Future Home of the Living God(59)

“Hi,” says Tia faintly. “I’m having my baby.”

“Her contractions are five minutes apart, regular.”

“My water broke,” says Tia, her hands about her stomach, eyes deep. She’s lost in sensation.

Sera kneels beside her and asks questions, professional-sounding questions. It’s a relief. She smoothes Tia’s hair back, off her forehead, and smiles. She holds Tia’s wrist reassuringly between her fingers, and says that her pulse is excellent.

“Do you know how many weeks you are?”

“Thirty . . . maybe thirty-one?”

Mom nods comfortably, but I see her smile tighten.

“Have you practiced Lamaze breathing?”

“I used to practice with Clay, before they got me.”

“We’re going to review a few things. Cedar, you can practice too.”

We huff and puff, do cleansing breaths, panting breaths, together, in a welter of pillows and sleeping bags and blankets. I get dizzy and I think that Tia hyperventilates, too, because all of a sudden we’re acting like a couple of six-year-olds. Tia sticks out her tongue and rolls back her eyes. I bare my teeth and cackle. Mom gets into it with this exaggerated “Hee, whoo” type breathing that you see in birth movies. She twists her head around, shuts her eyes. “Oh yeah, the natural high.” She gets Tia loosened up, even laughing, and it touches me to see my mom acting like this, so unlike herself, in order to take Tia’s mind off where we are.

“Should we be making this much noise?” I ask.

“Probably not,” says Sera. She mimes a big exaggerated hushy face, and Tia keeps on breathing noisily, laughing, snorting. Suddenly she quits and goes silent. Her eyes widen.

“Ow!”

She makes a ragged sound of surprise, but Sera coaxes her into a breathing pattern. For an hour, that’s how it goes. The contractions are becoming uncomfortable now, maybe painful. I can tell they’re absorbing Tia’s focus. She still talks between them, but her forehead squeezes up and her eyes swim with inwardness, stark and bewildered. Her face is so stripped and pure when she’s immersed in a contraction that I want to kiss her. I do kiss her on the crown of her head. I hold her against me and Mom crouches next to her.

“Am I going to have my baby?” she asks in a normal voice, after one particularly hard contraction. Light beads of sweat have popped out on her forehead. “Is it coming now?”

“No,” says Sera. “Not for a while. But it’s time for me to check you, see how far along you are.”

Sera takes me aside while Tia is between contractions, limp and lost. She nearly goes unconscious when her contractions let up. “I have to see about sterilizing things, and make sure we’re safe here. I have to leave for a moment, find Shawn. Are you okay with her?”

“I think so.”

“Nothing’s out of the ordinary—just she’s not to term.”

Then Sera leaves to get her bag. While she’s gone, I hold Tia’s hand. I spread her tapered fingers out and knead them, massage my energy into her palms.

“That feels good.”

Then a contraction starts and she wades into it with a hopeless bravery, deeper and deeper, until at its peak she’s all the way under. I take off her watch, strap it onto my wrist, and tell her when she’s halfway through. The stretch is tightest, the pain most intense, at thirty seconds, but after that she slowly surfaces.

“That helps.”

Four minutes apart, now, and less time for her to rest between contractions. Mom comes back with Shawn—his face is solemn with alarm. With his skinny body and flapping lambskin helmet he looks like a Minnesota Frankenstein, and I almost laugh. He’s got black industrial poured-plastic moon boots on, huge things, buckled to the knee. When he kneels next to Tia, he is incongruously gentle.

“I’m going to carry you out of here,” he says. “We’re going out back between the container stacks, to the caves. We think there’s gonna be a raid in a few hours.”

Out in back of the station, the ancient banks of the Mississippi, dry cliffs now, are riddled with empty caves left when the cliffs were mined for sand. The great banks are warrened with places that over the years have been used to store everything from Prohibition liquor to explosives to drugs. These were gangster hideouts, speakeasies, homeless people’s squats. The man who started St. Paul, Pig’s Eye Parrant, kept a tavern in one of the caves. Hermits and crazy people have made the caves their home. Children have been lost in the caves, died in the caves, and a coffee shop or two are still set into the grottolike foundation of the caves. One is a ballroom where high school proms are held. Some are wired up for heat and rented to stores—livable.

“Won’t they look there?”

“Well, maybe,” says Shawn. “But we’ve got caves behind the caves, you know? Those lead into a labyrinth of tunnels. St. Paul sits on top of a whole other world. This place, you’re sitting ducks. In the caves you’ve got little back doors, weird ways of getting in and out, belly-crawl passageways. Like the way we’re going,” he says, gathering Tia in his arms. “We’re going through the basement of a house set right against the base of the cliff.”

He tenderly adjusts her in his arms and stands. I jam your notebook in the backpack and we go. Tia’s having a contraction, breathing hard, her eyes shut, leaning against Shawn’s oil-stained blue jacket. Sera and I carry all of the bedding, plus she’s got a black roller bag that she totes behind us. It is dark now, so if we skirt the big yard spotlight we are going to be okay. It’s hard keeping my balance with the sleeping bags, the blankets, my backpack, not to mention you. I take stiff little pregnant-lady steps, anxiety-laden steps, as we move down a dim trail past the hulking bales of cans, plastic, metal containers, boxcars, vast chewing and smashing equipment, all silent and dead still. The cool is lovely. Almost really cold. We go through several openings in four layers of link fencing—you can’t see these openings until you’re right at them—and when we squeeze through and close them they are again invisible. We wind around the base of the cliff, the massive old riverbed wall, until we come to some houses and broken-down businesses and little boarded-over shops. One of them, which looks abandoned like all of the others, has a side door. Sera pulls away a padlock and opens it. Shawn looks carefully all around us before he steps into the gloom. We stand for a moment in lightless, cold quiet. Then Sera lets us through another door, handing me a little pencil of an LED flashlight. Shawn carries Tia down a set of creaky stairs. In the basement, Mom sweeps her light at a wall of shelves and cabinets. She opens one of the doors and gently pries loose the wooden backing, which reveals a whitewashed wall. It takes a while to realize that it is actually a door set into the wall, one with a latch string left out down about a foot off the floor. Sera pulls the string, which lifts a bar on the other side, and Shawn ducks in with Tia.