That’s the line where I was to remain behind.
“But, Kathy,” I attempted to argue, but she held up her hands and told me that there had been complaints that they’d been too lax of late, and hospital officials were cracking down on security protocols, and I wondered now if the babies were fitted with tiny security devices on their wee wrists or ankles to keep someone from walking out the front door with them. Someone like me.
“But it’s just me,” I reassured her, holding up my badge, reminding her that I work here.
Except that by that time, she’d turned her back to me and was attending to an infant who’d begun to fuss; she wouldn’t let me in, and I could feel my hands begin to shake in withdrawal. There was a tightness in my chest and my head suddenly hurt. For a minute or two, I couldn’t breathe. My heart was palpitating, strong, irregular beats that left me light-headed, though neither of the nurses seemed to notice; no one noticed but me.
And then Joe was there coming to my rescue, as he appeared at the nursery to come lay claim to his baby girl.
“Joe!” I said too loudly, thrilled to see him, knowing that he was my key to that baby. Joe would get Jade out of the nursery; Joe would let me hold and coddle baby Jade as I needed to do.
He said hello to me, and what a nice surprise to see me, and at this, I felt a smile spread widely across my lips. My heartbeat slowed; the tension in my head and neck began to ease.
“Miranda called you to tell you the news?” he asked, but I said no, that I was working, that I had just come to visit the babies in the nursery when I saw baby Jade.
“Congratulations!” I said, offering an awkward embrace. Joe was not a man I knew well, and what I did know came from Miranda’s own complaints about him. How he was a jerk, a lousy father. But I couldn’t let this deter me now.
“How is Miranda?” I asked, and Joe replied as expected: Miranda was tired, Miranda wanted nothing but to sleep and already I imagined her, sore over her infant’s need to eat.
Kathy glided the rolling bassinet out the nursery door to Joe’s waiting hands, and when I made an attempt to follow, to accompany Joe to Miranda’s room where I would sit on the corner armchair with Jade in my arms as I’d once done with Carter, he said to me, “Another time, Eden? My parents are here,” meaning that they already had company, that Joe’s mother and father were here to see baby Jade.
That I wasn’t welcome in the hospital room with Joe’s mother and father because as everyone knows, three’s a crowd.
“Just for a minute?” I pleaded, staring at Joe, who looked worse for wear in that moment, tired and jaded. I could see it in his eyes: four children was too much.
I could help him.
I could take a single one off his hands.
Just one child.
“Just to offer my congratulations to Miranda and then I’ll go?” I begged—and even I could hear the desperation in my voice—but Joe shook his head, and I felt like a child then, like a five-year-old child who’d just been told no.
Joe said that he’d pass my message along to Miranda and then he turned to go without me. He walked quickly on purpose, faster than my legs could go, and I felt the dismissal a thousandfold then. I was being brushed off, given the cold shoulder as if I carried a stigma on my sleeve.
The stigma of infertility, the stigma of miscarriage, the stigma of a woman whose husband was in the process of divorcing her.
I blinked and Joe was gone, disappeared down the hall and around the corner where I couldn’t see him anymore, and immediately the headache returned, the palpitations, the sweat. The hospital walls began closing in on me as in a room nearby a lady, deep in the throes of labor, screamed, and instead of feeling sympathy for her, I felt a surge of jealousy and spite.
Oh, how I wanted to be the one screaming in the throes of labor pain! How I wanted to feel a baby inside me, wedging itself headfirst to get out. How I wanted to feel that baby press between my legs, to feel it crown as doctors and nurses gathered around telling me to push. Push!
My feet crept toward her room with instinct, setting my hand on the doorknob and turning it, opening it just a sliver so that I could see in. There was far too much happening inside the room for anyone to hear the door squeak. I stood in the doorway, inching a foot back so no one would see. A Peeping Tom. The door wasn’t open and yet it was ajar, not quite closed tight, and through the crack I saw her laid out on her back, gasping from pain. I saw her gather handfuls of blanket in her hands and squeeze, pushing to get that baby out. I heard her scream, this throaty, guttural scream, crude and uninhibited as a nurse on either side told her to push. “Push!” Her husband stroked her sweaty hair, brushing it out of her eyes. Between her legs was a shock of black and there I stared, wondering just where exactly she ended and the baby began as she pushed again, holding her breath—as I, in turn, held mine, parting my legs ever so and pushing too—bearing down, and this time, as she pushed, a baby came spilling out of her insides, covered in mucous, and the room was filled with a sudden rapturous bliss.
The door slammed shut in my face.
Someone had seen me.
I ran away, out of labor and delivery.
I was due back at my desk in just a moment. Soon the other women in billing would wonder where I had gone, and why I wasn’t yet back from lunch. They would tell our manager. I would be given a scolding.
But I couldn’t go back to billing at that moment.
I needed to get away.
I got behind the wheel of my car and I drove and drove.
I drove to the chophouse, needing to see Aaron, desperate suddenly to see him, for him to hold me in his arms, to stroke my hair and tell me everything would be all right. If I’m being honest, I was scared of the person I was, scared of the person I’d become. I was quite terrified, if Aaron didn’t put a stop to it, of what I might do. My thoughts were scattered, sown like seeds in my mind, and there was no telling which ideas would bloom, the sensible ones like going home and putting myself to bed, or the misguided ones where I return to the hospital and force myself into Joe and Miranda’s room, screaming like a lunatic, demanding that they give me their child.
I left the car parked haphazardly across parallel lines on the street outside, nearly a block from the chophouse. Parking in town was never easy to come by. I stepped from the car, my ankle giving on me as it sunk deep into a crater on the street. I shook it off, kept moving, feeling the ligaments beneath my shoes begin to ache and swell.
It had begun to rain outside, the sky darkening. The restaurants, the gift shops, the galleries that lined the street radiated light. They beamed from the inside out, while outside people scattered like roaches in daylight, hiding under canopies and slipping inside stores, seeking shelter, huddled in throngs beneath ample-size golf umbrellas, clutching one another, laughing.
But not me.
I made my way to the chophouse alone, fully intent on going inside. On speaking to Aaron. On begging him to help me, on pleading with him to take me back. I was desperate. What else could I do? The rain came pouring down, permeating my skin, so that I could feel it inside my bones. I hurried past people tucked warmly, drily beneath their umbrellas, no one offering to share. The rib of a passing umbrella poked me in the shoulder, but no apology came thereafter, as if it was my fault, as if it was my shoulder’s fault for getting in the way of this man’s umbrella.