In the Heart of the Canyon (31 page)

“He had his life jacket on,” said Sam, screwing up his face behind the lenses. “Didn’t he?”

“Of course he did,” said Mitchell.

“He’s a really good swimmer,” said Matthew.

“Then we’ll find him,” said Mitchell.

T
he man’s eyes were kind and gentle, and the first thing he did was to cover her with a fresh cool sheet from the waist down. Then he pulled on an exam glove.

“I want to do this in between contractions,” he said. “Can I slip your shorts off?”

Without answering, Amy lifted her hips. She was in the Grand Canyon, people thought she was in labor, and she was going to have to let a doctor examine her to prove she wasn’t pregnant. She had a cyst, a cyst the size of a grapefruit, just like a girl she’d read about in
Glamour
. Now she was in the process of expelling it. Probably like a kidney stone. Anyway, to get through this exam, she would pretend she was someone else—a college girl, say, someone who had a boyfriend and rode her bike across campus for the kind of female checkup that college girls get.

Sitting at her side, her mother laid a damp T-shirt over her chest. The cotton jersey was cool and soothed her skin. She found it hard to imagine that she had been so cold, after swimming Lava.

“How are you doing, honey?” Susan asked.

“Crappy. Is he a—” She couldn’t think of the right word.

“I’m not an obstetrician,” said Don as he folded her shorts and set them aside, “but I think I can help you through this. Scooch toward me a little. Draw up your knees. Try and relax. Sorry,” he said, looking up sheepishly. “I guess that’s like telling someone to relax in Lava.”

Amy tentatively let her knees fall apart. She was a college girl. She did this all the time. Her mother sat calmly beside her. Amy was impressed that she wasn’t flipping out.

“I hear you took a pretty good swim,” Don said. “And I’ll bet your baby said the hell with it, I’d be safer on my own.”

Amy wanted to remind him that it was a cyst, but she didn’t want to make him feel dumb.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” said Don. “Nice and easy. Deep breath. Here we go.”

For Amy, it felt like he was sticking a baseball bat up inside her. And when she thought he wouldn’t push any further, he did. And it hurt. It felt like another whole contraction. Or rather, that thing they said was a contraction but that wasn’t really a contraction.

“Okay,” Don murmured, placing his other hand on her stomach. “Okay,” and he gazed off toward the river. Amy could feel continents shifting inside her. She waited as long as she could.

“So?” she said.

The worst thing in the world during a doctor’s exam is sudden silence. Amy tried to think back to what Don had told her, about what he was going to check for. Something about dilation. Something about her cervix. He was expecting a baby, and she was expecting a cyst, but a third possibility suddenly occurred to her: Maybe it wasn’t a baby
or
a cyst! Maybe it was something much, much worse!

Don removed his hand and pulled off the glove and placed it on top of her shorts.

“You said you’ve been having stomachaches?”

“They weren’t that bad,” she said.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a week.”

“Nausea? Diarrhea?”

“A little.”

“Back pain?”

“Some.”

Don stood up and squeezed her knee. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and he motioned to Susan, and they both ducked out from under the tarp. Amy watched as they went over to where JT and Jill were standing together. He said something to them, and her mother made a sudden
movement in the direction of the tent, but Don took hold of her arm and held her back.

I’m dying, she thought. They all know it, and they’re wondering how to tell me.

I should have drowned in Lava.

The next contraction came without warning, while she was still alone. One moment there was a twinge of tightening, and before she could call for help, her stomach had frozen into an alien, rock-hard dome. Heavy machinery began scouring her insides. The pain was worse than before, something she wouldn’t have thought possible. Someone shrieked, and immediately people were kneeling beside her. Somebody cradled her head, and she turned and vomited all over somebody else’s knees, the stench hanging heavily in the air. She was afraid she was going to lose control of her bowels. She felt something cool on her cheek and grabbed whatever it was and bit down hard and pounded the ground with her fists. All this with a cork plugging her windpipe.

Then all the heavy machinery went still, and she was able to breathe. When she opened her eyes, her mother, Jill, Don, and Peter were all kneeling around her. Peter gently extricated the bandanna from between her teeth, and her mother held a cup of cool water to her lips.

“Go ahead, tell me,” she said flatly. “I’m dying, aren’t I.”

“No, you’re not dying,” Don said. “As it turns out, you’re about nine centimeters dilated. Which means your baby is pretty eager to make its entry into the world. I didn’t expect to find you so far along. But I think you’ve been in the beginning stages of labor for a day, maybe even a few days. That back pain? The stomachaches that came and went? I’m actually surprised you stood it so well.”

“I’m not pregnant,” Amy said. “I have a cyst.”

Don leaned forward. “It’s not a cyst, Amy,” he said. “You’re one hundred and ten percent pregnant. And you’re about to have the baby.”

“No,” said Amy. “No, I am not!”

Her mother’s face appeared. “Yes, you are, honey,” she said. “We’re going to walk you through it.”

“No,” said Amy, feeling the panic rise up. “You guys don’t understand! I’m not pregnant!” She refused to give in on this. It simply couldn’t be. She was not going to try to remember anything—not when or who or where. And she wasn’t going to give in to the humiliation that would come if she had to admit something like this. Because for a girl to go nine months without knowing she was pregnant seemed like the ultimate in cluelessness. And she was a smart girl. She’d scored 2400 on her SATs. She was going to be applying to good colleges this fall. She was going to be that skinny college girl, biking across campus to meet her boyfriend.

“Amy, listen,” and now Don’s face appeared in her circle of vision, and he looked directly into her eyes. “You
are
going to have a baby. Soon. It’s already on its way. There’s no other way out. It’s like going down a rapid. Once you’re in the tongue, you’re committed.”

Amy shook her head.

“You can do it,” said Don, “because you have to do it. Try and rest because there will be another contraction coming.”

“No,” Amy sobbed.

“Don’t cry!” Don said sharply. “You can’t cry right now. When we get this baby out you can cry all you want, but right now, you can’t cry.”

Her mother squeezed her hand. “He’s right. Save your strength. This is the worst part. Make it through this, and you can make it through anything.”

“How do you know?” Amy snapped.

Her mother laid a freshly dampened bandanna across Amy’s forehead. “Because I’ve been there. Once you get to ten centimeters, then you can start to push, and it’ll hurt too but not like this. This part is hell. The contractions are long and intense and come one right after another.”

Indeed, another one was starting—the tightening, the choking sensation, the deep imploding pain. She felt like she was being disemboweled. She tried to hold back a sob, but she was too afraid—afraid of the pain right now and also afraid of all the pain to follow. Don was
right: there was no way out of this. Everywhere she looked, there was pain.

Voices shouted but they were in the next world over. “I can’t do this!” she screamed.

“Yes, you can,” said her mother. “Breathe!”

“I can’t!”

“Amy,” and she felt her mother’s hands upon her face, turning her so that she was looking into her eyes. Her mother held up her index finger, right in front of Amy’s mouth. “Amy. Look at my finger. See my finger? I want you to pretend it’s a candle. Now blow it out!”

Amy wrenched her head away, but her mother turned it back and continued to hold up her finger.

“Blow,” her mother commanded.

Amy pursed her lips and managed a little puff.

“That’s right! Blow! Blow the candle out, honey! Deep breath in! Now little blows! That’s great, honey. You’re doing great!”

Amy squeezed her mother’s finger and tried to blow. The pain was both within and without, evil, twisting and stretching, and there was no letting up, no lessening of the force.

“Blow,” her mother said, and Amy was so angry at the pain that she grabbed her mother’s finger and bit down hard.

Afterward her mother sat back and wrung her hand.

“I’m sorry,” Amy said. “Did I break the skin?”

Her mother held up her finger. There was no blood, just a row of pink molar tracks. “Next time maybe just blow?”

“Next time she gets a stick,” said Peter.

Amy didn’t laugh. “More ice.”

Susan stood up. “I’ll be right back. Before the next one.”

Amy didn’t want to be reminded of the next one. She closed her eyes and tried to go limp. The strangest images came to her from far away: her chemistry teacher’s voice as he handed out their final, the smell of rain on hot pavement. The lack of pain right now was cool and sweet. She had already lost all sense of time, but now she felt herself floating as well, and she heard a humming sound. Then she felt something touch her lips, and she opened her eyes and saw that Peter was
holding a cup for her. His beard was bristly, and his hair rose in sweaty spikes from his forehead. Everyone else was gone.

Amy tried to take a sip, but it made her nauseous, and she belched loudly.

“It’s so bad,” she told him. “Its unbelievably bad.”

“You can do it.”

“How?”

“You will,” he said. “You just will.”

Amy had heard those words many times, but hearing them from Peter was different. For the first time, she believed them.

Although if anyone—Peter included—asked who the father was, she would get up and walk straight into the river and never return. She would. She really would.

“The camera!” she said, suddenly remembering. “I lost it! All those pictures!”

“Fuck ’em.”

This made sense. “Did you see what I did to my mother’s finger?”

“Hell yeah. Stay away from me.”

Amy closed her eyes. Peter held her hand, and as she began to pant (and no, she wasn’t getting good at it, there was just no other way to breathe), she sensed other people gathering around her.

But something different was happening now. Instead of feeling like she was being torn apart inside, she felt like she had to go to the bathroom. The pain was back just as strong as before, but now she needed to get to a toilet. This was terrible. The timing was awful. What were they going to do if she made a big mess on the sand? JT had made them be so careful the whole time, to protect the river ecology. And now she was going to pollute the whole beach.

But it was already coming, and there was nothing she could do but bear down and grunt like a beast and push.

JT
could feel it before he actually heard it, the thrumming in his chest that always put his nerves on edge when he was on the river. Automatically he looked up into the sky. Abo looked up too.

“Right on schedule, Boss,” he said, just before the sound of gunfire ripped through the canyon. Everyone on the beach craned their necks and shaded their eyes. In the next second, the helicopter materialized, a sparkling bubble sashaying up the river corridor.

“Get back!” JT shouted, waving his arms. “Over there, by the bushes! Sam! Matthew! Get out of the water!”

He and Abo ran out and rolled up the orange panels they’d laid out earlier to mark their location for Search and Rescue. The helicopter hovered, then lowered itself onto the beach, spraying sand and rippling the smooth waters of the shoreline eddy. The pilot cut the motor, and a man and a woman hopped down out of the cockpit and ran, crouching, over to where JT and Abo awaited them.

“Is there a baby yet?” the man shouted.

“No!”

They hurried toward the tented area. “I’m Andy,” the man said. “This is Barb. What’s going on?”

“Seventeen-year-old girl,” JT told them. “Swam Lava and went into labor.”

“When did she start?”

“Three hours ago. But she’s already pushing. Listen, I don’t want that baby getting born down here,” JT said. “Just so we’re clear on that.”

Before Andy could answer, Amy let forth another scream, and JT had to summon every bit of emotional strength not to cover his ears like a child. He had a strong stomach, and even in emergencies he
could usually remain calm, but Amy’s scream released a sickening flush of adrenaline.

Because of this, he stayed outside the tented area while Andy and Barb ducked inside. He crossed his arms and shoved his hands into his armpits and wondered what to do. Abo and Dixie were back at the helicopter, talking to the pilot. They didn’t need him in the tent, and they didn’t need him at the helicopter. JT felt like an extraneous uncle, so he was caught off guard when Jill stepped out from underneath the shade of the tent.

“Please tell me they’re going to be able to get her out of here before she delivers that baby,” he said.

“I wish,” said Jill.

“The Flagstaff ER’s less than an hour away,” he said. “That’s not very far.”

“A lot can happen in an hour.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You’re the Trip Leader,” she reminded him. “You have to be prepared.”

She was right, of course; he was captain of this voyage. But never had he felt like such a passenger on someone else’s boat.

Jill seemed to sense this, because she took his arm and led him away from the tent, toward the water’s edge. JT stood where the sand was soft and wet and let his feet sink down into the cold. He wanted to wade in and dunk himself until the water filled his ears and made his head ache, just to drown out the bad thoughts.

“I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way, JT,” she began, “but I don’t think you have any clue what it’s like for Amy right now. And it’s kind of been a while for me, Sam being twelve and all, but when I was pushing my babies out, if you had told me you were going to load me into a helicopter, I’d have put a gun to your head.”