The Nest(96)
Stephanie had been having prelabor contractions for weeks, but she was five days past her due date and still didn’t have a baby. She’d stopped going into her office, preferring to spend a few desultory hours at the computer before taking a long afternoon nap. She was bored. She was ready. She was beyond ready. Downstairs, Tommy was hammering. She still couldn’t believe the change that had come over him once he got that ridiculous artifact out of his apartment. The day Tommy collapsed on the stoop, EMS declared him fine. Exhausted and dehydrated, but fine. When they finally got him inside and she saw the statue, she’d nearly fainted herself. She knew all about the theft at ground zero because one of her clients had written an entire book about the recovery efforts downtown and was currently covering the rebuilding of the new Freedom Tower.
Logistics of statue moving aside, the transfer was absurdly simple. Stephanie asked her old friend Will to help, knowing she could trust him to protect Tommy. A rented truck, a late-night drop-off at a collection spot that had been set up for anyone wanting to donate 9/11 artifacts. Ever since the statue had been returned to its rightful place, Tommy had taken to his living quarters with a new zeal, renovating the entire garden level himself. It was going to be beautiful.
Five days late. Stephanie had taken her nap, refolded the baby blankets in the spanking new crib in the pretty new nursery. The July heat was blistering and the afternoons were too miserable to do anything but sit in her air-conditioned living room, watch reality TV, and saunter down the block for an overpriced gelato before dinner. Standing in front of a neighboring stoop, listlessly rummaging through a pile of books left out for the taking, she felt a little pop, like a balloon bursting quietly and deep inside. And then the telltale gush between her legs, followed by a long, throbbing ache, longer and heavier than the small precontractions she’d been having. She leaned against a neighbor’s stone balustrade with one hand and took a deep breath. She felt the sweat trickle down the back of her neck, between her tender breasts. She closed her eyes and the sun beat down on her face and shoulder and arms, the peach gelato in her other hand dripping down her palm and wrist. She wanted to remember this moment. She looked at the wet spot on the pavement and thought: This is before. The trickle down her inner thighs, the swelling ache at her back, they were ushering her to a completely different place, to after. She was ready.
As she stood, mesmerized by her amniotic fluid meandering down the slope of the bluestone sidewalk (the first and last moment, as it would happen, that she had the luxury of observing the process with any aplomb), the first contraction hit and was so sustained it took her breath away, doubled her over, and she was stunned to hear herself audibly groan.
Okay, she thought, I guess this is going to be f*cking intense.
As the pain receded and she tried to catch her breath and move toward her house, another contraction, right on the heels of the first and this one—she didn’t even know how it was possible that she registered it but she did—a little stronger and longer than the first.
As the second contraction subsided, she stood and waited. Nothing. She took the phone out of her pocket and hit the stopwatch function so she could time the intervals between contractions. Everything was happening too fast. Gingerly, she started to walk and when she was directly in front of Tommy’s living room windows, the third contraction. She grabbed onto the wrought-iron railing with both hands and the sound that came out of her was so primal and involuntary that she scared herself; she felt as if she were being torn in two.
Tommy loved telling this part of the story, how he heard her before he saw her. “Three kids,” he’d say. “I knew that sound. Oh, boy, did I know that sound.” He ran out the front door and managed to get Stephanie up the stairs and through the front door (contractions four and five). He tried to settle her on the floor (contraction six).
“Not on the rug!” she’d screamed at him. He’d run upstairs to grab some sheets out of the linen closet and a blanket to wrap the baby because it was evident that there would be no time to get to the hospital. A pair of scissors from the bathroom. Peroxide? Why not. He started toward her bedroom thinking he could use a few pillows when he heard her bellowing.
Downstairs, Stephanie was just trying to control her breathing. Shit! Why hadn’t she paid more attention to the breathing? Practiced? She couldn’t manage her breathing, couldn’t get ahead of the pain. She sat on the living room floor, pulled out her phone, and after a brief, unsettling conversation with her doctor during which she had two contractions and the doctor said, “I’m hanging up and sending an ambulance,” and before she could even check the time again—and she knew this was very wrong, way too soon—she had to push.
“Tommy?” she wailed up to him. Where was he? “I have to push.”
“No, no, no,” he yelled down to her. “No pushing. Absolutely no pushing.”
But telling her not to push was like telling her not to breathe. Her body was pushing, her body wouldn’t not push. She reached up from the floor and pulled a cashmere blanket off the back of the sofa. She could hear sirens, but it was too soon for her ambulance and she knew she wasn’t going anywhere. She tried to remember if she’d learned anything about what to do once the baby was out. Would she have to cut the cord? Oh, God. The afterbirth? What the f*ck was she going to do! The contractions were seamless; a constant tsunami of pressure, there was no break, no moment when she didn’t feel like every internal organ was trying to exit her body in one concerted rush. She pulled up her maternity skirt, managed to work her underpants off, and place the cashmere blanket next to her on the floor.