Page 86 of Night Songs

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

“I took a test.”

“What did it say?”

“We haven’t looked yet.” I nodded toward the test balanced on the rim of the sink.

He walked furtively over and peered into the little window. His back was turned to me, so I couldn’t see his face.

“Well?”

He turned around, and his eyes were wet. I lunged across the bathroom and snatched the stick. In the window, there were two lines.Two miraculous lines.

Phoebe grabbed it from my hand and shrieked, but I still couldn’t feel anything. My body wouldn’t let me be disappointed one more time; this must be some sort of trick.

“I’m going to be a dad…” Micah said dreamily, and I grabbed his wrist.

“No. Stop.” As if Hess read my mind, she pulled the rest of the boxes from beneath the sink and handed them to me. I unpackaged every test so that they formed a fan in my hand and squatted over the toilet. “Just wait asecond.” I searched for some secret reserve of pee deep inside my body and squeezed it out onto the sticks.

This time, the minutes passed quickly. When Micah’s phone went off, he and Phoebe eagerly checked them.

He came over to me with the tears collecting in the rims of his eyes, and put his arms around me. “They’re all positive.” He squeezed me hard. “You did it. We’re having a baby.”

Something gave way inside me, and all of the feeling I’d been suppressing for the last few years rushed forward in a dizzying flood. I wept into his shoulder, and I felt Hess and the girls come around my back and wrap their arms, so that I was encircled on both sides. I should have hated it, but for some reason it didn’t feel suffocating.

My body was a place of love. And someone, or for now,something, had decided to stay.

29lulabelle

1977

SIX YEARS LEFT

I was listening to Linda Martell’s “Color Him Father” on the record player when my contractions started. That first pain rolled through, and I thought,Here we go.

I didn’t say anything to Hess at first. She’d never seen a baby get born, so I knew she’d be flying off the handle and rushing us out the door. But I’d seen plenty of births, and it took hours. I wanted to spend as little time at the hospital as possible.

I’d wanted to give birth at the house, but Hess had insisted on a hospital, and she’d eventually worn me down. She’d heard horror stories from friends about complications that only a doctor could fix. Even though I’d left the holler behind, I’d imagined myself giving birth at home with the old granny witch catching it. I’d watched her put her hands on my aunt and sense the geological shifts happening inside, responding in kind. She treated women with animal tenderness. I couldn’t imagine anything better than that.

I switched the player to an album by a band called the Runaways that Martha had given me. The guitar chopped rhythmically through the air, and the pain pulsed with it. The women screamed from the speaker, andmy body screamed with them. I rode the waves from song to song, willing myself to hold on.

When the contractions got so quick and intense that I was having a hard time breathing, I hollered for Hess. She took one look at me and knew what I’d done, but she hid her anger as she helped me into the Gran Torino.

I made it to the hospital intact. The nurses did not share our sense of urgency. I wanted to scream as they casually found my chart, put me in a wheelchair, and rolled me into the delivery room. It was cold and smelled like a factory floor. I felt like I was about to be plucked and stripped.

A nurse came into the room and checked me out, then left without a word. No one would tell us anything. I’d decided to have him without drugs because of my past, but the nurse kept pushing them on me anyway.Are you sure? Do you understand the pain in store?As if I was a child who couldn’t make decisions for herself. I knew pain. I knew it better than she could comprehend.

Sometime later, as the pain took over, I thought back to her words and wondered if I’d let my own pride get the better of me.

It was truly remarkable.

The waves of pain crested higher and higher, while the relief in between got shorter. The nurse kept telling me to breathe, but how the hell was I supposed to breathe through something like that? I kept getting out of bed, looking for some way to escape the pain. But the nurse kept forcing me back down, making me lie still like a child at nap time. Hess was there for every moment, humming some new melody in my ear, and I clung to it like a raft.

When it was time to push, I felt something leave me, and I looked woozily over at my hand hanging there alone with the gold wedding band digging into my bloated finger. It was Hess’s idea to tell people I’d been married to Tate; that way the doctors and nurses would treat me well, and the new baby wouldn’t be shunned for being a bastard.

My head swiveled to the other side of the room, where they were trying to force Hess out the door. A panic rose at the thought of not having herthere. I just knew I’d fade away and the baby would fade with me if she left. I tried to cry out in objection, but the pain strangled the sound from my throat. It came out as an animal grunt.

Hess said something to the nurse I couldn’t make out, and the nurse’s face drained of color. She backed away from Hess and came back over to me with her rubber gloves, ready to assist the doctor.