The booklet. The booklet. What did I do with the doctor’s booklet?
I upended boxes, shoved fabric piles aside, scrabbled in every corner of the old man’s attic.
Think. Think. What did it say? But all that came to me were the illustrations, exaggerated in panicked impossibleness—the woman, trussed up like a bird on the spit and the baby inside, expanded by my frenzy to the size of a six-year-old.
I hadn’t read the booklet. Not really, but for one set of words flashing past during the time I’d paged through it with the old man. “Be calm. Childbirth is a natural phenomenon and if you approach it in a rational manner, there is no reason to presume you or the baby will come to harm.”
Harm.
Harm.
I was so stupid to tell Benedetta about the bubble, stupid to think it’d be fine. Stupid to feel safe, to feel happy. My own rising spirits had brought this on. Relaxed the bubble enough to let the baby progress, started his outward path. I needed help, needed reassurance, needed somebody, anybody to tell me everything I did in the next seconds, and minutes, and hours, would be the right thing.
I dropped to my knees.
And looked under the bed.
The booklet. Covered in dust bunnies.
Thank you, Jesus.
I dragged the booklet out and paged through, reading by the light cast by the projection.
Another sentence surfaced. “While many women deliver healthy babies in the home, with modern scientific methods hospital delivery is safest and best.”
Relief took hold of my heartbeat and calmed it to a canter.
Hospital. Yes. Of course.
I’d do like the booklet said. I’d be calm. I’d . . . wait for the old man, maybe. Hope Carlo didn’t decide to keep the boys all day. Once the contraction passed, Benedetta had looked all right. She’d know if it were close. Know if anything were trying to come out . . . down there.
I stared at the map, hanging on the ceiling slope, the hospital still stubbornly situated outside the last red concentric border. How fast did babies come?
Something thudded downstairs, heavy and insistent and sounding like it wanted my attention. “Fiora.”
Okay. Pretty fast. Off the edge of the projection, the trolley rolled into view, heading toward its upside-down stop.
Five minutes.
I didn’t wait to see if I saw myself boarding, saw myself helping Benedetta board with me. I grabbed my coat, grabbed my scarf, and headed downstairs, near somersaulting through gravity that seemed to evaporate in my eagerness.
To get Benedetta going. Get myself going with her. Make sure that baby was born safely, and securely. And anywhere but there.
Benedetta held to the doorjamb, her face white, making little panting sounds. I put on my mask, then wrapped another around her head. She pulled at it. I took her hand away. “Stop. You have to wear it. They won’t let you board the trolley without it.”
She grabbed my collar, twining her finger through a buttonhole. “Trolley. Are you crazy? I can’t go on the trolley.”
“You have to. We must. Nobody is here. I don’t know how to help you.” I thought of her aunt, Don Sebastiano’s reasons for not wanting Benedetta to go there. “You can’t give birth here, not so close to a death.”
Her face went still, her lips grim. Her grip tightened, her knuckles pressing painfully on the front of my throat.
I swallowed. And did a mental countdown. “Now you listen to me, Benedetta. The trolley will be here in two minutes. We have to go.”
I’d only had my own cycle five times at that point. I barely understood how a baby got inside a woman, much less how I was supposed to get one out. I pulled the booklet from my pocket and held it up. “Unless you think you can talk me through this.”
She buttoned her coat, and we made a slow, lumbering progress to the trolley stop. The market was near empty, the excitement on our stoop, over. A lady sweeping her sidewalk made a harrumphing kind of sound. “I understand Coatesville is very nice this time of year.” Then she walked into her house and shut the door.
Did streets echo? Before the influenza, even in the hour before dawn, I’d have said no. Life takes up space. Even when bundled into its bed at night, it perfuses the air, its pulse loud in the silence, unheard, but not unsensed.
The trolley rumbled to its stop, the car crowded. We boarded, working our way to a space by a window, yet the trolley felt empty, the passengers sapped of hope, skin-wrapped skeletons caught up in a pestilence-riddled nightmare, waiting their turn to meet the reaper.
I let go of the handhold, shaky, my impression strong. We were weeks into this sickness, the rates of infection, of death, reported in the newspaper daily, but little advice given. Public buildings were closed; businesses struggled to keep working. The war churned toward its end, working out its last bloody battles, and the government was determined nothing would slow that final push, no army, no philosophy, and certainly no germ.
I stood protectively between Benedetta and the rest of the passengers.
The trolley slowed, the wheels dragging on the rails. The pressure gathered. We were close to the edge, close to the place on the old man’s map where the concentric circles grew thinner, compressed by a barrier exasperated by despair, and formidable enough to perhaps make supply trucks move a block onward, take a different route for their delivery, find a more convenient way around, a subtle circumscription, unnoticed in the chaos caused by the influenza.
Benedetta’s face grew red. Sweat broke on her brow. She clamped a handhold, eyes squeezed shut, and moaned. “I can’t.”
I stood straighter. Can’t? “Can’t what?”
Benedetta groped for the rope, signaled a stop. “Let me off. Move. I don’t want to stay here anymore.”
I went after her, implored her to stay, to maybe find a seat, hang on a little longer. I thought the baby was coming then. I thought I’d be pushing everybody aside, telling them to make room, and then I’d . . . what?
I had no idea. I hadn’t read the booklet and I wasn’t going to read it then. It lay, an accusatory crackle in my pocket, and there it would stay. I tried to tell Benedetta that, but she didn’t listen.
We stood by the tracks, and watched the trolley cross the boundary without us.
“Benedetta? What are we doing?”
She lurched toward the sidewalk, and headed down an alley. “I can’t. I just can’t. I can’t have this baby. Can’t be a mother.”
I followed after. “Of course you can. I mean you have to. This baby is coming. You said so yourself. You don’t have a choice.” I ran ahead and got in front of her, spurred by a hopeful thought. “Do you?”
I didn’t know. Maybe the bubble would kick in again. Make it all stop. Send the baby back from wherever it was coming.
Benedetta made a tight little sound, halfway between a sob and a laugh. “I don’t know anything, haven’t been anywhere. I have no idea what I’m doing.”
Well neither did I.
She carried on a while longer, moving deeper into the alley. I pulled on her sleeve, tried to move her toward the street, but she clawed along the building bricks, a mouse caught in a maze.
My Benedetta was a practical, cheerful young woman. She kept her house neat, and her conscience clean, and knew exactly the right thing to say to everybody. I didn’t know the Benedetta who ignored my pleas, blubbering and flustered and sobbing so much her eyeballs must have been ready to slide out of their sockets. She was a changeling, a substitute, a stopgap sent to suffer for the real Benedetta. The woman who’d crocheted every article a baby could possibly want with love and with kindness could not possibly cower in a doorway, choking and tearful and declaring louder than was wise. “I do not want this baby.”
I clapped a hand over her mouth. Not quite over her mouth, over her mask which was still over her mouth. “Watch your words. You don’t know who might be listening.”
I looked up the alley. I looked down. I looked harder. I knew the place. I’d been there before. The side door to the pharmacy. The door from which the guaritrice had let me exit when I’d gone to the pharmacy with Carlo.
The guaritrice was a midwife.
She could help.
All the reasons I shouldn’t battled with all the reasons I should.
Benedetta let out another whimper. She clutched at the underside of her belly with the dazed expression of someone who’d been given a gift they didn’t much like, then looked up, the distress in her eyes real. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
Anger, blistering and volatile, steamed beneath my skull. The doctor was crazy. How did he expect me to help my friend? I’d done enough nursing with the flu to understand pain, but I didn’t understand what to do about it if there was a baby attached.
My mouth, always on a short fuse, exploded. “Shut up, Benedetta. Nobody’s going to die. Not today. Stop bawling. You’re making it impossible to think.”
The sky darkened. The air grew stifling and impossibly hot.
Benedetta unbuttoned her coat, then removed it, then flapped the collar of her shirtwaist. “I can’t stand it. I need air. Is this because of the bubble?”
I shouldn’t have told her. The bubble was my burden to bear. It belonged to no other. I unbuttoned my own coat and pounded on the entrance. “My friend is having a baby. Please, you must help.”
A clump of something, stalks and leaves cascaded to the cobbles. Benedetta scooped it up. “Verbena?”
From the iron ring over the door. Placed there by the old man. To keep things in. Or keep them out.
What in the world were we doing there?
I nudged Benedetta, poking her shoulder. “Get up, Benedetta. We have to go.”
“Go where?”
Anywhere. Anywhere at all. Just not there.
From behind the door came a shuffling, and a growl. Fear tendriled around Benedetta like smoke. “Is that a dog?”
The shuffling sound from the other side of the door got louder; the growl transformed to a howl. Something skittered in the shadows. A mouse. Or a rat. Burrowing in the trash piles.
I hauled Benedetta off the cobbles. Put my back to hers. We had to get out of that alley. Had to get back to the street. Had to find a house with occupants. Maybe a telephone.
Benedetta pointed. “Fiora.” Her voice sounded happy. “We are saved.”
A patch of brightness broke on the edges of my vision. I heard my name. “Who is that?”
The patch grew stronger. Every bit of Benedetta relaxed. She leaned against the jamb, her features stopped angling every which way and fell into their normal pleasant proportions. She shaded her eyes, her relief patent in the easy way she draped her fingers over her brow. “It’s Carlo.”
The noises stopped, the shadows fled. We were good. We were fine. We were going to get Benedetta to the hospital.
The door behind us, the door which I’d once exited as the side door to the pharmacy, opened. A set of strong hands pulled Benedetta and me through the entrance.
I saw Carlo advancing. He was right there, his face white-masked like ours. Then the door slammed shut. Leaving Benedetta and I in darkness darker than the darkness that happens when I close my eyes.
The shuffling returned, scraping and scratchy. Other sounds followed. Metal on metal. The click of a door bolt sliding into place. And the striking of a match.
A light flared. Benedetta held my hand. She squeezed tight. I blinked and blinked again. A shadow, fuzzy-edged and female-shaped, coalesced before me.
Tizi.
Holding an oil lamp.
Hand on hip, mask gone, her features cold and calculating and not in the least welcoming. “Mamma said you’d come.”