In Every Way (6 page)

“Can you believe it?” her mother says.

“How can I not?” Maria says, looking at her stomach. Another contraction starts and the spaces between her breaths begin to shorten.

“Here it comes,” her mother says.

Maria crumples to the floor. There is nothing else her body can fall upon that is not plugged in, piped, or brittle. Hank peers into the room, only to relax once he has confirmed that the groaning is not coming from his own patient.

“You OK?” her mother says.

“No,” Maria says. She understands that this progression of events was always supposed to happen, but that does little to make any of it feel right. It seems possible that her body is breaking.

“OK. She's OK,” her mother says to Hank.

Jack arrives seventeen minutes and one contraction later in khakis and a blue oxford, sleeves rolled up.

“Look at you,” Maria's mother says.

“Like I just got a job at Kinko's,” he says. “I know. But you gotta look like business if you want to do business.” He sits beside Maria on the couch and gently pets her head. Maria bats his hand away.

“Relax,” he says.

But Maria does not relax. Two nights pass without the gap closing to the four-minute window she has been instructed to wait for until going to the hospital. She has, since the beginning, been determined to have a natural childbirth and avoid the hospital as much as possible, but by the second night of labor, she begins to think this plan of action is folly. She is so tired that she starts to nod off in the moments between
contractions, even if only for a few seconds at a time. She lays her head back and closes her eyes, the voices in the room passing like fog, until everything snaps into sharp focus as a new contraction begins.

“I'm glad you're not telling her to breathe,” Maria's mother says, early in the third day of labor.

“She knows how to breathe,” Jack says.

“Take me to the hospital,” Maria says.

“I'll deliver that baby in the kitchen if I need to,” Jack says. “Hank can do whatever it is he does if we need him. But you're perfectly safe here until it's time.”

“It's time!” Maria says.

“Breathe,” Jack says.

“Fuck you,” Maria says.

“God I love you,” Jack says.

During the third sleepless night, the gap finally closes. At the hospital, the pain is worse than anyone had been able to explain. Maria tells herself to expect a leg to fall off and the fact that one does not is the only thing that makes each contraction seem tolerable. When the baby finally emerges, Jack places the gasping, viscous child upon Maria's breast.

She has heard stories of birth mothers who refuse to hold their newborns for fear they might become attached. But Maria is not so afraid. She tells herself she can do it all. That she can love for a few days and that then she can let go. After all, hasn't she been touching the child for nine months already? So Maria now holds her child to her chest, sobbing. She is baffled by all that her body has endured. A pride absolute and different from any other she has ever known has settled upon her. She cries, but they are not tears of sadness. Never before has
she cried from joy and exhaustion. So these are happy tears, she thinks, and then realizes that she does not yet know what sex the child is. In this moment, Maria uncodes how parents carry on through defect, deformity, and sickness. It doesn't matter what sex this child is, she thinks, or how it is, or why it is. It only matters that it is.

ANNE ARRIVES FOUR
hours later, and Maria has the feeling that she's been taking babies from mothers all day long.

“It's a girl,” Maria says.

“Isn't it, though!” Anne says, lifting the child from Jack's arms. “And what's this girl's name?”

“Bonacieux,” Maria says.

“Bonacieux,” Anne says.

It is the surname of Maria's mother's favorite Dumas character, the woman with whom D'Artagnan falls in love in
The Three Musketeers
. When Maria suggested it, Jack said, “God, you're smart.” He has a hard time saying the name, however, and refers to the child mostly just as B. Maria has not yet told her mother of the name. It will be a surprise.

“When do you take her?” Maria says.

“Right now is
your
time,” Anne says.

“I just need to bring her home to meet Mom,” Maria says.

“You can't actually move her.”

“I know.”

“I mean the baby.”

“You think she's going to steal something that's already hers?” Jack says.

“No, it's OK,” Maria says, remembering this rule. “Mom will come here.”

But Maria isn't sure her mother can come here. Her mother has not left the house in two weeks. To her surprise, though, after dinner Hank wheels her mother into the room. Maria is sure that there has been some computation about how many hours of life are lost with each minute it took to get here.

“She looks like Jack,” her mother says, gazing at Bonacieux. “And it's a good thing he's so handsome.”

When Maria's mother first met Jack, she told Maria that he was a loser and that it wasn't opinion, just empirical fact. She said he looked like a fool. Maria is jealous of the purity of her mother's mind now—she knows that her mother still believes these things about Jack but has reached a point where other things matter more.

Maria cannot tell if the child looks like Jack or not. It is as if there is a filter on her vision when she looks at the baby. Bonacieux looks like no one but herself, Maria thinks. She has blue-gray eyes, the same color as Jack's. Maria can see that. There is blond down on her head. Eyebrows so faint they are barely there. A bright red fig-sized birthmark on her stomach. But Maria can see no resemblance to either herself or Jack other than the most obvious traits of genus and race. Tracing back photos of her mother over time, Maria has always thought it all made sense—she always looked like the woman she one day became. Maria now realizes that this certainty works only in reverse. What this child will look like is a complete and total mystery.

Jack helps her mother stand. Maria has seen him do this more than a dozen times since the Fourth of July and wonders if this one will be the last. They have passed the window of life predicted by the doctors and are now in what her mother calls the Dakotas: a land of unknowns to which few have ever before traveled. Life in this territory could last
for days, perhaps more. The doctor won't say how much more, but according to the websites featuring Mexican alternative treatment centers that her mother has been leaving on the screen of Maria's laptop, life could continue for months, years, or decades. This sickness could mean nothing.

Her mother struggles out of her wheelchair, rising almost one joint at a time. She holds on to Maria's bed and finally collapses beside her. The mattress barely shifts.

“Meet Bonacieux,” Maria says.

The name settles like a balm upon her mother's face. She says nothing, but Maria can see the rightness of this name, the wisdom in its choice. Her mother takes Bonacieux and holds the child to her flat, scarred chest. Bonacieux cries, and as she does, Maria's mother nods gently as if in complete and utter agreement.

IN THE MORNING
, Anne stands at the foot of the bed. For the fourth night, Maria has not slept for more than a few minutes at a time. During the hours between sunset and sunrise, she was tended to by a lactation consultant named Maud who helped her successfully breastfeed, a challenge that brought such unexpected pain that Maria now feels like her doctor should be held accountable for negligence. At first the nurses were surprised that Maria even wanted to try. But she has read the literature. She listens to the reportage on NPR. She is not going to deny her daughter the benefits of her own milk, even if it is only for a day. But now, her nipples are chafed and raw, and she is, for a moment, excited to have anyone take the child so that she can just close her eyes and rest. This thought fills her with immediate guilt, but she cannot deny its veracity.

Anne says, “You're giving Philip and Nina the most wonderful gift a person can give.”

Maria lifts Bonacieux and the child's head droops onto Maria's chin. Maria gently takes a few strands of Bonacieux's soft down into her lips. She raises the child's chin, kisses her daughter on the lips, and holds her to her cheek, as if Maria's tears might mark her own daughter with some permanent scent that nine months in her womb could not. Bonacieux is a gift, she thinks. A gift for people who are ready to love her. But Maria already loves Bonacieux. She has been blindsided with love. The pride she felt after childbirth has only grown and somehow encompassed the child too, as if Bonacieux helped birth herself. Maria now feels with absolute certainty that she should keep the child. She knows that she should not, under any circumstances, pass this child to Anne. But there Anne stands, right there beside her in a gray dress that looks both perfectly casual and simultaneously more elegant than anything Maria has ever worn. And sixty pages of release forms have been signed. And there are Philip and Nina, beautiful both of them, birdlike Nina, somewhere, waiting in a house filled with baby things. And Maria has no baby things. She has no crib in which to place the child. She has not slept in almost five days. So she lifts the child into the air, terrified and confident that what she is doing is criminal, and delivers her daughter to Anne.

CHAPTER 4

I
N THE REFLECTION
of the mirror on Maria's white dresser, breast milk seeps in two small ovals through her thin gray sweatshirt. It has been three days. Three days that have passed with a magical ease, as if Maria has been stranded in some benevolent foreign land. The certainty of her own error has passed. She feels now that she has indeed done right by Bonacieux and wonders at the first stage listed on her photocopied stages of grief: denial. The steps beyond scare her and she hopes that denial, if that is what this is, can last forever.

It does not.

Two weeks and four days later, Maria stands inside the Orange County Animal Shelter. Behind a massive computer monitor a young woman clatters around a keyboard.

“Pinky, Pinky, Pinky,” the woman says. “Border collie?”

“Yes,” Maria says.

“I love that scarf.”

It is Maria's mother's orange Hermès. She also wears her mother's wedding ring on her middle finger and a touch of Chanel No. 5 from a dusty bottle in the medicine cabinet. “I don't need that stuff,” her mother has been saying. “Take it.” Maria is willing herself to be good enough for these items, as if they might wear her in and not the other way around. She is not yet there. She feels them on her flesh like new bandages.

“OK,” the woman finally says. “Pinky Pinkerton. Border collie.” She twists her mouth as if tasting something bitter, then bares her teeth and inhales a hiss. “Processed. A few months back.” At a glance she understands Maria's optimistic confusion. “Put to sleep,” she says. “After two weeks, that's procedure. I'm so sorry. Was he yours?”

“Yes,” Maria says. “Sort of.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Are there any other dogs I can see?”

“Yeah, of course. Second door on the left,” the woman says, “and I really do love that scarf.”

Maria opens the door to a mass of yelping life. A dozen dogs rise up on their hind legs and bounce, trying to reach her face with their tongues. Maria kneels, trying to locate just one head to pat, and they all pile atop her, licking any exposed flesh as if it has all been coated in gravy. Maria allows the weight of these beasts to roll her back onto the floor. They pant warm breath into her ears while nipping at each other in a battle over this human real estate. She purses her mouth shut against their lapping urgent tongues, but that is the only constraint. She lays her arms flat against the ground and, as they destroy the lauded scarf, she allows them as much access to her flesh as they want.

Later, inside the Volvo in the parking lot, Maria lights a cigarette. Pinky was just a dog, she tells herself. She removes the cigarette from her mouth and holds it above her forearm. She has memorized the pamphlet about grief. According to its progression, Maria is now due for anger. And she is indeed angry. She has been overwhelmed by a surprise onslaught of sorrow, confusion, and fury. She recalls stories from the news about recent mothers who have become suicidal after giving birth, of infanticide, of postpartum psychosis. And though
Maria is sure that she has not gone crazy, these accounts of new mothers becoming mentally unhinged now make a type of sense to her. At dusk every day, Maria cannot help but cry. She knows it is coming, like the eventual setting of the sun. There is no trigger needed, nothing but the hour. It brings with it a sadness mixed with anger, both at circumstance and at nothing. Her sharpest rage is often nebulous and confusing. She is ashamed and scared of these cyclical breaks, but knows they have happened before and will happen again—to her and countless others. The obviousness of it all infuriates her even further. Though the cigarette still glows just inches from her arm, she does not allow it to touch her flesh, although she is compelled to. She cannot imagine a way to explain the wound to Jack and her mother.