Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

The dense forest broke and the small clear lights of Liberty Gorge appeared. I made a quick left turn and followed the street to where the old hose tower rose up high above the small shops around it. At the curb I lurched the Jeep to a stop and ran in through the open bay doors. Four guys in dark blue uniforms were playing poker around a table. I barely got three words out before they rushed past me, instantly to work. The lights of the ambulance whirled on. Then the siren chirped, and I stood aside as three of the men eased Jill onto a gurney, stanching the blood and wheeling her to safety all at the same time.

I leaned against the rear of the Jeep, let my head drop back and felt relief and shame wash over me. She would be all right. She was in the hands of men who knew what they were doing. Men who were not me.

The baby’s cry was a strangled, wet little sound. It punctured the air of the white waiting room like the yowl of a cat. I’d been staring at the ceiling, slumped into an ergonomically curved plastic chair, and when the sound came I looked up in surprise. It had happened so fast. One minute they were wheeling her into surgery, fending me off with waving hands shrouded in plastic gloves, and the next—almost literally the next—came the cry. But it seemed a good long time before the door swung open and a small crib clunked through it, pushed by a nurse. On the center of the white mattress, like a seashell nested in cotton, lay the baby, all wrapped up with just its head sticking out. Its skin was dusky pink. Its eyes were closed but with eyebrows raised, head turned to the side as though listening to a distant hum.

“It’s a boy,” said the nurse, all cheerful, as though this whole thing were normal.

So this was the price I had paid. This was the six pounds that had crushed me like it was the weight of the whole world. I had to catch myself before I laughed. All of a sudden I felt like such an embarrassing whiner. For months I’d been carrying on like nature’s original jackass, and here was this baby who was—and there’s just no other word for it—cute. I’d never held a baby in my life, not even one of Candy’s, but I reached in and scooped him up. It was like picking up a soda can you think is going to be full but turns out to be empty. They had him wrapped up so tight, he was like a very delicate football.

“Is Jill going to be all right?” I asked.

“She lost some blood, but she’ll be fine once she recovers. Why didn’t you tell us she had placenta previa?”

“What’s placenta previa?”

She explained it to me, but the words went over my head, and I shrugged. The nurse asked, “Did she get any prenatal care?”

“We couldn’t afford it.”

She scowled at me. “It’s a potentially fatal condition for both mother and child. A simple sonogram would have detected it.”

“Oh.” I looked down at the baby. “Do I need to sign him out or anything?”

She gave me a funny look. “He’s going to the nursery. What did you think, you can just walk out the door with him?”

“Well—Jill can’t take care of him, right? She’s sick and all.”

“That’s what the nursery is for. He hasn’t even been bathed yet.” She took the baby from my hands as if he was a prize she’d decided I hadn’t earned after all. “Sit tight. As soon as your wife gets into a room, I’ll let you know.”

My wife. When the nurse said that I felt ashamed that she was wrong. It was yet another thing I’d dropped the ball on, like the prenatal care and getting a better job, keeping the fences in good repair and getting Elias taken care of before he turned into a raving lunatic at the sight of somebody bleeding.

It was a relief, at least, that Elias had nothing to do with why she was bleeding. I felt kind of bad about that, the more it sank in. If he hadn’t started screaming, Jill would have bled out right there on the sofa and nobody would have realized it until it was too late. It was such a weird response for him. The guy had seen carnage on a level I could never imagine. He’d seen dead Afghan people by the score, kids even, and he’d told me about some of those, mutilated or partially eaten by animals. He’d seen his own buddy blown apart into a dozen pieces by an IED. In those situations he had acted decisively, and we knew that for a fact because he’d lived and come home, a Purple Heart veteran, honorably discharged. And then in his own house he acted as if his legs were stuck in concrete, screaming as though a truck was barreling down on him. Those anti-anxiety pills he was taking weren’t doing a damn thing. I made a mental note to talk to him about that.

But it might not be anytime soon. I had a son to look after now, and that son had a mother I needed to watch out for, too. At least we knew now that under pressure Elias didn’t lash out—he froze. That made the whole thing a little less urgent. At least he wasn’t a danger to anybody.

I wish it had been that simple.

It was seven in the evening when the painkillers wore off. My eyes slit open to the view of a faded pink wall fractured by the beige plastic bars of my bed. On the little cabinet there sat the incidental items of an ordinary birth—an opened package of blue trauma pads, a stack of tiny diapers, a kidney-shaped dish, a glass jar of Hershey’s Kisses with a single balloon tied to its neck—but I knew the birth had not been ordinary. I tried to roll over onto my back, but a slice of pain seared through my abdomen. I winced and eased over more gently. Not long after I’d awoken from the surgery, in a busy room washed in a greenish light and the beeping of many machines, I had laid a cautious hand on my belly and felt the incision, a vertical one, the same as my mother’s. The surprise of it had filled me with an odd sense of peace. Her experience is yours now, I had thought. She came through it, and so will you.

I reached for the call button, but as I did my door swung open and a bassinet rattled through it, pushed slowly by a nurse.

“Here he is,” she said. “Chewing on his fists. Let me give you your meds and then you can feed him.”

I looked up to see Leela craning her neck to peek around the doorway. Strands of her gray hair, bunched up in its usual bun, had worked themselves out to form a disheveled halo around her face. “Oh, good, Jill, you’re awake now.”

The room was dim, the stiff green drapes drawn tight across the windows, and Leela didn’t offer to turn on the lights. When the nurse left she lifted the baby with competent ease and handed him down to me. I hadn’t seen him for hours, and already he seemed older, his round little face evenly pink and the tips of his ears unfolded from their squashed state. I pulled up the sheet for modesty while I nursed him, and Leela said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Goodness. How do you feel?”

“I’m okay.” The baby was so warm, his body soft and as radiant as a coal. I couldn’t help but think of Elias then, how dry and heated his skin always felt when I massaged his shoulders, like a clay dish lifted from the oven. My gaze caught on the little index card at the end of the clear bassinet. On it was the cheerful image of a blue teddy bear beside a name blocked in thick marker: “OLMSTEAD, Thomas Jefferson.” “I thought it would be a girl,” I told Leela.

She settled into a chair beside my bed and patted my arm. I expected her to murmur a platitude that perhaps the next one would be or that God liked to surprise us, but instead she said nothing. The sudden quiet felt almost like a moment of silence for someone lost. I stole a glance at her and wondered if she had hoped for one, too.