Eleven Hours (5 page)

The pregnancy has made her mean, made her small, Franckline thinks. On the subway and in the streets, she looks away from pregnant women—seven, eight, nine months along—so as not to poison them with her envy. The women who come into the labor ward are different; they are in their time of need; they are her charges, her children. But outside, she poisons the air with her resentment. When the subway train lurches forward, bringing her out of her post-work doze, she thinks for a moment that she felt the child move inside her, but of course it's way too early for that. Surely Bernard must guess—her diminished appetite, her reticence in bed. It is not right that she has not told him. The man was fashioned to be a father. Infants fall instantly asleep on his shoulder, older children run to him with a ball or jump rope, knowing he will agree to play. He has prospects at work and will provide more and more for the household as he advances. But what is the point of more money if they do not have a family? What then had they come here for?

Dr. Roper told her, “Beautiful—a beautiful, normal baby, Franckline.” That was only days ago. But now the stabbing pain near the ovaries, shooting into the womb.

When they return to the birthing room, Franckline tells Lore she must go to the restroom, she will be right back. “Going to use the restroom,” she repeats to Marina, who gestures to Carol to replace her in room 7. Franckline uses the bathroom farthest from the nurses' station, because if she finds what she fears, she may cry out. She closes the stall door and pulls down her scrubs, her underpants. She already pictures the star-shaped print of blood on the cotton panel. But there is nothing there. She sits, panting, on the toilet, releases a trickle of urine that makes her feel she has gotten rid of some bad news. Her stomach unclenches. But this is just one moment of reassurance, and there are so many more minutes—hundreds of thousands of minutes—to get through before the baby can be born. May 31—that is the date, if the baby lives. Franckline stands, flushes the toilet, washes her hands at the sink.

The baby that never cried, that raised its fist to the sky—it scraped her out, made her womb unfit to carry any more children. That baby that was fashioned so easily, out of the one time she let Maarten stay inside her. He had insisted that pulling out reduced his seed, would shrivel him over time like a curse from Ki Titha. She was only sixteen but she knew better. She heard a great deal from the laboring women she helped along. And nearly everyone knew that if the man didn't pull out you might get
SIDA
. But she let him stay that one time. Fatigue from fighting him, maybe. Maybe the sense of loneliness when the man's body withdrew so quickly, and you felt the cold between your legs and the abrupt sense of separateness again.

She was lucky her mother and father did not beat her or force her to become Maarten's woman when she swelled up with his child. Most daughters would have suffered that. Maarten, with his unblemished skin, his slim hips, his pretty singing voice. She hadn't been fooled for a moment by his talk of love, of promising to care for her always; she knew he had other girls. But she was curious about pleasure and he gave it to her. Her parents did not force her to tie herself to this light-minded, unreliable, delicious boy. They disliked his family—Franckline's father knew something against Maarten's father that he would never articulate—and were content to bury the association. But the kindness and gentleness that had always been in her mother cooled and evaporated, and Franckline became like a guest politely tolerated in her own home. Her mother went through the dutiful motions of serving food to Franckline's plate, of reminding her to say her evening prayers. But her soft, murmuring patter dried up near Franckline. Her every gesture expressed shame that her daughter could not control her body, could not stay pious and clean. And Franckline's shame at her mother's shame spread deep into her bones, settled there like an ache. Perhaps that was when the baby inside started to die. Started its long process of dying that would be completed only outside the womb. Her mother's quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline's despair at it was transmitted, she is sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that made it unable to live.

And she has been punished. Punished with a womb scraped of all the necessary ingredients for health and flowering. Yet she hopes.

(But Bernard says to her:
This is nonsense, what you tell yourself, Franckline. You can't kill a child with thoughts, with sadness. And there is no punishment: a bicornate uterus, Franckline, a simple medical fact; you were born that way
.

She knows all that, of course. Who knows better than she, with her training, her knowledge of anatomy? Yet over and over she needs him to say it to her.)

“And how are we doing here!” calls out a young, plump, fair-skinned nurse as she enters room 7. Lore looks up, relieved. The moment Franckline walked out, the room went still, like a ship when the wind shifts and dies. It felt so strange; and then Lore had gazed around at the couch against the big window and the computer monitor and the little cabinets with who knows what hidden behind them—linens, bandages, stuff to be smeared and sprayed—and down at the monstrous bed, with its white sheets and cranks and levers and her own hurt, breathing form. It was completely silent. It had made her sink and plunge for a moment, she who was never afraid of being alone. She had always known how to be alone. Yet for a moment (Franckline had left, so quickly, to go to the restroom) the edifice had shaken; she had wobbled. For several minutes she listened to her rapidly beating heart, taking long, slow breaths. But her heart would not give up its panic; it rattled on, afraid. Here is someone new, however. Perhaps she will be someone to hold onto.

“I'm all right,” she says hopefully. The nurse, turning away, plucks Lore's chart from the door.

“Laura, Laura,” she says. “Thirty-one, primigravida, forty weeks and two days pregnant, uh-huh, five feet nine inches, weight 179. Blood pressure, yup. Okay, Dr. Merchant checked you at 9:03
AM
, fifty percent effaced, three centimeters dilated.”

“It's Lore,” says Lore.

“Okay,” says the nurse. She gives Lore a quizzical look. “Where is your monitor?”

“I wear it once an hour. Dr. Elspeth-Chang said it was okay. I want to be able to walk around.”

The nurse frowns. “We can't keep track of the baby if you don't wear it all the time.”

Lore tenses at the phrase. These hospital people think
keeping track
is everything, the whole thing. “The doctor is fine with it. The other nurses have been fine with it. I understand the risks.” She'd like to inform the nurse that there are risks associated with using the monitor, too—Betsy had had plenty to say about that—but this isn't the time or place for a lecture, and the nurse is clearly not going to be swayed. She still hasn't gotten close enough for Lore to read her ID tag.

The nurse scans Lore's chart again, lingering over something that must be Franckline's notation about the monitor, glances at the clock. She flips through the rest of the chart, removes Lore's birth plan, looks at the first sentence or two, then puts it back. She gazes around the room as if in search of something she can improve.

“Let me spruce up that pillow for you,” she says, and although it creates an uncomfortable pressure, Lore bends forward to let the nurse—Carol: the ID tag has finally appeared in her sight line—remove the pillow and replace it. Carol presses a button and the head of the bed reclines a couple of inches.

“Could you leave the bed alone?” Lore says sharply. “I liked it the way it was.” In fact she's not sure she cares either way, but what gives this woman the right to come in and change things around, get snarky about the monitor, insist her pillow needs to be plumped?

“Of course, of course,” says Carol, smiling. She returns the backrest to its position.

A memory, obvious in its connection, prods at Lore. She and Asa had been in the apartment on the Upper West Side for a couple of months. They'd decorated indifferently, neither of them much interested in furniture, or things matching, so long as there was a nice bed and a few comfortable places in the living room to sit. There was a battered couch Lore had bought from her old roommates and an Ikea bookcase she and Asa had put together. Julia had a key to the place; it was Lore herself who had the idea and got it made. The apartment was closer to Julia's latest waitressing job than Julia's own; why not give her a place to grab a snack and put up her feet between shifts?

At first Asa said no. “Look, Julia and I have a complicated history. This should be our space, yours and mine.” But Lore—prompted by what? A desire to please Julia and show that she trusted her? Trusted Asa?—insisted. She felt it would be mean not to offer; perhaps Julia was even expecting her to do so and would be hurt and annoyed if she didn't. All right, Asa finally agreed; let's hope she doesn't abuse it. He said Julia didn't always have
boundaries
. He didn't want to come in at night and find her hanging out.

Julia didn't abuse her right. As planned, she came only after shifts to rest up; otherwise she rang the bell and waited to be let in. But one afternoon Lore returned after school to find Julia reading a paperback and the couch in a completely different place than it had been that morning. There was a brightly colored cloth over the coffee table, with irregular splatters of reddish-brown on it. Lore couldn't tell for sure whether the splatters were old wine stains or part of the design. That was so Julia. The table where Asa and Lore ate meals was at a right angle to the kitchen pass-through rather than flush against it, and Julia had taken the chair in the bedroom where Lore threw her dirty clothes and set it up near the walled-up fireplace. Lore began to laugh in discomfort.

Julia hid her face to her eyes with the book, making a theatrically anxious expression, and asked, “Do you like it?”

Lore suppressed a tickle of irritation. The room looked, in fact, wonderful. She even liked the splattered cloth. “I do. It looks much better than before.”

“You're not angry?”

“No, but you're bold, girl, you're very bold.” She laughed again and knocked Julia's book from her hand so that it tumbled to the floor. Julia, who hated for her books to get roughed up, reached for it, but Lore pushed her back and straddled her, giving her phony punches while Julia put up her hands, giggling. “I wanted to give you guys a present,” Julia pleaded. “It's your anniversary.”

“What anniversary?” Lore climbed off, out of breath. She went to get a glass of water.

“You've been together eight and a half months.”

“That's an anniversary?”

“Why not? Do you think Asa will be aggravated?”

“Asa's never aggravated by what you do.”

“That's definitely not true.”

“I'll tell him I like it,” Lore said. The new position of the couch made the room seem more spacious. And that spaciousness made it suddenly apparent to her that the walls of the room were very bare.

“We have to put some stuff up,” she said, pointing. “Here and here and here.”

“No kidding. I've been so good not to say anything about it. My friend Cliff's work would look great here. He's going to be a big deal one day, I'm really convinced, but right now he's selling his paintings for almost nothing.”

“Great, we'll look at them.”

“I want you to have a beautiful space.”

“Thank you,” Lore said.

“No, I really mean it. It's important that this place look beautiful for the two of you.”

Asa was in fact taken aback by Julia's redecorating. Julia and Lore had agreed in advance that he should find Lore alone when he came home, and that she should pass off the new room as her own work. But Asa didn't buy it.

“Julia did this.”

“I did it, Asa. I thought it would look better this way.”

“No, this is totally Julia. This thingy on the coffee table—that's Julia.”

“Okay, I asked for her advice. She brought the fabric, the rest I figured out myself.”

“Give me a break. This was her idea, whether you helped her or not, and I don't like it. This is our place. It shouldn't look like her. Do you get it?”

Lore, not a crier, felt something quiver inside. The idea of going back to the old room—how had she not noticed how bland, how ugly, it was?—dejected her intolerably.

“I don't see anything wrong with making things a little nicer. I don't have an eye for this stuff, and she does.”

“Lore.” He took her in her arms. “We can make the room nicer. We
will
make the room nicer. But Julia … she needs everything to have something to do with her. So fine. But not our place, Lore. Okay?”

He tried to warn her, Lore thinks now. She'll give him that much. Or maybe he was trying to warn himself. She squirms against the backrest Carol has readjusted, trying to get comfortable again. She and Asa spent that evening pushing the couch back into position, folding up the wine-stained fabric, returning the chair to the bedroom. “At least let's put something on the walls,” Lore said, and Asa answered, “Of course.” That weekend they picked out some pieces at an outdoor crafts fair, and Asa didn't even bargain over the prices. But Lore never liked them as much as she was sure she would have liked the paintings by Julia's friend.

Nurse Carol putters around, watering the hibiscus on the windowsill, checking bathroom supplies. “I'm surprised they gave you a room,” she says cheerfully. “You don't seem to have much going on.”

Lore shrugs. She's not going to defend her right to the room.

“Well, it's slow this morning, I guess they don't mind, but if it gets busy they'll move you back to triage. Maybe that will motivate you, huh?”