Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“Do you want a pill to sleep?”

“No! I want the air conditioning to work.”

“I’ll call maintenance, but they won’t get to it until the morning.”

“Fine,” she said, hard on the n , as though it weren’t.

The exchange had been unlike her. Not unlike how she wished to behave, but different from her usual suppression of any challenge, or demand of authority; knowing the hopelessness of requests, Nina generally didn’t bother to make them. But she had lived through hell, through a test of endurance and terror that now made disapproval from a nurse seem as trivial as it in fact always had been.

She lay in bed, hot, her skin chafed by coarse thin sheets, the bed too pliable, its height in the small room disturbing. She felt like a suitcase shoved onto the back shelf of a closet.

And her mind was awake — a lingering head cold decongested. She could breathe straight to the back of her skull, to places in her brain that had been dark and musty for months.

Luke, Luke, Luke, Luke, she recited, picturing boys, beautiful boys with hairless skin jumping into Walker Pond near her family’s summer home in Maine, their voices trilling in the rustling birches, dancing through the sun-splotched forest. She kept a hand on her deflated belly as if she could freeze it back into solidity, and saw herself slim again, dressed in a loose white blouse and worn jeans, walking hand in hand with an eager blue-eyed boy, her Luke, her creation, the living tissue of her pride and power.

She still hadn’t seen Luke. She wanted him.

What was she celebrating? Her ecstasy shuddered and crumbled like old plaster. She hadn’t held Luke to her breast, to welcome him to the world, soothing him for the squeezing horror of the birth canal. Luke’s first sensation had been cold steel, gloved hands, suction — Eric’s vague description of the scene allowed for endless nightmarish inventions.

Newborns don’t remember anything, she reminded herself.

But she didn’t believe that; she knew Luke’s body would remember, that inside him something would always flinch at the world, at a world not of warmth and love but of brutal technology and simple survival. What had she done to him? She wanted to hold him, to apologize for her clumsy work as an usher, hold him tight, press him with reassurance.

She decided to go to the nursery and demand to see him. She lifted the sheet off and swung her legs over. The pain was searing! Hot. The skin pulsed, outraged. It stung right through her, in two lines running up her torso, the movement of her legs pulling her apart, ripping her skin like paper.

She didn’t dare look. She must have torn the stitches; the blood would be flowing. “Nurse!” she tried to call out, but tears, tears of pain, exhaustion, and failure, drowned the cry. She pressed the call button. She shut her eyes against the pain that glowed below, radioactive with hurt.

The nurse appeared, impatience in her stance, a hand on a hip, her body only halfway in the room. Nina raised her face, slack from hurt and tears.

“You’re in pain?”

Nina stared at the nurse with hatred and enough rage to incinerate her.

“You’re due more painkiller,” the nurse said. “I’ll get it.”

“I want my baby,” she said, blubbering like a kid about a lost toy. “I want to see him.”

“Can’t now. He’s under the heating lamp. I’ll bring him in at six. Let me get you something for the pain.” She disappeared.

Nina breathed. In sharply, and out slowly. She inched off the bed, easing into the descent. The white support socks the hospital had given her to wear made her feet look frail. She watched them slowly slide across the big squares of white linoleum, crippled enough by her wound that the tall, wide door of her room seemed an impossible goal.

But she got there. From its half-open position Nina could see the nursery only ten feet away. The halls were empty, asleep. The nursery (divided into two sections, with a nurses’ station in between) had the shades drawn over the windows. Nina saw a different nurse walk across the station into one of the nursery rooms. Nina shuffled herself toward the open door of the station, moving faster, although her pelvis felt cut in two, tearing more with each step, and as she approached, Nina heard exhausted wailing: groaning squawks, high-pitched, easily recognizable as a deserted baby, abandoned, alone. She knew immediately it was her son.

Nina moved into the nurses’ station. The nurse was inspecting some charts in the quiet nursery. Nina shuffled to the other nursery, filled by the agonized cries, and looked in.

That was Nina’s first look at her son: Luke baked under a big lamp, a chicken warming on a delicatessen counter, nude, his thin arms and legs clawing blindly for help, his face distorted, so that his toothless, open, agonized mouth seemed huge.

Her mind closed against the cruelty and horror of the sight. She felt panic. She moved into the room — echoing with her son’s cries of outrage (what monster could ignore them?) — but hesitated to grab him. She had no doubt the baby was Luke. It was the technological setup that intimidated her. What if removing him from the lamp was dangerous?

“Miss! You’re not allowed in here!”

The nurse had spotted her.

“He’s crying!” Nina pleaded.

“You’re not allowed in here,” the nurse insisted, and took Nina’s arm.

Nina looked down at the nurse’s hand and saw two circles of bright blood on the white floor. They came from her — leaked from her wounded heart.

The nurse followed her eyes. “You shouldn’t be out of bed, Mrs. Gold. You might tear your stitches.”

Nina looked at her gown and saw a dull ooze of red at the groin. Who is Mrs. Gold? she thought as the world swayed away from her and she fell after it — into the nurse’s arms.

DIANE STUDIED herself in the standing Victorian mirror beside her dresser. She was framed by its dark wood, like a portrait. Her apparel was inappropriately modern, however, dressed as she was, in L. L. Bean slacks and a green polo shirt that emphasized her enriched breasts. The pants belonged to Peter, an old pair she had borrowed earlier in the pregnancy. Diane’s body was now going in reverse, a much more reassuring process, and she followed the loss of weight, the tightening of skin, with minute fascination and satisfaction.

She heard Mrs. Murphy’s voice, lilting, singsong — phony— talking at Byron outside in the hall. Diane walked there and she found Byron cradled by Mrs. Murphy’s meaty arms against her puffed, upholstered bosom. “Oh, the eyes are getting heavy now. You’ll be sleeping soon.”

“I’m going to take him for a walk.”

Mrs. Murphy stood in her tracks and tilted her head. “Now?”

“I have to mail some letters, I—” Why am I explaining to her? she thought. “Here.” She broke off, holding her arms out. “I’ll take him.”

“It’s windy today.”

“He’ll be fine. He’ll be in the carriage.” Diane gathered Byron gingerly. Mrs. Murphy had swaddled Byron in a thin cotton blanket and one arm shot out as Diane took him. Diane kissed the tiny wrinkled fingers, sucking on the soft buttery skin for a moment. Byron’s big bald head flopped against Diane’s chest, and immediately his mouth opened, jawing at the cotton of her shirt.

“He might be getting hungry,” Mrs. Murphy said. “He’s due for a feeding.”

“In a half hour. I’ll be back by then.” Diane hated this, loathed accounting for her every move and decision. It was just like being with her mother. Lily always demanded constant justifications for every action, laying the groundwork for a cross-examination that would devastate the opposition’s rationale.

Mrs. Murphy held out her arms. “He needs to be changed. I’ll get him ready.”