Chapter 9: Thirty-Two Weeks
I breathed.
I breathed because she told me to, and because her hand was on my shoulder and it was the steadiest thing in the hallway, steadier than the floor, and because between the bands there was nothing else to do. In. Out. The tile against my cheek. The drinking fountain running. Her face above me with the glasses in her hair, not moving, not looking away, not once looking up to see where the ambulance was, as if I were the only thing in the Ashford County Courthouse that needed looking at.
“Again,” she said. “Good. That one was shorter.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It was. I’m counting. You’re not.” A hand touched my forehead, dry and cool. “You’re hot. Your hands are swollen. When did the headache start?”
“Sunday.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No.”
“No,” she agreed. “You wrote it down instead.” Something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You’re your mother’s daughter.”
The band came again and I stopped being able to hear her, and when it let go the hallway was full of boots and a voice I didn’t know was saying thirty-one and change, BP one sixty-two over one-oh-eight, contractions four minutes, I want her on her left side, somebody get me—and hands, a lot of hands, lifting, and the ceiling tiles going by overhead one after another like pages, and the last thing I saw before the elevator doors closed was a small grey-haired woman standing in a corridor in flat brown shoes with her arms at her sides, watching me go, and Teddy beside her in the red raincoat, and Deputy Okoro behind them both with his hat in his hands.
Then the doors shut, and it was just the ceiling, and the sound of my own breath, and the band.
* * *
They gave me something that made the world go soft at the corners.
Not away. Soft. Dr. Anand’s face came and went above me, cold hands, quick words to people I couldn’t see. Magnesium. Steroids for the lungs, now, we may not get the second dose. Where’s the neonatal team. Someone put something on my finger that glowed red. Someone else, a woman with a kind tired voice, told me her name three times and I lost it three times. The room was very bright and then very dim and I understood that I’d closed my eyes and I opened them again because it seemed important.
“Lena. Lena, look at me.”
Dr. Anand. Close. Her hair was coming out of its clip.
“Your pressure’s too high and it’s not coming down and the baby’s heart rate is telling me she’d like to be somewhere else. I’m not going to wait. We’re going to the OR now and we’re going to get her out, and she’s going to be small, and she’s going to be early, and she’s going to be fine, because I’ve done this four hundred times and I’m very good at it. Say yes.”
“Yes.”
“Say it again so the nurse hears.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Her cold hand on my cheek, the left one, the one that had stopped hurting a week ago. “Who do you want in the room? You get one.”
I didn’t have to think.
“Mrs. Pruitt.”
They put her in a paper gown and a paper hat and she came through the door looking like a loaf of bread somebody had wrapped for the freezer, with her purse still over her arm because nobody had been brave enough to take it, and she sat on the stool by my head where they pointed and took my hand and didn’t say anything for once in her life, and when the pressure started low down, that strange tugging that isn’t pain, she leaned in close to my ear.
“Your mother broke my knuckle,” she said. “This one. Doing this. You go ahead and break the other.”
I didn’t break it.
I held on, and the tugging went on, and somebody behind the blue sheet said okay, here she comes, here she comes, and then there was a sound.
It was so small. That’s what I remember. Not a cry. A sort of indignant creak, like a hinge, like a very old door being opened by someone who didn’t want to be disturbed, and the room went still around it the way the steps had gone still around his hand, except that this was the other kind of stillness. The kind where everyone’s listening.
“There she is,” said Dr. Anand, from behind the sheet. “Three pounds, eleven ounces. Lungs are working. Listen to her complain.”
They held her up for one second over the top of the sheet. One second. A red furious face the size of my palm with its eyes shut tight and its mouth open and a fist, an actual fist, up by its ear like she was about to make a point. Then she was gone, into the hands, into a clear box on wheels, out the door with four people around it moving fast and talking low, and the room was just a room again, and Mrs. Pruitt was crying without any sound at all, and I lay there with the soft corners and the tugging and I thought, so that’s what she sounds like.
She sounds angry. Good.
* * *
The first night I didn’t have her.
They’d taken her one way and me another, and I lay in a room on the fourth floor with a drip in my arm and the soft corners slowly going hard again and a machine beside me that took my blood pressure every fifteen minutes without asking, squeezing and sighing, squeezing and sighing, like something breathing in its sleep. Mrs. Pruitt was asleep in the chair with her purse in her lap and her mouth open. Somebody had taken the paper hat off her and nobody had taken the gown.
Dr. Anand came at midnight, still in scrubs, with her hair finally down.
“One forty-four over ninety,” she said, reading the machine. “That’s the magnesium. It’ll feel like being wrapped in wet wool for a day and then it’ll feel like nothing. I’m going to say the word now.”
“Preeclampsia.”
“You looked it up.”
“Sunday night. After the headache.”
“Of course you did.” She sat on the edge of the bed, which I’d never seen a doctor do. “She’s in the unit downstairs. She’s breathing on her own with a little help. She’s warm. She weighs what a bag of sugar weighs and she has opinions about everything, and in six weeks you’re going to take her home and in six years nobody will be able to tell. I’m telling you that now because you’re going to spend the next six weeks not believing it, and I’d like you to at least remember that I said it.”
“Can I see her?”
“Tomorrow. When you can stand.” She stood. At the door she stopped. “The man who did your face. Is he going to be a problem here?”
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded, as if that were a vital sign too, and went out.
* * *
She was in a box.
That was Tuesday, and Wednesday, and it was still true on Thursday when they finally let me sit beside it in a wheelchair for longer than ten minutes. An isolette, the nurses called it, and I learned to call it that too, because box made them wince, but it was a box, clear on all sides, warm inside, with holes you could put your hands through, and inside it a creature the size of a loaf of Mrs. Pruitt’s banana bread lay on her back under a lamp with a tube in her nose and wires on her chest and a knitted cap on her head that one of the nurses had made, pink, far too big, slipping down over one eye like a hat on a drunk.
You had to wash to get in. Three minutes, to the elbow, with the pink soap and the little brush for under the nails, while a laminated card on the wall told you how, and I did it in the wheelchair with a nurse holding the bowl, and my hands came out red and raw and clean enough, finally, to be allowed near her. The unit was dim and warm and full of a sound I’d never heard anywhere else, dozens of small machines all breathing at different speeds, and other parents in other chairs beside other boxes, not looking at each other, each of them bent toward one lamp like people at a shrine.
I put my hands through the holes.
You weren’t supposed to stroke them. The nurse explained. Their skin was too new; stroking felt like sandpaper to them. You were supposed to rest your hand on them, still, warm, so that they knew there was a hand. So I rested my hand on her. My palm covered her whole chest and most of her belly, and under it I could feel her breathing, fast and shallow and determined, and her heart going like something small and frightened running across a road, and every so often the whole creature would stiffen and let out the creak, the hinge sound, and the numbers on the monitor would jump, and the nurse would say she’s just telling you about it, Mom.
Mom.
Nobody had called me that. I hadn’t called me that. I sat in the wheelchair with my hand through the hole and the word went into me and sat down and didn’t leave.
“Does she have a name?” the nurse asked, on Thursday. “We’ve got her as Baby Girl Whitlock on the board and the night shift keeps calling her Peanut, which I’d like to put a stop to before it sticks.”
“Ruth,” I said.
I hadn’t known until I said it. Then it was the only thing she’d ever been called.
“Ruth,” the nurse said, and wrote it on a piece of tape, and stuck it to the box. “That’s a serious name for three pounds eleven.”
“She’s a serious person.”
The creak, right on cue. The nurse laughed.
The last name stayed on the board. I noticed that. I looked at it every time I was wheeled in, Ruth Whitlock, in blue marker, and every time it was like a stone in a shoe, and I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know yet what there was to say.
My mother had given me her name and nothing else, because she’d had nothing else to give, and I had handed it over at twenty-eight at a desk in a county office for a man who’d practiced my new one on legal paper. I sat by the box and looked at the tape and the marker and thought about that. Ruth. Hers. Whitlock. His. A three-pound person under a lamp with a name that was already a tug of war, and she didn’t know it, and she creaked at the ceiling with her fist up by her ear, and I thought, not you. Whatever else. Not you.
* * *
Teddy came on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, with banana bread she hadn’t baked, and sat on the end of my bed and told me things in order, the way I liked them.
The storage unit had been full. Every box my mother owned, and the grey filing cabinet with the fern-ring still on top, and in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, nothing, because the men with the van had been looking for a green book and hadn’t known that Ruth Cole never kept anything that mattered in a drawer.
The company offices had been less interesting than Natarajan had hoped and more interesting than Parrish had, which was, Teddy said, how you knew it had gone well.
The study on Fairmont had not had an ugly chair in it.
It had had a safe. And in the safe, among other things, there had been a manila folder with my name on the tab, in Grant’s handwriting, and in the folder there had been eleven practice sheets of my signature on yellow legal paper, the L with the loop too far left, the Whitlock running downhill, over and over, getting better, the way you’d practice a piano piece. The ninth sheet was good. The tenth was perfect. The eleventh had a date on it in his writing in the corner, and the date was the eighth of March.
“The day before,” I said.
“The day before. He’d been practicing for a week. Natarajan thinks he’d planned to do it at the house, get you to sign something else and slide it under. Then you started bleeding at two in the morning and he saw a better way.” Teddy chewed. “She also found your license. Photocopied. Both sides. Stapled to a draft of the deed with the date left blank.”
I looked at the ceiling.
“Lena. He was arrested Monday at eleven fifteen in the hallway outside 3A, about forty feet from where you were lying on the floor. Forgery, two counts. Filing a false instrument. Identity theft, which is what it’s called when it’s your wife’s license even if the law hasn’t caught up to how that feels. Witness tampering is coming, for the kitchen table, and that one’s going to land on his mother too, and she knows it.” She stopped chewing. “His mother came Wednesday. Here. With lilies, which I’d have thought she’d know better than to bring to a woman who’s heard that tape. Mrs. Pruitt met her at the elevator with the spoon, I’m told, and the lilies went back down in the elevator alone.” Teddy pushed her glasses up. “And then on Thursday morning Constance Whitlock walked into Natarajan’s office with her own lawyer, not Parrish, a woman from the city, and a banker’s box. The loan file. The board minutes. Dana Keel’s notary journal, the real one, with your name in it in a different pen from everything around it. She sat there for three hours. She didn’t ask for anything in return, which Natarajan says nobody does, which means she’s asking for something she hasn’t named yet.”
“Grant.”
“Or herself. Or the company, what’s left of it. I don’t know. I know she said one sentence on her way out that Natarajan wrote down.” Teddy looked at the ceiling. “She said, I’ve signed enough things for that family. I’d like to see what happens if I don’t.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t have anything.
“He was out by Tuesday afternoon. Bail’s bail. Parrish is good at bail. He’s at his mother’s with an ankle monitor and a thousand feet between him and you, and the bank walked Tuesday at nine a.m., and there is no Juniper Commons, and there isn’t going to be.”
“And the house?”
“The deed’s void. It never happened. The house is yours, with a rotten porch and a sign on the lawn that I’d very much like to watch you take a hammer to when you can lift one.”
I didn’t say anything for a while.
“He said she was his too,” I said finally. “In the courtroom. Before they took him out.”
Teddy’s jaw stopped.
“Yes,” she said carefully. “He did say that.”
“What does that mean? Legally. What does that—”
“It means what it means. He’s the father. Until a court says otherwise, and courts don’t say otherwise lightly, he has rights to a child he hit the mother of on camera, and the first place he’s going to try to use them is—” She stopped. She looked at the door. “Is going to be somewhere exactly like this. A hospital. A form. A nurse who doesn’t know the whole story and a piece of paper with a line for a father’s signature on it.”
“The birth certificate.”
“The birth certificate,” Teddy said. “I’ve already talked to the records office. There’s a flag. Nobody’s letting him near it. But I want you to know that I know he’s thinking about it, because I’m thinking about it, and I’d rather you weren’t surprised.”
* * *
I was surprised anyway.
It was Friday evening. Visiting hours were over and the ward had gone into its night sounds, the carts, the soft shoes, the monitors talking to themselves in the dark, and I’d been wheeled back from the box an hour before with my hand still warm from her and had fallen asleep on top of the covers in the chair by the window, because the bed was too far away and the chair was right there.
The door opened. I thought it was the nurse.
It wasn’t the nurse.
He was in the pale blue shirt with no jacket, and he’d shaved, and he looked rested, and he stood just inside the door of my hospital room with both hands empty and open at his sides like a man showing he had nothing in them, and he didn’t come any closer. He’d learned that much. There was a thousand feet in a court order and he was standing in twelve of them and he knew exactly how that looked and he’d come anyway, and I understood from the way he stood that somebody had let him through, somebody at a desk, somebody who’d been given a reason.
“Don’t get up,” Grant said. Quietly. Pleasantly. “I’m not here for you.”
I had the call button in my hand. I don’t know when I’d found it. I pressed it, and held it, and he watched me do that and didn’t move.
“I’m not here for you, Lena,” he said again. He reached up and ran two fingers down the front of his shirt where the tie would have been.
“I’m here to sign her birth certificate.”
