The Senator's Wife (24 page)

Nancy's hand dismissed Meri again. “I'm good at persuasion. And it's so clearly the only reasonable choice.”

“Well.” Meri got up. Nancy got up too, and they started out of the living room, down the front hall. “Good luck, I guess,” Meri said. “Maybe I'll see Delia before you go back. But please, if you could tell her I stopped by. And to let me know when and if she wants me to take up my chores again.”

As they said good-bye at the door, Meri was struck again by something hard, something embittered in Nancy's face. But maybe, she told herself, it was just the presence of the fierce, deep lines around Nancy's mouth that unfairly made her look that way.

As she talked with Nathan about it that night—talked about what Nancy had told her of Tom's stroke, what Nancy had said about Delia and Tom and their marriage—Meri was gradually conscious that she was feeling relief. Relief in being able to discuss with Nathan the things she'd known all along from reading Tom's letters; relief that she could be honest, with him at last about all of that.

Or partially honest, anyway.

W
HEN
M
ERI STOPPED
working on the crib for a minute and looked out the window again, Delia was gone from her backyard. The chair was empty. She resolved to ask Nathan about a time they could have her over for drinks or dinner, if she was going to be around for longer than a day or two.

It took her more than an hour to get the crib set up. When it was ready, she put the mattress in it. In the bureau drawer she found a stack of rubber-coated pads covered in flannel and she laid one on the mattress. She unwrapped the plastic from around a crib sheet. It had little figures printed on it, animals—rabbits, kangaroos, sheep. All the sweet ones, she thought. None of the killers.

She made the bed, and stepped back. It looked nice, actually. It looked as if they were people who'd planned for this baby, organized themselves around it, instead of the slackers they were. She went downstairs to start supper.

When Nathan came home, she took him upstairs. He was impressed, but he was also worried about her having done it by herself. “Should you be doing this stuff? Working so hard this late in the pregnancy?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “It was like mild exercise. It was probably good for me.”

Over dinner, they talked about what else they had to do—Nathan was taking the weekend off, just to focus on baby-related chores at last. Meri had a pen and pad by her place at the dining room table, and while they talked, she jotted down what they'd need to buy, what had to get done.

As they were clearing their places, she said, “I saw Delia today.”

“And what's happening with her?”

“I don't know. I just saw her. We didn't talk. She was out in the backyard when I was up in the baby's room.” She set her dishes on the drainboard. “She looked tired.”

“I'm sure she is,” Nathan said. “We should have her over.”

“My thought exactly,” Meri said. And then she said, “I wonder how
he
is.”

When she came to bed with Nathan, late, she'd slung another towel between her legs. She'd explained to him earlier the genius of this arrangement. Now she wondered aloud why she hadn't thought of it earlier.

“Because, of course, it's so attractive too,” he said.

They laughed, and Nathan switched the lamp off. He touched her face, he kissed her quickly, bringing her his swimming pool smell—and then he fell back away from her and both of them turned on their sides. They hadn't made love in almost a month, it seemed by mutual consent. Certainly Meri had no interest.

Maybe it was the exertion of the previous day, but Meri slept through until almost five in the morning. This was unprecedented in her life of late. Usually the pressure on her bladder got her up several times in the night.

When she woke, it was with the first easy contraction of her labor. Even as she realized this, even as she was taking it in, she was also taking in the fact that the bed was soaked. Nathan was snoring lightly. The wet towel between her legs and the sheet under her were clammy and cold. What a disgrace, she thought. What a disgrace I am.

She eased out of bed and stood, feeling liquid gush out of her. In the bathroom, she removed the towel. It was soaked and there was a faint, pink smear of blood on it. For a moment she was startled, and then she realized: this had to be her waters. Not urine, then. Perhaps not urine yesterday either, though she wasn't sure of that. She stood, looking at herself in the mirror for a minute. What came now? What was the next step here? She put the bloody towel into the hamper. She washed her legs, her crotch. She got a clean towel and put it between her legs. She brushed her teeth, and her hair. She washed her face. Bending over the sink to rinse the soap off, she felt another tightening of her body.

She was frightened, suddenly. She wasn't ready for this. They'd been to only a few birthing classes, they'd both been so busy. She hadn't packed a bag with any of the things you were supposed to pack a bag with. She didn't even remember what those things were. Somewhere in the house was the book they'd bought that told them all that, she could see it in her mind's eye—a fat yellow book with a happily pregnant woman on the front cover, her hands resting lovingly on her belly.
Now
was when they'd been planning to read it carefully, now that they were done with work. Now was when they'd been going to do everything.

She went downstairs. She searched the shelves in the living room for the book, the book that would tell her what to do next. It wasn't there. She went back upstairs, to her study. It wasn't there, either.

She sat down in her desk chair for the next contraction. It was almost five-thirty. She noted the time, and went downstairs again. She would time the contractions, time the intervals between them—she remembered that this was important information, information the doctor would need. She made coffee for herself and she had some toast. She ate a banana too. She had another contraction, like a terrible cramp, while she was doing all this. The interval had been twelve minutes.

At a little before seven, when the intervals were still about ten or twelve minutes, she called the doctor and got her answering service. She gave the woman at the other end of the line the timing, and told her she thought that her waters had broken too.

Ten minutes later, as she was stopped with another contraction, her coffee cup set down on the counter, the doctor called back. She asked Meri about the contractions, about the blood, about exactly when her waters had broken. Meri said this morning sometime, while she was asleep. That she woke to a wet bed.

And then she said she wasn't sure, but she thought they might have been leaking since yesterday morning, actually. The doctor's voice sharpened. She asked Meri what made her think so, and Meri described it, the liquid leaving her body, the damp towels through the day and overnight.

The doctor told her to come in to the birthing center now. “I think we may need to get that labor going,” she said. “I don't like a baby to be high and dry for too long in there.” Meri said she'd be there within a half hour and hung up.

Nathan was coming down the back stairs—she heard his footsteps. She turned to see him step into the kitchen barefoot, wearing his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. His hair was scrambled, his eyes puffy. “Who called?” he asked, frowning. “What's going on?”

I
N THE BIRTHING CENTER
, everything happened quickly, too quickly for Meri. There was the ugly hospital johnny she had to put on, and the exam with Nathan standing right there while the doctor's hand went inside her. There was the frowning, serious, pretty doctor, peeling the glove from her hand, wanting to know why Meri hadn't called her yesterday. Meri felt in the wrong, as though she hadn't lived up to her part of some bargain.

The doctor said they were going to start her on a drip of Pitocin to speed things up. She was sorry to do it, it was likely to make the labor harder, she said, but she felt it was necessary. The concern seemed to be the possibility of infection after the waters were broken—but for whom? For the baby? for her? Meri wasn't sure. The doctor hadn't said, and Meri had felt too rushed, too confused to ask.

They stuck a needle in her hand, and hooked her up to a bag of fluid on a pole. And then suddenly she and Nathan were alone in the birthing room.

“Hey,” he said. He sat down next to her at the edge of the bed.

“Hi,” she answered.

“It's exciting, isn't it?” he said.

She smiled at him, and nodded. “It is.” It was. She was excited. And scared.

She looked around the room, only now really taking it in. Everything seemed to her like the adult equivalent of the crib sheet she'd put on the baby's mattress yesterday: everything was prettied up, everything was
nice
—the bed with flowered sheets, the La-Z-Boy reclining chair with its striped slipcover. Even the curtains.

“What's
dimity,
Nathan?” she asked.

“Where is
this
coming from?” He looked incredulous, and then amused too. He'd pulled on a T-shirt and some jeans, and his jogging shoes. His hair was still a mess.

She lifted her hand toward the window. “Just that I have a sneaking suspicion those curtains are dimity,” she said.

“Look, if you say the curtains are dimity at this particular point in time, I'm going to say they are too. But if I were you, I wouldn't waste my advantage on the
curtains.
”

She laughed. And then a contraction started. “Here we go,” she said to him.

It was harder, fiercer than any so far, and Meri wasn't able not to make noise through it. Nathan held her hand through it. As her noises eased, so did his grip, and only then did she realize how hard he'd been squeezing her.

“Too tight,” she said, when she could speak. She was rubbing her hand.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Just, you scared me.”

“Imagine how much I scared myself,” she said. “It really hurt, Nate.” He kissed the top of her head. “I'm so unbrave,” she said.

“You are not.”

“Am too.”

After a minute she pointed to the pole, the bag of liquid dripping into her arm. “Did you get exactly why I'm on this?”

“Because your waters broke a while ago? Because that's not good?”

“But why?”

“I guess you and the baby are sort of . . . open to the air, as it were. To germs. That's what I gathered anyway. And I guess the labor wasn't going much of anyplace on its own at this point.”

She sighed. “How can it be that I'm a fuckup already?”

“The kid will never know. We'll never tell him.”

“Or her.”

“Or her.”

After a minute, Meri said, “But Nate, don't you have to tell the truth once you have a kid?”

“Was that in the pregnancy book?” he asked.

She smiled. “Neither of us has the least idea whether it was or not.”

“Well, we're both fuckups,” Nathan said.

Over the next half hour the contractions gradually intensified and the intervals between them shortened, and then suddenly Meri was swept by a wave of pain in her back and belly that grew so extreme that she cried out in a guttural deep roar of agony, of insult, a voice she hardly recognized as her own. The nurse, who had come in to check on the baby's heartbeat just before the contraction started, stood still and watched her.

Even after the pain subsided, Meri was panting—grunting really, each breath coming out angry and deep. And it seemed to her that she barely had time to breathe normally again before the next contraction came and she was making her noise again, her mouth open wide now in shock. The nurse left to get the doctor.

When she came in, she took one look at Meri, hunched over the end of the bed, roaring, and she grabbed the drip, she made some adjustment to it.

After that the intervals between contractions grew gradually longer again, but the overwhelming force of them didn't change. Meri waited, dreading each one, grunting much of the time between them now. Each time she was seized, her knees bent, on their own it seemed. She squatted, holding whatever was closest—Nathan, the bed, the La-Z-Boy recliner. She felt as though her spine would crack, her body rip open. She couldn't believe there could be such pain without permanent damage, without death. She was terrified.

She knew she was making too much noise—Nathan's frightened face showed it, and the nurse spoke gently to her over and over, trying to calm her: “Meri. Can you stop now, and just breathe? Just breathe. Just use your panting.”

But it seemed Meri couldn't, though in the intervals between blows she was sometimes quieter. But then the brute pain would seize her again, would hold her in its vise, and she would roar, she was so scared, she was so angry, she was so beside herself.

The hours went by, though each time the pain came she couldn't imagine how she would bear the next minute. Her throat grew sore and dry from crying out, and they gave her ice chips to suck on. Sometimes she walked in the intervals, sometimes Nathan rubbed her back as she stood braced against the wall. For a while she found that she could endure the seizures better if she was on all fours, kneeling on the bed. She felt like an animal, a beast, braying in terror.

At some point she noticed that the light in the window had faded, and then later, that it was gone. The nurse stayed in the room, checking the baby's heartbeat often, and the doctor came in frequently; and then, when the window had gone black, there was another, different doctor, one who had apparently taken over.

By now, though, Meri had stopped caring who was there, whose hand was going up her. She was limp, lost, between contractions, and then helpless and lost too in their grip. It seemed impossible to her that it could go on, but it did. It went on and on.

When she began to weep at the end of one long seizure, Nathan turned to the nurse. “Can't you help her? Can't you give her something?”

Nathan. Nathan was her husband. Nathan would make them stop this. Meri felt such love for him in that moment, such hope lift her.

The nurse said, “I hate to do that, when she's getting so close.” She turned to Meri. “Meri?” She spoke louder, as though Meri were deaf. “Meri, just a little longer, honey. You can do it. I bet you can.”