Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

Eric had another preoccupation while he waited in the trench for the next round of shelling — namely, whether Gomez was back asleep in his chair or lying dead in a pool of blood on Ninth Street. Along with that came the humiliating memory of his own cowardice and passivity. He had been impressed with Nina’s behavior on the street, until, in a discussion while they waited for the nurse to give her an enema, he discovered that Nina had never seen the switchblade; indeed, she argued vehemently that it didn’t exist. Until then, because Nina and the cabdriver had been so casual at the scene, Eric assumed he had exaggerated Gomez’s jeopardy. But if Nina didn’t know about the knife, then perhaps they had made a fatal error. Eric didn’t want to bring his child into the world already owing God one life.

Such thoughts were driven from his mind by the increased pace of Nina’s agony. He had a mounting dread of the end result. Ephron seemed nervous now. At first, her reaction to Nina’s pain had been impatient and stern. Ephron pushed Eric out of the way and took over coaching Nina, shouting at her, holding her head so she’d make eye contact, even scolding her. Eric got angry at Ephron, wanted to fire her on the spot, but of course, that was impractical. For a while Ephron’s brutality worked. Nina did the breathing, and it seemed to distract her from the pain. But when the internal heart monitor (a clear disk smeared with a sticky ointment) was inserted inside Nina onto the baby’s head — the thin multicolored wires running out of Nina to the beeping machine made it seem as though she had a phone inside — Nina had to lie flat on her back to avoid disconnection. The pain then overwhelmed everything, and Ephron started administering drugs.

They’d been warned repeatedly that hospital procedures such as the internal heart monitor made back labor worse, that painkillers didn’t really stop the hurt; they simply disoriented the patient, making the memory less vivid in time, but not soothing it at the moment. Ultimately, what they had learned merely made it clear that with back labor everything would conspire against them. Eric told himself to insist to Ephron that they disconnect the machine and let Nina get on her feet so the pressure on her spine would be lessened, but he knew that the counterargument would be the danger of not tracking the fetus’s heart — that if something did go wrong, and the baby died, Eric would have to live with the responsibility for a lifetime.

This situation, which made all the childbirth advice and training useless, reminded Eric of his work as an investment counselor. What was Nina’s pain worth? It seemed like a stock decision in the midst of a panic. If you hang on, you can come out a big winner most of the time, but there is always the once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe to fear, the slight chance whose consequences are so grave that no victory is worth the risk.

So he let events topple on him, not wanting the burden of decision to fall on him, preferring someone else to take the responsibility of disaster. But he hated himself for this, knew that it was his worst fault, that it had been his father’s weakness, that it was what held him back from being a great man.

And reliance on anyone else was always wrong. He could see Ephron’s confidence and resolve weaken. Nina’s wild thrashing and incoherent pleas got stronger and more urgent, rather than diminishing, and Ephron’s predictions of when the end would come, when Nina could begin to push, kept being wrong. It was over an hour longer than Ephron had originally guessed, and Nina hardly seemed human. Her skin was like translucent china; her pupils were huge, filled with terror and confusion; her rich brown hair was soaked, a colorless wet mop stuck to her skull. She seemed so weak, barely able to lift her head, that to expect her to have enough strength to push out the baby was absurd. Always, always, it had been Eric’s assumption that Nina’s giving birth was safe, that there were no real risks — he hadn’t even really considered that the baby might be brain-damaged or malformed — and he had certainly never worried that a nineteenth-century event such as Nina’s death might occur.

But now Ephron’s nervousness, the sudden appearance of a resident, and two other nurses opened an abyss he had never looked into or guessed might be in his path. He saw Nina dead and him alone.

Now, at last, Nina had been told to push. He tried to brace her as he was supposed to, but she had no muscularity to buck up, she seemed made of clammy, boneless flesh. Her attempt to push was pathetic, all of it coming from her neck and face, rather than from below as it should.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a red light flash on the monitor, followed by rapid beeping. Ephron and the resident exchanged looks, but what they said to each other was lost because Nina was hoarsely begging him, “Is it out? Is it coming out?”

“You’re doing great, honey,” he said, and let her slip back into a delirious sleep. I’ve killed her, he realized. To have a stupid replica of myself, I’ve killed this good woman.

DIANE THOUGHT: they’ve left a scalpel inside me. Maybe a clamp. There is something large, mobile, and sharp in my intestines. In the night of the hospital — hushed talk from the nurses’ station, occasional laughter, the whisper of a patient’s slippers en route to the lounge for a cigarette, the soft flop of an orderly’s mop — she became certain that the rippling movements in her belly and the stabbing jolts in her bowels couldn’t simply be gas built up by an inactive system.

They asked, “Any flatulence yet?” every time she complained, but their persistence didn’t persuade her. Farting couldn’t possibly relieve this. Her headache was gone now — evaporated by a sweaty afternoon nap — but this was worse, pressure building inside, a thick rope twisting against raw skin, pushing on her sore incision, appearing in her dreams as a snake she had swallowed, weakening her legs, and dismaying her appetite.

She was awake when they brought a wailing Byron in for a 2:00 A.M. feeding. This time he clamped onto her nipple immediately, a fierce warm sucking engine for a few seconds, desperate, thirsting. Then he lapsed into sleep, his lids shutting as if weighted, his little nostrils resting on her swollen skin. She depressed the point of contact with her finger so he could breathe and nudged his cheek to rouse him. He sucked again a few times, but then his body shuddered into sleep, overwhelmed by pleasure. She cuddled his littleness in her arms. His mouth, open with exhaustion, slid partly off her. The sight of her expanded breast, the thick nipple projecting like a bullet at his little face made her feel big, potent, and full of affection.

Byron started suddenly. His mouth closed to find succor. In that half-off position his hard little gums bit right onto the nipple. Diane screamed from the pain and yanked him away. Byron’s eyes and nose collapsed together, his mouth opened wide in silent agony, and then a piercing cry of betrayal and loss shattered the hospital hush, while his little arms yearned out clumsily, pleading for something to hold. She clutched him to her, frightened and humiliated.

“Oh, baby, baby, Mommy loves you, Mommy loves you,” she begged him, embarrassed, convinced his cries had exposed her to the whole maternity wing, to every mother in Manhattan as incompetent and insensitive. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she pleaded, filling his open, agonized mouth with her nipple to alert him that his desire was still there to be had. He finally got the message and gnawed away frantically for a while, before he sighed deeply and passed out again.

She kept at it faithfully, rousing him, careful now to make sure her nipples weren’t in danger, tapping him on the back with a finger to keep him awake, and, as promised by the books, slowly, but surely, he seemed to get the idea, that persistence was rewarded with actual milk. After a while, her unused breast tingled, abruptly and uncomfortably alive, numbed nerves prickling to consciousness — and the leak of moisture that quickly followed proved she had at last succeeded.