Pamela Erens - Eleven Hours

“Judith Cooley’s room?” he asks. “I thought this was Judith Cooley’s room?”

On the bed Lore is holding her gown together with one hand, with the other arranging it to cover her thighs. Franckline steps between her and the man to better block her from his view.

“Check with the charge nurse,” she says briskly. “Out the door and back to your right, the big desk.”

“ Coming up at four: Laura Bush’s top barbecue recipes! ”

“I’m her brother,” says the man, not moving, as if hoping that by staying longer he can lessen his blunder. “I just drove in from Rochester.”

“That’s all right,” says Franckline. Go! she thinks. “Down the hall to your right and talk to Marina.”

Lore watches the panda (WELCOME BABY, its white T-shirt had read) bob out of sight and disappear; the door closes with a resounding bang. She curls onto her side, her knees drawn up, her fists tensed against her belly, the obstructing cords from the fetal monitor enraging her. She’d thought for a moment … there was that familiar-looking black wool coat, a familiar height and dark hair; she’d believed for a moment … she will not say it! But her thoughts betray her. Asa . Asa with his arms full of childish whimsy; Asa whom she had forbidden to see her again. The man had stood there; she had felt the shock of familiarity in her belly and her groin; her heart had moved with giddy velocity toward his figure.

She curls over the baby, protecting it from her deranged vision, apologizing: A mistake, my little one, a momentary fit, he is not good enough for you, not good enough for us, and he is never coming anyhow, and we do not need him, we do not need him!

And the baby moves within her, pressing, replying: Get up, get up! For I am coming! For the baby does not care about him . It has nothing to do with him, nor with her, either, not really, not now. It has only one task, to press forward. It cannot help it. It will tear her if it must. It will, if it needs to, freeze a mouth and an eye.

The pressure in her pelvis expands. And there, by the bed, before Lore has said anything, or is even aware that she has made a sound, stands Franckline. The nurse props her up and she leans over the pillows now stacked at the foot of the bed, which do just what Franckline promised. They take the weight off her dangling wrists and hands and allow her to feel almost gravityless, to concentrate on the only facts that matter: the prying-open of the exit to her womb and the heavy weight of Franckline’s hands. Franckline massages her back, her strong thumbs pushing into the narrow pockets around Lore’s spine and into her sacrum, the pain of this pressure breaking up the pain coming from within. Her throat loosens to let out more voice.

“… biggest feet in the universe …”

“… I can top that one …”

Lore’s growls drown out the television voices, render the action on the screen pantomime. The figures on the couches laugh, flap, lean toward and away from each other. They perform for nobody. But when Lore is silent again, their conversation rises and swoops into the room. “ Well, I’d never let my husband …”

“Could you turn off the TV?” Lore asks. Franckline picks up the remote and gives the TV a zap. The shiny women and the smooth man vanish.

It was a full minute, Franckline tells Lore. Lore should be proud of herself. The nurse takes a chance and strokes the girl’s forehead. While attending to Lore, her own pain disappeared. Perhaps she had indeed imagined it.

Lore’s forehead is hot; her stomach churns threateningly. The sensation gradually passes, and her eyes flutter closed. In a couple of minutes she wakes, feeling calm. She turns her head. Franckline is sitting quietly by the bed, her hands folded. Lore fixes on the nurse’s cross, a small gold piece hanging from a gold chain. She again has the impulse to ask Franckline about herself but she is tired, she thinks she won’t be able to listen, and besides, stories are too hard, are almost always convoluted and do not tell the thing you really want to know. What she wants to know is what Franckline does in the moments when she despairs. Does she ever despair? Surely — that cross — she prays, and praying is something Lore does not believe in, or even know how to do.

Another contraction. Though Lore focuses as usual on her voice, on expelling sound as the pain rises, she has the sensation this time of standing slightly outside of herself, and she is aware, now, of other sounds in the room: the speeded-up heartbeat the monitor broadcasts ( lub-lub-lub-lub-lub-lub-lub ), Franckline’s deep, heavy breathing as she presses hard into Lore’s back. She is fascinated to hear the baby’s heartbeat slow as the pain recedes. There are sounds of the wind outside, erratic rattlings of the window, and a dog’s sharp bark, one-two-three-four, stopping abruptly. Footsteps in the hallway outside.

Then she is asleep again.

When she wakes she has the sense that it has been several minutes. Her body is quiet; she detects no pain moving in. But it can’t be far away. When another few minutes pass and nothing happens, she tells Franckline she would like to get on her feet. Franckline helps her off the bed, holds her arm until Lore is steady. Lore walks back and forth a few paces to restore the sense of ground under her, then moves to the window. The sky is still dark and the snow doesn’t look as pretty as she had hoped; rapid footfalls are already disrupting the thin layer and pushing it into the street, where cars that seem to be driving too fast return it from their tires as dirty spray. She watches as another ambulance pulls up, this one silent for some reason, but turns away before she can see what its back doors will discharge.

The pain hasn’t abandoned her. It is coming toward her again, and she reaches out for Franckline.

“Show me your hand,” says Franckline. It is past three. Lore lies on her side. There was a good half hour, forty minutes, of more frequent contractions, and now she is waiting again. The dark air outside washes in and mutes the bright fluorescents, creating an under-the-sea effect. A short time ago she cried out in frustration and disbelief, and Franckline said that some labors are just like this, start and stop, start and stop. “But the baby comes eventually, believe me,” she said.

She rests Lore’s palm in her own and tells her that the finger with the ring seems to her more swollen than before. “Your blood pressure could be up — I want to check that. We need to take this off,” she pronounces firmly, touching the silver band. “Is it something special?”

“No,” says Lore.

“You haven’t wanted to take it off.”

Franckline gazes down at her, waiting. Lore likes her silences; she can look at her then, study her long, smooth face that has a small scar below the left eye.

“We can save it,” Franckline assures her. “They will cut it in just one place, and you can have it repaired later.”

The ring cost Lore a good deal, nearly three hundred dollars. Of course that was much less than Asa must have spent on the one he bought her, a teardrop emerald flanked by two diamonds. She flushed it down the toilet six weeks later, the day after she sent him back to Julia. It could have been sold for good money.

“Lore. Can you feel it when I press your finger? I didn’t think so.”

She never figured out how Asa paid for the ring. Probably only a loan from his parents could have made the purchase possible, but at the same time she can’t imagine proud Asa ever asking them. She was appalled when he first gave it to her — she was even more frugal, in some ways, than he was. He had come home with a louder than usual clatter of shoes and satchel, gripping the day’s takeout coffee that he wasn’t going to finish — because tossing it would be profligate. He seemed hyped up. They sat down to bowls of a lentil soup they’d made over the weekend and he nudged the ring box in her direction. She opened it and looked at him. He was silent.