by Nancy Thayer
Sometimes she heard from down the hall, which in the Nantucket Cottage Hospital was not very long, the cries of a woman in labor, and then the chillingly eerie and beautiful wail of a newborn babe. Sometimes then she would shake with desire and fear and Madaket would put down her book and approach her bed and lean over and hug Joanna, whispering in her ear, “You’ll be all right. Your babies will be all right.”
One afternoon a nurse entered, checked Joanna, and left quickly, her mouth grim. A few minutes later Gardner came in. Swiftly he examined Joanna and the monitors, then took her hand and said, “Okay, Joanna, here’s the situation. We’re going to do a C-section now.” As he spoke, Madaket rose and came to take Joanna’s other hand. “We’re concerned because the heart tone of one of your babies is dropping.”
“What does that mean?” Joanna asked.
“It means a baby’s in danger.”
Her heart thumped. “Will they be okay?”
“I hope so, Joanna. We’ll do our best.”
“Can Madaket come in with me? Please? Gardner, I’m afraid.”
Gardner looked at Madaket. “All right. Go find the nurse She’ll give you some scrubs.”
Things began to blur. Joanna was lifted onto a gurney wheeled into the operating room, and moved onto a table under a bright light. Soft-voiced strangers helped her to sit and steadied her with her legs hanging down and her head slumping forward as they administered the spinal. She tried not to imagine the intrusion of the needle into her delicate core. Her mouth filled with bile, and jagged clouds of black and gray pressed against her eyes.
Madaket came in, the dark brilliance of her eyes framed by the green cap and face mask. She put her hands on Joanna’s shoulders, smiling, saying, “Isn’t this exciting. You’re about to meet your babies!” But Joanna could sense the tension in the room.
With Madaket’s help, they lowered Joanna back down onto the table. The anesthetist pierced her vein. An icy numbness spread up her legs and through her belly. Gardner worked with quick, certain movements, his blue eyes dark with concentration. A draped section was placed between her breasts and her belly, shielding her from the sight of her abdomen being cut into and pulled apart so that the babies could be lifted out. Something deep inside seemed to tug at her heart.
She couldn’t help but sense that something was wrong. Her heart turned inside out with fear. Then the electric power seemed to fail, for the lights flared and dimmed, and appeared to be falling toward her. She called out to Madaket, “What’s happening?” but realized that her sounds didn’t form coherent words. Madaket disappeared. Faces clothed in white bent over her. Jets of icy cold spurted through her hands and feet. Her throat sucked at her mouth, pulling it down. Just before her eyes rolled back in her head, she understood that she was going into convulsions.
“Joanna.”
Faces floated at her from thick clouds.
“Joanna. Can you talk to us?”
Her eyelids were heavy. The world whirled at her with dizzying speed. She was afraid she was going to vomit. She felt sick. She wanted only to sleep.
“Joanna. Hi.”
As the room swam into view, she realized that it was night, for through the window the sky showed black. She couldn’t imagine how she’d slept so soundly in a room blazing with so much white light. Even the people gathered around her seemed to be iridescent, flickering. Madaket was there, and a strange nurse, and Gardner. And a shadow, a dark blur, like a blot in the air.
“My babies?”
She spoke before she thought, and as she spoke, she looked down. She was tucked quite tidily into soft blankets and so she imagined rather than saw her body, sliced and stapled, bathed and bandaged. She was in pain, she was groggy, and there were still IVs in her arms.
But where were her babies?
“Hold out your arms.”
She did as directed. A nurse folded pillows beneath her arms to support them. Gardner handed her a small soft bundle.
Inside the blankets, a small rosy face gleamed. Two dark blue eyes looked up at her with an expression of infinite calm. The baby’s tiny fists rested beneath its chin, and as Joanna studied it, the baby stretched its limbs in a long, languorous, fluid movement, then nestled against Joanna, its serene face turning toward Joanna’s breast.
“Meet your son,” Gardner said.
Tears flooded Joanna’s eyes. “It’s the Swimmer!” she said. “Oh, isn’t he perfect!”
“He is. Four pounds eight ounces. A healthy size. He’ll need a little time in the incubator before you take him home. He’s a preemie and needs to build up his lungs. But other than that, he’s a healthy baby.”
Joanna looked up at Gardner. “And where—?”
She saw the tears well in Madaket’s eyes and didn’t need to finish the sentence.
“She didn’t make it, Joanna,” he said. “I’m sorry. There was nothing we could do. The umbilical cord was around her neck.”
“It was a girl?”
“Yes.”
“It was the Chorus Girl!” Joanna cried. “Oh, no!”
“I’m sorry. She was stillborn.”
“Can I see her?”
Gardner nodded. A nurse left the room. Another nurse took the Swimmer from Joanna. The nurse returned with a bundle and handed it to Joanna. Opening the blankets, she looked in to see a perfect baby, tiny, exquisite, lovely, and blue.
“Her color is off because when the cord was wrapped around her neck, she was deprived of oxygen,” a nurse informed her.
“That was why she was kicking so,” Joanna said. “She was trying to change positions—but there was no more room—”
“There are many different reasons for this,” Gardner said. “It’s something we can’t control.”
Joanna wrapped her hand around the Chorus Girl’s fist. It was cold, hard, a little ridged stone. But she could not stop looking at the baby, as if the warmth of her love, and the sheer enormity of her longing, would make the baby come back to life. Pulling back the blankets, she saw that the nurses had dressed the baby in a white cotton sleeper, and that human gesture, of garbing the stillborn child for its few moments on earth, twisted Joanna’s heart.
She closed her eyes. Let this not be real. Let it all go back to yesterday. Please.
“Your little boy’s fussing a bit. Would you like to try nursing him?” the nurse asked.
“Not yet. I’m still—” She stroked the pale cold face. She bent her head and nestled her warm cheek against the tiny lifeless perfect head.
“Joanna. You need to take care of your baby now.” Gardner reached out to remove Joanna’s dead daughter from her arms.
“No. Not yet.”
“Joanna, you can see her again. But your little boy needs you now.”
“No,” Joanna insisted. “I want to keep her.” She clutched the baby against her, and for a moment was overcome with a rushing flood of longing to have this baby, her little girl, back inside her again, safe, alive, kicking. Peering up at Gardner and Madaket, she recognized concern in their eyes.
“You can give her a name,” the nurse said. “For the birth certificate.”
“Thank you,” Joanna said. Somehow, oddly, that helped. She surrendered her daughter to Gardner, who accepted the baby as carefully, cradling the little head in his hand, as if she were alive, as if it mattered if her tiny neck wobbled.
As the Swimmer was settled back in her arms, a cold and numbing despair wrapped around her heart. This was the wrong child to live, she thought, I would have liked the Chorus Girl better. I wanted a daughter. What will I do with a son?—then she hated herself for such thoughts and tried to shut them away from her consciousness.
“What are you going to name your baby?” Gardner asked.
Joanna shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Madaket came next to the bed and put her finger into the diminutive fist. “He’s so beautiful.”
“I’ll leave you now,” Gardner said. “The nurse will show you how to feed your baby
. He won’t get much nutrition yet, but the closeness will be good for him.”
But as Joanna went through the motions, letting the nurse undo her gown and position the baby just so in her arms, watching as her son, her living child, searched blindly for her nipple, then found it, and latched onto it firmly with his mouth and sucked, as Joanna heard the nurse exclaim, “Oh, what a smart little fellow you are!” she seemed to hear and see and feel all of this, even the bite of the baby’s mouth on her nipple, as if from behind a barricade of sorrow. It was not a whole, entire sensation. It did not have the quality of reality.
The day after the birth, nurses helped Joanna out of her bed and into a chair, where she sat, groggy and stupid with the aftereffect of the anesthesia used during the delivery. In the afternoon they began to take her for hourly walks, drunken, painful little shuffles out into the corridor, then down the corridor, a longer way each time. Gradually her mind cleared while her body remained a clumsy, heavy bulk dragging from her shoulders.
The nurses brought her her son, and she held him as he slept or gazed up at her with his wide unfocused look. Her milk had not come in yet, and her breasts felt hard and uncomfortable against his small supple body. In spite of herself, she kept sagging; without the use of her abdominal muscles it took immense effort to sit holding him, and she often was afraid she would simply slump over and crash onto the floor.
“You’ll feel more like yourself tomorrow when more of the drugs have worn off,” the nurse promised.
In the very early morning of the next day the nurses came bustling in with their charts and thermometers and sharp anesthetic aroma. Madaket woke from her sleep on the cot against the wall, and stretched and yawned and came to Joanna’s bedside.
“How do you feel?”
Joanna considered. “More alert. Less completely stupid.” The nurses were fussing with her gown, checking the dressing over her abdomen.
Madaket smiled. “Great. I’m going to get some coffee.”
“Coffee,” Joanna said, and suddenly she was salivating. “I’d love some coffee.”
“You’ll have some right away,” a nurse said. “Juice, too. Let’s sit you up.”
A cacophony of pains blared through Joanna’s body as she made her way into the chair. The worst of it was the gas left in her abdomen from the C-section; it wasn’t dangerous, and eventually it would disappear, the nurses promised, but for the moment she had no choice but to tolerate it. Madaket returned to the room and indulged Joanna in as thorough a washing up as she could manage, then she creamed Joanna’s face and hands and feet and brushed Joanna’s hair.
Gardner came into the hospital room and perched on the bed, looking over at
Joanna.
“Doing better today?”
“Much better.”
He cleared his throat. “The nurses will bring your son to you in a minute, but first I need to get some information from you.” He paused. “I’m sorry, Joanna, but I have to ask all this. Would you like to arrange to have your baby buried or cremated, or would you prefer that the hospital take care of it?”
“Take care of it?”
“We would cremate her.”
Joanna moaned and Madaket gripped her shoulders and stood behind her, holding her that way, supporting her. “I’ll do it,” Joanna said softly. “I want to do it. I want her buried, not cremated. I don’t know why, but it seems important that she have a proper burial.”
“If she’s buried here, she’ll always be here,” Madaket said softly. “Your daughter will always be here on the island. She’ll have a place on the earth.”
“Yes. You’re right. That’s it,” Joanna agreed, looking gratefully at Madaket. Turning back to Gardner, she asked, “Can she be buried here on the island?”
“Yes. In Prospect Hill Cemetery.” Gardner looked at Madaket. “Perhaps you can help Joanna? Call the funeral home and make the arrangements?”
“Of course,” Madaket said.
Gardner nodded. “It should be done fairly soon. And if you want a service, you’ll need to talk to a minister—”
“All right,” Joanna said. “We’ll do it. Madaket can do it.”
Gardner and Madaket left then and the nurses arrived with her baby boy. Joanna held him with a numbed, muted pleasure. The significance of his existence, the pleasure of his living, came to her cramped and twisted, as if it had forced its way through a stony wall of grief. As soon as he was taken away to his incubator, she was washed through with despair. She sat sagging in her chair, head nodding forward like a drunk’s, eyes closed as she replayed her dreams of the Chorus Girl, laughing and running. When people entered her room and disturbed her from her fantasies, she wanted to snap at them, to tell them to leave her alone, to let her remain with her dreams.
Three days after her babies were born, Joanna stood in the privacy of the hospital bathroom, hiked up her gown, and studied her body. Her waist hung in wrinkles and folds over a jiggling belly through which a long puckered scar ran from navel to pubis. She looked like a thing that had exploded, she looked like something destroyed. And she was, she was something destroyed.
Joanna and her son were to remain in the hospital for a week. Mostly they slept. In the evenings, friends came to visit, bearing gifts. The baby, fragile, and mewing like a kitten, was held and admired. Pat and Bob, June and Morris, Tory and John, and Claude all gave their condolences about the daughter she’d lost, but advised her to forget about her, to let her go, and enjoy the child she had. Joanna could only promise she’d try.
Doug showed up one evening. After a few moments of awkward conversation, he presented her with a box; Joanna unwrapped it to find a white, powder-soft blanket.
“It’s beautiful, Doug,” Joanna said, running her hands over it.
“My wife chose it,” he confessed, smiling. “But I chose this. For you.” He handed her a small gold box of Godiva chocolates.
She smiled. She was genuinely pleased. “Thanks, Doug. It’s nice to get a present for myself for a change. I wonder why people don’t think of giving the mother a present. After all, we do so much of the work.”
“I’m sorry about your other baby, too,” Doug told her. He cleared his throat. “My wife and I lost a baby. She miscarried at five months. Not quite like what you’ve gone through, but …”
“Five months,” Joanna said quietly.
“Yes. She had to go to the hospital. It wasn’t easy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Somehow we all get through it.”
Night darkened the world beyond her windows, and Joanna and Doug were enclosed in the gentle dome of light falling from behind her bed. It was an intimate thing, lying in a gown in a hospital bed while Doug stood nearby. But he had come in pure and simple friendship.
“I looked in the nursery window at your little guy. He looks great,” Doug said.
“Yes. Yes, I think he’ll be fine.”
“Madaket said you’d probably want us not to work out at your house for a while.”
“I think I’ll need just a few weeks to get settled in and get my strength back. Is that all right with you?”
“Sure. I’ve got a list as long as my arm of minor repair work people have been asking me to do. Just give us the word when you want us to come back.”
“Thanks, Doug.”
“All right, then. I’ll be going.”
He came very close to her, as if intending to embrace her. Joanna felt blood rush to her cheeks. He did not smile. His eyes were fixed on hers in an intense gaze that seemed purely sexual. As she watched, enthralled, he bent toward her, and then brought himself up short. He patted her hand.
“Take care of yourself,” he said, and nodded, and turning abruptly, left the room.
In the middle of the night the nurses brought Joanna the baby for his feedings, and then she had him all to herself. In the private glow of her hospital light, she unwrapped the blankets and unsnapped the hand-sized cotton T-shirt and ran her fingers over the skin, soft as petals,
which thinly covered the birdlike ribcage and beating heart. His head, like a hot little softball, fit exactly into the palm of Joanna’s hand. His perfect ears lay against his head like shells, and his skin was of a marvelous pearly iridescence, as if the Milky Way had been spun into fabric. When he slept he smiled, and slowly moved his limbs, as if swimming gently through her dreams or memories.
Did he dream of the sister who had floated in warm security beside him?
Joanna’s dreams were full of her. She thought of nothing else all day, all night.
Joanna awakened on the fifth day to discover a masculine presence in the room. Her eyes and senses focused on … a suit, which meant someone from off island, since a sports jacket was as formal as Nantucketers usually got … a rich tweed, hand-tailored over massive arms and bulky shoulders …
“Jake!”
“Hi, sweetheart. How ya doin’?”
Pushing herself up on her elbows, she shook her head. “Not very well at all!”
“Come here,” Jake said. He sat on the side of the bed and took both her hands in his and looked directly at Joanna. “Tell me about it.”
Because of Jake’s tremendous power in the network, he’d always served as a good judge of the seriousness of any situation. His presence in this small hospital room seemed confirmation of the significance of what had transpired. Joanna looked into Jake’s eyes and saw such generous sympathy that she simply leaned forward, trusting that he would catch her, and he did, and he held her close to him, her face against his chest. He stroked her hair, smoothing it over the back of her head and down the base of her skull as if soothing a child. He smelled of wool and tobacco and the peppermints he ate constantly in an attempt to stop smoking. His arms were muscular and burly and strong, and his embrace was so thorough it was like a kind of homecoming.
