Perfect Little World(35)
Mr. Tannehill shook his head and said, “I’ll just stay in the waiting room, if that’s okay. Unless you want me there, Izzy?”
Izzy did want him there, or, rather, wanted someone in the room with her, but she could not imagine the embarrassment of his presence when her private parts were exposed. “I’ll be okay,” she said, and tried to smile, but it was difficult since she was grinding her teeth so hard.
“You’ll be okay,” he said to her, and he squeezed her shoulders. The nurse led her to a room and helped her get into her robe. “That baby is coming, isn’t it?” the nurse asked, and Izzy could only nod. “I’m a little scared,” she admitted.
“Let’s get you comfortable and you’ll be less scared, I promise. The doctor has been alerted and she’ll be here soon.”
“She? My doctor is Dr. Kirwin.”
“He’s not on duty tonight. Dr. Starling is. She’s very good, very capable. You’ll love her.”
It was a strange relief that, in her most vulnerable moment, Dr. Kirwin would not be present, that she might have this baby without a single comment about her hospitable womb or questions about her work toward finding a new boyfriend. She lay back on the bed and let the pain run through her, so intense that she felt it in her hair, in her toenails, in her rapidly beating heart. And then, good lord, all the pain was in her back and she grabbed on to the sheets underneath her and she wished that she had two tongues in her mouth so that she could go ahead and bite one of them off.
She wished Hal were still alive, if only for him to be present in this moment. She wanted to be on a team, to be a part of something, so that she could say, “I’m scared,” or “This hurts,” and someone who loved her would reply, “I’m scared, too,” or “It will be over soon.” She wished it wasn’t so, but all she felt when she pictured him, sheepishly handsome and promising her all manner of good things, was disappointment and anger. There was no room left over for grieving. He was gone and she could not bring him back and, even if she could, he probably wouldn’t have been in this room anyway. She got out her cell phone and sent a text message to Dr. Kwon that read having baby, the best she could do under the circumstances. She wondered when Dr. Kwon would see the message, if everyone in the complex was fast asleep with their children already in their arms. Or their children in someone else’s arms; she imagined a huge heap of bodies, with Dr. Grind at the bottom, all of them holding on to each other like a hurricane was coming. And then another contraction hit her in the spine and she cried out a little and a nurse helped her stand so that she could try to evenly distribute the pain. “Baby, baby, baby, baby,” she wheezed, the easiest mantra, and the nurse, who had a heavy Eastern European accent, said, “Not much longer now, darling.”
The doctor finally showed up, the tiniest woman Izzy had ever seen pass for an adult. She was dressed in workout clothes, her eyebrows perpetually raised as if she didn’t know whether Izzy was aware of the fact that she was having a baby. Dr. Starling put on a pair of gloves and Izzy allowed herself to be examined and, a few seconds later, the doctor poked her head back up and said, “This baby is almost here, okay? You are very lucky. This is going to be so easy.”
“It does not feel easy at all,” Izzy said, and the doctor raised her eyebrows again, smiled, and said, “Easier than it could have been.”
A few more nurses came into the room and Izzy sucked on ice chips and let the pain wreck her and, though she could not have explained it, it felt like the contractions were turning into a bright light inside her. She would see her baby soon and she was not afraid. Two of the greatest things in the world would coincide, the discomfort would stop and her baby would be born. The doctor touched her thigh and paused and then told her to push, which she did, though it felt like nothing was happening. “Push,” the doctor said again, and Izzy shouted, “I’m trying,” and the Eastern European nurse was helping Izzy hold her legs in the right position and the doctor again said, “Push,” and Izzy did, two, three more times, though it all seemed futile and stupid and yet so necessary. She kept pushing and then not pushing and then pushing again, her body finally not her body, and then, a miracle, if they existed, every sound in the room became inaudible and everything in the room became a flare of light, and then, in the silence and whiteness, she heard the sound of her baby crying, the most ragged and paper-thin sound she had ever heard, a sound that was connected by an invisible wire to all of the receptors in her body.
She was exhausted and her teeth were chattering, and Dr. Starling put the baby on Izzy’s chest and she and the baby instinctively reached for each other and that was it. There was nothing that would ever be as important as this, Izzy was certain. She had made something and now it was hers and no one could ever tell her otherwise. She was not alone in the world. She had been so lonely, she understood now, and never would she be again. She held on to her baby and the baby held on to her, this wild, purple animal that she had made. “I did it,” Izzy said to Dr. Starling, pitched somewhere between a question and a statement, and the doctor merely nodded. “A beautiful and healthy baby boy, Isabel,” the nurse said to her. Izzy smiled and lay back against the bed and felt her body, so much stronger than she ever gave it credit for being, repair itself in preparation for whatever came next.
Izzy had trouble remembering the next day in the hospital; time became connected only to the baby’s actions. Occasionally, someone would enter the room to check on her, the nurses, Dr. Starling, a lactation consultant, a woman going over Izzy’s payment plan, a parade of people who affirmed that Izzy was a mother and this boy, swaddled so tightly, was hers. Izzy received a phone call from Dr. Kwon, who said that everyone was so happy and that Dr. Grind himself was on his way to see her. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she would come to the complex, and so Izzy saw her time in her little room, so clean and quiet and filled with reassuring medical equipment, as a kind of halfway house between her old life and her new one. She wanted to stay in this space for as long as possible, safe and protected from whatever lay outside those walls.