A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  “I must be nearly ready,” she said.

  The nurse peeled off the glove and tossed it into the wastebasket on the floor beside the bed. “Your cervix is two fingers dilated,” she said. “And the baby seems to be on a bit of an angle, seems to be coming not quite square. I’m going to call the doctor at home. He should be able to tell you more.” She pulled Andy’s johnny shirt down, smoothed and tidied it, and then brought the covers up and folded them across her chest. Just before she left the room she turned and said, “You shouldn’t drink anything, just in case.”

  Paul passed the nurse on his way back in and she didn’t stop him. He lifted the curtain, ducked under it. Andy was quiet, not quite so apprehensive now that things seemed to be under way. She pushed the covers off, asked him, “Is it hot in here?”

  Paul said no, he didn’t think so but then he wasn’t doing any work.

  The nurse returned in a few minutes to check the baby’s heart rate again and soon after she left them the doctor on call came into the room. He let Paul stay, which worried Andy, although she didn’t say this out loud. The doctor moved his hands over her belly, his fierce blue-black eyes concentrated on her taut, mounded flesh as if the small dips and lumps could be read, could be comprehended. He told them that he didn’t think it was a case of anoxia in utero, he didn’t believe the baby was in any difficulty. He said Andy could deliver normally, and because the baby was relatively small and not far off true in its position, he should be able to give it a slight turn. He said he was sure a turn was all that was needed and that they would take her into the delivery room in an hour or so, depending.

  They waited together through the contractions, which Andy said were the real McCoy now. She said she’d know them in any dark alley. When it was time to go she leaned up to kiss Paul goodbye. “If the baby is born tonight,” she said, “it will be Tuesday’s child, like Krissy, full of grace.”

  Meagan started to come just after midnight, which made her Wednesday’s child, full of woe, although in the throes of labour Andy would not be able to remember this next line of the verse. Paul sat down the hall in an orange plastic chair with his head in his hands, waiting as he had waited before, ready to wait out the night, but Meagan didn’t take long getting herself born.

  While the doctor stitched Andy up, good and snug this time, he said, winking, as if consideration for a husband’s lifelong pleasure was one of the hospital’s policies and certainly one of his own, certainly worth an extra tug or two on the sutures, a nurse took Meagan to the other side of the room to bathe her. After she’d got her cleaned up and wrapped snugly in a receiving blanket she laid her on Andy’s already aching breasts, allowing them a couple of minutes before she took Meagan down to the nursery. Andy couldn’t see much of her new daughter, could see only her fuzzy scalp and her odd little face and her tight-fisted hands, but by all appearances she was a healthy baby.

  Paul spent a few minutes with Andy in the recovery room, just long enough to assure himself that she was all right, and then he went to the nursery to get a look at Meagan through the glass. After they pulled the nursery curtain shut, he drove out to the lake to wake Bill and Margaret and Daphne and Sally, to tell them. They all got up and sat around the big table in their pyjamas and nighties to listen to him tell it.

  Just before dawn Andy was deemed recovered and taken up to another floor where she was put into a room with three other patients, two of whom still had the slightly mounded bellies of recently delivered women, the third not a woman at all but a girl of no more than sixteen. She rested, dreamed, talked a bit to the woman beside her who had just had her first baby at an astonishing and likely dangerous forty-six. The nurses appeared regularly with thermometers and blood-pressure cuffs and Andy drank all the juice she could get her hands on, which meant she was soon up to the bathroom on her own.

  Paul ate Margaret’s celebratory breakfast of bacon and French toast and after he’d held Neil and Krissy on his lap to tell them about their sister, he drove back into the city. He sat out in the waiting room while Andy slept, went down to the gift shop to buy her a small bouquet of cut flowers, helped her with her sponge bath. The first time they brought Meagan down he waited in his mask and gown until the nurse was gone and then he laid Meagan out on Andy’s stomach, unwrapped her blanket, and took off her tiny shirt and diaper to expose and examine her, to run his hands over every inch of her long bones, her bright pink skin.

  That night he went back out to the lake to tell them everything all over again and to say that Andy was in a normal room now and that he’d had a good look at Meagan and she was just as she should be. He slept alone upstairs on the sleeping porch, his dreams filled with the fishy smell of a boat after a storm. In the morning, Margaret and Sally took Neil and Krissy for a long walk down the beach, leaving the cottage quiet so Paul could sleep through until his body had had enough.

  * * *

  WHILE PAUL SLEPT, Daphne drove in to the hospital. She came into the room just as a nurse was finishing up her examination of Andy’s sutures so she stood quietly outside the curtain, waiting until it was yanked open. The nurse hadn’t heard her and as she was leaving she backed into her and yelped in startled surprise. She told Daphne she should wait in the hall next time. She wasn’t much older than Daphne herself, maybe twenty-five, but she did not lack confidence, she was in fact just the kind of nurse people liked. Finished with Andy, she walked quickly over to the girl by the window, who was lying curled on her side with her back to the room, pulled the privacy curtain around the bed, and asked the girl to please roll over.

  When Andy saw Daphne standing there with her skin so tanned and her body so fresh and trim and tight and angular and jumped-up with energy, she said, and immediately wished with all her heart she hadn’t said, “Oh, Daphne, you look like a slightly different species of woman. Maybe vaguely related to the species in this room, but not really the same, not the same at all.”

  “And hello to you too,” Daphne said, smiling, meaning to let it go.

  “It’s just because you look so strong,” Andy said. Which was the truth.

  “I’ve been down to the nursery,” Daphne said. “They brought her to the window for me. She’s lovely. She’s small but it looks like she’s got Paul’s bones so she won’t stay small for long.” She sat down in the chair beside the bed. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Sore bum? Sitz baths helping the sore bum?”

  Andy was thinking, I do love this woman. “Yes,” she nodded. “Although sore hardly says it.”

  The nurse who had been examining the girl by the window yanked the curtain open again. “Today makes it three days,” she said firmly and loudly. “If you won’t do it yourself, we’ll have to haul you out of that bed. And we’ll do it, believe you me. You’ve got to get up and get walking and not just to the bathroom. It isn’t a matter of choice.”

  The girl didn’t answer. The nurse left the room, shaking her head, fed up.

  “Have they had you up and down the hall yet?” Daphne asked. “It’s chock-full of slow-walking women in really awful housecoats.” She looked at the two empty beds. “Your roommates must be out there already.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Andy said. “But it’s my understanding that today is the day.” She started to sit up, pulled herself up straighter in the bed. “The doctor is going to give Meagan a once-over this afternoon and he’s supposed to come to see me first thing tomorrow morning. Then maybe we can come home.”

  Daphne was just about to tell Andy how pleased Bill and Margaret and Sally were when the nurse who had just left returned with another, much larger woman in a different uniform. They walked quickly over to the girl by the window, pulled her up by her arms, turned her, lifted her off the bed, stood her upright, and walked her out the door, not a word said.

  “Oh,” Andy said, covering her mouth with her hand so she wouldn’t be heard. “For the love of God.”

  “I don’t see why they think they have to keep her on this floor,” Daphne said. “If
they gave it two minutes’ thought, they might figure it out.” She shook it off, stood up from the chair. “Are you ready to give the hall a try?”

  Andy brushed through her wet hair with her fingers to tidy it. “I guess,” she said. “I’ve showered and, after much repeated encouragement, pooped. So what else is left?” She turned and dropped her legs over the side of the bed, wincing. She stopped moving for a minute, looked down at her bare feet. “It’s a mighty long drop to that stool,” she said.

  Daphne eased her down. “We’ll find someone out there to challenge,” she said.

  Andy tried to hold her johnny shirt closed while Daphne helped her into her housecoat. “Your day will come,” she said. “And I’ll be there just as soon as I can to inquire about your bum.”

  They went out into the hall to join the flow and halfway down to the nurses’ station they passed the girl and the woman in the different uniform who held her up. The girl’s eyes were shut and she was walking close to the wall, hugging it. The other women who were up working off their various discomforts looked only briefly and then took care to avoid bumping her.

  Daphne and Andy continued slowly past the nurses’ station and down to the nursery. All the babies were being transferred to a kind of trolley, a long row of little rolling beds, and Meagan had already been moved, she was lying snug in her receiving blanket waiting to be delivered to her mother. “She has your face,” Daphne said. “Your forehead. And your chin.”

  Meagan stirred a bit, stared and blinked at the ceiling lights high above her. “I saw one of the older nurses pinch her arm and watch to see her reaction,” Andy said. “Almost like a test. But she didn’t react. Neil and Krissy could raise a complete stink by the time they were a day old but she doesn’t fuss at all.”

  “Paul told us,” Daphne said. “I say good for her. There’s already too much fussing in this sorry world.”

  They walked down the hall with all the other women who were making their way back to their rooms, and after Daphne got Andy up onto the bed, she asked if she wanted her new nightie from the suitcase. The nightie had been Daphne’s gift. It was a beautifully soft cotton print with two discreet nursing slits, two secret little passages. While Andy unbuttoned her housecoat, Daphne found it and handed it over.

  A nurse came into the room pushing the two other babies, and after she had them safely in their mothers’ arms, she brought Meagan and parked her close to Andy’s bed. Without looking at Daphne she told her she would have to leave now. This was no surprise to Daphne. She thought about asking for a mask and a gown but then thought no, she’d leave them their privacy. “I’ll be back in a little while,” she said. Just before she stepped back to pull the curtain around them, while the nurse was busy admiring Andy’s nightie, she reached out to touch her fingers to the top of Meagan’s fuzzy head. “This, my little love,” she whispered, “is called breakfast.”

  She had thought she would just go out to sit in the waiting room and leaving she glanced for some reason over to the window. The girl was there again, covered and turned away and curled up.

  She didn’t ask herself what she was doing, she just walked over, pulled the chair up close to the bed, and sat down. The girl looked up at her as if she had two heads, two very ugly, unwelcome heads.

  “I’m on my way down to the gift shop,” she said. “Can I bring you a chocolate bar or something? A magazine? Maybe Seventeen?” The girl was silent, her face collapsed into a sturdy frown.

  Daphne took a deep breath. “I just thought I’d like to tell you,” she said quietly, “that I was adopted. My mother was young, like you. But I’ve had a really good life. I’ve always wished I could tell my mother that. And I’ve always wished that she had a good life too. When I think about her, that’s how I imagine her, having a good life of her own.”

  The girl’s eyes were wide open now. She was looking at the high green branches of the elm just outside the window. She spoke so quietly Daphne almost missed it. “That’s nice of you to tell me,” she said.

  Daphne stood and tucked the girl’s blankets up around her shoulders, a useless gesture because the girl had already pulled them up as far as they would go. But it was all she could think to do. “Sore bottom?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the girl said, crying a bit now. “They keep bringing me the heat lamp and I hate it. I really hate it.”

  “I’m a nurse,” Daphne said. “Maybe I can try to put a stop to the heat lamp for you.” The girl hadn’t moved but Daphne hadn’t expected her to. She ran her hand lightly over the curled-up, covered body and left.

  She found the head nurse doing paperwork at the nurses’ station. By the evidence of her cap she had trained in London too, which would mean that she was a very good nurse indeed. Daphne was careful to introduce herself as the woman’s junior, to smile a quick deferential smile. On the way down the hall she had thought about asking if the girl could be moved to another floor, but with the head nurse standing there in front of her, attentive and patient but obviously busy, she decided to settle for the lesser but more probable win. Initially the discussion veered close to the abrupt, although it soon settled down to a successful resolution, Daphne’s point being that since the nurses themselves decided on heat lamp treatment, what would be the harm in no more of it for a kid who might be distraught but was likely sharp enough to know whether something was helping or hurting her.

  The older, larger woman, the one in the different uniform who had been walking the girl up and down the hall, had come up to the desk and was standing there listening. She was, Daphne decided, the homeliest woman she had ever seen. “You think she should be pampered?” she asked Daphne.

  The head nurse ignored this. “I’ll have a look at her myself,” she said. “As soon as I’m finished here. If she’ll try to get up and get a move on, we can maybe put an end to the heat lamp.”

  Daphne thanked her and went to sit in the waiting room for ten minutes and then she walked back down the hall to Andy’s room. The girl’s curtain was still open and she had shifted to lie on her back, with her hands out on top of her blanket. That looks like courage, Daphne thought, smiling a bit in case the girl looked her way, which she didn’t. She ducked in through Andy’s curtain.

  Meagan was asleep in her mother’s arms, apparently sated, and Andy was still sitting up straight on the bed. She had been waiting for Daphne to come back through the curtain. She didn’t speak the question but mouthed it, slowly and clearly. “You’re adopted now?”

  Daphne just shrugged her shoulders and reached out for Meagan. “Give her here,” she said. “I’m her perfectly healthy aunt. They can stuff their rules and regulations.”

  Lifting Meagan into her forbidden arms she thought, She feels so heavy, why would a baby born early feel so surprisingly heavy?

  * * *

  THE PROMISED STORM arrived early in the evening two days after Meagan was born, at the end of their last full day at Dunworkin.

  Paul and Murray and Margaret and Sally had gone in to the hospital right after lunch, and while they were gone, Patrick and Mary came in the door from Boston, surprised that there were no cars parked out behind the cottage, surprised to find Daphne alone with the kids. They had timed their return to have one last night at the lake and to help clean the cottage properly in the morning, before the owners moved in for August. They hadn’t expected to come home to a new niece.

  They’d had a quick rest upstairs and were sitting at the table drinking beer and asking Daphne about Andy and Meagan when they heard the car doors slamming shut. Sally was with Murray in his Mustang and Paul was alone in his truck. Margaret had stopped off in town to come back out with Bill and on the way they’d gone to the drive-in beside the Casino to get fish and chips and milkshakes for everyone.

  Margaret set the table and while they ate, Patrick and Mary answered questions about their trip, about the hotels they’d stayed in, the seafood they’d eaten, the people they’d met, the traffic. When the table was cleared Bill said they shoul
d start to think about packing up because there was a storm in the air and they were likely going to lose the lights before the night was out. But they didn’t start to think about packing. They took their coffee out to the porch to wait for the storm to come up over the water.

  At about seven, the temperature dropped quickly, heavy clouds gathered and settled low over the lake, and the breeze began to stiffen into wind, to skim the sand on the beach and in the grassy dunes. You could see the sand moving in the dunes, shifting itself into new patterns. And then the nature of the waves changed. They came to shore not in frothy little overlapping spills but each wave on its own, in a loud, dark rush, smacking the sand.

  Margaret and Mary went upstairs to close the windows and drop the shutters in the sleeping porch and bring the bedding and mattresses inside and Bill ran down with Patrick to pull the boat farther up on shore. Paul and Murray got the tarp and the ropes from the shed and after the tarp was wrestled onto the boat, Bill walked around it and pulled hard on the ropes, double-checking their knots. He yelled to them above the wind that they had to be especially sure because this wasn’t their boat. They’d never had their own boat, although one spring the boys had built a rough raft and launched it in the creek behind the house. They’d taken it only a few miles, past the golf course and Livingston’s gully but not very far after that, not all the way over to the lake.

  Aside from a bit of quick eye contact, the younger men made no response to Bill’s comment. Just in the last few years, but more and more predictably, Bill could not restrain himself, could not resist the chance to teach them a little moral lesson, as if grown and educated and capable, and as sensible as they were ever likely to be, they might suddenly begin to slide down the slippery slope to childish or criminal behaviour, to moral decline.