In the Heart of the Canyon (28 page)

The last time JT had had a swimmer in Lava was three years ago, and it barely counted because, after getting washed overboard, the man popped up near the boat and was able to hold on for the rest of the ride. But Amy’s experience definitely counted as a swim; she’d gotten sucked down deep, and when he saw her head vanish, he knew she wouldn’t be coming up for a while. Nevertheless, he had a boat to row, and he did his best to alert the others on the river while seeing his boat safely through to the bottom of the rapid, albeit one passenger short.

The kayakers had landed farther down the beach, and JT wanted to thank Bud for rescuing Amy. But right now he had to attend to the girl. Something was definitely wrong. He saw it as soon as she tried to climb out of the boat: she couldn’t even stand, she was so doubled over with pain. His first thought was a broken limb. They helped her up onto the beach, where she fell onto her hands and knees and put her head down in a kind of yoga pose. She’d unclipped her life jacket, and the buckles dragged on the sand as she let her hips sway back and forth, moaning, seemingly deaf to the guides and her mother and Peter standing around asking if she was all right. Then she fell onto
her side and drew up her knees and made an awful face by baring her teeth and sucking in a great deal of air.

Peter and JT exchanged looks.

Then slowly she emerged from her trance. She opened her eyes and looked at their faces. “What?” she said irritably.

Peter squatted and brushed his fingers against her shoulder. Susan, who had been hovering close, sat back on her heels. Amy rolled onto her back and propped herself up on her elbows. Beads of sweat glistened above her lip, and she licked them off and plucked her wet T-shirt away from her middle and said, “Can’t you guys find something better to look at?”

JT’s first order of business was to get her out of the wet clothes. Even thirty seconds in the Colorado River could send a person into shock. And granted, Amy had a lot of padding, but he was still worried, especially with the way she was acting.

“Let’s get your life jacket off,” and he held the jacket open, and Peter guided Amy’s arms out of the armholes. Then Susan helped her take her T-shirt off, so that she was exposed down to her bathing suit.

This was the first time JT had seen her without a T-shirt, and it took every ounce of willpower not to stare. Her breasts were like melons, straining at her pink halter-style top. Her vast, doughy belly folded over onto itself in several places. For bottoms, Amy simply wore a pair of baggy black shorts with the waistband rolled down low, beneath the folds of flesh. Susan quickly tugged the shorts up an inch or so; from the look on her face, JT guessed that it had been a very long time since she had seen her daughter without a T-shirt too.

In the meantime, Abo had gotten a sleeping mat, and they all helped Amy lie back. Then Abo draped a sheet over her, for although her skin was dry and the temperature was well over a hundred degrees, she was shivering.

“Is that comfortable?” JT asked.

Amy shrugged.

Though worried, he wanted to make light of things. “You’re on the Lava Swim Team now, you know. Pretty elite.”

“Are there T-shirts?”

“Are you kidding? T-shirts, hats, duffel bags, the whole shebang.”

“Good,” said Amy, closing her eyes. “I was never on a team.”

Susan tucked a small towel under Amy’s head, and JT was going to suggest that she try and drink some water, but Amy got that look in her eyes again. She covered her face with her hands and bent her knees and wiggled her toes in the sand.

“I think something’s wrong,” Evelyn ventured, from over JT’s shoulder.

“Amy,” said Susan. “Amy, look at me.”

Amy rocked her head from side to side and gouged her heels into the sand.

“Amy?” Susan said. “Honey?”

Amy didn’t answer, and JT wasn’t happy about this. “Any history of seizures?” he asked Susan.

Susan shook her head.

“I don’t think this is a seizure,” Evelyn offered.

Then Amy went limp again. This time, however, she didn’t open her eyes. She kept her elbow crooked over her face. JT glanced down and saw a large circle of wetness under her hips. He didn’t know if she sensed it or not.

“I’m not a fucking epileptic,” Amy said in a muffled voice.

Susan stood up and hugged her arms to her chest. Evelyn shifted to give her some space. The others—JT, Jill, and Peter—just sat there beside Amy, not knowing what to do. JT himself was hoping the whole problem would just go away, when Bud walked up.

“Thanks for the help out there,” said JT.

“How’s she doing?”

“Not good, actually.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Not quite sure.”

Bud squatted down. “Hey. Remember me?”

Amy opened her eyes. She looked at Bud and his big white beard and then looked around at all the other faces. Then she closed her eyes again.

“What’s the matter,” she said. “Haven’t you guys ever seen a fat person before?”

It wasn’t a seizure, Evelyn knew that much. Julian had seizures. This wasn’t a seizure. She wished people would listen to her. How was it that she was fifty years old and a full and tenured professor of biology at Harvard University, and still people didn’t listen to her, unless she was up at the lectern? And even then.

Peter’s fear was that it was appendicitis. She’d had it for days, and he should have known, and now the tiny useless organ had ruptured. He thought of all the appendicitis scares his mother had had—all those stomachaches, high up, low down, deep in the belly, dull, sharp, throbbing, incessant. Always he’d taken her to the hospital; always the pains turned out to be gas. Peter had grown to think of appendicitis as something from the 1940s, old-fashioned and extinct, like polio. Now, with it staring him in the face, he’d done nothing.

Thinking of his mother’s trips to the hospital made him think of hospital beds and clean sheets. How nice it would be, to crawl into a freshly made bed. And then he thought about Miss Ohio folding linens in her sun-drenched laundry room, telling her pimp-husband how Peter was still tied to his mother’s apron strings.

An odd thought, but there it was.

Mitchell traipsed along the shoreline, whistling for the dog.

It was Jill who put it together. She watched Amy go rigid, watched how she dug her heels into the sand and made little gasping noises. She saw the long slow leakage underneath Amy’s hips on the sand. She thought back to the night that Sam and Matthew drank the margaritas, when Peter said something and Amy got mad and left. That walk. That waddle.

She told herself it couldn’t be possible. A girl would know. Her mother would know.

Then she remembered stories she had read in magazines over the years. Lack of education. Denial. Overweight to begin with.

Susan had gone off to get Amy some water. With Susan gone, Jill gave herself permission to look at Amy’s stomach. And she knew. She didn’t know how she knew; she just knew. She put her hand on Amy’s forehead.

“Could you give me a moment?” she asked JT and Peter.

JT seemed relieved. He stood up and went over and conferred with Dixie and Abo. Peter stayed and Jill didn’t argue.

“Amy,” said Jill, “is it your stomach?”

Amy nodded her head.

“How bad?”

“Really bad.”

“Amy,” said Jill, “would you mind if I felt your stomach?”

Amy opened her eyes and looked at Peter. Then she closed them again. “Fine.”

Jill laid her hand on Amy’s belly. The skin was warm and sticky, and there was a raisin-shaped mole just below her navel. She felt around. She was wanting to feel nothing so that her suspicions would be wrong. But just below Amy’s diaphragm, a little to the left, she felt a lump. It was roundish, maybe the size of a plum. Jill pressed, and it rolled beneath her fingers. An elbow, perhaps a foot; Jill couldn’t be sure.

She took a deep breath and, not knowing what else to do, gently began to massage Amy’s belly. She had never rubbed another woman’s belly before, she realized; in fact, it was possibly the most intimate thing she had done to anyone lately, except Mark.

“Does that feel all right?” she asked.

“It feels fine. Anyway, I don’t hurt right now. I’m not an epileptic, and don’t anyone call a helicopter.”

“The pain comes and goes?” Jill asked.

Amy nodded.

“For how long?”

Amy shrugged.

Jill was trying to keep her face calm, but inside she was in ER mode.
ER mode was where she went when Matthew broke his leg up at Alta and they looked at the X-ray and said,
Actually, it’s a lot worse than we thought, and see this little spot on the bone?
ER mode was when Sam spiked a fever and got a stiff neck and then went limp in her arms; when Mark had chest pains, and they hooked him up to machines and wires and a counselor came and asked if he had a living will. She had always thought that ER mode was a place she only went when it involved her immediate family, but now she realized that was wrong.

She thought she could deal with telling JT what was going on, and she even thought she could deal with telling Amy. But she didn’t think she had it in her to deal with telling Susan—in whom she had confided so much on this trip—that her seventeen-year-old virgin daughter was going into labor on the Colorado River, miles from the nearest emergency room.

J
ill stood up in the hot sunshine. Her knees were stiff from crouching and her mouth was dry. She touched Peter on the shoulder and motioned for him to join her out of Amy’s earshot.

She’d noticed over the course of the trip an unlikely alliance between these two. She recalled meeting Peter back in Flagstaff the night before they left—noticing how he had a kind of snotty attitude toward everyone, especially Amy. Jill had left the meeting wondering how she was going to hold her patience for two weeks with this frat boy who was obviously more interested in getting laid than enjoying his time on the river—she could read the disappointment in his face when he looked around and saw the likes of Amy and Evelyn, Susan and Jill, little Lena and ancient Ruth.

So she wouldn’t have guessed that he’d have chosen Amy to spend so much time with. She wouldn’t have guessed he’d had it in him, to develop a friendship with a woman with whom the possibility of a sexual relationship was not the first thing, quite frankly, that leapt to mind.

Now Peter stood with his eyes cast downward, head cocked toward her, waiting.

“Has Amy told you anything?” she asked him.

“She’s had these stomachaches,” he said. “I guess I should have said something, but she didn’t want me to.”

Jill glanced around Peter’s bulk to where Amy had rolled on her side again. And she wished suddenly that her wristwatch wasn’t buried at the bottom of her overnight bag. It would be helpful if she could time the contractions, and she would need a watch for that, because after ten days on the river, she didn’t trust her sense of time in the least.

“It’s not a stomachache,” she told him.

“What is it?”

“She’s in labor.”

She waited, then, for it to sink in. And this frat boy, whom she expected would back away nervously, folded his arms across his chest and nodded gravely, as though he had expected nothing less bizarre.

She had to hand it to him.

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve gone through this twice. I’m sure.”

“I knew it wasn’t just a stomachache,” he said. “But I didn’t think it was labor. Did you tell JT yet?”

They both looked over to where JT was listening to Mitchell, who was speaking and gesturing with agitation.

“No,” said Jill. “But I will in just a minute. I thought maybe you could explain to Amy what’s going on.”

“She doesn’t
know?”

“If she knew, she wouldn’t be so terrified,” said Jill. Then she reconsidered. “Fine, she’d be terrified, but she wouldn’t—She’s clueless, Peter. Trust me. She has no idea.”

Peter looked dumbfounded. “How can this happen? Don’t girls miss their periods? Don’t they notice they’re getting kind of big?”

“It’s definitely bizarre, but it happens,” said Jill. “When a girl’s seventeen, she might not be keeping track of her cycle. And when you’re as big as Amy, well, sometimes you just don’t notice things. There was a girl in my high school twenty years ago. She was like Amy—really, really big. And she didn’t know. Honest to god she didn’t know. And then one day she went to the bathroom in between math and science and—”

“Okay,” said Peter. “I get it.”

“So it can happen,” Jill finished.

“How close is she? To, you know, actually having the baby?”

“I don’t know,” said Jill. “I don’t think she’s that close, but she might be. I don’t know.”

“So what do we do now?”

“JT’s going to have to radio for help. Because we have to get her to a
hospital. And in the meantime, we’re going to keep her very very still and try and slow down the contractions. But I want you to tell her what’s going on. She likes you.”

Peter scratched the back of his neck. “Of all the gin joints in all the world,” he murmured. “Fine. I’ll tell her.”

“Just think of how it’s going to be for Susan,” said Jill, by way of consolation.

Peter went back to where Amy lay propped up on her elbows again. Her legs were extended out in front of her, dimpled and thick, and he tried to look at her like nothing was different but found it impossible. He wished he had said something directly to JT about her stomachaches, but he also realized there was no good to come of him scolding himself, so whenever that thought came into his mind, he pinched a little fold of skin on the back of his hand. Hard. It was a trick he’d learned from his shrink when he was trying to get over Miss Ohio. The shrink told him to pinch himself whenever he thought of her, and it would decondition him.

“The whale surfaces,” Amy said, feigning drama as she tried to sit up.

“How do you feel?”

“Crappy.”

Peter looked upriver to Lava Falls. It seemed small and far away and unimportant. This was going to be hard, and he could think of no better way than to just say it.

“Jill thinks you’re having a baby,” he said.