Castle of Water: A Novel(69)
The word left his mouth and seemed to hover above, a zephyr of uncertain promise.
“Twins.”
Sophie straining with a shrieking intensity, his own hands shaking at a violent pitch, Barry helped usher their second daughter into the world. She greeted it with a flurry of tiny kicks and a feisty little cry. It was the first human voice—besides their own, of course—that the two of them had heard in person in three long years.
“Let me hold her,” Sophie pleaded, sitting upright, her face flushed with motherhood and tears. Barry severed the second cord with a careful flick of the knife, kissed the mucus-coated baby on the top of her head, and lowered her into her mother’s arms.
“You did it, Sophie. She’s beautiful.”
“Ma petite Persinette,” Sophie whispered into her daughter’s ear. “Ma petite chérie.”
The two new parents shared a knowing glance, one of infinite caring and boundless love, and then Barry noticed that his knees, upon which he had been balancing for most of the delivery, suddenly felt sticky and wet. He looked down and his heart dropped.
Flowing between them was a river of blood.
46
In the world that Barry and Sophie had left behind with that first dip of their Cessna, postpartum hemorrhage was a relatively common and treatable condition. But on the island that had sheltered them since the plane hit the water, there was simply no way to repair that which had ruptured. Whereas a quick dose of oxytocin spiked with a dash of methylergometrine would have been promptly administered in any delivery room in New York or Paris—resolving the bleeding in just a few minutes—all Barry could do was pray and hold on tight as he made futile attempts with the first-aid kit gauze to stop the unstoppable flow of deep red blood. And as for Sophie, all she could do was weep, hold her living daughter to her breast, and beg for the life that was slipping steadily out of her. It was clear that something had gone terribly wrong and that something desperately needed to be done. But there was nothing to be done, and both of them knew it. For Sophie, the sensation of helplessness was a familiar one, nearly identical to that which she had experienced when the life of étienne had ebbed out in her arms. For Barry, however, it was horrifically novel, and that unique form of helplessness was … well, there are no words for that sort of thing. If there was mercy in any of it, it was in the fact that it was over quickly. Barry managed to tell Sophie that he loved her a final time before she lost consciousness; she was unable to respond, but she seemed to acknowledge it with a final tight squeeze of his hand. After that, there was a minute of shudders and rasping breaths, followed by a single bursting gasp of sentience—her eyes shot open, looked imploringly at Barry, begging for the salvation that was not there to give. And then her brown irises drifted upward, higher than the palms that bowed above them, higher even than the peaks of the Pyrenees in the Cirque de Gavarnie.
And then she was gone. Sophie Caroline Ducel, daughter and mother, age thirty-two, quietly ceased to be.
The need to scream welled within Barry—only his new sense of fatherhood prevented him from doing so. He didn’t want the first sound on his newborn daughter’s ears to be one of anguish. Instead he bit his own bicep, hard enough to bleed, teeth cutting through skin and down into muscle. He let the tears pour hot down his face, but he somehow held the sobs and despair captive, deep and congealed in the pit of his chest. Sophie’s arm was still around their living daughter, suckling quietly at her still-warm breast. Barry lay beside them both, his body racked with the agony of the moment, and allowed the child to drink her fill—he did not know if there would be another meal. When she was finished, he wrapped her in the freshly cleaned remains of his threadbare dress shirt, rocked her gently to sleep in his trembling arms, and set her to rest, so he could bury her mother and her sister.
47
The love of his life buried beneath the palm tree where they first had kissed, his living daughter now sleeping in the coconut-wood cradle, Barry at last found himself alone on the beach, expelling the sobs he had stored for so long. Keening of the sort one hears only once or twice in a lifetime. The splitting heartache, the indescribable sorrow, the crushing guilt of being unable to save her—those would stay with him for quite some time. A lifetime, in fact. But the gagging, chest-rattling sobs came pouring out, until at last, depleted, he had nothing left to give, and in the void, his thoughts regained some semblance of clarity. The reality of the situation, and the responsibilities of a father, began to take hold. His vision may have bordered on legal blindness, but his options were clear.
Two paths, white and shimmering as a summer day in Macoupin County, appeared before Barry. Amid his immense terror, depthless loss, and visceral sadness, a choice took shape. Suddenly his life was a fork in the road, a binary system both horrific and beautiful in its simplicity. One path was as follows: He could close his eyes, cease his struggle, and let his body go limp. He could stay on the island and watch with horribly compromised vision his child—their daughter—wail in pain and waste away without breast milk or formula, and then finally cease to breathe altogether. He could linger on, slowly succumbing himself to starvation or madness, until the day came when he no longer had the energy or will to rise from his sweat-stained pallet and face the growling incertitude of the day. At which point he, too, would give up the ghost.
Or he could gather up his child, stock the canoe, and paddle like a motherf*cker.