floor 3.” Next to the number is a picture of a zebra. “Or we’re on floor zebra, whichever is easier for you to remember.”

  “Zebra,” he says. But he holds my hand while we walk to the elevator and then across the street.

  It is shocking to come to this enormous complex after the low-silhouetted natural spread of Nantucket. To reassure him, I remind him, “It’s just the big city, Jere. You know. Like the Alewife parking garage, when we take the T into Boston to ride the swan boats.”

  “I know,” he says quietly, clutching my hand.

  Thank heavens, Children’s Hospital is a child-friendly place. The lobby is large and airy and colorful and when we enter it, Jeremy’s eyes light up. He runs first to the large aquarium, then to the bright, entrancing Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang kind of perpetual motion machine like the one at the Museum of Science. Kids and people are everywhere; it’s like a museum.

  I approach the information desk, overlooked by a lifelike sculpted giraffe. A woman with a beautiful smile instructs me: We want Farley 4.

  On this level, where the pulmonary testing is done, the hospital floor is patterned with large bright triangles and squares, elementary, friendly, familiar shapes.

  Allen, the pulmonary technologist, wears street clothes: jeans, a striped rugby shirt. With his buzz haircut and contagious cackling laugh, he seems like one of the young men who coaches Jeremy’s T-ball team, and Jeremy is only a little nervous as they attach the gauze pads and electrodes to his arms.

  Jeremy seems unconcerned, more curious than frightened. He chooses to sit on a chair rather than my lap; still he leans toward me, and allows me to keep an arm around his thin body.

  There are toys in the lab room where we sit, but Jeremy wants to know about the process, wants to hear the real, grown-up words about what’s being done to him.

  “Pilocarpine s
timulates the sweat glands,” Allen tells him.

  “Pilocarpine,” Jeremy repeats, syllable by syllable.

  “We’ve already weighed the gauze pads; when the time is up, we’ll weigh them again to see if there’s any change; this difference would be in sweat, from which we measure the salt content.”

  “I have salt in my body?” Jeremy asks, eyes wide.

  “We all do. Human beings have lots of minerals in our bodies.”

  He is such a beautiful boy, with fine gold-glinting brown hair that curls in loose lazy swirls and huge eyes, thickly lashed. (“Not fair, Mom!” Margaret has often chided me. “Why did you give Jeremy those long lashes and not me?” As if I had some control over their genetic inheritance!)

  Now his eyes widen in response to the electric currents.

  “Feels like when your foot falls asleep, doesn’t it?” the lab tech asks.

  “Like when I hit my crazy bone,” Jeremy tells him. He looks up at me. “It kind of itches.”

  “Good boy.” I nuzzle a kiss into his hair. His scalp smells clean and slightly salty, as if we were still at the sea.

  “Time’s up! You did great, Jeremy.” Allen detaches the electrodes. “I need you to keep the gauze on for about thirty minutes, okay? You don’t have to stay here. In fact, you ought to go check out our entertainment center. Just come back in about half an hour.”

  Jeremy holds my hand as we find our way back through the corridors to the elevators and then down to the main floor. The entertainment center is a large open area with a stage. Several children are playing in the long stage curtain, hiding in its folds, and Jeremy runs over to join them. I sit down at one of the low tables. Whenever Jeremy looks for me, I wave, as if we’re at a playground.