Mom went into labor three days before Christmas, and she insisted we go holiday shopping together.
“Shouldn’t you like lie down or go to the birthing center or something?” I asked.
Mom grimaced through a cramp. “Nah. The contractions aren’t that bad and are still like twenty minutes apart. I cleaned our entire house, from top to bottom, while I was in early labor with you.”
“Putting the labor in labor,” I joked.
“You’re a smart-ass, you know that?” Mom said. She took a few breaths. “I’ve got a ways to go. Now come on. Let’s take the bus to the mall. I’m not up to driving.”
“Shouldn’t we call Dad?” I asked.
Mom laughed at that. “Please, it’s enough for me to have to birth this baby. I don’t need to deal with him, too. We’ll call him when I’m ready to pop. I’d much rather have you around.”
So Mom and I wandered around the mall, stopping every couple minutes so she could sit down and take deep breaths and squeeze my wrist so hard it left angry red marks. Still, it was a weirdly fun and productive morning. We bought presents for Gran and Gramps (a sweater with an angel on it and a new book about Abraham Lincoln) and toys for the baby and a new pair of rain boots for me. Usually we waited for the holiday sales to buy stuff like that, but Mom said that this year we’d be too busy changing diapers. “Now’s not the time to be cheap. Ow, fuck. Sorry, Mia. Come on. Let’s go get pie.”
We went to Marie Callender’s. Mom had a slice of pumpkin and of banana cream. I had blueberry. When she was done, she pushed her plate away and announced she was ready to go to the midwife.
We’d never really talked about my being there or not being there. I went everywhere with Mom and Dad at that point, so it was just kind of assumed. We met a nerve-racked Dad at the birthing center, which was nothing like a doctor’s office. It was the ground floor of a house, the inside decked out with beds and Jacuzzi tubs, the medical equipment discreetly tucked away. The hippie midwife led Mom inside and Dad asked me if I wanted to come, too. By now, I could hear Mom screaming profanities.
“I can call Gran and she’ll pick you up,” Dad said, wincing at Mom’s barrage. “This might take a while.”
I shook my head. Mom needed me. She’d said so. I sat down on one of the floral couches and picked up a magazine with a goofy-looking bald baby on the cover. Dad disappeared into the room with the bed.
“Music! Goddammit! Music!” Mom screamed.
“We have some lovely Enya. Very soothing,” the midwife said.
“Fuck Enya!” Mom screamed. “Melvins. Earth. Now!”
“I’ve got it covered,” Dad said. Then he popped a CD of the loudest, churningest, guitar-heaviest music I’d ever heard. It made all the fast-paced punk songs Dad normally listened to sound like harp music. This music was primal and that seemed to make Mom feel better. She started making these low guttural noises. I just sat there quietly. Every so often she’d scream my name and I’d scamper inside. Mom would look up at me, her face plastered with sweat. Don’t be scared, she’d whisper. Women can handle the worst kind of pain. You’ll find out one day. Then she’d scream fuck again.
I’d seen a couple of births on that cable-TV show, and people usually yelled for a while; sometimes they swore and it had to be bleeped, but it never took longer than half an hour. After three hours, Mom and the Melvins were still screaming along. The whole birthing center felt tropically humid, even though it was forty degrees outside.
Henry dropped by. When he came inside and heard the noise, he froze in his tracks. I knew that the whole kid-thing freaked him out. I’d overheard Mom and Dad talking about that, and Henry’s refusal to grow up. He’d apparently been shocked when Mom and Dad had me, and now was completely bewildered that they chose to have a second. They’d both been relieved when he and Willow had gotten back together. “Finally, a grown-up in Henry’s life,” Mom had said.
Henry looked at me; his face was pale and sweaty. “Holy shit, Mee. Should you be hearing this? Should I be hearing this?”
I shrugged. Henry sat down next to me. “I’ve got the flu or something, but your Dad just called asking me to bring some food. So here I am,” he said, proffering a Taco Bell bag reeking of onions. Mom let out another moan. “I should go. Don’t want me spreading germs or anything.” Mom screamed even louder and Henry practically jumped in his seat. “You sure you wanna hang around for this? You can come back to my place. Willow’s there, taking care of me.” He grinned when he mentioned her name. “She can take care of you, too.” He stood up to leave.
“No. I’m fine. Mom needs me. Dad’s kind of freaking out, though.”
“Did he puke yet?” Henry asked, sitting back down on the couch. I laughed, but then saw from his face that he was serious.
“He threw up when you were coming. Almost fainted on the floor. Not that I can blame him. But the dude was a mess, the doctors wanted to kick him out . . . said they were going to if you didn’t come out within a half hour. That got your mom so pissed off she pushed you out five minutes later.” Henry smiled, leaning back into the sofa. “So the story goes. But I’ll tell you this: He cried like a motherfucking baby when you were born.”
“I’ve heard that part.”
“Heard what part?” Dad asked breathlessly. He grabbed the bag from Henry. “Taco Bell, Henry?”
“Dinner of champions,” Henry said.
“It’ll do. I’m starving. It’s intense in there. Got to keep up my strength.”
Henry winked at me. Dad pulled out a burrito and offered one to me. I shook my head. Dad had started unwrapping his meal when Mom let out a growl and then started screaming at the midwife that she was ready to push.
The midwife poked her head out the door. “I think we’re getting close, so maybe you should save dinner for later,” she said. “Come on back.”
Henry practically bolted out the front door. I followed Dad into the bedroom where Mom was sitting now, panting like a sick dog. “Would you like to watch?” the midwife asked Dad, but he just swayed and turned a pale shade of green.
“I’m probably better up here,” he said, grasping Mom’s hand, which she violently shook off.
No one asked me if I wanted to watch. I just automatically went to stand next to the midwife. It was pretty gross, I’ll admit. Lots of blood. And I’d certainly never seen my mom so full-on frontal before. But it felt strangely normal for me to be there. The midwife was telling Mom to push, then hold, then push. “Go baby, go baby, go baby go,” she chanted. “You’re almost there!” she cheered. Mom looked like she wanted to smack her.
When Teddy slid out, he was head up, facing the ceiling, so that the first thing he saw was me. He didn’t come out squalling like you see on TV. He was just quiet. His eyes were open, staring straight at me. He held my gaze as the midwife suctioned out his nose. “It’s a boy,” she shouted.
The midwife put Teddy on Mom’s belly. “Do you want to cut the cord?” she asked Dad. Dad waved his hands no, too overcome or nauseous to speak.
“I’ll do it,” I offered.
The midwife held the cord taut and told me where to cut. Teddy lay still, his gray eyes wide open, still staring at me.
Mom always said that it was because Teddy saw me first, and because I cut his cord, that somewhere deep down he thought I was his mother. “It’s like those goslings,” Mom joked. “Imprinting on a zoologist, not the mama goose, because he was the first one they saw when they hatched.”
She exaggerated. Teddy didn’t really think I was his mother, but there were certain things that only I could do for him. When he was a baby and going through his nightly fussy period, he’d only calm down after I played him a lullaby on my cello. When he started getting into Harry Potter, only I was allowed to read a chapter to him every night. And when he’d skin a knee or bump his head, if I was around he would not stop crying until I bestowed a magic kiss on the injury, after which he’d miraculously recover.
I know that all the magic kisses in the world probably couldn’t have helped him today. But I would do anything to have been able to give him one.
10:40 P.M.
I run away.
I leave Adam, Kim, and Willow in the lobby and I just start careening through the hospital. I don’t realize I’m looking for the pediatric ward until I get there. I tear through the halls, past rooms with nervous four-year-olds sleeping restlessly before tomorrow’s tonsillectomies, past the neonatal ICU with babies the size of fists, hooked up to more tubes than I am, past the pediatric oncology unit where bald cancer patients sleep under cheerful murals of rainbows and balloons. I’m looking for him, even though I know I won’t find him. Still, I have to keep looking.
I picture his head, his tight blond curls. I love to nuzzle my face in those curls, have done since he was a baby. I kept waiting for the day when he’d swat me away, say “You’re embarrassing me,” the way he does to Dad when Dad cheers too loudly at T-ball games. But so far, that hadn’t happened. So far, I’ve been allowed constant access to that head of his. So far. Now there is no more so far. It’s over.
I picture myself nuzzling his head one last time, and I can’t even imagine it without seeing myself crying, my tears turning his blond curlicues straight.
Teddy is never going to graduate from T-ball to baseball. He’s never going to grow a mustache. Never going to get into a fistfight or shoot a deer or kiss a girl or have sex or fall in love or get married or father his own curly-haired child. I’m only ten years older than him, but it’s like I’ve already had so much more life. It is unfair. If one of us should have been left behind, if one of us should be given the opportunity for more life, it should be him.
I race through the hospital like a trapped wild animal. Teddy? I call. Where are you? Come back to me!
But he won’t. I know it’s fruitless. I give up and drag myself back to my ICU. I want to break the double doors. I want to smash the nurses’ station. I want it all to go away. I want to go away. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be in this hospital. I don’t want to be in this suspended state where I can see what’s happening, where I’m aware of what I’m feeling without being able to actually feel it. I cannot scream until my throat hurts or break a window with my fist until my hand bleeds, or pull my hair out in clumps until the pain in my scalp overcomes the one in my heart.
I’m staring at myself, at the “live” Mia now, lying in her hospital bed. I feel a burst of fury. If I could slap my own lifeless face, I would.
Instead, I sit down in the chair and close my eyes, wishing it all away. Except I can’t. I can’t concentrate because there’s suddenly so much noise. My monitors are blipping and chirping and two nurses are racing toward me.
“Her BP and pulse ox are dropping,” one yells.
“She’s tachycardic,” the other yells. “What happened?”
“Code blue, code blue in Trauma,” blares the PA.
Soon the nurses are joined by a bleary-eyed doctor, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, which are ringed by deep circles. He yanks down the covers and lifts my hospital gown. I’m naked from the waist down, but no one notices these things here. He puts his hands on my belly, which is swollen and hard. His eyes widen and then narrow into slits. “Abdomen’s rigid,” he says angrily. “We need to do an ultrasound.”
Nurse Ramirez runs to a back room and then wheels out what looks like a portable laptop with a long white attachment. She squirts some jelly on my stomach, and the doctor runs the attachment over my stomach.
“Damn. Full of fluid,” he says. “Patient had surgery this afternoon?”
“A splenectomy,” Nurse Ramirez replies.
“Could be a missed blood vessel that wasn’t cauterized,” the doctor says. “Or a slow leak from a perforated bowel. Car accident, right?”
“Yes. Patient was medevaced in this morning.”
The doctor flips through my chart. “Doctor Sorensen was her surgeon. He’s still on call. Page him, get her to the OR. We need to get inside and find out what’s leaking, and why, before she drops any further. Jesus, brain contusions, collapsed lung. This kid’s a train wreck.”
Nurse Ramirez shoots the doctor a dirty look, as if he had just insulted me.
“Miss Ramirez,” the grumpy nurse at the desk scolds. “You have patients of your own to deal with. Let’s get this young woman intubated and transferred to the OR. That will do her more good than all this dillydallying around!”
The nurses work rapidly to detach the monitors and catheters and run another tube down my throat. A pair of orderlies rush in with a gurney and heave me onto it. I’m still naked from the waist down as they hustle me out, but right before I reach the back door, Nurse Ramirez calls, “Wait!” and then gently closes the hospital gown around my legs. She taps me three times on the forehead with her fingers, like it’s some kind of Morse code message. And then I’m gone into the maze of hallways leading toward the OR for another round of cutting, but this time I don’t follow myself. This time I stay behind in the ICU.
I am starting to get it now. I mean, I don’t totally fully understand. It’s not like I somehow commanded a blood vessel to pop open and start leaking into my stomach. It’s not like I wished for another surgery. But Teddy is gone. Mom and Dad are gone. This morning I went for a drive with my family. And now I am here, as alone as I’ve ever been. I am seventeen years old. This is not how it’s supposed to be. This is not how my life is supposed to turn out.
In the quiet corner of the ICU I start to really think about the bitter things I’ve managed to ignore so far today. What would it be like if I stay? What would it feel like to wake up an orphan? To never smell Dad smoke a pipe? To never stand next to Mom quietly talking as we do the dishes? To never read Teddy another chapter of Harry Potter? To stay without them?
I’m not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I’m not sure that I want to wake up.