On the whole dark drive, everything fell away—Miss Parcae, the witches, the Home—none of it mattered. Fern’s world narrowed to her body and the hand inside it, clenching and releasing. Her muscles obeyed something more powerful than her now. Something older had taken over her body.
The taxi pulled up in front of the hospital and everything exploded: too big, too bright, too loud. After being closed inside the Home for so long, Fern felt exposed. Nurse Kent disappeared, leaving her in the idling car, the driver nervously watching her in his rearview mirror, smoking a cigarette out his window, then the hand squeezed again and by the time it released Nurse Kent had the door open beside her with a man in white and he grabbed her arm, and the two of them dragged her out. Instinctively, Fern flailed, grabbing at the car door, but they already had her in a wheelchair.
Fern squirmed. Sitting up straight felt wrong. She needed to stand, to move. She struggled, trying to get up, but something pressed down on both shoulders, holding her in place.
Nurse Kent set her paper bag in her lap, then patted Fern.
“You’ll be fine,” she said.
She got back in the taxi.
“Wait!” Fern panic-shouted because she couldn’t leave her with these strangers, but the orderly was already rolling her away, and she heard the car roaring off, and the big glass doors pushed open, and she was inside the burning light. At least it was air-conditioned.
The stranger wheeled her down bright-white-and-green halls. The faces of strangers glided by, staring down at her. She groped in her pocket for her dad’s ring, then remembered she’d left it back in her room. She gripped Hagar and Miriam’s pouch through her duster instead.
The orderly rolled her onto an elevator and left her facing the back wall. A man and a woman got on and stood beside her. They talked about her over her head.
“Things like that are a real shame,” the man said.
“They say it’s the generation gap but I don’t know,” the woman said.
“You’ve got these hairballs smashing up their schools,” he said. “They don’t understand how easy they’ve got it.”
The elevator jolted to a stop and the orderly pulled Fern off backward and she saw the man and woman receding, then she was being turned and pushed down the hall. She wanted to get out of this chair—it hurt so much sitting up like this—but the orderly wheeled her around a corner, down another hall, around another corner, down another hall, deeper and deeper until finally he rolled her up to a counter she couldn’t see over.
“Who’s this?” A young nurse with a scrunched-up nose smiled, looking over the counter at Fern. Her freckles made her look like Clem. “What’s your name?”
“My name?” Fern asked.
Did she want her name from the Home or was she supposed to give her real one?
“She’s a Jane Doe,” the orderly said.
All the kindness went out of the nurse’s face. She picked up a clipboard and wrote it down.
“Age?” she asked.
“Fifteen,” Fern managed.
“Cripes,” the nurse said. “Have your membranes ruptured yet?”
Fern felt like she was supposed to know the answer to this.
“Has your water broken?” the nurse repeated, rolling her eyes at the orderly.
“No?” Fern said.
The nurse made a note, then said to the orderly, “Put her in five,” and he pulled her backward down the hall, the tall counter receding before her.
He spun her around too fast and pushed her through a door into a dark room and turned on the lights. Fern wished he hadn’t. They showed a white iron bedstead with a tight white sheet pulled over a thin mattress with a stack of cardboard boxes that looked like they held paper towels in the corner. The feet of Fern’s wheelchair touched the bed. There was no room in here.
“I’m not going to carry you,” the orderly said, and Fern realized she had to somehow get on the bed herself.
She knocked the paper bag out of her lap and onto the floor. It was the best she could do. Standing was fine but the hand squeezed again as she transferred her weight and she sank forward, knees bent, gripping the mattress, gasping until it passed. She could feel impatience radiating off the orderly. Then she made herself walk around in a small semicircle, kicking her bag out of the way, and sat on the edge of the mattress. As soon as she was down, the orderly pulled the wheelchair out of the room and closed the door. Fern keeled over onto her side. With an enormous effort she pulled her legs up onto the bed and lay there, gasping.
If only they’d leave her alone like this for a little while, she thought. She could handle this if they just left her alone.
The door opened and a nurse with gray hair bustled in pushing a little cart. She looked like Mrs. Rich, the music teacher at Fern’s elementary school, and Fern felt so happy to see a familiar face. The nurse picked up Fern’s paper bag and dropped it on the chair beside her bed. Then she clicked on a bright lamp clipped to Fern’s headboard and looked at a chart hanging off its foot.
“Open,” she said.
Fern opened and she stuck a thermometer in her mouth. Fern felt one of the clenches coming and grimaced.
“You’d better not bite down,” the nurse said.
Fern didn’t bite down.
The nurse recorded her temperature and took her blood pressure. The pressure cuff pinched and Fern wanted to cry.
“It’s too late for that,” the nurse said.
She checked the watch pinned to her chest, and while she wrote something on Fern’s file she said, “Get undressed.”
Fern knew she could do this if she timed it right. She just needed this clench to pass and she could stand, but before it was over the nurse was lifting her duster over her head, yanking her arms up, moving Fern like she was a piece of uncooperative meat.
When she was done, Fern’s sweaty, wet duster was on the cart and the nurse had a loose white gown draped over her front. It felt so good to be wearing something dry and clean that Fern didn’t even care it wasn’t fastened in the back.
The nurse tied it at her neck, then pushed Fern down until her head rested on the scratchy pillow. An entire layer of muscles in her lower back crumpled and she squeezed her eyes shut and wished it would all go away, just for a little while, just so she could rest. She could handle this if she could just rest for a minute.
Fern slit her eyes open in the glare of the lights as the nurse took a little pink plastic bowl shaped like a kidney off her cart. A towel lay over it and a green plastic razor sat on top of the towel and for a moment Fern thought she was going to shave her legs.
“Spread, please,” the nurse said, and Fern waited for more instructions. “I didn’t think I’d have to ask you twice,” the nurse said. “Spread your legs.”
She was already pushing the gown up around Fern’s hips and Fern didn’t want this to happen, but she was too weak to stop her, and then her hands were between Fern’s legs. She felt her shoving the towel under her bottom and then she smeared cold shaving cream all over her box. Fern tried to sit up and stop her, but she didn’t have enough strength.
“Please don’t,” Fern said to the ceiling.
The nurse ignored her, and with six or seven rough strokes she shaved off Fern’s pubic hair. Then she yanked the towel out from under her and pulled it up between her legs, wiping the hair and shaving cream away in a single stroke. A few more hard scrubs and she was tucking the towel into the bowl and putting it back on the cart.
Fern couldn’t see anything past the swollen mound of her stomach, but she felt scraped raw. She hated this. She hated this so much. The nurse took a red rubber bag from her cart.
“Have you had an enema before?” she asked, not looking at Fern while she unrolled a translucent yellow tube.
Fern didn’t even know what an enema was.
“I don’t know?” she said.
The nurse let the next cramp have its way and before it had finished Fern felt one of her gloved fingers on her bottom, poking around, and then the tube slid into her too fast, making her bruise. How could everything hurt so much? She tried to squirm away.
“Stop fighting,” the nurse said in a voice that froze Fern in place.
No one had ever done this to her before. All the contractions felt like they were trying to push something out of her body, and now someone was trying to shove something back in? The nurse squeezed the red rubber bag and an incredible pressure surged into Fern the wrong way. Warm water filled her, and then kept going, inflating her like a balloon. There was no room. Something was going to burst.
The nurse pulled the tube out.
“Don’t move,” she said.
Fern clenched herself tight. She’d do anything to make these people stop being so angry at her. The nurse put a bedpan under her.
“Release,” she said, and Fern let go.
She heard something spraying and the smell of her own wet bowels filled the room. The nurse took the bedpan away, gave her a few more rough wipes, and sprayed a can of Lysol around the room like Fern was a germ. She changed her rubber gloves and reached between Fern’s legs again and Fern couldn’t even feel ashamed anymore.
“When did you start contractions?” the nurse asked.
“I don’t know,” Fern said.
“The nurse from the Home said it was two hours ago,” the nurse told her. “You’re at five centimeters. You’ve got five hours to go. At least.”
She noticed something around Fern’s neck and bent, her watch dangling in Fern’s face, and Fern felt fingers fumbling behind her, trying to untie the pouch.
“No…” Fern said, but a contraction seized her, and it was deeper than the ones before, and it turned her words into a wide-mouthed moan.
The nurse stood and then she held a pair of flashing silver scissors. Fern heard the snip behind her head and the nurse had the red string dangling, and Fern tried to grab it. The nurse dropped it onto her paper bag.
“Don’t make such a fuss,” she said. “You’ll get it when you’re through.”
Then she left, turning off the overhead lights as she went, leaving Fern alone.
There were no windows, only the bright light clipped to the head of her bed. The shadows were darkest in the corners. Fern rolled onto her side. It took all her strength. She strained one arm for Hagar and Miriam’s pouch and snagged it off the chair, then slumped back onto the mattress, clutching it in her fist.
The nurse had left her door ajar and she heard a woman shouting in the hall.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the woman screamed. “Help this sinner.”
She sounded like she was right outside Fern’s door.
“Mother Mary, help me!”
The hand clenched again. Something rolled past her door and she heard someone moan as they went by, long and low like an animal. Fern clutched the pouch harder. It was too hard to get it back around her neck. Through the wall behind her she heard someone crying.
“Oh, God!” the invisible woman sobbed. “Oh, God, please!”
The sobbing continued, unbroken and unchanging. Fern didn’t know how a person could cry so much.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman wept. “I’ve changed my mind. Please. I’ve changed my mind. Make it stop. Please, God, make it stop!”
“Angel of God!” the woman in the hall shouted. “Jesus! Save me!”
Fern looked up at the acoustic tiles over her bed and tried to remember a prayer but all she could think of was “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.”
“Is Larry taking you to the Star-Lite tomorrow?” a young woman asked outside her door.
“He doesn’t have his ride,” another woman answered.
“Oh, man,” the first woman said. “That’s just beautiful.”
“Yeah, beautiful.”
Inside Fern, the hand squeezed. Muscles moved behind her ears and rippled over her scalp. Her neck hurt so bad she thought it would snap. The pain rose and receded like the tide.
“What happened to his ride?”
“He loaned it to his brother.”
“Please, Jesus! Please, Jesus! Please, Jesus!”
“His brother who goes with Linda?”
“Right.”
“That’s beautiful, man.”
“I changed my mind! I don’t want this! Please!”
“Just beautiful.”
Fern wanted someone to hold her hand. She wanted Zinnia. Or Holly. Somebody. But the only person she had was Charlie Brown.
“Oh, God, Chuck,” she moaned, clutching the pouch tighter. “I don’t know if we can do this.”
The pouch got soggy in her sweaty hand. Her muscles spasmed harder, closer together, giving her less and less time to rest, and all this power inside her body, she didn’t think she could contain it, it was going to break her. The nurse came in again and pushed her legs apart and felt between them and left and the bands wrapped around her pelvis pulled tight, tighter, so tight she thought they were going to snap her bones.
“You poor dear,” a voice said, and Fern looked up into the bright light and Miss Parcae’s face.
Fern wanted to scream, she wanted to get away, but her body wouldn’t move. Miss Parcae encircled her face with her cool hands and then Fern wasn’t inside the supply room anymore. She felt a warm breeze and she lay on soft furs and women with wild hair knelt on either side of her, holding her hands, pouring cool water down her throat from a golden bowl; her stomach flexed and her body felt strong and in a disorienting whirl she was also standing on a cliff, looking over stormy seas, her baby in her swollen belly, feeling him move beneath her hands, and she was in a bower on a nest of ferns in the dark of night, wild drumming playing nearby, feeling her baby slither out of her body, and she felt confident, she had done this before, she felt no fear, and she was in a warm room, staring up at thatch, hearing rain sizzle down, smelling the warm bodies of large animals, and she was so many women, and all of them were having babies, all of them…
“I can make the pain stop, dear,” Miss Parcae said, and Fern looked up into her blue eyes and they were cool and deep. “It can go away.”
“Yes,” Fern gasped. “Please.”
“Honor your promise,” Miss Parcae said, smiling kindly. “That’s all you have to do. Will you honor your promise and let me in?”
Fern lay on the bower of ferns in the dim twilight again, and they felt cool and soft, more real than the scratchy hospital sheets, and they smelled green, and she felt the distant drumming like fingers massaging her skin.
Scyld ðū ðē nū þū ðysne nīð genesan mote, Fern thought. ūt lȳtel spere gif hēr inne sīe
The alien words filled her head, erasing her, replacing her, and she panicked. It was too late. She was falling and she grabbed onto something.
NO!
She reached for herself as she fell, shouting, “NO!”
Blinding overhead lights switched on, and Fern squinted and no one was in her room except the nurse coming back through the door and a beautiful man with dark hair wearing a white coat, and they stood between her legs. Her sheets were soaking wet.
“What’s all this fuss?” The man smiled.
Then he reached into Fern.
A powerful rippling moved through Fern’s body, rushing toward him, and her hips strained like something impossibly large was trying to squeeze between them. Her pelvis felt like giant hands were bending it in half.
Fern looked over her stomach at the doctor and said, “She…was…here.”
He looked up at her, raising his eyebrows in mild amusement.
“What do you need, darling?” he asked.
“Where’d…she…go…” Fern tried to explain. “Where…”
He smiled and patted her arm.
“Don’t you worry,” he said. “We’ll give you something for the pain when the time comes.”
Something for the pain? That hadn’t even occurred to her and suddenly it was all she could think about. They could give her something for the pain!
“Please,” she said. “I need it now. I need something now.”
She hated hearing her voice wheedle and cringe.
“I thought you were a brave girl.” The doctor smiled. “We’re not going to let anything happen to the baby.” He turned to the nurse. “Call me at eight centimeters.”
He left and he hadn’t given her anything for the pain and he wouldn’t until something was at eight centimeters and Fern wasn’t even sure what a centimeter was. The nurse stayed behind and Fern realized they were going to leave her alone again. She grabbed the nurse’s hand and the nurse pulled it away.
“Don’t…leave…” Fern said, through gritted teeth. “…please…”
The nurse looked like she was about to snap, then her mouth relaxed.
“Your mother did this,” she said, in that voice only nurses have. “And so can you.”
Then she walked out the door, but she left the lights on.
Fern’s body clenched and unclenched, over and over again. Fern didn’t know how long she lay there on the wet sheets but Miss Parcae didn’t come again. The pouch soaked up her sweat like a sponge. The woman in the other room kept crying. The woman down the hall screamed again.
“That Jean Seberg picture’s going to be at the Star-Lite next weekend.”
“Please, Jesus. Please, Jesus. Please, Jesus.”
“That’s beautiful, man.”
Fern tried to watch the dark corners of her room for Miss Parcae, but her body consumed all her attention. The nurse came back and Fern couldn’t help herself, she burst into tears the second she saw her. The nurse reached between Fern’s legs, into the spasming, twitching heart of her, and then she left quickly, and Fern tried to call after her, but a spasm cut off her breath.
The nurse came back with the orderly. They were lifting her onto a stretcher and it hurt so much she couldn’t fight when they pried the sopping pouch out of her fist.
“…hippie engagement ring…” The orderly laughed.
The nurse didn’t.
It was so bright in the hall. Fern didn’t want anyone to see her like this, but the nurse at the counter stared as she rolled by. She heard women crying all around her and their voices surrounded her and Fern added hers to the chorus, and they all cried together.
They rolled her into the middle of a bright room with dark green tiled walls with white grout between them and there were black rubber hoses hanging in coils. Fern knew something bad was going to happen here, and she tried to fight, but she wasn’t strong enough to make her body do anything anymore. They lifted her onto a table with three flat-faced lights staring down.
She felt bands go around her wrists, locking them in place, and they pushed a machine up to her head with so many tanks and valves and pipes. They lifted her legs and pulled them apart and people gathered around her wearing baggy green sacks that covered their entire bodies except for their eyes. They were going to carve her up. They were going to carve her up and cook her in an oven.
Someone put a rubber mask over Fern’s mouth and nose and for a panicked moment she couldn’t breathe and she choked and someone said something and the mask hissed at her like a snake and she breathed cold air and then she didn’t feel anything at all.
The nurses slid the patient’s legs into canvas socks and tied them at the knees, then lifted them into the stirrups and bound them with belts at the ankle and thigh, securing the patient in the lithotomy position. The OR nurse spread a drape across each of the patient’s legs, and Dr. Jensen stepped between them and draped the patient’s midsection, leaving her vagina and anus exposed.
The lamps over the delivery table were switched on. The second stage of delivery was well underway, and the patient’s uterus made firm, steady exertions. Soon, the dark wet head of the baby cleared her pubic bone and became visible.
As the baby’s head exerted pressure on the patient’s perineum, Dr. Jensen placed a folded towel against the patient’s rectum and put downward pressure against it to control delivery of the head and reduce the risk of a perineal tear.
The patient’s next contraction pushed the baby’s head forward, then pulled it back. As did the next. The skin of the patient’s hymenal ring stretched thinner. Dr. Jensen pressed down harder. The baby was not advancing.
“He’s turtling,” Dr. Jensen said after a moment. “We need to cut.”
The OR nurse handed him a syringe with a five-inch needle. Dr. Jensen flashed its point, then squirted a bit of the local anesthetic it contained in a small, tight arc. He reached inside the patient’s vulva, pulled away a band of her exterior flesh, and drove the needle into her perineum twice, hard and sharp. The second time he injected the local anesthetic, counted to five, then withdrew the needle and handed it back to the OR nurse.
“Scissors,” he said, holding out a hand.
She gave him a pair of surgical scissors and Dr. Jensen slipped their sharp tip into the bottom of the patient’s vulva and angled them under the taut skin of her perineum at a forty-five-degree angle. He took a good grip on the patient’s left thigh with his other hand and pressed the scissors closed until they connected with tissue. He adjusted his wrist for a better grip, then bore down hard and the blades sliced their way through four muscle groups, an inch and a half deep, cutting toward the soft muscles of the rectum.
A nurse sponged away blood from the mediolateral episiotomy as Dr. Jensen continued to cut. Then he withdrew the scissors and the patient’s vagina gaped open. He flapped back a loose, bloody triangle of skin to reveal the baby’s head, resting on a soft bed of tissue.
“Forceps,” he commanded, and the OR nurse placed a pair in his hand.
He clamped their blades lightly to either side of the baby’s soft, unjoined skull, and let experience guide his wrists to a firm but not crushing grip. Then he pulled from his shoulder and the baby slithered out into his other hand. He was proud of his forceps technique.
He clamped the umbilical cord close to the baby’s stomach and quickly snipped it with a pair of sterilized scissors. He handed the baby to the nurse, who carried it to a metal table and turned on a heat lamp. She suctioned mucus out of the baby’s throat, then wiped his face and weighed him.
While the doctor waited between the patient’s legs, the nurse placed the baby in a gray warming box and squeezed a single drop of 1% silver nitrate solution into each eye to avoid any gonorrheal ophthalmia. Immediately, it began to wail. The doctor waited as the patient’s body delivered the placenta into a plastic bowl he held, then he asked for a stool and sat between her legs.
Using chromic catgut 000, Dr. Jensen took a curved cutting needle and used four interrupted sutures to close the incision in the patient’s levator ani muscle. Then he put three running sutures of the same catgut in the bulbocavernosus sphincter. Using a continuous suture, he pulled together the subcutaneous fascia and carried it upward to close the vaginal mucosa. Then he added two extra stitches for tightness. When this poor girl got married, she’d be grateful. Her husband would never know what had happened here today. Dr. Jensen tied off his sutures and stood.
“All that before eight a.m.,” he said, and left to wash up as one nurse wheeled the unconscious patient out of the delivery room and back to recovery while another nurse carried the baby’s warming box in the opposite direction, away from its mother and toward the nursery.