Future Home of the Living God(58)

You decided to exist. I don’t really figure into your decision. Life is all for life. All for selfish continuance. And the two objects sit, one ripening, upon a tabletop that stretches into the shadows.

*

Tia wakes up and rubs her hands across her face. She is, of course, accustomed to watching me write in this book, and so she doesn’t ask what I am doing, she snuggles back down and dozes as I scratch on. The ceiling is high and the air is very cold. I’ve cut the fingers from a pair of mismatched, cheaply knitted, scavenged gloves, like Shawn, so that I can hold this pen. I’m afraid we won’t get out. Afraid that the night is not deep enough to hide us. We may run endlessly, even after you are born. And I am afraid that my mom’s absence means that something out there is going wrong.

All of a sudden, Tia says, “Hey, I’m bleeding.”

But it’s not blood, or there’s not much blood. It’s clear—maybe amniotic fluid, I think.

“I’m going out, to get my mom,” I tell Tia. “Don’t worry. She knows what to do.”

I give Tia a stack of paper towels, settle her into my sleeping bag, and hang hers off a hook in the wall. Tia’s face is a bloodless white, a gray color, and between her eyebrows a crease suddenly forms. Her forehead is scored with a knifelike shadow. She seems smaller, and I see with chilling clarity that the huge baby will not make it out of her. It’s trapped, a sailing ship in a bottle. She will have to break. This stuns me—I can’t catch my breath as in equal fear you jam yourself high in my rib cage, just under my heart, shouldering my lungs aside.

“Go, go, then,” cries Tia, her face crumpling.

I move, fast as I dare. The floor is slippery with torn wet newspaper. I edge through the door into the gray and green industrial hallway. From there, I slip along the rubber treads set in the painted cement, to the windowed door that leads into the big garage. Through the smeared yellow pane I see my mom. She is dressed in coveralls, and she’s talking to someone I haven’t seen yet. He could be dangerous. She could be heading him off, feeding him a story, explaining us away. I should wait, and I do try. Her focused stillness as she listens to the man tells me that she’s playing a part, acting out the role of a listener. She is never this nonparticipatory, this quiet, in a real human interaction. But I need to get her attention. So I walk down the hall a bit farther, try one door, which is locked, and then the next, which opens into an office. An office that juts into the garage, with a window, which is how I succeed finally in attracting Sera’s attention. I wave my arms like semaphores through the window until I’m pretty sure she sees me. I point. I leave. Surely she will get the message and she’ll follow me back to the storage room, to find out why I’m panicked.

Back in our hiding place, Tia is a little better, breathing carefully and curled up with an old fake fur pillow—gray shearling, matted and gnarled.

“That’s really dirty,” I say, upset because she’s usually so fastidious.

“Don’t take it away,” says Tia.

Uh-oh, I think.

“I’m feeling something. I think I am feeling a twinge. A squeezing sort of feeling.” She puts the pillow aside and her baby juts between us. “Here.” Tia takes my hands and puts them on the base of her stomach where the bands of muscle tighten as she speaks, and she says, “See?”

“Yeah, but maybe,” I say, “they are those Braxton Hicks contractions that don’t mean you’re going into labor yet.”

Still, if she doesn’t, I know that there’s a risk of infection after the baby’s waters break. I hold her wrist and take a look at her watch, timing her next contraction, and the interval between that one and the next, and so on. They’re quite mild, she says, no pain. But they are only five minutes apart. And as four of them go by they seem too unmistakably regular and synchronized to be anything but labor. Still, she is in no pain. And now I hope that Tia is one of those phenomenons, women you hear about, even before getting pregnant, women who barely have time to lie down on the kitchen floor, the women who have their babies in the backs of taxicabs, the women who don’t feel any pain, either, or just a little, the women whose babies practically fall out of their bodies. We all long to be these women.

“There’s another one,” says Tia, and she looks even better, now, like she’s amazed, happy, pleased with herself. “Is that good?”

I’m pretty sure that the onset of contractions has also released some sort of natural opiate in her brain, the chemical that mercifully dulls fear, inflates courage, and makes us eager above all else to see our babies.

Only Tia isn’t all that much farther along than I am, and we have no way of knowing, since they wouldn’t tell us what they saw on the ultrasound, if her baby is ready to survive yet all on its own. So I don’t know which to hope for—that she have the baby, or not go into labor—not that my hoping makes a difference, after all. I’m also hearing that noise as she fell to the roof. I wonder how hard she landed, but don’t want to remind her. The only thing I can do is sit with her and time her contractions, which stay at exactly five minutes apart for half an hour of awful mental strain—I’m desperate for Sera to come and tell me what to do. Finally, she knocks. I jump up, run to the door, and push the dead bolt back. Sera puts her arms around me.

“For godsakes, don’t ever go out again,” she says. “That was a regional manager who may or may not be ready to spill the whole thing. We don’t know how much he knows or what his opinions are, politically speaking. He could be ready to report us all. Or he could be . . . What’s going on?”