by John Searles
“So what are you doing here?” Mr. Erwin asks, pointing his thick, dirty index finger at the needle on the table. “Surgery?”
Melissa swallows her wine, which tastes bitter in the back of her throat. “I was piercing my ear.”
He stares up at all the studs and crosses already cluttering both her ears. “Looks like you’ve got plenty of holes in you already.”
At one time in her life, this sort of comment would not have bothered Melissa. After all, she and Stacy used to insult each other on a regular basis. Now, though, the slightest mention of her appearance leaves her feeling bruised. Mr. Erwin must read the hurt on her face, because the next thing he says is, “I don’t mean any offense. They look real nice on you.”
Melissa shrugs. “Well, it’s just a hobby, I guess. Some people like to garden or go fishing or read those strange but true stories from the newspaper the way you do. Other people cook and clean, like your wife. And I like to—”
“Put holes in yourself,” Mr. Erwin says, dropping his voice lower.
Maybe it is the wine, but something about the statement strikes Melissa as funny. She leans her head back and releases a laugh, not bothering to cover her mouth with her hand the way she normally would to hide her missing teeth. Mr. Erwin laughs too. And this begins an unexpected fit of giggles between them. As Melissa stares up at the ceiling, which is blotchy from so many leaks, she says, “That’s right. My hobby is putting holes in myself.”
The elevator releases a high-pitched ding when it reaches the eighth floor, summoning Melissa back to the present. The doors part and the orderly pushes her out into the hallway. The two nurses follow at her sides still, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking against the speckled floor. As they move through the maternity ward, Melissa smells a flat antiseptic odor in the air as well as a scent that is something akin to boiled corn. Both smells are familiar to this building, though she’d forgotten them until now. She thinks of the bland food and ever-revolving shifts of listless nurses and hurried doctors the last time she was here. The biggest difference Melissa notices is that the maternity ward is quieter than intensive care had been with its beeping machines and the constant clamor of the staff. Here, they pass room after room where the lights are off, and only the occasional television flickers inside.
“The last time I was in this hospital it seemed so noisy,” Melissa says out loud without really meaning to.
“Excuse me?” the lumpy nurse says.
“I said, the last time I was here, the place was so noisy.”
“When was the last time you were here?”
“Five years ago,” Melissa tells her.
“And what was that for?”
“An accident,” is all she says.
The discussion is cut short because they have arrived at their destination. The orderly wheels her into a large room where the walls are bright green and a series of blue curtains divide the space. Melissa eyes a cluster of machinery that is similar to what she remembers from intensive care—a heart monitor, an IV rack, and dozens of other pieces of equipment she doesn’t know the names of. A nurse she has never seen before approaches as the others cross the room to talk with a bearded man who Melissa guesses is her doctor. This new nurse is a kind-faced black woman, with thick eyebrows and a broad smile. She wheels Melissa behind a curtain to help her change into a hospital gown. It takes some time, though, because of another contraction. This one sends an agonizing spasm into the deepest part of Melissa’s body. She feels the urge to push but does her best to hold off. When the feeling finally passes, she returns to the task of slipping on the thin gown. The nurse takes her blood pressure, then taps the veins on Melissa’s arm, before hooking up an IV. Just as she is taping the tube to Melissa’s skin, the bearded man appears in green scrubs and one of those familiar plastic ID tags hanging from his neck. Melissa reads his name at the same time the nurse says, “This is Dr. Halshastic.”
“Hello, Melissa.” He is talking to her but staring at a clipboard in his hands. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” she says.
This answer causes him to look up. Melissa sees that familiar, startled expression on his face, before his gaze drops to the vicinity of her chin. “Well, I’m happy to hear it. Now listen, we are going to ask you to lie back on this table so we can determine how far along you are in the labor process. Is that okay?”
Melissa nods.
“I’d like it if we could make a deal. I’m going to need you to speak to me when you answer. No nodding. All right?”
“All right,” she says.
“Good,” he tells her. “If we do this as a team, I’m confident that things will go smoothly.”
After the doctor and nurses help Melissa onto the table, she lays her head back on a pillow. They tell her they are going to put a monitor against her stomach to keep track of the fetal heart rate. Then they ask if she would like an epidural for the pain. Melissa declines. She is not afraid of the pain. And besides, she wants to feel this baby coming into the world. The last thing she hears the doctor say before her eyes flutter shut is that her cervix is fully dilated.
That’s when Melissa’s thoughts travel back again to last spring. Only this time she sees herself waking the morning after Bill Erwin came to her door with those white tulips. As she stretches out on her sagging mattress in her pale yellow bedroom, Melissa realizes that she is dressed in her flannel pajamas—a pair she only wears during the winter months. She cannot remember changing into them, nor can she remember climbing in bed to sleep. The only thing she does recall is Bill Erwin lighting a cigarette and opening another bottle of wine after they’d finished the first. Then she remembers the way they kept giggling about people’s hobbies, particularly Melissa’s hobby of piercing her ears.
Why had we found that so funny? she wonders for the longest time.
When no answer comes, Melissa gets out of bed and walks to the living room, feeling sluggish and more hung over than ever before. Everything in the place looks the same, though slightly more orderly. The cushions on the sofa have been fluffed. The glasses have been placed side by side in the sink. The empty wine bottles are on the floor by the kitchenette. Thinking of how much they drank, Melissa is filled with worry about how she might have acted in front of Mr. Erwin. Finally, she pushes the thought from her mind and goes to the refrigerator to pour a glass of water, touching one of the silky white flower petals in that pasta pot as she gulps it down. After that, she turns and heads back to bed a while longer before starting her day.
“So here’s what we are going to do,” Dr. Halshastic is saying when Melissa opens her eyes. “First, we are going to help you regulate your breathing. I want you to hold Barbara’s hand and breathe right along with her. Okay?”
“Who’s Barbara?” Melissa asks.
The doctor points to the kind-faced black nurse, who is already holding Melissa’s hand. “Meet Barbara.”
“Hi,” Melissa tells her, wondering where the nurses from downstairs have gone.
Barbara smiles and gives her a gentle squeeze, then instructs Melissa to inhale. All throughout her pregnancy it seemed to Melissa that it has been getting harder to breath. Sometimes she even wondered if the baby was slowly suffocating her from the inside. For the first time in months, though, Melissa finds it easier to take deep breaths. When she says this out loud, the nurse tells her, “That’s because the baby has dropped, relieving some of the pressure on your diaphragm. So let’s take another deep breath and release it. Ready?”
Soon they are working together—inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. Finally the doctor says, “Okay, we are going to ask you to begin pushing when you feel the next contraction coming on. Do you think you can push?”
Melissa nods, then remembers their agreement. “Yes,” she tells him.
And when the next contraction comes, she takes her deepest breath yet, filling herself up with air before giving a good hard push. Her eyes close, and this time she does not return to that morning
last spring. Instead, she simply sees the image of Bill Erwin’s wrinkled face, his chapped lips, his silver hair, in the darkness behind her lids.
“You are doing great,” Dr. Halshastic tells her. “Now push again.”
The whole while Melissa pushes and breathes and pushes and breathes, Mr. Erwin’s weathered face remains there. She remembers the sound of their laughter. She remembers taking slow sips of her wine at first, then drinking more quickly. She remembers the way his eyes kept darting over to the window. She remembers the way he came back a week later and they drank and smoked again. The week after that too … until soon, it became something of a tradition. She remembers so many mornings when she woke, exhausted and hung over, her limbs aching, wondering why she had allowed herself to get so carried away the night before.
“Keep working with us, Melissa. Come on. Now give us another push.”
Melissa sucks in a breath and gives her hardest push so far as the pain racks her body. She feels the baby shift inside, moving through the birth canal. The nurse’s hand is soft and warm in hers, and Melissa squeezes it tight. Her eyes close, and she sees herself getting out of bed again that first morning after Mr. Erwin came to visit. She sees herself walking to the living room, where everything looks the same though more orderly. The cushions and pillows on the sofa are fluffed. The glasses placed in the sink. The wine bottles lined up on the floor. And that’s when Melissa notices the curtains, which had been open the night before while Mr. Erwin kept looking outside, are now closed.
“You are lucky, Melissa, because this is going very quickly. A few more pushes and we are in business. But we need you to focus.”
“Breathe with me,” Barbara says and pats a damp, cool cloth against Melissa’s forehead. “Stay in the moment.”
Melissa wants to go backward again, but the nurse and the doctor keep urging her to focus. Finally, she gives up on those strange memories and forces herself to remain in the present. When she does, Melissa inhales and summons her strength, then pushes with all of her might.
“Very good,” the doctor coaches. “Can you give me another?”
Again Melissa inhales. And again she pushes. She continues working just like that and does not let up until she hears the doctor say these words: “You have a boy. A beautiful baby boy.”
When the sound of his crying fills the room, tears spring to Melissa’s eyes, because it is her baby making that sound. Moments pass, as the nurses clean and weigh the child, then complete a few quick tests, before placing his small body in her arms. Melissa holds the baby carefully, crooking one arm and placing a hand beneath his head, just as Barbara instructs her to do. She stares down at his squeezed-shut eyes, his round, pink face, and his fuzzy scalp with all its bumps and wrinkles as so many emotions tumble through her at once. She feels happier than she can ever remember. Yet, there is also a sense that, while something has been given to her, something else has been taken away. Melissa doesn’t allow herself to indulge in the tumult of those emotions, though. She asks the doctor, “Is he okay?”
Dr. Halshastic smiles. “Ten fingers. Ten toes. He looks pretty okay to me.”
Melissa counts each and every one of those fingers and toes herself. They seem impossibly small and fragile. She brings the baby closer to her face and kisses his soft, tender forehead. She smells his sweet skin. And this is what Melissa tells herself: that she is not going to force this child to live a life bound by the sort of rules and restrictions that her parents imposed upon her. Rather, she will give him freedom and unconditional love. No matter what, she is going to love this child. That is what Melissa keeps thinking long after the nurses take the baby away to lay him down in the nursery. And that is what she is thinking about when they wheel her to a room with two empty beds and turn out the lights so she can close her eyes and drift off to sleep.
Twice during the night a nurse gently wakes Melissa, so she can feed the baby. The third time, she wakes on her own and looks out the window to see that it is a bright winter morning. The lighthearted chatter of nurses in the hallway makes the place seem livelier than it did before.
“Most people can’t wait to get out of here,” she hears one of them say. “But I think that lady mistook this place for a hotel. She got used to being waited on hand and foot.”
“If it’s a hotel,” another one says, “then I’m waiting for my tip.”
This last comment causes their laughter to rise up. As Melissa lies there in bed—feeling exhausted, but surprisingly clear-minded considering all she’s been through—she begins planning her new life with her baby. The first thing she decides is that it’s time for her to move out of that cottage and into a place more suitable for a mother and her child. The next thing she makes up her mind about is that she is going to begin looking for a job again. Perhaps she will try for one in a veterinarian’s office, the way she wanted to do last spring. And though it will take time for her to save enough money, especially with the hospital bills that are about to be piled upon her, Melissa tells herself that eventually she is going to make an appointment with a dentist and see about having her teeth fixed. In the midst of all this planning, a nurse pops her head in the door and says that there are people in the hall who want to see her.
“Who?” Melissa asks. If it’s the Erwins, she does not want to see them.
Before the nurse can answer, the last two people Melissa expects step inside: Charlene and Richard Chase. Unsure of what to make of their presence here, Melissa sits up in bed and stays quiet as they say hello and enter the room. It has been almost five years since she has seen Richard. Five years since that day when he wrote the check for the cottage and the car, then told her that their friendship had to end. After the incident at the cemetery with her father, he said he realized that whatever they had between them was wrong. For years afterward, Melissa hated him for abandoning her. Over time, though, her hatred softened. Mostly, she learned to feel grateful that he had helped her leave her parents’ house. That is the way she feels looking at him right now.
“I thought you were in Florida,” she says to Richard, while glancing nervously at Charlene, who is standing near the doorway.
“I was,” he tells her, stepping to the foot of the bed. “I came up yesterday at the last minute.”
Melissa wonders if he came for her, but she doesn’t bother to ask. Up close, she sees that Richard has aged over the years. His hair is grayer than it used to be. His blue eyes have faded behind his wire-rimmed glasses; the skin there is crisscrossed with wrinkles. He still bears a resemblance to Ronnie, though it is not what she chooses to see. Melissa is about to inquire about the reason they’re here, when Richard asks, “So how are you feeling?”
“Good,” she tells him. “A lot lighter.”
Still lingering near the doorway, dressed in the same black cloak she wore the other night, Charlene speaks up for the first time. In a muted but pleasant voice, so different from her hysterical outburst two nights before, she says, “I remember what a wonderful feeling that is.”
Melissa is overcome by a momentary sense of shame, thinking of the scene she caused at their house. But she forces herself not to dwell on it. Earlier this morning, while she was feeding her baby, she decided once and for all that her prayer had finally been answered. No matter what the circumstances, this child is still a miracle. That is the only truth worth believing. “Did you see my baby in the nursery window?”
“We did,” Richard tells her.
“He’s beautiful,” Charlene says, taking a step closer to the bed.
“Can I ask,” she says at last, “what made you come to hospital?”
“Well, we wanted to see you,” Charlene tells Melissa. “And I … well, I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for the way I acted the other night.”
“It’s okay. Why don’t we just forget it?”
“It’s forgotten,” Charlene says.
They are all quiet until Richard puts his hands on the metal footboard of Melissa’s bed and clears his throat.
“There’s something else, Melissa. We also came to talk to you about Philip.”
“Philip? What about him?”
“We want to know if he came by your house yesterday.”
“Yes,” Melissa says. “Why?”
That’s when Charlene tells her that he didn’t return home afterward. She goes on to ask what time he’d been there, and Melissa says that it was late in the day, around four or five. She also questions her about whether he mentioned where he was going when he left. Melissa thinks a moment, recalling the last words they said to each other as he stood on her stoop in the dying light.
You really haven’t smoked in all these months, have you?
Of course not.
I believe you. I know that sounds strange. I’m sorry I didn’t before.
She wonders if somehow he had figured out what she could not, or rather, what she didn’t allow herself to before. “He didn’t say where he was going. But there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. I mean, other than his leg, so I don’t think you should worry.”
“Like I said before,” Richard tells Charlene. “He probably left for New York.”
“Probably,” Charlene says in a quiet, resigned tone of voice. She is standing at the end of the bed now too, her hands gripping the metal footboard as well. Melissa watches as her eyes move around the room—from the stripped bed on the other side, to the blank face of the TV near the ceiling, to the wide window overlooking the parking lot where the bright morning sunlight streams inside. When her gaze returns to Melissa, she offers her a limp, melancholy sort of smile. “Now that you’re a parent, you’re going to see for yourself how hard it is to let go of your child. It’s one of the hardest lessons a mother ever has to learn.”
Melissa doesn’t know what to say so she stays quiet. She scratches the skin around the white tape on her arm and stares up at the clock. In another ten minutes, it will be time for the baby’s next feeding. Melissa can hardly wait to hold him again. She can hardly wait for the feeling of peace she has when he is in her arms.
