The Book Eaters(26)
ACT 2
MIDNIGHT
8
GIFTS FOR THE CHRIST CHILD
TEN YEARS AGO
In the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the dead of night, under the feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe, a girl came into the darkness with a wail.
—George MacDonald, The History of Photogen and Nycteris
Devon thought she must be dying. Every contraction brought worse agony and she didn’t understand how this could possibly go on and on, yet it did.
A handful of Winterfield women flitted around as she screamed into her pillows from pain, then cried from the shame of screaming. Writhing and moaning was for weak women—wasn’t it? Not strong, young, six-foot-tall book eater brides. Birth was supposed to be her whole raison d’être, after all.
Six hours into labor and Luton came by, barking disgruntled orders for someone to “give that girl something before she makes us deaf.”
“She can’t help it,” Gailey said, hand on Devon’s head. “The infant is back-to-back.”
“What?” Devon gasped.
“What?” Luton echoed. “Do we need external intervention? Surgery, or ah…”
“It’s not a problem,” Gailey assured him. “Just a long and painful labor.”
That sounded like an enormous fucking problem to Devon, but she didn’t have enough air left over to complain.
Luton did, however. “Long? You mean this will be hours? Then give her a sodding injection, for God’s sakes! If I have to sit through another minute of this howling I will lose my bloody sanity. It’s supposed to be Christmas Eve, I want some peace.”
The women objected with hissing, angry statements she couldn’t hear. Pain was part of book eater tradition; trauma made it more difficult for mother and child to bond, which in turn made it easier for mother and child to be separated.
But Luton’s will won out, as did his desire for a quiet Christmas Eve. A pinprick Devon barely even felt, stabbing into her thigh. He watched with narrowed eyes and fingers in his ears, this man who was supposedly her husband. She resented him for treating her with such indifference, and also simultaneously wanted to collapse at his feet to sob with gratitude.
Sleepiness took hold as the diamorphine kicked in. Pain still prevailed but more distantly, the echo of something she hated instead of agony she was immersed in.
“It’ll wear off.” Gailey seemed to be speaking from the other end of a very long, echoing tunnel.
“Then give it to her again when it does. Some of us have work to do!” He left with footsteps that seemed to reverberate. His voice had an echo, too. Everything was humming. Devon felt like a quivering string.
The rest of the birth slipped through gaps in her memory. She could index her brain for any sentence in every book she’d ever eaten, but thinking back on those remaining hours summoned up only fragments of sensation and flashes of garbled conversation. The diamorphine made her sick to her stomach; it also seemed to swallow the minutes, skipping erratically through the hours.
Without warning, the pain ceased abruptly. No more contractions, no more pushing. She gazed at the ceiling above her bed, stunned to be alive and seething with betrayal because fairy tales had never described birth. Women buzzed around her, talking about cords and cutting and the baby—
The baby. She struggled to sit up. “Let me see him!”
“Not a him,” said Gailey, and passed her the child. “You have a healthy little girl, my lovely.”
“A … girl?”
“Merry Christmas, love. Your own little Christ child.”
And Devon reached out with sweat-slick arms.
She stared, awestruck, at the writhing form with a red, crumpled face. The tiny fists and swollen cheeks.
Nothing externally had changed. The galaxy still spun in vast unknowing indifference, and the uncaring world still flowed past beyond the confines of her bedroom. But here in that moment, the axes of Devon’s personal universe tilted and she was left teetering, off-balance to the core of her being.
The baby wailed, sounding like a stepped-on frog.
“She’ll be hungry. You should nurse, my lovely. Be good for you both.” Gailey came over, helping Devon sit up straight, to undo her top and position the scrabbling infant while the aunts gasped and fluttered. A girl! A girl! Such incredibly good fortune!
Silence fell as the tiny thing latched, eyes drifting closed. Stillness pooled like blood and still Devon sat, stunned and terrified to move in case her universe tilted again. The aunts were already cleaning up: wiping blood off her legs, changing the sheets around her as best they could. Someone carried the placenta away.
“Your milk will be black, when it comes in,” Gailey said. “Don’t be alarmed by that. All perfectly normal.”
Devon just nodded, too overwhelmed to speak. Perfectly normal? How could anything be normal ever again? Her life had been a series of twisted fairy tales in which she had imagined herself the princess, but this, here, living and breathing and snuffling in her arms, had more truth than all of her swallowed stories combined.
She was her daughter’s whole world, a realization both humbling and empowering. Devon had never been anybody’s world before—had never been anything at all, in fact, except the sum of paper flesh she’d consumed without thought.