CHAPTER ONE
There was a point in Carrie’s labor when she wouldn’t stop asking if I was okay.
Carrie had declined drugs until she was six centimeters dilated and the contractions left her shaking so hard she couldn’t steady her jaw. When she forfeited her fantasy of a natural birth, she did so completely; she wanted the drugs flowing through her system in an instant. But the anesthesiologist was with another patient, and then he was on his lunch break, and then he was with yet another patient. Moaning and periodically vomiting into the plastic tray her mother held beneath her chin, Carrie endured. In the few seconds between each contraction, she would wipe tears from her eyes and say, “Is Amanda okay?”
Crouched in the corner of the hospital room, I was too dizzy to stand and too ashamed to answer Carrie’s question.
“Amanda’s fine,” said Mrs. Hart, her voice clipped. Carrie’s mother hadn’t wanted me in the room to begin with, and now she took no pleasure in having correctly predicted my uselessness. She wanted me gone, but I was not going to leave. My goal was to return to Carrie’s side. In another second.
“Don’t worry about Amanda,” murmured the nurse, strapping a fetal monitor around the globe of Carrie’s abdomen. “Amanda’s not the one having a baby tonight.”
Later Carrie would say she had been sincerely worried about me. Driven insane by pain, it seemed possible to her that I had, coincidentally, been struck ill. That I needed medical attention. That the nurse’s indifference toward me would facilitate my swift and untimely death.
No, I was just freaking out.
Carrie’s pain shocked me for two reasons. For starters, I believed we were prepared. We had read all the books and attended a six-week childbirth class in a church basement. With our eyes wide open we watched both the vaginal delivery video and the C-section video. Neither of us passed out—which was more than we could say for one husband in the class, a man whose habit was to surreptitiously eat Skittles out of his pocket while the instructor defined mucous plug and episiotomy. Carrie and I both cried at the videos’ conclusions. The blue-faced babies covered in wax and jam, the moms with their naked elation.
The second reason was that I had once watched Carrie attempt to hurdle a shopping cart in the Walmart parking lot and land on her face. Peeling herself from the pavement, horror movie blood gushing from her nose, she regarded the boy who had issued the dare and said, “My bad.”
In the delivery room Carrie moaned like she was already half dead, but her pain remained theoretical to me. I couldn’t share it. I couldn’t make it stop. A small and stingy part of me even suspected her of exaggerating. Of writhing and wailing because birth was, among other things, a little bit boring. The child in me—the child even younger than the one I was—wanted to gripe, “C’mon, Carrie, cut it out.”
But if Carrie could have labored quietly, with a stoic grimace on her face, she would have.
The anesthesiologist remained MIA. Carrie asked the nurse to check the progress of her cervix.
“We checked an hour ago,” the nurse argued.
“I just feel like I need to push,” Carrie said.
“Can you describe the sensation? Does it feel like you have to poop?”
Through gnashing teeth, Carrie said, “It feels like I need to push a baby out of my vagina.”
I laughed in my corner.
“You!” Carrie shouted. “If you’re dying, then go get some help already. If you’re just being pathetic, then get your ass over here.”
I got my ass over there. Seeing my friend up close was a revelation. Moments ago her agony had rendered her strange to me, but now I realized she was more herself than ever. Carrie was in charge; she was pissed off; she was unapologetic. She was alone in this, but she wanted me near her. No one would have blamed her for banishing me from the room, either out of girlish embarrassment or an instinct to shield me from my own future suffering, but the two of us knew what no one else would admit: Carrie could handle this.
The nurse confirmed that Carrie had dilated from six centimeters to ten in under an hour and finally paged the obstetrician. He was a white man with square glasses and an equally square head, who entered the room with a Coke Zero in one hand and took his time assembling his collection of tools. As he removed the lower half of Carrie’s bed, he said, “First baby, I hope?” and Carrie clamped her eyes shut, as if the effort would make the doctor disappear. The wayward anesthesiologist wandered into the room, took one look at Carrie with her knees splayed, and reversed back into the hall.
I will hate those men forever.
For two hours I held Carrie’s right leg while she pushed. When her doctor, nurse, and mother began counting in unison from the start of each contraction—urging Carrie to sustain the push—I studied the creases in her forehead and said, “Don’t do that. She hates it.” When her lips became so dry they cracked and bled, I smeared cherry-flavored Chapstick all over her mouth.
Between each contraction I offered her both a basin for puke and a drink of water. She had time to choose only one.
When she screamed for someone to please, please help her, I cried into the scaly flesh of her bent knee. I didn’t think about her age (inadequate) or about the boy (same) whom she’d abandoned in the waiting room. I’d forgotten all about the baby. I thought, distinctly, This girl is the love of my life. If Carrie died, I would die too. Her mother had stopped shooting me looks and was standing on the other side of her with a concerned, haunted expression. Like she couldn’t remember what year it was.
I watched Carrie’s perineum tear open and spill blood onto the doctor’s shoes. I watched Nina emerge sunny-side up with her full head of black hair. She was waving her arms, protesting the eviction, the arctic air of the delivery room. The doctor tried to hand the baby to the nurse, but I said, “No. Give her to Carrie,” with such ferocity that no one argued.
With her daughter in her arms, Carrie laughed. “That was so fucking brutal.” Radiating love, she stroked the pillow of Nina’s cheek. For the first time I understood what it meant to be proud of another person. That I could already feel Carrie retreating from me didn’t seem to matter. We were eighteen years old; one of us would snap at the other within the hour. So what? I was sure of two things I hadn’t previously known: I would become a mother too, someday, and Carrie Hart would be in the room when it happened.
“I promise, nothing will ever be so bad again,” Carrie told Nina.
Even now, over a decade later, I count this among the best days of my life.
CHAPTER TWO
By the time I untangle the baby from the straps of his car seat, he’s screaming like I’m trying to murder him. His fire engine song exhausts me without actually winning my sympathy. Every once in a while, his sorrow is slow to build, beginning with wide eyes and a trembling lower lip. That’s the move that melts my heart, but he has no idea.