Mary and O'Neil by Justin Cronin
Then it is 2:00 A.M., and Mary awakens in a puddle that smells like straw, a strong contraction moving through her, and she goes to O’Neil where he has fallen asleep in front of the TV to tell him the moment is here, the baby is coming, that they have to go to the hospital, now.
O’Neil at 5:00 A.M., asleep and dreaming: a brief, unhappy dream in which he watches his parents fly over a cliff into darkness. The image plays before him like a movie on a screen, his parents moving away, and he can do nothing. He is pinned to his chair in the theater, and when he looks down he sees his wrists are tied; when he looks up, his parents are gone.
Then a new sound reaches him, distant and familiar. O’Neil thinks at first it’s a lawn mower, then that it’s the telephone, then that it is his wife, Mary, vomiting; they have been to a party, a weird and marvelous party where all the guests wore bedsheets and carried small faceless dolls, and Mary is drunk, and throwing up in the bathroom.
“Ooooooo . . . Neil.”
He opens his eyes, and at once he remembers: he has fallen asleep in the hospital, his head rocked back in a chair pulled close to Mary’s bed; he understands that he is in the hospital, and also why. Mary is on her side, facing away, and the ridges of her backbone are exposed where the sides of her gown have opened. It is O’Neil’s job to press his hands against this place when her contractions come. He has dozed only a moment.
“Jesus, O’Neil, what’s going on back there?”
O’Neil rises on his toes and leans in. The memory of his dream, of darkness and flight, flits over his consciousness, like the shadow of a bird crossing a field. Was it his parents? He and Mary? He remembers terror, and the sound of water below. His arms feel like rubber, his eyes like little balls of lead. He has been pressing Mary’s back for three hours, first in the front hallway of their house, again in the backseat of the car where it was parked in the driveway, and so on, right until this moment.
“I’m sorry,” O’Neil manages. “It’s your body. You have to tell me.”
Mary groans, her breath catching in her chest like a hiccup. “Is that what you think?”
The nurse, whose name is Rachel, brings in some extra pillows to prop up Mary’s knees. She has brown hair and a pleasant smile; on the lapel of her white jacket is a button that says, We Deliver. As she slides the pillows under Mary, she asks them if they know the sex of the baby.
They do. The baby is a girl. When Mary doesn’t answer, O’Neil tells Rachel they’re not sure.
“I think it’s better like that,” Rachel says. “You can be happy either way.”
Rachel leaves again. Outside the sun is rising, and O’Neil knows he won’t sleep again until after the baby is born. He would like to leave the room, the building even, to take a quick walk in fresh outdoor air, just once around the hospital. But he knows he can’t, that this desire is selfish and can’t even be mentioned, like the wish to buy a sports car or spend a summer in France.
Mary’s obstetrician arrives a little after seven. She is a pretty woman, very small, who always dresses nicely; this morning she is wearing a blue chalk-stripe suit under her white coat, and a pair of gray flats. O’Neil would like to call her by her first name, which is Amy, but since she’s never invited them to do it, he has always called her Dr. Sullivan.
She reaches under Mary’s gown to examine her. She feels around inside her, her eyes pointed upward and away, like someone cracking a safe. She finishes the exam and removes her gloves.
“Five centimeters.”
On the bed Mary groans. “God. That’s all?”
Doctor Sullivan lifts her tiny shoulders in a shrug. “Five is pretty good. It could be eight an hour from now.”
Mary lets her head fall back onto the pillows. “I feel like I’ve carried a piano up the stairs.”
But at ten o’clock Mary is still at five, and she is still at five at noon, when Dr. Sullivan examines her again. The baby is in a good position, she tells O’Neil, but Mary’s cervix won’t dilate. She speaks in a low voice, and uses the word stubborn. Mary has been in labor now for ten hours, fifteen if they count it from the Home Depot. Her face is damp and flushed from exertion, and golden strands of hair cling to her neck and cheeks—the long, rich hair of pregnancy. Mary’s contractions come just two minutes apart now, and between them she has little to say, to him or anyone. She seems to doze, although O’Neil knows she is actually concentrating, putting her mind in a state of readiness to ride out each contraction like a surfer paddling in front of a wave. It is a lonely feeling, he realizes, watching your wife have a baby. With each passing hour she moves farther away from him, into a place where all her strength comes from.
“I know it seems like days, but technically, it’s not all that long for a first labor,” Dr. Sullivan says. The pager clipped to her waist begins to beep, and her hand darts to her waist to shut it off. She peeks at it quickly, frowning. “Well. I have to take this.” She lifts her eyes once more to O’Neil. “Her blood pressure is fine. The baby’s in great shape. But without the epidural, as I said, this could get hard. She could run out of gas.”
All along, Mary has been saying that she wants nothing, no Demerol, no epidural, not even an aspirin. It is history she is thinking of, and O’Neil has seen the pictures: faded black-and-whites of the women of her family, a lineage of stern Germanic matriarchs who bore their children in covered wagons in the middle of blizzards on the Minnesota plain. O’Neil knows that having her baby without painkillers is part of Mary’s conversation with these women, with the past itself. But all along he has hoped that, when it came time, Mary would opt for something to make it easier.
“No epidural,” Mary says from the bed. “Are you kidding? I’ve seen that needle. It’s like something designed by the Pentagon.”
Dr. Sullivan leaves to take her page, and Mary and O’Neil are alone again. O’Neil hasn’t set foot from the room since dawn; somewhere in the late morning his body turned a corner, leaving exhaustion behind and taking him into some new state where night and day have lost their meaning and nothing else will happen until Mary has their baby. The way his body feels reminds O’Neil of the night his parents died, when O’Neil was just nineteen. They had just been up to visit him at college, and on the trip home their car missed a turn and went over an embankment. This is the memory he often returns to. O’Neil was coming back from a party, and when he opened the door to his room and saw the college chaplain there, and his roommate, Stephen, and then noticed behind them his track coach, talking in a low voice to the dormitory’s resident advisor, and their eyes, a luminous chorus of compassion, rose all at once to meet his own where he stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand, he knew something awful had happened, and also what it was; before anyone could speak, a hole appeared in O’Neil’s heart where his parents had once been. Though he has gone on to live his life, to choose a profession and marry and start a family, he is not certain he has ever left it, this pause—a gap in his life like the valley of rocks and trees where his parents’ car, upside down and wheels spinning, came at last to rest. It was three days before he slept again. This is the way he feels now—suspended, like a balloon that will neither rise nor fall—and he wonders if there are other men in the building who feel the way he does.
The doctor has suggested that Mary walk, and O’Neil helps her out of bed and into her robe. He is uncertain how much weight he should bear, and he settles for letting her take his arm, like a couple walking down the aisle. For four hours more they shuffle the short hallway of the hospital’s labor and delivery unit, from the empty operating room where cesareans are performed to the front doors and back again, pausing whenever Mary has a contraction so she can brace herself against the wall. Most of the other rooms are empty, though as they pass one door they hear a woman’s deep, throaty moans, and a man’s voice telling her to push. When they pass it the next time they hear a baby crying.
When Mary can walk no more, Dr. Sullivan examines her again. Mary’s contractions are so tightly spa
“Have you eaten anything?” Dr. Sullivan asks him.
O’Neil can’t remember. He guesses he hasn’t. He is holding Mary’s damp hand and wiping her face with a cloth he has moistened in the pitcher on the table by her bed.
“Well, you better get something if you’re going to.” Dr. Sullivan snaps off her gloves and speaks in a bright, loud voice. “Ten centimeters, Mary. I think we’re off to the races here.”
A fresh energy fills O’Neil, and he decides he can make it; there’s a candy machine in the hallway, and he asks Rachel—back for the night shift, still with her happy smile and jokey button—if she’d mind getting him something, anything, to tide him over. O’Neil telephones Mary’s parents in Minnesota from the phone on the bedside table to tell them the baby is coming. Rachel hands him a tiny cellophane tray of yellow cheese and stale Saltines while the phone is ringing in his in-laws’ house, a thousand miles away, and a burst of saliva washes down the insides of his mouth; he hadn’t realized he was so hungry. When the answering machine picks up, O’Neil decides not to leave a message, because his mouth is full of the cheese and crackers. He would rather call later to tell them that their granddaughter has been born, anyway.
In bed Mary raises her thighs with her hands and bends her chin to her chest. “Can I push now? Oh please . . . I . . . want . . . to . . . push.”
O’Neil takes her hand. “Can she?”
“I’d say you already are,” Dr. Sullivan says.
Mary in labor, dreaming of crows: she is on her knees, vomiting into the snow and corn stubble, and when she looks up she sees them—their glistening beaks and dark eyes on her, on the terrible thing she’s done. Her car idles on the side of the road behind her. At the clinic they told her she should not drive. A baby, she thinks; I am twenty-two and it was a baby.
The vision scatters; her next contraction comes, obliterating her, every memory she has ever contained. It bears down on her in a black cone, a roar enveloping her like a subway bursting from its tube into the station, only the train does not stop. It roars and roars, full speed past the platform, the air around her shuddering with the heat and weight and noise of it. A chorus of voices tells her to push, and Mary knows she is. Like a flock of birds, every atom of her body turns and points itself toward pushing, but the place where force must be applied is deep within her, a point of light that moves whenever she looks at it. If she can find it, she knows, the light will become a face, her daughter’s face, and the baby will be born.
How much time has passed, she does not know. Behind the drapes the sun has set, but Mary cannot remember if it is the first evening of her labor, or the second, or even, impossibly, the third. She has been doing this forever, trying to push the baby out. Another contraction comes, and she counts the cars as they blow past—twenty, thirty, forty. O’Neil is telling her to push, and she wishes she could do something for him, tell him not to be afraid. Between the contractions it is like dreaming, what she feels; her body seems scattered and broken, pieces of a puzzle spread across the floor, each one a different picture of something that has happened to her: waiting in the rain for someone to pick her up after a dance at school; O’Neil diving into a lake, his arms and legs flailing as he laughs and then is swallowed by the water; the crows and the corn stubble and their glistening gaze upon her. It is only a moment, this oasis of the past. She opens her eyes then and sees O’Neil, his glasses fogging, and beyond him the silver edge of the portable steel lights that have been brought into the room so the doctors and nurses can see the baby coming; she hears her own voice, howling, almost hooting, and knows that it is O’Neil’s hand she feels in her own, and that soon she will return to him. She closes her eyes again, letting the contraction take her: Louise, she thinks, Louise. She named her, the first one she did not, could not have, ten years ago, when she was twenty-two; in her heart she had given her the name Louise, there in the wintry field where she knelt with the crows’ eyes on her, telling Mary what she had done and what it meant, and that nothing—not even the pain she feels now—would take this burden from her. Louise, she thinks again. Then: Nora. Nora. A voice, O’Neil’s voice, tells her the baby’s head is crowning, and that her hair is blond, like Mary’s. The roar swallows her again, for what Mary knows is the last time. It is a train, a comet, the moon set loose and sailing down to her, taking her over, and at once it becomes the light that she has worked to find. Her body wraps around it, this light that is first two faces and then just one, a great calm fills her, and Mary pushes the baby out, safe and well: alive.
It is after eleven by the time Mary and the baby are settled down in their new room, where a cot has been wheeled in for O’Neil to spend the night with them. Their little girl is small, just six and a half pounds, and wearing a diaper and T-shirt that looks to O’Neil as tiny as doll clothes. Propped up in bed with Nora in her arms, Mary opens her robe and guides her to her breast; the baby latches on at once, her pink mouth pulling at Mary’s flesh in a languid rhythm that seems to O’Neil a pure force of nature. He strokes Mary’s hair, then gives one finger to Nora, who wraps her fingers around it and squeezes. She tugs at it to match the cadence of her mouth. O’Neil feels his knees buckle. “Wow,” he says.
When Rachel comes to change the baby’s diaper, O’Neil leaves the two of them in the room and takes the elevator down to the ground floor to find something to eat. But the truth is, he’s too tired to eat, or even sleep. What he wants is a moment alone with the idea of the day and what has happened: that he has watched his wife have a baby, and that her name is Nora. He wouldn’t mind standing a minute outside, someplace quiet and ordinary, even if it means standing by the Dumpsters. He passes the cafeteria, which is closed, and beyond it a room with vending machines, and a small lounge where someone in a white coat, a doctor or nurse, is lying on a sofa reading a People magazine in the dark. Then someone comes through a door O’Neil hadn’t noticed, and he realizes he has found what he is looking for.
The door opens onto a little portico, with a wheelchair ramp leading down to the lawn and a large ashtray full of butts. More cigarettes are scattered on the ground. O’Neil looks around, and sees that he is at the back of the hospital. It would be the right time, he thinks, to smoke, but he doesn’t; he wishes he did. There is a stretch of grass beyond the portico, and what looks like a garden with beds of flowers and a bench. The moon has risen, and everything is very still.
In the little room of vending machines O’Neil finds a pay phone and calls his in-laws in Minneapolis, who use the other telephone line in the house to make travel arrangements while O’Neil is still talking with them, giving them all the news, and by the time the call is over they have booked a plane to Philadelphia, arriving the next evening. As he hangs up he realizes that he is woozy with hunger; he buys a peanut butter sandwich from one of the vending machines and puts it away in four bites, washing it down with a pint of milk as he sits at a Formica table in the empty room. My wife and daughter are asleep upstairs, he thinks, and then he says it: “My wife and daughter are asleep upstairs.” O’Neil rises again and returns to the pay phone. His parents have been dead for sixteen years, but he still remembers their telephone number, and without thinking he dials it, surprised to be doing it, and by the way it feels and sounds: a sequence of bright tones that resonates inside him like an echo on a canyon wall, as strange and familiar as his own heartbeat. O’Neil intends to listen to the phone ring a couple of times and then hang up, but then there is a click on the line.
“Hello?” It is a woman’s voice, groggy with sleep. “Honey?”
“I’m sorry,” O’Neil says. He thinks at first she is an older woman, then that she is young, then neither; old or young, he doesn’t know. “I didn’t mean—”
For a moment O’Neil does not answer. The phone is slick in his damp hand. “It’s late,” he says finally. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you.”
The woman’s breathing in the receiver is deep and even, like sighing, and O’Neil thinks she may have fallen back asleep.
“Mmmm. I was having the strangest dream. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” O’Neil says. He hesitates, then speaks again. “I think everything’s working out just the way I wanted it.”
“That’s nice to hear. It’s nice when everything works out like that.” The receiver rustles against her face as she pulls the covers close. “Honey? You sound . . . I don’t know. Far away.”
“I’m really okay,” O’Neil says. “A little tired. It’s been quite a day. I have some news too.”
“I know,” the woman says sleepily. “You love me.”
The answer is easy to give. “I do. Of course I do.”
“I wish you were here, honey. Let everybody else handle things for a while. Can you? Just come home.”
“I will,” O’Neil says. “As soon as everything’s taken care of here, I’ll come straight home.”