The Source of All Things

by Tracy Ross

  By the time Shawn called the dog catcher and realized Merlin had been locked up, I’d had my blood pressure taken for the fifth of possibly 120 times. I’d changed into a hospital gown that wouldn’t close in the back because my stomach was too enormous. I’d called my parents, who were not invited to the birth, and Shawn’s mother, Linda, who immediately began packing for a two-day stay. And Dr. Schaller had decided that induction was a good idea.

  He asked me to lie back and spread my legs, good and wide, so he could see all the way up to my throat. He poked my cervix, which made me want to vomit, and then told me that I was days, if not weeks, from dilation. “You’re not even softening,” he said, and I thought, No shit, I’m not softening. I will never soften. I am a lead shell of fear.

  Fortunately, there are drugs to take care of that. Dr. Schaller spread some magical softening cream on my cervix, placed a gel tab of labor-inducing Pitocin inside, and left the room. I was relieved he left but then worried about the contractions he promised would come. I switched on the television and waited for a python to squeeze my belly. I continued waiting but nothing happened. The nurse watched my blood pressure rise and fall, creeping into the danger zone and back out again without explanation.

  Several hours later, Linda arrived from Denver. She planted herself on a wooden chair directly across from my bed; I could see her smiling over the tips of my feet. The next time Dr. Schaller came in (twelve hours later, with more Pitocin), Linda had a pervert’s-eye view of my labia. Respectfully, she turned away, while the nurse checked me for softening. Hours of bad sitcoms passed. Linda smiled encouragingly, asked if I needed anything. I did: a temporary lobotomy. I began to retain water, taking it on like a capsizing boat. In photos I look like my brother, who weighed 220 pounds at the time. Sometime after midnight, I fell asleep to the muffled rhythm of Scout hiccupping in my belly.

  The following morning arrived, and with it more devices, encouragement, and hope. Linda said, “This is the day, I know it!” And Dr. Schaller returned, carrying a long, plastic poker with a hook on the end. He explained that he would use the hook to break my water, which would kick labor into high gear. It took significant poking, but he persisted. With a sharp sting, my water bag broke, sending a burst of warm fluid down my inner thighs. Now the contractions would come, and with them, Dr. Schaller promised, a new boy.

  He didn’t lie. Within minutes of the manipulated water-breaking, the contractions arrived, violently and without warning, making me buckle in pain. Because of the induction, I was confined to bed, hooked up to a series of monitors that tracked my vital signs along with Scout’s. All along, Scout had been a trooper, sleeping and gently swimming, moving a shoulder across my belly, jamming a knee into my spleen. I couldn’t believe I would meet him in a couple of hours. I hoped he would like me as much as I already liked him.

  Then—all of a sudden—there was trouble, as Scout’s heart rate began to skip and flutter, weakening with each contraction. Summoned to my room, Dr. Schaller shoved an electrode into my uterus, fished around for Scout’s head, and stuck a white pad sprouting red wires to his temple. The snake-squeeze contractions continued, but furtively. When the nurse checked my cervix for the umpteenth time, she frowned and said, “You have to relax.” I wanted to relax, but I started to cry. Twelve hours after my water had been broken, I was dilated one centimeter. The nurse said, “Don’t worry, one way or another, we’ll get this baby out of you.”

  But I did worry.

  I worried that I had made the shield too strong. I worried that even now, because of something my dad did twenty years ago, I was too damaged to experience this joy. How could I tell the nurse and Linda and Shawn that there was no way a baby could get past the clamp? How could I tell them that it is a medical impossibility for something so bright and beautiful to move through a place that is so black and blue?

  In the end, I couldn’t—tell them, or deliver Scout vaginally, even though for a few electrifying minutes, it seemed like I might. At 2:30 a.m., on the morning of May 18, 2001, I was overcome with the urge to push. At first I whispered it: “I need to push.” And Shawn, unknowing, said, “Yes!” But something told me I needed Dr. Schaller’s permission. I held off until I was overcome again and then shouted, “When can I push?! When is it okay to push?”

  All at once, it was as if an alarm went off in my room. The nurse rushed out and ushered Dr. Schaller in. “Your cervix is hard as a rock,” he said, stating the obvious. “If you push, you could rupture it, which could kill you and your son. What you have to do is wait and resist the urge to push, and maybe something will start happening.

  “Then again, maybe it won’t. There’s no guarantee that you won’t have contractions for several more hours and still never fully dilate. The baby is fine, we’re monitoring him, but you’ve been going at this for days. You’re exhausted. Your uterus is worn out. If you want to, we can take him by Cesarean. If you’re rea—”

  “I’m ready,” I said, cutting him off and looking around for Shawn. He was standing right next to me, holding my forearm. “Is it okay if I’m ready?”

  Shawn’s eyes filled with tears. He squeezed my hand and nodded.

  At three a.m., the sun has not yet poured over the horizon, and it’s still dark enough to count a million stars. This was when I told Dr. Schaller to cut Scout out of my body. Shawn put scrubs on over his rumpled clothes and walked alongside the stretcher as they wheeled me to surgery. A curtain dropped in front of my face, so I couldn’t see them making the incision, which is in the shape of a half-smile a few inches below my belly button.

  On the operating table I felt the doctors digging into my uterus, rooting around for Scout. He was lodged deep in my pelvis, his shoulders in a tight, determined hunch. It took serious tugging, but they lifted him out of the blood and entrails and put him up to the light. He was the most perfect baby you’ve ever seen, except for one thing: when they held him in front of me, I noticed that the top of his head was pointed in the shape of missile.

  He had only been trying to move out of my body and into the world.

  He had been interrupted by damage already done.

  Seventeen months later, on October 18, 2002, Scout’s brother, Hatcher, was born with the same complications. Shawn and I tried for a VBAC, a vaginal birth after Cesarean section, at a hospital in Denver. Hatcher was two weeks late, and the weather forecast predicted heavy snowfall in Winter Park. When women go into labor in our former ski town, their offspring are often born in an ambulance screaming over Berthoud Pass. I called my midwife and told her it felt like my water might have broken. When she summoned us to the hospital, Shawn and I knew that the next time we came home, we’d be bringing a fourth member of our family with us.

  A doctor induced me on the afternoon of October 16. Once again it didn’t work. After two more tries, I finally went into labor while Shawn slept on a stiff, plastic-covered recliner in our birthing room. I thought I was going to be brave and open enough to let Hatcher slide into the world without incident. Even my obstetrician was optimistic. After I’d labored for several hours, he examined my cervix and said, “Looks great. Keep going. You should be having this baby within hours.” Shawn called our parents with the good news. But then my cervix clamped shut, forcing Hatcher to be surgically removed from my body.

  Not that any of this matters to Scout and Hatcher. Both of them believe that before they were babies gestating in my body they were shooting stars. The stars could see. They had eyes and they could think. They knew they wanted me for their mother; they knew Shawn was going to be their dad. Whether the boys were stars or not before they were babies, I believe they chose us for parents because we seemed just right. Not too much of anything. Wild but not gamey. Wounded just enough to sympathize. Younger than we should have been for all we’d been through.

  “I’m going to tell you how this happened,” said Scout.

  We were sitting at the kitchen table a few days before Christmas 2005. The boys were coloring their birth s
tories on big pieces of white paper. Scout, who was four, had sandy red hair, lapis-blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles sprinkled across wind-burned cheeks. At three Hatcher was shorter and slighter, with auburn hair and skin that felt like warm milk.

  The boys pulled dried-out markers and colored pencils from a shoe box, spreading glitter glue over planets penned in ink. Hatcher drew Harry Potter, who symbolized himself, in the middle of a starburst. When he was younger, Hatcher always drew Harry Potter. When we played Harry Potter, I was always Hermione.

  It was just after lunch, and bright sunlight filled the kitchen. Scout and Hatcher were feeling light and special because I was coloring with them, a rare afternoon when I was not too distracted by my plans, my dreams to fall completely into theirs. We’d already been out skiing, cutting tracks across hard-crusted snow as we zigzagged through the woods that surround our house. Years ago, when I was pregnant with Scout, Mayz told me that my little boys would become my best friends, the playmates I’d always wished for but never had the good fortune to meet. I’m glad I didn’t believe her, because they are so much more than that.

  One day, when they are old enough to finally read this, I’ll want my sons to know they rescued me. That even though I was terrified by their raw, needy bodies, I loved them the second I touched the silky hairs covering their rice-paper skin. Ever since they were born, they have forced me out the darkness and into a bigger, happier world. Before them, there was me. And I was lonely, even with Shawn. With them, there are puppies, and friendly postmen, and maybe God—plus strangers I realize it’s okay not to talk to. With my sons come mystery and wonder, a universe of smells and sounds, and, mostly, their trusting faces whispering hilarious, zany secrets into my ear. When they do this, their cheeks are so close to mine that I can push out my lips and kiss them. Sometimes I do. And it’s always okay.

  In case I don’t say it enough when they are little, I want Scout and Hatcher to know that despite the cloud that sometimes engulfs me, because of them, I am more here than I have ever been.

  “Okay, tell me,” I said to Scout, handing him a marker that smelled like a watermelon.

  “So you were sleeping,” he said. “And you had your mouth open.”

  “Yup, that’s right.”

  “And Hatch and me, we were floating around in the sky. Were we the same star?”

  “Nope. You were two separate stars.”

  “Were we stars at the same time?”

  “I think you were. But you had probably never seen each other, the cosmos being so big and all. Plus, I’d say you were on a different rotation, because Hatcher was born in October and you were born in May.”

  “Were there other babies up there floating around?”

  “I’m not sure. I bet there were, though, since if we go by your theory all babies choose their parents, and they could have been stars for millions of years before coming to Earth.”

  Hatch looked up from his picture, screwed his mouth to one side. His eyes are not green or brown but the color of humus in the spring when the ground is in thaw.

  “So, we flew down into your mouth and then we went into your tummy?” he asked.

  “That’s what Scout says. I’m pretty sure that’s how it went.”

  “Did you know when it happened? Like, did it burn you?”

  “No, I didn’t get burnt. But I’d say I knew when it happened.”

  I mean it when I tell them I remember. On the night Scout was conceived, though we knew it wasn’t safe, Shawn and I didn’t use protection. The ground was too cold. The air too clean. Shooting stars were zinging through the inky sky with amazing regularity. We made love like we meant it. And when the moment before the moment came, I told Shawn to stay where he was, inside of me. I’d even say my mouth was open, so that a star could actually have fallen in.

  Hatcher, influenced by Scout, has been contemplating his own accidental arrival on the planet since he was three. At first I told the boys they had been angels before becoming our kids. But angels scare them in the same ways skeletons do: they signify death and the vast emptiness that will eventually envelop the great time we’re having on Earth. Skeletons are less scary than angels, because angels, being formless, can’t swim, or ski, or jump on the bed in their underwear. A shooting star, on the other hand, seems like a perfectly reasonable prehuman incarnation to Hatcher.

  “I remember you,” Hatcher said, hoisting himself onto his elbow and leaning in close to my face. “I saw you waiting for me.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. You were just standing there. And then I surprised you! Flying into your mouth and down into your tummy.” He was gaining momentum, building on the images flooding his brain.

  “Then what?”

  “Then you got fat and threw me up.”

  I couldn’t tell Hatcher this because it would have disturbed him too much, but I would have preferred giving birth out of my mouth, even if it required extricating every tooth to make room for his skull, his shoulders, his feet. Cut out my tongue, fine, as long as you can put it back in. Snip the sides of my mouth—let that be my episiotomy. Dislocate the joints in my jaw. I would have done it to avoid the prodding and pulling, the hands-on examinations, the scrutiny and extreme focus of nurses and doctors, midwives and medical students, all seemingly injected into my life (not once, but twice!) to remind me of the six years my dad held me down and treated me like a motion-activated version of a Raggedy Ann blow-up doll.

  You see now why the boys aren’t the only ones who prefer the birth-by-star-vomiting story.

  22

  PTSD

  At the wedding my dad told Mayz he’d received a miracle, and it’s true. I’d said all three words: I forgive you. He and my mom immediately started patching things up. They held hands and went camping, later buying a brand-new bright silver Airstream they paid for with cash. My dad, who’d done well for himself selling natural gas to developers in Nevada, surprised my mom with diamonds buried in long-stem roses and fancy candlelit dinners on Lake Las Vegas. One time she even called to tell me they were rediscovering feelings for each other they hadn’t had in years.

  Dad and I talked on the phone like old friends too. We met at campgrounds and on barstools whenever work or play brought us in close proximity to each other across the West. Twice my parents returned to Alaska, to see more of what the fuss was about. And when Scout and Hatcher were born, my dad fell for them like a meteor shower.

  He hadn’t expected to love them so much, I don’t think. And at first he was afraid. But soon they had replaced me as the brightest light in his diminished life. By the time Scout was walking, Dad was asking when he and my mom could come babysit for a week.

  In the beginning I let them, believing that my dad would never touch a baby, especially my baby, after what he had done to me. I convinced myself that he had suffered enough and that it wasn’t up to me to prolong his punishment. It was obvious that his life had been a long string of sadnesses and disappointments, and I felt obligated as his daughter to cheer him up. More to the point, opening old wounds was inconvenient. Everyone finally seemed so happy. I didn’t want to ruin the high.

  You’d understand my willingness if you could have seen how he held my boys, treating them as if they were precious and never letting them linger too long on his lap. They’d climb all over him, like little kids do, entirely unaware of where they were jamming their hands and feet. He let them smash his nose and smear their chocolate-pudding-covered hands all over his favorite Ralph Lauren polo shirts. But he was always searching my face for a sign of approval to assure him that, yes, it’s okay if you hold my children and whisper sweet nothings in their ears.

  This need for constant permission was a kind of currency for me, something I could hold against Dad when he did something I didn’t approve of, like snap at me for leaving dishes in the sink, or lust after women in the casinos in Las Vegas. He knew, in some deep, primeval place, that he was on borrowed time and that one misplacement of a hand or finger
on my sons could mean the end of our relationship.

  Then one day, something changed. Scout was two years old and Hatcher was seven months. We’d taken them back to Redfish Lake because I thought it would be romantic to introduce them to my favorite place. Shawn was working a construction job, so he couldn’t make the seven-hundred-mile drive from Boulder. In the soft light of summer’s evening, I removed my sons’ diapers and let them wade among tiny flickering minnows that flashed like silver paperclips between their chubby legs.

  We spent the first few days of our vacation digging sand castles, hiking, and watching ranger programs at the outdoor amphitheater near Fishhook Creek. While my parents napped in our rented cabin, I loaded Hatcher in my kid carrier and held Scout’s hand across a boardwalk that stretched over the wetlands of my youth. I knew the boys were too young to see the magic lingering beneath the mossy green logs at the bottom of the creek, but I hoped this trip would create an early childhood imprint that would make them want to go camping forever.

  At first, all of us felt lazy and idyllic. But then Mom started to get restless. She said she wanted to drive to Sun Valley to go shopping, just her and me. Dad would stay in our cabin with the boys, pushing them around the gravel parking lot in their double jogging stroller until they fell asleep. It would be simple, Mom said, and a good test of my dad’s grandparenting ability. I was uneasy but agreed. With two babies under the age of three, I took all the help I could get back then, especially when it came from family.

  Mom and I made it fifteen miles down the road to Sun Valley before a vision in my mind made the air around me turn to ice. Without explanation, I skidded my dad’s truck off the side of the road, spun an out-of-control U-turn, and sped back in the opposite direction.