Midwives and drug dealers have something in common. The world owes them an uneasy living. Lena had been up this road once before, probably to some kind of party. But tonight she was in no hurry. First babies always take a long time.
The Jeep took the ruts in the road. Night arched over the pinon scrub, perfectly full of late winter stars. All afternoon it had snowed and melted, then snowed a bit more, until sun thawed steam out of the earth and fog rose through branches that were just about to turn green at their tips.
Lena didn’t foresee any trouble. Sarah’s cervix had been soft, even a centimeter dilated. Sarah seemed a calm sort of woman, big hipped, soft, with long hair that was twenty years out of date. If she wanted something, she didn’t say. But most women lost all ambition by the time they were nine months pregnant. It took the arrival of a helpless baby to crank up the juice again. Lena could tell all about it, but no one asked her.
The house was lit up completely, light pouring out of the unshaded windows. It sat like a lumpy adobe ship, moored in a clearing of trees. The second story bristled virtuously with solar panels. It looked like it would leak in a bad storm.
The door was unlocked. Lena let herself in and left her boots parked in a corner of the blue tile. Her sharp eyes caught spiderwebs, but in her profession one didn’t judge people by their housekeeping. Still, they owed her money, more than half the fee. She noticed a good Navajo hung on the wall, next to the curve of a poorly designed staircase.
Lena smelled woodsmoke, coffee, and that other, unmistakable smell — the smell of the edge of things, metal and blood. And she smelled weed, a high grade sensemilla that burned green and golden, all female buds.
* * *
The baby’s room was strange, a foreign country, as remote as Tanzania or Pakistan. For a while Sarah had simply kept it empty, it was just the second bedroom to the right of the crooked stairs. And she kept the door closed. At first she couldn’t imagine why the baby needed a room at all. The baby didn’t, really, being just the size of a lima bean and then a walnut, floating securely in amniotic fluid.
Then Sarah’s mother arrived from Cleveland, armed with a Sears charge card and the notion that her grandchild should start life in style, even in these Third World surroundings. By then Sarah was clumsy and awkward, but she obligingly drove her mother to the mall. Sarah’s mother hated to drive an unfamiliar car. Perhaps, in a way, Sarah was relieved to be taken in hand. After all, what did she know about babies? But the heaps of stuff the still unborn child required frightened her. They bought a crib, a changing table, a bathinet, twelve tiny undershirts, a set of pastel sheets, and even two packages of those waterproof pads that look so useful.
Obviously the baby needed a room not so much for baby as for baby’s things. Still, vague superstition held Sarah back from unpacking the boxes from Sears. But in life you take your chances, she told herself in an attempt at courage. She’d had the usual tests; it was unlikely that anything was wrong. All pregnant women worry.
When the nesting instinct hit, Sarah set to work assembling the changing table. The instructions might have been written in Rumanian for all the help they were. It took the better part of an evening to line up the alphabet blocks properly — an ABCD in bright plastic. Sarah couldn’t visualize the baby — was it housepet or houseguest? Baby might wear a little pink or blue hat but naked look mysterious and far away, like a green tree standing on the rim of the horizon. Baby herself was a foreign country and spoke no English but kept on talking in her own syllables about milk milk milk.
Maybe they might sleep the winter away like a den of foxes. Baby could sleep in the crook of an arm, on the curve of a stomach. Baby’s room was full of objects so much larger than baby. Baby preferred one ray of sunlight across the dusty floorboards.
* * *
He’d been out in the desert once. Okay, so he hadn’t always known what he was doing. But this one time, it was something special. Somehow he knew just where to look. It wasn’t a cave or anything, just a depression, a sandy place in rock. And he’d dug, not too deep, and he’d found it, perfectly preserved. A water jar, maybe a thousand years old, perfect, fat bellied, thin necked. Some woman had molded it in clay and fire. Some man had buried it here full of water, full of water in that hungry thirsty desert place, and then forgotten to come back. Or not forgotten, but died, or been killed, moved on, met with other people, taken another wife, joined a different hunt. The pot felt warm to his fingers, warm, slightly rough, its color a reddish brown. At that time touching it was one of the few things that gave him a feeling of peace. He looked inside and there was a long abandoned nest of some small animal — grass and hair and pellets of shit. But it smelled dry and clean as a bone. A bone that had been left out a long time.
* * *
Steve’s beard was scruffy, as befitted a man whose wife was in labor. He wanted dinner. But of course he hadn’t expected Sarah to cook. The pain had begun to intensify, to focus, he could see that. She wasn’t as restless anymore, like a cat caught off its own turf. She’d stopped roaming around and taking all those showers. He was glad that midwife, what was her name, was here. He certainly didn’t know what to do. Well, so maybe he should have read the god damn book. But he hadn’t. It was a lot different when it was your own family. Where was the frying pan? He wanted a sausage fried with green peppers and onions. Too bad he and Sarah were macrobiotic vegetarians. Gloomily he opened a can of beans. He bet the midwife, Lena, that was her name, ate meat. She was skinny though. A house full of women. Did he want a boy or a girl? Everyone assumed boy, but boys could be a lot of trouble. In a way a girl would be nice. Not just because she’d be pretty, but because … well, she’d like him. Sometimes Sarah could just be so … She’d never even learned to drive a stick shift. That galled him, here they were all the way out in the boonies and she could never drive the second truck. He’d teach his daughter to drive stick. Really, it was important, you never knew where you might be stranded. Maybe you break down somewhere, and … never roll down the car window to a stranger. He’d teach her that, too.
“Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus.” Sarah’s voice ran up an unfamiliar scale. He took a peek into the room. Sarah was crouched on all fours on the floor. The midwife, whatshername, had a great looking ass.
* * *
Lena and Sarah climbed the stairs slowly. Sarah would take one, maybe two, steps until the next contraction started and she would moan and clutch Lena around the waist.
The bedroom was better. It always is. Try the toilet if all else fails. Sarah lay curled on her side. Not ideal, maybe, but she had been up a lot. It would do.
Lena opened a dresser drawer, pretending to look for another sheet. Actually, she was checking for jewelry. All the stars in the sky couldn’t make up for a lack of silver coins. Lena had done worse things; and on some days, when it smelled like it was going to rain, she would admit it.
Still, Lena was not the sort of woman to drink too much tequila at the bar at the Pink Adobe and start announcing that she had left two of her own children on a commune in West Virginia in 1974.
The best thing about Lena was her silence. That, and her fabulous collection of silver jewelry. She didn’t trust a woman without earrings. Even tonight she was wearing a filagreed silver hand on a chain around her neck. The hand held a turquoise stone in the middle of its palm.
A woman in labor thinks she is the center of the world. Why trouble yourself when usually all goes well. Lena was still working without insurance, though. But who said that was against the law. Stupid, maybe, but she’d never lost anyone. That time the child wouldn’t turn. Of course you only think about the insurance afterwards.
Lena had done things that were bad. Things the world called bad but also things like stepping on a hill of red ants and stomp stomp stomp killing two or three of them for no reason at all.
* * *
Lena wanted to get stoned, not stoned stoned but just slightly stoned, just a buzz on. Everything was going fine. It would take what, two, three minutes. She went back down to the kitchen.
“Want a smoke? Coffee?” Steve seemed to read her mind. She took the fat joint he handed her. It was nice, his thought was for her, help the helper.
“Thanks,” she said. Then, “Sarah’s doing fine,” when he didn’t ask.
“Ahh … good.”
“I figure an hour more, two at most, before she starts pushing. She’s well dilated, the baby is in a good position. Everything’s fine.”
“Okay,” he said.
“You really should come up now. Sarah needs you. Maybe bring her some ice chips, and I need some more sterilized cloths, would you like …”
It seemed effortless. Was she too stoned? They leaned at each other across the kitchen table, a nicely refinished table with a green patina, and by accident Lena was kissing this no good husband with the tip of her tongue sliding between his dry lips. What did he expect, that she slide to her knees, unzip the cold zipper on his jeans, unzip it with her teeth?
Lena got up. She’d only been gone a minute, but Sarah was deep into another contraction, groaning like a black goat.
“Come on,” she said to Steve.
But he needed a breath of fresh air first. God, he was stoned. From the back porch he looked straight into the dark, at a red rock formation fifty feet to the east. He looked at it, even though he couldn’t quite see it, as if it was the most fabulous sight in the world, a woman’s tits and ass.
Okay, okay, he would go upstairs and cover Sarah’s forehead with a cool wash cloth. He knew a lot about some things, light planes and small boats. He’d only been a medic there. Still, that was no excuse.
* * *
The place was red and narrow. So this was what it really felt like. The room was a cramp. When she was little she’d had a collection of dolls and stuffed animals piled on a narrow daybed. Then she hadn’t minded faces. Push, push. Things you’d worried about didn’t matter now, like getting cut there. You just wanted the baby out. Would she remember or would she forget. How could you forget. This place was narrowing. “Thank you,” she said. And then: “Oh Jesus.”
* * *
Sometimes, out in the desert, you came across a small ruin, just a few rooms, unexcavated. The stone walls had fallen in. Green wasps buzzed. Asters grew, and yellow weeds full of butterflies. Sometimes there was the shape of a kiva in the earth, a circle filled in with dirt. Bits of pottery lay scattered about, bold with red waves or black lines. The people had gone away long ago. It was hot and dry and quiet. They weren’t coming back.
* * *
…was pushed forward into light, a girl child calling from the top of her lungs.
