The Bookstore (46 page)

MY NEXT SHIFT
at The Owl is with Bruce and George again. Luke has already left on his tour. He won’t see the baby for weeks, if it comes on time. The world is even grayer without Luke.

George still seems to be deep in sorrow at the unappreciative nature of his customers.

“Were you here for the Anatole France guy? Luke thinks I was an idiot. He wanted leather spines . . . I don’t know. And I had a girl in here before you came in. She wanted some mystery books. ‘What sort of mystery books?’ Any mystery books. Did she have any favorites? No, but she was decorating her apartment, and she thought that mystery books might look cooler than regular novels. I thought of our new directive, and I wasn’t rude to her—I took her to the mystery section. She said she didn’t have time to look for herself—could I just pick some out for her while she went to get her nails done?”

“And so you said no.”

“Oh, no,” says George, glimmering a smile. “I picked out all the B’s and all the S’s.”

Bruce and I start to laugh, and after a minute, so does George. And then the pain comes.

I lean over onto the counter. It is all over me. I thought it would be focused on my pelvis. Nope. After a couple of minutes, the pain flows away completely, like waves rolling back on a beach.

George says, “These are contractions? You’re in labor?”

“I think so.”

Bruce is standing glued to the spot, his face in a rictus of a smile, his attitude that of a man about to offer to find boiled towels.

“Have you someone you call?”

“Stella.”

“Yes. Give me your phone, I’ll call her.”

“She’s in the Hamptons for the weekend. I just remembered.”

“So?”

“So, I’m not going to make her come back. She was so happy to be going—”

“She made a commitment—”

“Which she will keep if I call her. I am not going to. I’ll be all right.”

“You don’t have a backup?”

I pause.

“Stella was my backup. Mitchell was—”

“Okay. Who else?”

“I am fine.”

The pain comes back, another high wave, and again peaks and flows away.

Another one is going to come, so instead of performing it in the middle of The Owl, I go to the back again, to endure it in private amid the first editions.

I want to get an awful lot nearer to the hospital than I am now.

George anticipates me. “Was that another one? Shouldn’t they be more spaced out than this? I think we should get you to the hospital right away. I will come with you.”

“You said you were allergic to hospitals,” I say.

“I get a reaction to industrial cleaning agents. I can take it.”

George stands to hail a cab. I am next to him, my hands on my belly. The cabs fly by.

“Hide,” he says. I do, stepping back and blending in with the surge of people. The next cab swerves in to pick him up. George opens the door and I get in first. George gives the address to him instead of naming the hospital. The driver is wise to it, though, and casts a sharp eye on me from his mirror. “Miss, ma’am—are you—?”

“No, no,” I say, beaming manically at him, “I have weeks and weeks to go. I am going to have triplets. It’s a checkup.”

We pull back into the traffic and I lie back and have another contraction. I duck below the mirror.

When there is no contraction, there is no pain. When there is no pain, I feel quite chatty.

“I’ve got a book called
Painless Childbirth
. I found it in The Owl,” I say to George.

“Maybe you should’ve read it.”

“I did. It’s by Grantly Dick-Read. Isn’t that a great name? It sounds like an adverb. ‘The old man was very courteous and grantly.’ ”

“You nevertheless seem to be experiencing some pain.”

“It says painless childbirth is all about relaxing, about not believing there’s any pain involved. Oh . . .” The new wave of pain is much worse. The wave is like one of those impossible breakers you see in films, and I feel like the tiny dinghy out there by mistake. When it goes, there is scarcely any relief before the next one. I start to believe I am going to have the baby in the cab.

I have learned how to breathe, I have learned how to concentrate. I should be able to do this.

We pull up at the hospital, and George helps me, and in what seems like two seconds I am in a birthing room that looks like a hotel suite. I have refused to let George come in with me, to his intense and evident relief.

The midwife comes in. She is wearing high leopard-skin-print boots and a short skirt. She looks exactly like Michelle Pfeiffer.

“Hi, Esme, we met, didn’t we? I’m Anouska. I will just go to change and then we will deliver your baby. This is Hilda. She will stay with you.”

“I want the drugs,” I say. “I want the drugs.”

But she has gone, and Hilda does not react.

Anouska comes back in. She’s changed the slinky clothes and leopard-print boots for a green gown and white rubber clogs. She still looks gorgeous.

The pain comes back. This is the worst so far. Each one is. This one makes me inseparable from pain. Pain and I are the same thing.

“The contractions are every thirty seconds or so,” says Hilda. “She’s doing fine.”

“I am not,” I say. “The next one is coming.”

“Good. I will examine you,” says Anouska.

Pain engulfs me again.
This
is the worst; each one is the worst. This time the room is pain, the air is pain, I am pain.

“I—want—the—drugs,” I say, when I can speak again.

Anouska smiles. “You are ten centimeters. The pain does not get worse than this. It is too late for drugs. I remember how this feels, you are doing well.”

“I’m not,” I repeat. It is all I can manage.

“It is time to push, Esme. Are you ready?”

In all the books, all the lying damn books I have read, it says that the urge to push will be uncontrollable. It says that that is why babies are born, because it is impossible not to push. That many women want to push before full dilation, and have to be stopped. That French nurses yell, “
Ne poussez pas,
” that German ones probably yell, “
Nicht puschen,
” that the world over, midwives are putting their hearts and souls into preventing women from pushing too soon.

There is no urge at all.

A new contraction comes. I cry out.

“Push into the next one,” says Anouska.

“I can’t,” I sob. “I can’t. It hurts.”

I try to push with the next one, and I hear an unearthly, prolonged, agonized cry, from someone’s very soul. And then I get a brisk tap on the cheek. Anouska is glaring down at me.

“No. No, no, no. Your energy is not for screaming. You need all of it. Look at me, look at me. Good. Do you understand me? You need all your energy for this. You are not to waste it. Now push.”

I stare at her. During the scream, I remembered the name of
Dennis’s daughter. Dennis himself told me, and it had gone out of my head. Josie Jones.

“Push. You must push.”

I try again. She makes me hold my legs, but I can barely do that. My arms feel like boiled spaghetti. I look helplessly at her.

“I can’t,” I say.

“You
can
. Esme, if you do not push, your baby will not be born,” says Anouska. “Now
do
it.”

I do it. I push. I do not cry. I push, and when the pain comes, I push some more.

“Your water broke,” she says.

My water broke
?
Doesn’t that happen right at the start?

I push again.

“It’s crowning,” says Anouska to Hilda. “Esme! Esme!” She is shouting as if I am far away. “Esme, I can see the top of your baby’s head. Do you want to see? Do you want a mirror? It will help you.”

Do I want to see? Do I want to see my own vagina, distended beyond all imagining?

“No,” I say, with as much firmness as I can summon. “No. I
don’t
.”

“Get her a mirror,” says Anouska.

Hilda magics a mirror from somewhere.

“Look!” commands Anouska. “Look at your baby’s hair.”

I peep reluctantly into the mirror. Astonishingly, I can see it. My baby’s hair.

“Your baby is nearly born. Now
push
!”

I close my eyes and push, one big, agony-ridden push.

“The head is out,” cries Hilda.

“The head is out,” cries Anouska.

I close my eyes and push again. This time there is a curious slippery feeling, and something wet and not so very painful slides out of me. And something else, not painful at all. It is the strangest experience I have ever had by a long, long way. Then I hear a loud, indignant cry from a tiny thing.

“Your baby is born, Esme,” cries out Anouska.

I am laughing and crying. She is holding up the baby.

“What is it?” I ask. It is scrunched up and bawling with outrage at being born.

“It’s a girl,” she says. Anouska is laughing and crying too. It must be a pretty full-on job, midwifery.

She gives me my daughter, who stops crying.

It is a minute in a net of gold. She is perfect. All mothers say that. All babies are.

“Hello,” I say to her. I kiss the top of her head. I want to be the first person to kiss her in the world. Her mouth is nubbing at my chest, the instinct, like a foal, like a lamb.

“Eleven twenty-two
P.M
.,” says Hilda.

“She’s looking for milk,” says Anouska. “Let me help you.”

She shows me how to get the baby to take the nipple. It hurts, but now I have a new yardstick to measure pain with, and this is only inches. She begins to suck, and is quiet. Her eyelashes are very long. She is a girl.

“That was a fast birth,” says Anouska. “Only three hours or so. Normally they take a lot longer, are more painful.”

I have nothing to say to the “more painful.”

They take her to the table at the side of the bed. It is like a James Bond room—the table converts at the push of a button into some scales. They clean her up, too, and put a nappy on her. When they give her back to me, they have given her one of these little onesies that fastens underneath, and she is wearing a blue hat.

“Where did she get her hat?” I ask.

Hilda says, “The paperwork isn’t here. I’ll just be a second.”

When she comes back in she says, “There are two people waiting in the waiting room.”

For a second, my soul skips. Mitchell.

“Who are they?”

“The man who brought you, and a girl in a black leather jacket.”

“Stella is here already? And George waited?”

“Yeah, they can come in soon.”

Hilda looks at her watch for the date.

“She was born at eleven twenty-two on the eighteenth,” says Hilda, and writes it down.

“What is her name?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Her eyes are changing color. They were blue when I saw them first. They’re changing to mushroom . . . Is that normal?”

Anouska says it is.

“You don’t know her name?” says Hilda.

“No, I don’t know yet.”

“Honey, she has to have a name, for the birth certificate.”

“Straightaway?”

“Yeah,” says Hilda, her eyes wide.

That explains so much about American names.

I had thought already about naming her after a female artist. Sofonisba, Mary, Elizabeth, Tracy.

“Georgie, then,” I say. “Georgie Garland.”

Stella and George come in together; they seem to have bonded in the waiting room. They almost tiptoe, and they regard Georgie, fast asleep next to me in the big bed, in silence. Stella has tears in her eyes. She bends to kiss me.

“How did you know?” I say.

“I gave George and Luke my number. I knew you wouldn’t call if I wasn’t in the city. But this little girl came out too fast for me to be a doula! Next time . . . Can I?” She holds her camera up.

I nod. “Of course.”

I tell George that I remembered Josie Jones while I was in labor.

“So now we can at least tell her,” I say. I suddenly feel exhausted. “About her father.”

“Yeah,” he says. “We’ll find her.” He looks again at Georgie. “Congratulations, my dear. You are very blessed.”

“I am,” I whisper. “I am.”

STELLA COMES BACK
again in the morning to help me get Georgie back home. We hire a Lincoln Town Car and take a long time fixing the car seat. The man says we have done it so right that we could be on the instruction video. Stella looks for the fifth time at the leaflet to make sure.

Now she, the baby, is lying here, in the Moses basket next to the bed, and Stella has gone, and we have been left to stillness and each other. The room is full of clear light, and Georgie is in her white sleep suit and a stripy hat. I wonder if her head is too warm. There is a white duvet cover on my bed, a little blue blanket on Georgie’s. There are white pillows on my bed. Everything is still and clear and blue. Love is pouring out of me like milk.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT