The Most Wanted (38 page)

“How did you know it’s a police car?”

“I know. Everybody knows what those cars look like.”

“Well, they’re just checking, you know. They do that all the time.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. They’re checking up on you, you know. They know that Dillon would realize it’s around the time when the baby would be—yes, I understand.” She was back on the phone. “No, there will be no inconvenience to my client in that regard. I’m sure you will make every effort to see Missus LeGrande to her room promptly.”

That police car followed us the whole way. Once we got there, we didn’t even wait five minutes. There were a few police in uniforms in the lobby. “There are always police in city hospitals,” Annie said. “You should see Bellevue.”

The medical technician came to take blood samples from me right when we got off the elevator. “Keep walking,” the tech said. “Maybe you can get things happening on your own that way. Worked for me.” I was in my room in under ten minutes. The nurse came right away.
“Sientes bien, mi hija?”
she asked me sweetly.

“I don’t speak Spanish,” I told her, trying not to sound like I was smart-mouthed. “I’m not Hispanic. I just look it.”

It made Annie mad that they assumed I
had
to be Mexican, since I was a young girl and had no man. But the way it turned out, this nurse, Shelley, didn’t even know who I was or what had happened with Dillon. She wasn’t the type to pay attention to the news, not that any of this would have made Annie get less angry. By that point, she was ready to blow sky-high.

“Well, I never miss the chance to try out my Spanish,” said the nurse, and she asked Annie, “Will you be with Missus LeGrande? Are you responsible for medical decisions?”

“I’m her lawyer, and I’m her friend, so yes. Her husband can’t . . . be present.”

“I see,” Shelley said.

The nurses took my clothes and I showered. Annie stayed right there with me. I didn’t mind. They gave me this cotton gown stamped all over with red stars. I found out later it came from the pediatrics ward and that they gave it to me because they thought I might like it better. I think that was a nice thing to do. As they were hooking up all the tubes and the baby’s heart monitor, Annie took off and went for coffee. When she came back, I just for, like, tradition’s sake, decided I should ask her to call my mama.

But Annie answered, “I already tried. I couldn’t reach her.”

Well. That was that. To keep from feeling sad, I watched Shelley and another nurse fiddle with dials and knobs.

“See?” Shelley said, pointing to the line of liquid light. “That’s the baby’s heart rate: one-sixty, one-thirty, one-forty, one-eighty. Can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl. It’s all over the place.” All of a sudden, I felt the baby unfurl and stretch.

“It moved,” I said, “the baby.” It was only then I realized it. After months of gymnastics, the baby had hardly moved at all in . . . well, I didn’t remember how long. I just hadn’t noticed.

“Doesn’t the baby move all the time, honey?” Shelley asked.

“No, not hardly ever,” I told her. “Not for days and days. Is that okay?” I saw Annie and the nurses look at each other. The nurse who was not Shelley went out into the hall. Then Dr. Carroll came in—he was so clean!—and shook hands with Annie. She’d been his patient for years, but they didn’t look very friendly right now.

“Doctor,” Shelley told him, “Missus LeGrande isn’t feeling very much movement.”

“Maybe not much room left to move, I suspect? Well, that’s why we’re here.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Anne,” Dr. Carroll said then, softly. “My daughter is a lawyer too. And she says that the primary rule of law is that you never go after a mosquito with a cannon, because you usually miss.”

“You don’t know what she’s going through, or what she’s going to have to go through,” Annie said.

“In fact, there was no intent to upset or discourage Arlington this morning. It
was
a misunderstanding. And it would have been corrected within a very few minutes even if you hadn’t—”

“She didn’t know that. I didn’t know that.”

“But I did,” he said firmly. “No patient’s status with Medicaid nor any other events in her life have any bearing on my individual treatment of that patient. Surely, in your work, you practice the same standard.”

“All my clients have the same status,” Annie said. “Except her.”

Dr. Carroll smiled. “I know this is a time of real stress for you. I know that as your physician and as your friend.” He turned to me. “Shall we have this baby?”

“Yes, please,” I said.

They left Annie and me alone for a while. Even Shelley left. I was just supposed to contract. The induction would be slow and gradual. “People say that you get harder labor with Pitocin, but it’s just not true,” Shelley told us when she returned. “You’ll go just the same way as anyone else.” As she hipped open the door, there came an animal howl from down the corridor. “Another citizen of the republic,” she said, smiling. I gripped Annie’s hand. That lady sounded like she was dying, not having a baby. She sounded like a horror movie.

I had to take my mind off it. “Let’s watch TV,” I told Annie. “Let’s watch the
Today
show.”

Annie said, “No. You have to concentrate.” Now I know why she did that. But then I thought it was pretty unfair—after all, I was the one who was having a baby.

Plus I was starving. “I reckon they won’t let me eat, huh?”

“No.”

“I’m so hungry I could eat Saint Augustine grass.”

“Well, hurry up and have a baby, then.”

“Maybe I should try to sleep.”

“Good idea.”

She was the one who fell asleep, though. She closed her eyes and relaxed her grip on my hand, and in about one second she was gone, her head just leaning against the mountain of my belly. It was weird; I could see it get all hard, like the sides of a volcano, whenever a contraction came. They didn’t even hurt. The sun was coming up, and the slats of the blinds made bars across Annie’s face. She was moaning in her sleep. When Shelley came in and checked me, Annie didn’t even move. “There’s a policeman out there,” Shelley said.

“It’s because I’m a movie star,” I whispered. I can’t believe I said that. She could tell I was goofing around.

“I didn’t know!” Shelley replied. It was like she actually believed me. But by the next time she came back in, I figured she knew exactly who I was, because she shook her finger at me, like “bad girl,” and said, “You poor little thing. You ain’t but a child yourself. I bet you wish he was here, huh?”

“I guess so. And I . . . I keep thinking about where he is right now and if he can feel what’s happening to me. . . .” Something about those words woke Annie up. She told me to stop getting overexcited.

“I’m not overexcited!” I told her, but I was. I wanted Shelley to know I wasn’t some gangster girl. “Those other boys who broke out . . . Dillon’s not really like that.”

Shelley left the room. Annie and I looked at each other. The contractions were coming closer together now and lasting longer. They were real labor pains. “I know I’m going to have to raise this baby all by myself,” I told Annie, all of a sudden.

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, I know that after . . . what Dillon did, even if he didn’t actually do it himself, I know we can’t ever be together anymore. He can’t be with the baby or me. He’s going to go back to prison. Maybe he’ll be like one of those people Stuart helps.”

“That depends,” Annie said, real slowly, like she was trying to ask me something instead of tell me something.

“You know it doesn’t, Annie. You know they’d think of him as a murderer.”

“Arley, you’re having a baby—let’s not talk about this now.”

“I know all that stuff. But if I say I don’t love him . . . if I don’t love him anymore, if I’m not what he is, then I never loved him.”

“You didn’t know what you didn’t know.”

“You have to take the person for better or for worse. That’s how it is. You’re not supposed to just take them for their best.” I tried to find words. “We made a person, Annie. And if I don’t love the boy I made a person with, then I really am a fool like they all probably think. So I have to believe there was something in him that night that is gone now—or that everybody is mistaken about what he did.” It was starting to really hurt. “I’m going to take deep, cleansing breaths. You’re supposed to go without meds as long as you can.”

“Arley,” Annie said, “God made drugs for times like these.”

“Innnnnnn. And ouuuuuuut . . .” I didn’t want to take any drugs. Dr. Carroll said eighty percent of women didn’t need anything at all.

Annie went downstairs for more coffee. Before she left, she opened the blinds. It suddenly looked like it was going to storm, the clouds lowering and gray. When she got back and put her hand on my forehead, I smelled popcorn, which pissed me off a lot. “You ate good stuff!” I said. “And I’m starving!” She went into the little airplane-sized washroom and washed her hands. Shelley came in and examined me, told me I was halfway there.

“It hurts some,” I told her. “Actually, it hurts pretty wicked.”

“Do you want to sit in the whirlpool?”

“Will it hurt the baby?”

“I wouldn’t suggest it if it would,” Shelley said.

Sitting in the tub didn’t do one damn thing to change the pain. It felt good in other ways, though. Like, I felt lighter. I could breathe. I think I fell asleep for a minute. I had a dream, about a swimming baby. A kind of baby mermaid. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember how Annie spelled her first name. So I called her.

“With an
e
,” she shouted back from outside the door of the whirlpool room. “The right way.”

Shelley helped me dry off and gave me a scrunchie for my hair. “Things are going to move faster now,” she said.

Annie rubbed my back, the way they tell husbands to do in class. I wanted to hunch over, clench my teeth, fight the pain. You weren’t supposed to do that. You were supposed to ride on it, like a surfer on the waves. But I couldn’t keep ahead of it. “I can’t do this, Annie. I’m not old enough,” I told her.

“You can, you have to. Look at my face: I promise I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

“Ever?”

“Ever.”

“Breathe, blow,” I said, trying to relax, and then this terrible thing happened. My legs, which had been paining like a pulled tendon—they all of a sudden were gone. “I can’t feel my legs!”

Annie jammed her thumb on the red button. Shelley came running, but she said it was just some nerve depression or something. “There ain’t nothing worse than labor,” she sort of sang to me.

“I need a shot—”

“Just a little longer.”

“No, now!” shouted Annie. I screamed when another contraction gripped me, this one like a knife in the base of my spine. I could smell my own sweat, and it didn’t smell like me at all. It smelled like metal, like a piece of machinery that was on fire. I hollered again for Annie. It didn’t seem like even a second since the last pain, and here I was having another one. I was going to rip apart and bleed to death, I knew it. I’d never felt anything like it, not a cramp, not a headache, not even the time I broke my ankle, and they say that’s the sheerest pain there is. Annie took my face and tried to center it. But I was thrashing my head like a wild horse. I reached up and grabbed Annie’s wrists and pulled them down.

“Get the damn doctor!”

“I don’t want to leave you!”

“Get him, or I’m going to die right now!”

She ran. I grabbed the sheet in both hands and tried to rip it, though I couldn’t. The pain in my back was so big, I couldn’t imagine I would live through it. The only bigger thing was the feeling of wanting to push the baby—which I now hated—out of me forever. And that feeling was the biggest feeling you’ll ever have on this earth. No other way to describe it. It simply towered over you. And so I began to push and grunt, and I felt spit coming out of my mouth, and I screamed, “Annie! Mama! Mama!”

And Annie came running in like the devil was chasing her, and right behind her was Dr. Carroll, and he whipped up the sheet and said, “Okay, okay, we’ve got a head crowning down here . . . couple more pushes, Arley. Don’t waste it. . . .”

“I was calling you—” I said to Annie, reaching for her hand.