The Passage (52 page)

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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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Then the crest pressed her down again, and she stared into the dark, arched helplessly in the crushing grip of something more ancient and more cruel than anything one understood until they had to give birth or die.
 
 
AND the sea heaved endlessly through the dark hours.
Dan sat beside her, staring into nothingness, and thought, There's something wrong.
He couldn't remember how long it was supposed to take. But if the average was twelve, and this was Graciela's fourth, if he understood what she was saying at all, it shouldn't be taking this long. It had been almost twelve hours now and the contractions were still coming, the times between them varying, but never more than three minutes apart. For a long time, she'd borne them with courage and held his hand. Then she'd passed gradually into irritable querulousness. She'd begged him for something for a long time, but he never understood what it was … . Now her hand dangled limply in the water, not moving at all.
She was getting weak, dimming, going out, like the batteries of a soaked flashlight.
He had to do something. But what? He thought desperately of a cesarean, but he didn't have a knife. Anyway, that wouldn't save her, only the baby.
Suddenly, she screamed, a terrified burst of animal sound followed by rapid, agonized Spanish.
He took a deep breath, fighting panic. He'd hoped it would be a
normal birth, that he could just coach her and catch the baby when it came. But it seemed it wasn't going to work that way.
Okay, boy, he told himself. It's time to see what's wrong.
He turned the flashlight on and thrust it between his teeth. The feeble glow was no brighter than a lighted cigarette. Leaning swiftly so as not to capsize the boat, he washed his fingers in the clean seawater outside. Not touching anything else, he bent close to her opened legs.
Her hot, strained flesh opened easily to his searching fingers. Inward, inward, sweat prickling on his back. Her inner flesh was slippery with blood and fluid. He set his teeth and kept probing in.
Something hard—hard and smooth and slightly gritty. He moved his fingertips along it and felt the curving.
He remembered watching Nan emerge in the bright green-tiled room: the obstetrician's big gloved fingers showing him the crown of the baby's head; Susan's legs shaking, shaking; and Dan swallowing with sudden terror. He could see the top of the baby's skull. But it was too small. Microcephalic! He glanced around at the nurse's face, the doctor's, searching for the horror and shock and pity. But their eyes were unconcerned, routine, and he gulped back his fear and watched as Susan groaned and pushed again and the baby moved forward an inch or two. He saw then that the head wasn't too small after all; it was just pointed, like the end of a football.
This came back to him, and he remembered Dr. Carter's casual deep voice as he “just widened the canal a little, make it a little easier.” How Susan had screamed, then cursed him wildly, but Carter hadn't taken offense, just smiled and patted her leg and said she was doing fine.
“Bueno. Mucho bueno.
You're doing fine,” he murmured now, and slipped his fingers around the crown of the baby's skull.
Something tough and only yieldingly elastic was holding it back. He pried it outward, pressing down on the hard yet at the same time yielding bone, till he got his middle finger under the lip. Graciela was rigid, making no sound at all. Maybe she'd passed out. That would be good … or maybe it wouldn't, if she went into shock. Sweat broke down his back again as he started working around it, pulling outward at the membranous ring. The baby's head was jammed against it with enormous force. But he pulled steadily, closing his eyes, concentrating all his attention on the tips of his fingers, trying not to tear anything, just gradually working his way all the way around, top to bottom to top again.
Graciela screamed again, suddenly, coming out of whatever syncope or absence she'd been in. Her muscles tightened around his hand. At the same instant the baby slid forward, jamming his finger against the edge of the cervix, or whatever it was. Then the boat bucked upward under his knees and a deluge of warm water
smashed down on them. The deck dropped away, and he cursed wildly and jerked his hand out and pushed himself back, scrambling aft.
When he pulled the line in, there was nothing at the end. The life jacket was gone. The nylon strap dangled ragged where the stitching had torn out of the kapok. He held it, mind desolate. He didn't have anything else to put on it. Already the skiff was drifting around, presenting its beam to the sea. When that happened, they'd go over. His foul-weather jacket? No way to make a scoop out of that.
Out of nowhere, he remembered a light-filled afternoon at the Naval Academy: in the natatorium, fifty guys in the pool treading water, the instructor telling them to listen up, the Navy didn't give you a fifty-thousand-dollar education so you could drown and waste it. He was going to show them how to abandon ship safely, how to swim through burning oil, and how to stay afloat.
How whenever you were in a cotton uniform, you had your own life preserver with you.
He pulled his wallet and keys out, stuffed them into his shirt pockets, and buttoned them. Then he stripped his pants off and tied knots in the ends of the legs. He pulled the belt out of its loops and rove the line through them. Then he bent and put it carefully over the side.
He opened the makeshift drogue with a jerk on the line, then paid out as the stern skidded around. Better, but they were still going downwind fast. By now, the wind should have backed to north or even northwest. They were headed south, right back toward Cuba.
Back to Graciela, to find her into another contraction. He waited till she was done, breathing with her, saying whatever came into his mind—that she was doing fine; they'd be picked up soon; the ship would find them at dawn. Then, when it passed and she sagged back, he dilated her a little more. Warm fluid trickled over his fingers.
 
 
HE jerked himself awake, feeling instantly confused, then frightened, then guilty—as if he was responsible for this, for everything.
Graciela moaned again, and he sat up and pressed the switch on the flashlight. The filament didn't even redden. He dropped it into the water that sloshed back and forth across her opened bare legs.
Then realized he didn't need it.
The sky was still dark, but here and there were streaks lighter than the rest, faint rays, not yet what you'd call dawn, but like the ribs of a fan unfolding behind the gray clouds. The seas rolled endlessly
toward them, black and gray in the distance, then translucently emerald as they towered. They crested but didn't break, passing silently beneath the boat. It took a while before his slowed mind realized the reason.
The wind no longer roared, no longer drove the sea mad with its siren song. Only a steady breeze cooled his face as they rose once again, and he looked across a world of water toward a distant black bank of departing cloud. He lifted his wrist and licked greasy salt film off the face of his watch.
Dawn crept toward them across the sea.
Graciela lay sprawled in her nest under the cuddy. Her hair straggled wet and tangled from beneath the cloth. It covered her face. Her cracked lips were bloody, and blood and shit darkened the water that rolled between her open legs.
The kid was sleeping, too. In the growing light, he looked even younger than Dan had thought last night. Dan looked back at the sky. Was that blue? He stared at it, unable to decide if it was clear sky or just a glimpse of a higher, paler cloud cover. If it was blue
… He suddenly felt a surge of hope. It was barely possible that they might make it through this. Stay in the Stream; try to attract somebody's attention, either a Coast Guard cutter or even one of the larger refugee boats.
Then he saw the shark.
It must have been circling them for a while, because when he first noticed it, it was quite close. It slid down the side of the skiff, the tip of its fin making a faint rippling noise. He could have reached out and seized it. Instead, he just watched, sitting on the spongy floorboards in the growing light, watching it move past and off until he could no longer see its dark long form beneath the green sea.
Then he noticed something else. Looking down to where his weight rested on the bottom. As the boat surged, filaments of green light opened along the boards. There wasn't anything holding the boards together, and when the frame of the boat worked, they opened up. He put his hand down and felt the cool upwelling current between them.
“Ayúdame,”
Graciela whispered.
He crept forward on his hands and knees, trying to keep his weight on the thwarts, afraid to put his feet on the rotten bottom. The boy slept on. When he took her hands, they were icy.
 
 
SHE lay spent, empty, melting into the blackness beneath her.
She knew dimly that she was dying. The child was not going to be born. She'd held back a little strength, husbanding it for what she knew would come: the last, incredible, impossible task of pushing
the baby out. But that time had come and gone, and the baby had not. It was locked inside her, and together they would die.
She'd thought that if this happened, she would call on the Virgin, but she knew now that no one could help her. The life was being crushed out of her, like a dog caught beneath the wheels of an oxcart. She'd seen that once at the
cooperativa.
She opened her mouth to scream, but she had no breath left in her. She couldn't see. The red mist blinded her.
Her last conscious thought was of her own mother. So many years before …
Then there was nothing but the mist—no thought, no body, only something that watched without self, without anything but the watching. As it gazed, the red mist slowly began to whirl. As it gathered speed, a black opening appeared at the end of it. It grew swiftly larger, with nothing beyond but the black. She hurtled toward it with incredible velocity, knowing that this was the final and utter obliteration only in the last instant before it occurred.
 
 
WHEN he turned back her clothing again, he could see the baby. The top of its scalp showed wet and glistening, with little dark whorls of plastered-down black hair. But that was all. All these hours and it hadn't emerged. He didn't know how long it could stay like that and still be alive. Maybe it was dead already. Kneeling, he ran his fingers again around the taut barrier of restraining flesh. It locked the child in no matter how hard the uterine muscles shoved. He tried again to pry it apart, but he couldn't even get his fingertip under it now. If that was all that was holding it back … Graciela was exhausted, her breathing almost invisible. Blue shadows lay under her jaw. Her wrists looked bruised and bloodless, fragile against the swollen bulk of her body. He could see she was dying. “A knife,” he muttered, rubbing one hand uncertainly against his chin-stubble. His dry lips were caked with salt. Christ, he was thirsty.
But he didn't have a knife. He didn't have anything sharp at all. The baby was stuck, and it and she were going to die here, and probably all four of them when the rotten planks split apart. Their fishy friends would see to that. His hand slipped down from his chin—and stopped.
An instant later, he was fumbling with his collar. The little nipples that held his collar insignia popped free and sank, to shine quietly brassy on the dark submerged wood.
Two pointed pins glittered in the glowing light.
He bent one back on the thwart, leaving the other sticking out, and gripped the silver bars firmly between thumb and forefinger. He didn't want to do this. He was no doctor. But she'd been in labor
since the night before. She was exhausted. Like what they said about tactics: When it was time, you had to act, whether what you did was right or wrong. Or you'd inevitably lose as your opponent acted and you did not.
Now, at this moment, he knew his opponent was Death himself. A moment later, blood welled up, dripping into the water and uncoiling like falling silk. It dripped, then trickled, then gushed out.
“Shit,” he muttered. He'd cut it and the baby still wasn't moving. Graciela didn't react at all. “God damn you! Don't do this. Help us! For once—”
The baby turned slightly under his clutching fingers.
He panted, set the pin again, and bit his lips as he cut deeper. Then he stopped, horrified as the split suddenly widened of itself. A fresh burst of blood came from the tearing flesh. Jesus, he hadn't meant to do that … . But the head moved again. It was turning, as if the baby was trying to burrow its way out. He adjusted her legs, moving them as far apart as they'd go, and lifted her hips.
Suddenly, the baby's entire head slid out amid the blood and mucus. It was blue. Little eyes bulged beneath closed lids. Graciela groaned and threw her head back. Lenson dropped the pin and seized the little shoulders, eased them to the left.

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