At the clinic, Dr. Caprini listened and looked and questioned. “You are dilated but only about three centimeters. Why don’t you go have a light lunch somewhere and come back around two? Or sooner, if necessary. Leave your things in your room because you’re definitely staying here tonight.” My room is small but airy, with gauzy saffron curtains billowing at the open window. Most thoughtfully, a daybed for Colin, not a recliner. Fashion magazines on the coffee table must remind the new mother to get back quickly to la bella figura. I wanted to crawl in immediately, but Dr. Caprini insisted that it’s good to keep moving.
The first body-shocking pain struck as we drove back to the hospital after lunch. In the parking lot, another hit hard. Really? Like this? I bent over at the door of the clinic and heard a growl come out of my mouth. What happened to the gradually increasing contractions I was expecting? Colin called out and someone with a wheelchair pushed it under me and rushed down the corridor. Contractions five minutes apart. “You’re not wasting time, Signora,” the nurse said, simultaneously helping me into a gown and hoisting me onto the bed.
Five hours of this and I wanted to die. Some prehistoric beast was mauling my body. This cannot happen to a human, this thing that is ordinary and happens and happens. Then, I’m infuriated—the pain clenched, contractions hammering constantly. Thunderous avalanche, skis akimbo. Speedboat smacking down hard in high waves. Worse.
An old story, the oldest story (Eve yanked out). I will skip to the hours-later ending, when I am wheeled into the whitest room, where silence reverberated and masked people peered down at me, the one whose body is riven. They urged me on. (Wrung-out washcloth over the sink. Wrung and wrung.) Colin kneeling at my side, white as the doctor’s coat but steady. Holding my arm, whispering—what? I couldn’t tell for the din of pain.
The noise level increased. Everyone bustling. Dr. Caprini smiling over me like a lurid clown in a convex mirror. “Crowning,” I heard, and thought of a tiara I wore with my pink tutu and ballet shoes, my mother clapping in the front row. “You were wonderful,” she says at the moment the baby pushed out like a pea from a shooter, was lifted, bloody cord dangling, a little face, fists, a parabola of light blazing in my face, I was crying, laughing, Colin stony, shocked, Dr. Caprini saying, You have a lovely boy as he wailed (I will hear that first cry my whole life) and she placed him on my chest and I’m to push again and, as something else slid out, I hallucinated a jellyfish, I looked into the deep-space eyes of my son.
In my room, I got to see him, clean and swaddled and, miracle, looking around at the new digs. I think he focused on Susan’s red and purple anemones by the bed. We undressed him to see his fierce small body, took turns holding him, analyzing his scrunched face, downy black hair, and pursed mouth. Lips, defined lips and ears, all the whorls. What I recognized and I recognized clearly was that he has my father’s upside-down V eyebrows, the shape children draw of birds in the sky over the iconic square house with the sun shining overhead.
“He’s our boy,” Colin says. He put his finger on the eensy hand and the baby squeezed as though saying, I’m with you. At that instant, I think Colin’s face underwent a permanent transformation.
On June 20, that’s how life swung from its trajectory and headed toward a different star. We could not have been happier. (They say the pain fades but I goddamn know it won’t. I was cleaved, an ax in a melon.) The next day, as we drove home, I was hyperaware of the menace of cars and I began to understand my mother always saying, If you have a child you are a hostage to fate. My new worry, my glorious new worry. Colin keeps grinning. He is such a Mozart lover that we almost decided on Amadeus. I flirted with Fulvio. We named him Lauro Raine Davidson.