Moonface (14 page)

“So much can go wrong,” I tell my mother on the phone one day, summing up what these books are trying to tell me.

“Don't worry so much,” she says, waiting to drop more of her superstition on me. “Your worry will make your baby into a worried person.” This is the last thing I want. Imagine Charlie with a neurotic kid, a kid who is worried about his head splitting open as Charlie tosses him in the air.

Charlie starts a job at an educational company where the hours are reasonable and the pay is better. He stands at the top of the steps and looks at every room in the house, planning how to begin to make repairs. He escapes to these quiet, thoughtful moments that have little to do with what's happening inside my body now, and more to do with what will happen after the baby is born.

But then one night, as we are sitting on the couch eating ice cream from the carton, he says, “It'll be a boy. I know it. We'll call him Hawthorne.”

“Ugh, too nineteeth-century-early-American-novel-ish.”

“Henry,” he says, scooping out another spoonful of dulce de leche.

“Kind of the same thing,” I tell him.

At my month-three sonogram, I am in a waiting room. When the nurse calls me in, she holds open the exam room door and says, “Is there anyone with you?”

“Sadly, no,” I say. This is one of the moments when I wish Charlie were here—the moment when we find out the sex of our baby. I don't think Charlie cares too much for milestones, though. He uses the excuse that he needs to save up vacation days for when the baby is born. Still, it is difficult to feel so excited all by myself.

The ultrasound room is womblike—dimly lit, warm. If I were not lying down, I would probably pass out from the heat. I swaddle myself in the white sheets the nurse gives me. The technician runs a bead of cold gel just below my belly button. She checks a few things on the screen.

“Would you like to know what you're going to have?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Care to guess?” she asks, looking at the screen, but giving no clues in her smile.

“Boy!” I say, waiting for her to point out a little penis on the screen. A boy, I think. With curly, dark brown hair. A boy, with Charlie's charm. He is in there being rambunctious and smart, athletic and fast, swimming around my uterus as if it were a lap pool.

“How about a girl?”

I turn my head to look at the screen, and there she is. A blurry kernel of popcorn. A girl. Her heart is a flicker; it's a strobe light illuminating the entire screen.

At home, I jump on Charlie as he steps in the door. “A girl!” I say.

Again in shock, the poor boy makes his way slowly to the couch and sinks into the cushion with all his weight. “Are you excited?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, smiling. “But what am I going to do with a girl?”

My head snaps back at his remark; it feels like a knock to the nose.

“What?” he sits up and asks. “What did I say? Why are you crying?”

I don't realize I am crying until he says so. I put my hands to my face, and sure enough, they are wet with tears.

“It's the hormones,” I say, shaking my head. But then: “No. Wait, why do you have to say it like that?”

“Uh,” he says, angry with himself, “I'm saying all the wrong things! I meant to say, ”What's a girl gonna do with me?” How am I going to know what she wants? How am I going to make her stop crying? And how am I going to help you through this? What am I supposed to do? I'm already screwing it up.”

I listen to him unload, and I grab his hand.

“You can do this, Charlie,” I tell him. “I really believe you can.”

As soon as we tell our parents that we're having a girl, Charlie's mother begins sneaking in a suggestion here and there every time we see her. “Louise,” she says. “Or Laura.” And once, “Maureen, maybe.” The way she enunciates her syllables makes the names sound particularly melodic. They are storybook names for girls with banana curls and petticoats. I try to picture a Louise coming out of my body, and the image seems alien and surreal. Or maybe I am the alien, giving birth to someone completely unlike me.

I want a name that might show off her ethnicity, something that will match her (hopefully) brown skin and dark eyes. Nothing too long. Nothing ending with a soft “a” sound or, especially, a long “e” lest the girl eventually change the spelling of her name so it ends with the letter “i” which, during her teenage note-writing years, she will inevitably dot with a puffy heart. We shall prevent this at all costs.

Charlie sends me emails from work with only a name written in the subject line. All his suggestions emphasize the “u” sound:
Beulah, Lula, Maru
. When I read them out loud at my desk, I pucker my lips and passersby must think I'm trying to kiss the screen. I write him back: “These make our daughter sound like she's a featured performer in the circus.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, if you'll please turn your attention to the tightrope to witness the feats of The Amazing Tululah O”Doyle.”

“What's wrong with that?” he writes back.

I shoot his suggestions down like soda cans on a fence.

One day, while sitting at my desk at work, I hear the familiar voice of a woman on the radio, one who always sounds like she is being mowed down slowly by a tank. “I'll be your mirror,” Nico moans, “reflect what you are, in case you don't know.” And when I take away the sound of her voice and the image of the tall, blonde German model on heroin, I see her name in print—two little cute syllables for one cute little girl.

In early February, when I'm five months pregnant, Maggie, another friend from Iowa, emails me to congratulate me on the pregnancy. I know that she's been trying to get pregnant for months, and I think that it is selfless of her to be so happy for me. She also tells me that she read an article in the New York Times about a woman who found her kidney donor on the Internet. She writes that she is “seriously considering being a donor.”

“For whom?” I wonder.

“For someone who needs a kidney. Anyone,” she writes.

“We need more people like you in the world,” I write her. And I mean it. Maggie, with her powerhouse body and adventurous attitude, would be a perfect donor. I could see her giving up her kidney to a stranger for the sheer joy of knowing that she could help someone. But in her email, she reminds me that none of the insemination efforts she and her wife have been trying have worked. She'd probably have to donate before her next insemination.

But I can't imagine her trying to get pregnant after she'd had an operation to remove her kidney. Then what? Have a baby on one kidney?

“Yeah,” she writes, “but I wouldn't have the complications that you do. I would have one kidney, but my overall health would be good.”

I want to be encouraging, but I don't want to tell her something that might put her in the same situation that I am in. Not that I've been alerted to any problems yet, but the worry of what could happen sits in the back of my mind. This baby may not make it to full term. Neither might I.

“Just wait for now,” I tell Maggie, wanting her to consider it more carefully. “Just look into it, but don't do anything yet.”

“Motherhood is full of choices,” Violet calls from Vegas to tell me. As she talks, the one-year-old in her arms coos into the phone. “Every day is like: feed her this or that? Give her milk now or later? Hat or no hat? Put her in the crib or keep her in bed?”

“Sounds exhausting,” I say.

“I'm just tired of having to think every scenario through, you know? I'm surprised those little dilemmas aren't bothering you already.”

“Should they?”

“Well, what are you going to do after maternity leave? Are you going back to work? Full-time or part-time? Are you getting a nann—”

“Stop!” I tell her. “No more!”

“No,” she corrects me before hanging up. “Plenty more.”

When I hang up the office phone, I turn to Kristi and I say, “Think the boss would let me go part-time after the baby's born?”

She answers without looking away from her computer screen, “Eh. Well, no. I don't know. Then she'll have to cover all that editing herself. She might as well hire someone new.”

“But why would I have this baby if I'm not going to spend every waking minute with her?”

“Uh,” Kristi says, “are you sure that wouldn't drive you insane? It would make me crazy.”

I just can't imagine this little thing driving me crazy if she's not even here yet.

At around five months, I ask my mother, “Shouldn't she be kicking by now?”

“You'll know when the baby kicks,” my mother says. “Imagine that you've got a little bird in your hand, and it's moving around on your palm, pecking around your fingers.” She raises up her closed fist and smiles as if she has something inside it. This is the gentlest I've ever known my mother to be—she opens her hand slowly, and though nothing is inside, she peeks behind her fingers and smiles coyly into her palm.

Every week, the Silver Fox measures my belly as I lie back on his exam table. And every week, I have new questions for him. This week I ask him how I will deliver.

“I want to push,” I tell him. Over the years, all those movies with pregnant women pushing and screaming while yelling at their husbands has become the way I imagine birth to be: loud, raw, and painful.

“There is no reason why you wouldn't be able to deliver vag-inally. If everything goes well with the pregnancy, the kidneys shouldn't be a problem. They will not be in the way of the birth canal.” He pulls a measuring tape across my belly to assess its growth, then stops and rolls the tape back up in his hand to make sure we're clear on one thing:

“But if something happens, and I tell you that you'll need a C-section, then you will have a C-section. That is not up for debate.” He pulls the measuring tape over me again, and I laugh when I look down and cannot see my feet.

One night, I dream that I am standing at the top of the stairs in our tiny row house with my bare feet on the hardwood floor. I peer down the steps and, just under the living room window, there is a bird. It is tiny and pale blue, with furry white wings, and it is busy picking at a floorboard in the living room. When I see it, I immediately yell for Charlie: “Charlie! Charlie!” I scream. “Come quick! There's a bird in the house. There is a bird in the house!” Charlie slides past me in his socks and comes sweeping down the steps in his pajamas. He swings around the banister and stops in front of the little bird. It looks up at him, too frightened to move. Charlie cups it in his hands and holds it up for me to see. I peer at it from a safe distance.

When I tell my mother about my weird dream, she giggles and shakes her head. “
Anak
,” she says, “that bird in your dream is your baby.”

The dream haunts me for days, or rather, my reaction does. It plays over and over in my head. The scream that came out of me when I saw that bird. And here's what bothers me most: I can't figure out if I was calling out in worry or delight or utter terror.

Chapter Thirteen
The Woman who Swallows Fire and Exhales Angels

I
am not well-versed in chili cook-off etiquette, so I just stand in a corner counting the bowls in other people's hands. There are three conference tables laid out end to end in the fourth-floor hallway of my office. I have finished six bowls of chili, and I could have eaten seven or eight. The employees have been asked to try all of them before submitting their votes. I am the only one in the office willing to admit that this is nearly impossible. But by the fifth one, I'm certain I know which one my winner will be. The one with the chocolate in it. The base is thick and dark, and the chocolate gives richness to the tomatoes. There were two I sampled that were hot, hot, hot; afterward, the little bird inside me pushed hard against my uterine wall. She stretched her legs gradually into my ribs after I spooned in the one with chocolate, so I knew I had a winner.

I notice on the drive to work that the steering wheel is slowly inching its way closer and closer to me. I admit that I am feeling particularly loaded today, thick around my ankles and around my face.

Over the weekend, I was worried about my face, which seemed particularly thick in the mirror. “Well, your name is Moonface, right?” Charlie'd said. Looking in the mirror, I was unsure if I was worrying too much. I went for a blood test first thing on Monday morning just to be sure.

It is April and the sun comes through the windows and makes large yellow squares on the patterned carpet. A co-worker sits down next to me with a bowl of chili (not my pick). “So, how much longer you got?”

“Two months. Can you believe it?” I raise my pant leg to show him my elephant-like ankles.

“Man,” a woman beside us interjects, “don't you wish you could just get the darn thing over with? I was pregnant with my first two all through summer, and my thighs were so thick it felt like they were glued together the whole time.”

“June,” I say, trying desperately to get that image out of my head. “But I'm not complaining.”

If I do say so myself, pregnancy has changed me. I've lived my whole life in a body that looks like it belongs to a prepubes-cent boy. Charlie and I even used to have a character based on it. I'd stuff my hair into a baseball cap, put on a flannel button-down and jeans, and walk around smacking gum and throwing a baseball into a mitt. “Hey, Ricky,” Charlie used to call me as we walked beside each other down the street. It was funny to us for a while until Charlie started worrying that people in the neighborhood would think he was a pedophile.

But now, that gangly body has been replaced by hips I can rest my arms on and breasts that actually protrude. And with a belly that has just begun to fill out my maternity jeans, there's no denying that I am a woman. I can see other people noticing it, too. They look at me like they are watching something beautiful happen, like they're standing behind a street artist as he paints a view of the city. They can't take their eyes away.

Someone is taking pictures for the company website, and as she passes by me, she says, “Wait! I've got to take a picture of the pregnant woman!” So I stand up for her, with my belly in full effect, holding my number-one chili pick.

With my stomach full, I take a slow duck walk back to my desk to find my voicemail light flickering. There are two messages. The first is from my nephrologist, who tells me that my lab results indicate that I have pre-eclampsia, and with my blood pressure so high, the baby's health is in danger. I should come into the hospital now, she says. The second call is from the Silver Fox, who says the same thing, but with urgency. “I will not be there when you arrive, but my partner will be waiting for you,” he says. “This is what I talked about. Go now.”

I hang up the phone. I reach for my belly, thinking that I should be able to feel a heartbeat or something, right? Even though I haven't been able to feel one through this whole pregnancy without my doctor holding one of those microphones to my stomach. I should be able to feel her, right? Or at least she should be able to tell me she's all right.

Melissa, my boss, is a mother of two, and I think only a mother can drive me to the hospital the way she does, her wheels screeching as she slides under the labor and delivery entrance sign, a
Dukes of Hazzard
moment if ever I had been in one. She goes from running a tractor-trailer off of I-83 with her lightning-fast Honda to gently putting a comforting hand on my back as she walks me to the front desk. Her heels click and clack in the lobby, and when a receptionist tells me they've been waiting for me, Melissa holds my hand for several seconds before click-clacking away. Now it's just a matter of getting Charlie there, too. This morning he rode his bike to work, and the nurses are telling me that Charlie should come now, find a way to get from downtown to beyond the county line within the hour. “He should ditch the bike,” she says.

I call Charlie at work and I tell him what is happening, and he answers with a series of breathless “okays,” as if he's going to jump off the phone call and into a race. That's exactly what this feels like: a race. How to get everyone in place—the delivery team, Charlie, and the baby—all in the same room before it's too late.

A female doctor, who is Silver Fox's partner and resembles Carrie Fisher with warm brown eyes, sits on a couch in my hospital room and says, “I think you're going to deliver this baby before Friday.” It is Wednesday, eleven weeks before the baby's due date. I keep trying to remember in the books I've read what hasn't yet formed. Lungs? Fingers? Will my baby have feet? The lady doctor goes through my chart and rereads my history. “Two transplants,” she says. “You're not going to make this easy for me. Order another set of labs for her,” she says to the nurse.

Fifteen minutes later Princess Leia says that I will probably deliver tonight. Fifteen minutes after that, she tells me I will probably deliver within the hour and
where the hell is my husband?

It is too fast to worry about the baby or me. Clearly these people know what they are doing—more than I know what is happening to me. As they run the ultrasound probe over me again, I give Charlie another try on his cell phone, though I am unsure he knows completely how to use it, since he was a self-proclaimed Luddite before I told him he needed to get a cell phone for this pregnancy.
Freakin” Luddites
, I think now.
Where is he?
I'm beginning to sense the urgency of the situation as the doctor orders a test to examine the physical health of the baby.

I'm chewing on the edge of the bed sheet, gnawing over all my worries, when a nurse comes in and says, “How's your pubic hair situation?”

And I know I should be thinking something serious right then. But I look at her holding the electric razor and I just bust out laughing and so does she.
Is this for real?
Maybe it isn't as bad as I think. Just then, my husband comes in, running through the threshold as if he had just finished a marathon, his pale face now red and sweaty.

“Charlie!” I say, throwing my arms open toward him.

“You've got to go get ready,” says the nurse and, before he has a chance to speak, she spins him around by his shoulders and says, “Go prep!”

“Okay!” Charlie says, running out the door.

The next time I see Charlie, my pubic hairs are shaved and Charlie is in a souffle-like yellow hat and yellow gown, and he's sitting on a stool next to my head.

The anesthesiologist introduces himself while I am splayed out on the operating table being prepped for the C-section. During pleasantries and introductions, we discover that I spent part of my childhood in the same Pennsylvania town where his wife grew up. As we wait for the doctor to arrive, he starts naming people I might know. I know none of them. I'm thinking he got the town name wrong.

“Tina Beckman,” he says.

“No, I don't think so.”

“John Beckman?”

“Where's the doctor?” I ask nervously, wanting to get the surgery going.

“She's coming,” the anesthesiologist assures me.

Charlie sits on a stool staring up at a wall of medical supplies: gauze, long plastic tubes, steely scissors. He rubs my forearm and mumbles to himself, “I will not look past the curtain; I do not want to look past the curtain.” His brother has already taught him how to handle a C-section so he will not faint: “Don't look past the curtain,” Wes drilled into him. “Do not stand up from the stool.”

When Princess Leia arrives, she's ready to operate. She holds a scalpel up in the air, and I can see the sharp end peeking out just above the curtain. She says, “Okay, here we go,” and dives in like I'm a salad.

“Do you know Ellen Casperato?” the anesthesiologist says, as he looks at the monitor over my head.

“No.”

“Where did you say you went to high school?” Despite his preoccupation with our finding a common acquaintance, he seems to be doing his job, because I don't feel a thing as Princess Leia dictates to her team.

“Okay, we're gonna get her now,” she says.

Charlie and I lock eyes; he's staring deeply at me, sending me telepathic signals and saying everything is going okay. The anesthesiologist stops his name game for a second and leans down close to Charlie: “Um, sir, perhaps you'll want to look up now.

Your baby girl is being born.” Charlie cranes his head above the curtain, lifting his body only a few inches off the stool. He is silent. The room is silent. I am just waiting to hear the cry. One cry. One sound. Let me hear that bird. I can't see anything beyond the curtain, no matter how much I lift my head.

“Oh, dear! Look at her,” Charlie calls out.

“What?” I ask. “How is she?”

Another nurse says, “Oh, my.”

“What?” I say. I still don't hear a cry. There is the ruffling of paper linens. There is metal clanging against metal.

Charlie lets go of my hand, bounds off his stool, and follows a nurse who is carrying our baby to a corner on the other side of the room.

“Charlie? Where is she?” I call out.

“We're just giving her some tests, Mrs. O”Doyle,” a male voice beyond the curtain says.

From the corner, Charlie begins giving me the play-by-play. Though I can't see him—I can't see anyone—I can tell by his voice that he is smiling. “Oh, she's kicking. Oh, look at her arms. She's a knockout, Moonface.”

Then: “Waaaaaaaah!”

“Oh! She's yelling!” he screeches, his giddiness rising up over the blue curtain. “Oh, she's pissed, Moonface, she's pissed!”

“Waah! Waah!”

“She's good!” a doctor from the corner says. “She passes!” Charlie says.

Another doctor brings her near my head, and I see her for the first time. She is brilliant. A loud, crying baby doll, annoyed by the bright lights. She is a tiny, dark bundle with shiny skin, an eggplant enveloped in a pink and blue blanket. I give a kiss on the littlest nose I have ever seen.

“She'll be upstairs in the NICU when you're ready,” he says, and they take her up to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Charlie tries to inhale deeply but clenches his chest and wheezes. He wipes the sweat off his brow with his sleeve. “Whew!” he says, “Whew!” He sits down again and grabs my hand.

Princess Leia and her staff close me up. I can't move anything but my arms, but as I lie there, I think that if I try hard enough, I can get up from this table all by myself and I can go to my baby before she opens her eyes and spots someone else while she's looking for me.