The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

I nodded. My mother nodded.

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Nicole looked back and forth between me and my mother, and then said, “Well, that’s a heck of a way to get things started.”

  Nicole excused herself after a minute and changed into her scrubs in our bathroom. When she came out, she was ready to get down to business.

  “Now,” she said, taking a long accordion of printouts off the fetal monitor’s table, “let’s talk about you.”

  Nicole wasn’t convinced that I needed a C-section. But Dr. Fred was a doctor, and Nicole was only a nurse, so she couldn’t really overrule him. But she could bring in a consulting physician.

  A half hour later, a very fit, wide-awake, curly-haired woman named Dr. McKay was saying, “I’ve got a good feeling about you! Let’s try some pushing!”

  I was too tired to push. “Some pushing?” I said, stalling.

  “Let’s push!” she said cheerfully. “This is going to go well. You’ve got great hips.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” I said.

  Before I knew it, they had me in a pushing position, all curled up like a shrimp. My mother and a nurse held my shoulders, while Nicole and Dr. McKay manned the nether regions. Nicole watched the monitor so that I could time my pushing to the contractions. Kind of like having turbo on your sports car.

  “Okay!” Nicole said, and I pushed.

  As soon as I started pushing, Nicole and Dr. McKay and the nurse who was standing behind them started shouting words of encouragement, telling me they could see the head, that he was just right there, almost out, and to keep going. I wondered if they were just faking to help me keep my energy up or if they really saw something. Finally I decided it didn’t matter. It did help me to hear all that encouragement. And so I chose to believe them and pushed my little heart out.

  It worked. Three pushes later, he was out. I didn’t even feel it, but he came out, and I got the big news of the day: He was, in fact, a she.

  “I guess this rules out ‘Dean junior,’” my mother said.

  I hadn’t even left room for the possibility that he might be a girl. I didn’t even have a name for a girl. I had just known that he was a boy. But, as with other things in my life, I’d been mistaken.

  They pulled her up to my chest, and she started to nurse. Things finally seemed real. Her eyes were wide open and milky black, and she was looking at me as if to say, Okay, I’m here! What’s next? I couldn’t believe the tiny mouth, the little fingernails, the fuzzy hair on top. Eyelashes! I’d made eyelashes inside my body! How the heck had I pulled that off?

  I had not even let myself think about giving birth. It had seemed so impossible, it was like trying to visualize outer space—more of a brainteaser than anything real. And even after I had just done it, it still seemed impossible. Once the baby was out, it was as if she had always been right there, pink-faced and wet, on my chest.

  But here we were. I knew it was huge moment, and yet, at the same time, I couldn’t seem to take it in. I felt like I ought to be having big “I just created another human being” feelings—weeping with joy or trembling with excitement. But instead, I just felt something I could only describe as pleased. I was very, very pleased. This was exactly right. She was exactly the little creature I had been waiting for. I watched her nursing, now with her eyes closed, and I knew right then: She was better than I ever could have wished for.

  I did not want to ruin the moment by thinking about Dean. But when I thought about how I shouldn’t think about him, I paused for a moment to marvel at the fact that he’d chosen to miss this. What was wrong with him? Granted, I’d done all the work, but we had made this human being together, and here she was. And he was in some truck stop off the interstate, buying Ding Dongs and paying for gas.

  And I resolved right then and there that I would not be one of those single mothers who holds out hope of her child’s father coming to his senses and coming home. This little person would not grow up with a hole in her life where a father should be. Nobody in our house was going to miss Dean. From here on out, he’d be nothing but a sperm donor. This baby’s childhood was going to be a veritable parade of people who loved her. She was going to have more admirers than she knew what to do with. True, she would have no father—a big exception any way you sliced it. But, dammit, I was going to be so good, she wouldn’t even miss him.

  13

  Despite my protests, they whisked the baby off to the nursery. I was too tired to fight them. My mother went along with the baby to make sure she was okay, and the doctor and Nicole were gone soon after.

  It seemed like they all left at once. And then I was alone. A nurse was supposed to be coming to the room to clean me up and help me move from the labor-and-delivery room to one on the infant hallway, but she must have been taking a smoke break. She was nowhere to be found.

  I just lay there in the silence, disliking the quietness, the smears of blood on the floor, the fluorescent lights. The lights had been dimmed while I was laboring to make it feel homey, but once the pushing started, those fluorescents came on like at a football field on a Friday night. Now the place lacked atmosphere, and voices, and people, and distractions.

  I was desperate to see the baby, and I might have wandered down the hall to look for her—but I couldn’t walk. I wondered what they were doing to her in the nursery. I hoped they weren’t giving her formula, as Betty had said they would try to do. My birth plan had expressly forbidden bottles of any kind, so as not to interfere with breast-feeding. Not that my wishes carried any weight.

  So I was paralyzed, wide-awake, and flooded with hormones. I thought about Dean. As mad as I was, I also just wanted to talk to him. There was a phone near the birthing bed, and I grabbed it and dialed his cell number. No answer, of course. I’d been thinking he might not recognize the hospital’s number and pick up. But my luck didn’t run that way.

  Dean was gone. I had no job. This meant I had no income at all. How was I going to pay the mortgage? The taxes? The electric bill? What was I going to live on? I had a small bundle of stocks that my grandfather had left me, but I was never, ever supposed to touch it. And even if I decided to use it to live on, it’d be gone within the year.

  My mother would help me some, of course. But she didn’t have the cash for an extra mortgage lying around. And I knew better than to even think about my father. He was an up-by-the-bootstraps guy. His own father used to drop him at the freeway exit near their house and let him hitch to school. To elementary school. If you asked my father about it, he’d tell you he looked a lot older than he was. He’d tell you he met a lot of interesting folks that way. He’d tell you it was good for him, in the end. He did not look kindly on people who didn’t take care of themselves.

  I guessed I’d have to sell my house and move in with my mother. She’d take me. She’d have to. I’d sell off most of my stuff (oh—it didn’t bear thinking about: the dinette, the Victorian fainting couch, the inlaid Art Nouveau bookshelf) and move back into my childhood bedroom. The baby and I would share. I could cook for my mom to earn my keep, and when the baby was old enough for day care (when was that, exactly?), I’d find a cheap apartment somewhere. It could work. I could make it work.

  Or maybe I could rent out the house to cover my expenses and move back there years down the road. I actually couldn’t stand the idea of losing the house. It was almost as bad as losing Dean. Maybe I could rent out the house, stay with my mother, and figure out a get-rich-quick scheme in the meantime.

  Then my cell phone rang, and it was Meredith.

  “You thought I was Dean, didn’t you?” she said right off the bat, and I confessed I had. Then she said, “How are you doing?”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m less pregnant than I used to be.”

  “You had the baby?”

  “I had the baby,” I said. “She’s a girl.”

  “I knew it was a girl,” Meredith said. “What’s her name?”

  “I’m working on that
,” I said.

  I gave Meredith the whole birth story, leaving out no detail, and then she did the Reader’s Digest version of her third date with Dr. Blandon. He held the car door for her. He had a dimple she’d never noticed. He took her to a Moroccan place for dinner but accidentally drove right past the restaurant.

  “Do you think that means he was nervous?” she asked.

  “It sounds like a good bet,” I said.

  They were supposed to go to a jazz concert, but they talked so long at the restaurant that they went for ice cream instead. They sat on the hood of his car and licked their cones while he asked her all about herself. “I’m telling you,” Meredith said, “he was Barbara Walters.”

  “Was that good or was that bad?”

  “Everything about him,” Meredith said, “is good.”

  I was about to ask if he’d kissed her good night when a skeletally thin nurse came in and made a distinct “hang up the phone” motion with her hands. So I did.

  “Time to get you cleaned up,” she said, and started pulling my sheets down.

  She removed my catheter as she gave me her opinions on everything from raising children to air pollution.

  “I’ve seen hundreds of births,” she said. “Women come, birth the babies, and then we wheel ’em out of here with the goofiest looks on their faces. You’ve got one. All the moms do. It’s got to be the hormones, because I don’t see how those wrinkled little baked potatoes could make anybody that happy.”

  I was quiet. She was not a person I wanted to share with. I just watched her swish around the room, getting the place squared away with remarkable speed.

  When we were ready, she and an orderly moved me to a new bed and tucked me in with some pillows and blankets. Just before she wheeled me off to my new room, she suggested I might want to put on some makeup.

  “You look a little droopy,” she said.

  We went past the nursery on the way. I could see my mother and the baby in there. My mom was wearing a hospital coat and gloves. “That’s her! That’s her!” I said, pointing at the window, begging to stop for a minute so I could see better.

  But the skinny nurse just kept on walking as if I hadn’t said anything at all. She parked me in my room, hit the brake, and I was alone again.

  I waited a good half hour after that. Finally, my mother arrived, and behind her, a nurse with the baby wrapped up like a papoose in a plastic box on wheels.

  “Is she sick?” I said, instantly terrified.

  “No, no!” my mom said. “She’s just in the warmer.”

  The nurse left strict instructions not to take the baby out of her box, and though I’d had my own instructions not to put her in one in the first place, I was afraid to take her out. What if I took her out and something terrible happened? She could get hypothermia. She could start screaming and just refuse to stop. A whole team of medical professionals could rush in and yell at me to put her back.

  I watched her while my mom told me about what they’d been up to: a bath, some shots, some glop for the baby’s eyes.

  “The glop is in case you have venereal disease,” my mother explained. “So the baby doesn’t go blind.”

  “I don’t have venereal disease!” I said.

  My mother shrugged. “It’s the law.”

  I could not imagine what kind of shots a one-hour-old baby could possibly need. This place was so weird. They just popped ’em on a conveyor belt and sent them through a Rube Goldberg machine.

  My mother pointed through the box at the baby’s forehead. “And she has a little birthmark above her nose,” she said.

  I could barely make it out.

  “It’s called a stork bite,” she said. “It should be gone by kindergarten.”

  I looked up to see if she was kidding.

  “But mostly gone in a year,” she added.

  We studied the mark.

  “I think it’s cute,” my mother said.

  “I’m taking her out,” I said to my mother, who glanced furtively at the door as she helped me get the box open, working quickly so we wouldn’t get caught.

  And out she came! I felt desperately relieved. I’d known this baby less than two hours, and already my arms felt empty without her. I held her snugly and touched her forehead with my nose. I couldn’t believe how tiny she was. She was fast asleep in her swaddling blanket, and her eyes were closed in a little crescent of lashes. She was easy to hold in this little wrapped-up bundle, and I made a note to learn how to swaddle before I left the hospital.

  It was almost noon. I should have slept, but before I could settle, the visitors started to arrive. They kept up a steady parade, one after another throughout the day, and with them came the question “Where’s Dean?” My mother, who stayed for most of the day, did her best to distract them.

  My cousin Sarah, who burst into tears when she saw the baby, burst into tears a second time when I told her Dean had left me.

  After that, I lied to my aunt Lindy, who brought a yellow blanket she’d crocheted and who wanted to see Dean. I didn’t have the heart to tell her. I said he’d gone down to the cafeteria to get me a snack. “He’s going to be such a great father,” she told me.

  I also lied to both of my ex-stepmothers, two perfectly nice women who had, like my mother, failed to make it work with my dad—and both of whom came with cookie bouquets and missed each other by minutes.

  My cousin Peter and his wife, Anna, traded off shifts watching their kids in the hallway. They didn’t want to bring in any germs. I told them Dean was out buying a car seat, and they went on and on about how we should have thought about that sooner, about how having kids is all about thinking ahead.

  Meredith had been the first person to arrive, peeking in on her way to work. She showed up with a bottle of champagne and a stack of Dixie cups and insisted I take a sip. After our toast, she peeked over my lap to get a good look at the baby.

  “Do you want to hold her?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  I must have looked disappointed, because she went on.

  “You know, she’s asleep. I don’t need to mess with her. And what if I dropped her? You guys are all settled there. I’m not great with babies. Plus”—she held up her Dixie cup—“I’m drunk.”

  I nodded. There was a short silence, and then she held up the tweed jacket that was over her arm.

  I gave her the curious look she wanted, and she said, “It’s Dr. Blandon’s. He’s going to stop by work and pick it up. Thought you’d like to see.”

  She had me. “How did he happen to leave it with you?”

  “He came in for some ice cream.”

  “After you got back from the ice cream shop?”

  “Well,” she said, twinkling, “we had some more.”

  Turns out, he got a crazy back spasm not too long after they walked in, and they spent a couple of hours with him flat on his back on her new rug from Ikea.

  “He has a bad back?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “He had to carry a Great Dane up a flight of stairs that morning.”

  I looked at her.

  “This dog weighed a hundred and sixty pounds.”

  She gave Dr. Blandon chocolate-chip mint and they talked about his life as a vet. Then they rolled him over and she gave him a massage.

  “So,” she said. “No first kiss. But a first massage.”

  “Meredith,” I said, “you look smitten. You look smitten in a way that you never, ever do.”

  “It’s just the champagne,” she said, waving her Dixie cup again.

  My father, in contrast to Meredith, was the last visitor of the day, hitting the hospital right at my late-afternoon sinking spell. He’d had a cold, so I made him wear a mask and sit in the armchair across the room. My mother “went for coffee” when he arrived. He asked where Dean was right away. What he actually said was, “Where’s the genius who got you in this trouble?”

  “He’s catching up on some sleep,” I said, which could have been true. Dea
n’s leaving seemed so much worse now that I was holding a baby in my arms. And my father, a rifle owner, might actually have tried to hunt Dean down. It occurred to me it might be best not to tell him at all and spend the rest of my life pretending Dean was in the bathroom or working late.

  After the basics of asking about me and the baby, my dad took off the mask to go, but then lingered. He paced around the room, reading the cards and examining the flowers. I watched him for a while, then I said, “What’s going on with you?”

  He sat down on the edge of the armchair and said, “I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Let’s hear it,” I said. My epidural was really wearing off.

  He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and said, “Do you think your mother would go out with me?”

  I looked at him. “I don’t understand the question.”

  He nodded and looked around the room like he might find some kind of guidance among my leftover hospital-issued Jell-O bowls and plastic cups.

  Then I said, “She just invented an excuse to leave the room, if that gives you any sense of her feelings.”

  He nodded again.

  I continued. “Isn’t there anyone else in the entire city you could date?”

  “The thing is,” my dad said, “I may be in love with her.”

  “Again?” I asked.

  “Again,” he said.

  A number of responses ran through my head, but I went with “You might want to rethink that.”

  “I can’t help it,” he said. He put his head down and squeezed a fistful of his hair. “It just hit me.”

  Then a nurse came in.

  “Hi,” she said to me, glancing over at my dad. “We’re going to need to get you in the shower.” My dad looked up then, and she recognized him.

  “Doc Harris!” she said, moving quickly to shake his hand. He stood and put on a smile, flirted a little, and then got himself out of there pretty fast. When he was gone, she said, “That’s your dad? He’s so dreamy! Every nurse I know has a crush on him.”

  “He’s quite a guy,” I said.

  My mother returned midshower, just as the baby was waking up and starting to fuss. She picked her up out of the bassinet and did her best to quiet her.