Evangeline was being rushed down a long hallway, the gurney clattering as if it were broken.
“Dr. Taylor just arrived. We’re going to try a spinal.” The woman’s voice, which came from behind Evangeline’s right shoulder, was directed not to her but to others Evangeline couldn’t see, people who jogged near, who seemed in need of direction.
A spinal. She’d be awake for the surgery, then. She imagined a blade filleting her like a fish. Not that it scared her in the slightest. A scalpel would be a kindness compared to the claw that was digging its long-spiked nails into her muscles and guts. But even this pain, pain that would have been the end of her a week ago, was of no consequence. She was no longer Evangeline. She was simply a body—two bodies—in need of emergency repair.
The gurney burst through double doors into an OR. She was stripped and swabbed. People entered and left. A needle was driven deep into her low back. And again she didn’t mind. Not a bit of it. Not until a nurse dropped a drape like a wall at her chest, dismembering her lower half.
“You’re going to feel some pressure now.”
There was pressure, but it was removed. She was half a woman on a table, alone with sounds of flesh being cut somewhere out of sight.
A terrible begging started up in her mind, an unrelenting pleading for her mother. If only her mother would appear, the long-ago mother who’d held her, whispered words of love—I could just gobble you up—before the addictions to drugs and Jesus and men; if that mother appeared, then everything would be all right.
But this begging failed to return her mother to her, and Evangeline tried bribing whoever it was that decided such things. She wouldn’t lie or steal or screw around. She’d study her ass off, get a good job, be the best mother ever. Still, there was no one—no mother, no Isaac, no Lorrie—and she’d run out of inducements. She was left with an inner chanting: You’re a body, just a body. Over and over she repeated, Just a body, just a body.
She told herself that the rest of it—the pain and fear, the mystery of everything that was approaching, everything that would transform her life—could wait. Right now, she was an animal who needed to survive. Only she kept remembering who she was, that she was sixteen, giving birth alone, no one at her side who knew her, who cared if she bled out on the table. No one who cared if the baby lived or died.
She might actually have spoken. She might have said some of these things out loud, because a voice came from behind her head.
“I’m here,” Isaac said, not as reassurance but as apology, as if saddened to have only himself to offer.
She twisted at the sound of his voice.
“Stay still!” came from behind the curtain.
She straightened, and Isaac moved forward, took her hand. He was gowned and gloved and masked, but it was him, and it didn’t matter that she couldn’t really see him, didn’t matter how or when he’d arrived. He was there, and that was everything.
“I’m scared,” she whispered.
“I’m right here.” His voice carried the same pain as it had with Rufus, and she wondered if soon he’d begin to sing. Remembering the words, she pictured herself as the ocean, her lungs swelling like waves, rising and falling, rising and falling. And she wanted to fall away, fall from her wounded body, fall from the world itself. She’d only ever stayed on this planet by clinging with all her might. What a relief it would be to just let go.
She caught herself as if waking. “The baby,” she said.
A deep ache like a dull blade sawing muscle.
“They’re working on it,” Isaac said. “You’re both in good hands.”
From behind the curtain, “Retractor. Another couple centimeters. Good. Hold that.”
More blunted tearing or cutting or stabbing, she couldn’t tell which, and a sudden fear caught her. “Don’t hurt the baby!” she shouted.
Then she was hit with a force like a car being driven into her belly, set in reverse, and backed out. A moment later, the room shifted, a river of light flooding from behind the curtain. A bloody baby girl was held above the drape, but only for a second, long enough for Evangeline to see her mouth open wide in a wail. But there was no sound. Evangeline wondered if she’d gone deaf? Shouldn’t the baby be crying? And something else was off. Under the blood, the baby appeared the color of twilight.
Gowned people whisked the baby to the side of the room, set her on a counter. A moment later, the baby found her lungs and throat and mouth and began to wail. Evangeline and Isaac whooped at the sound, but the nurses and doctors did not. Why weren’t they happy? Didn’t the baby have a right to complain?
“I want to hold her,” she said.
But a new doctor had arrived, a youngish woman who bustled to the crying infant without speaking to Evangeline. After a moment, the doctor lifted the baby and carried her from the room.
“Where’s she going?”
Evangeline had been forgotten. Even Isaac had left her side.
“What’s happening?” she asked the emptiness.
“They’re taking her for observation. Just a precaution.” The woman’s voice came from the far side of the curtain. Evangeline hadn’t been completely abandoned.
“Why?”
“Just a precaution,” the voice said again.
“Isaac!” she shouted, and he appeared at her side.
“She’s okay,” he said. “She was a little blue at first, but she’s all pinked up now. They’re going to monitor her awhile.”
Behind the curtain, someone was gathering pieces of Evangeline and suturing them back into place. She pictured her belly with Frankenstein stitches, hideous and beautiful and perfect. She heard her baby’s wails heading down a hall. And already she ached for her. This child she had yet to touch.
She wondered if this is what it meant to be a mother. To ache for a life that was not your own, to long for a child who could, without the slightest input from you, fall completely out of view.
She could no longer hear the baby, only the snip of final sutures behind the surgeon’s drape, but she felt her daughter there, curled tight and permanent in the emptiness of her, and she understood that her own mother, wherever she was, could never have outrun an ache like that.