She passed herself down slowly, branch by branch. She had a bit of the monkey in her after all. She hung from a low branch by both hands, skimming above the ground with her feet. Then she let go.
The fall was small, but it was grand. Her hands hurt like crazy. Her whole body was shaking with nervousness and pleasure. Her chest was so full she could barely fit a breath into it. She felt like she was living someone else’s life.
She crept around the house to let herself in the front door. Before she even turned the knob, she realized it would be locked. And so would the back door. And so would the side door. She was locked out of her house.
This struck her as so unbearably funny that she rolled around on the grass and laughed until she cried.
Sometime toward morning, Bridget’s fever broke. As dramatically as it had gone up, it came down. She was hardly aware of what was happening when the air around her suddenly turned from bone-cold to sweltering hot. The sweat seemed to pour from every inch of her skin. When she awoke with a start, she realized she had thrown off all her covers in her sleep. More alarmingly, she was lying in her underwear, still circled in the arms of Eric’s sleeping body. Now she was afraid to move. Whether Bee was sick or not, this would not look good to Kaya, for example. She didn’t want Eric to wake up and see how it was.
She thought she could very carefully untangle the sheet from the bottom of the bed and cover herself with it before he woke up. She was feeling remarkably lucid as she grasped the edge of the sheet between the first and second toes of her left foot. Moving as slowly and smoothly as she could, she pulled her foot toward her.
How funny and strange that she and Eric had slept in the same space twice in less than two weeks. And not for having chosen it. Not for having wanted to sleep together at all. (Well, maybe she did…but no longer at his expense.)
In a way it was a tragic waste, and in a more profound way it was the most romantic thing she had ever experienced. Two years before, they had slept together in the figurative sense; this summer, in the literal one. The former had split her in two. And the latter made her feel whole. The first summer had made her feel abandoned. This made her feel loved.
Sex could be a blissful communion. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.
Eric shifted and she halted her foot abruptly. Still asleep, he pulled her closer, so her whole self was pressed against him, his arms and chest against her bare skin. He sighed. He probably dreamed she was Kaya. She also dreamed she was Kaya, the one he truly loved.
Bridget wanted to enjoy this, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t bear to think of him waking up and feeling embarrassed and compromised after he had cared for her with such perfect kindness. She wanted to protect him from that.
She waited until his breathing sank into a rhythm again, and she started back up with the sheet. Morning was almost fully upon them, and the sun was streaming through the window, illuminating their twined bodies. Don’t wake up yet, she begged him.
She had gotten the sheet almost up to her thighs when he awoke. Oh.
For a moment, in that transition, he clung to her hard. And then, in stages, he seemed to recognize the yellow hair spread over his arms and to realize who it was he held like that. Confused, he looked at her full on, at the two of them together, and then he looked away.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, pulling his arms from her.
How she missed them. She pulled the sheet up over herself. The bedding under her was soaked with sweat. “Please don’t say that,” she said.
Bridget had always believed that the night was more dangerous than the day. But in the preceding twelve hours, her conviction had reversed itself. The night protected her and the morning laid her bare.
“I didn’t mean…,” he began, flustered.
“I know,” she said quickly.
He couldn’t look at her anymore. “Are you feeling…?”
“So much better,” she supplied.
He was up on his feet, turned away from her. “I…uh, I’ll let you get dressed. Grab anything you want of mine. T-shirt or whatever.” He pulled a pair of shorts over his boxers.
There were so many things she wanted to say to him. So many shades of the words thank you. So many routes to get to an apprehension of love. Not that kind of love. This kind of love. Any kind of love, really.
She wanted to say these things to him, to make him understand her feelings and also to make him know that though this thing between them was fragile and strange (she knew, she really knew it was!), he was safe.
But it was too late. He was already gone.
This “telephone” has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
—Western Union internal memo, 1876
“Mom?” Carmen strode into her mother’s room and toward the closed door of her bathroom. “Hey, are you okay in there?”
Carmen was nervous to begin with because her mom had stayed home from work, explaining she was a little under the weather. Carmen had made her scrambled eggs for breakfast and Christina had only picked at them.
Christina had been in there a long time. Carmen heard a moan and then nothing.
“Mama?” She knocked on the bathroom door. “Is everything all right?” She felt her heart pounding. When her mother opened the door a moment later, her face was white.
“Mama! What’s going on?”
Even Christina’s lips were white. “I think…I’m not sure…” She put her hand on the doorframe to steady herself. “I think my water broke.”
“You…you…you do?” Carmen felt like she’d been transported to one of those old-fashioned movies where the wife goes into labor, only in this version, Carmen was the bumbling husband.
“I think so.”
“Does that mean…?”
Christina transferred both hands to her spherical stomach. “I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m in labor.”
“It’s too early!” Carmen shouted at her mother’s stomach, as though the baby should know better. “The baby isn’t due for four more weeks!”
“Nena, sweetie, I know.”
“Should I call the hospital?”
“I’ll call my midwife,” Christina said. She walked slowly toward the phone.
“Do you…feel okay?” Carmen asked, watching her mother call.
“I feel like I’m…leaking.” Christina pushed a button and waited. She waited longer while the receptionist paged her midwife.
Carmen paced while Christina alternately talked and listened. When she hung up she looked scared, and that pushed Carmen’s heart from a trot to a canter. “What?”
Christina’s eyes were teary. “I have to go to the hospital to get checked. If my water really broke, I have twelve hours to go into labor naturally and after that they induce. The fear of me getting an infection is bigger than worrying about the baby being early.”
“So the baby is coming…”
“Yes. Soon,” Christina said faintly.
“Where is David?” Carmen asked. It was obviously the thing Christina was thinking about.
“He’s, uh…he’s…” Christina put her hands over her face. She was trying not to cry, and that made Carmen feel worse. “I’m trying to think…. He’s been away so much. I think he’s in Trenton, New Jersey. Maybe he’s in Philadelphia now. I’m not sure.”
“We’ll find him!” Carmen shouted, further alarming them both. “We’ll call him!”
“First we’ll go to the hospital, okay? The midwife said go right over.”
Carmen’s hands were clammy and she raced around ineffectively. “Have you got your bag? I’ll drive.”
Once in the car, Carmen watched her mother intently.
“Nena, honey, keep your eyes on the road. I’m okay.”
“Are you having…” Carmen wasn’t sure what the right terminology was, having diligently tuned it out most of the summer. “…labo
r?”
Christina kept her hands on her stomach, her eyes vague, as though she were feeling for some message tapped in Morse code from within. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Does anything hurt?” Carmen asked.
“Not really. My back is cramping, but it’s just uncomfortable. Not really painful.”
Once they were at the hospital and Carmen had landed her mother with a resident to get checked out in an examining room on the labor and delivery floor, she called David’s cell phone. It went right to his voice mail without even ringing. That wasn’t a great sign. She left a message for him. She meant to sound calm, mature, and informative, but as soon as she hung up she knew she sounded more like semihysterical.
She shot up at the sight of her mother’s face, at the door of the waiting room.
“What?” Carmen said softy, inwardly screaming at herself to be calm.
“My water did break,” Christina said. She looked overwhelmed. Her voice was quiet and she was clearly scared.
“Okay.”
“I’m not in labor, though.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Yes.”
“So now what? We go home?”
“I have to stay here,” Christina said. “They want to keep an eye on me until eight tonight. Then they’ll induce.”
“Induce means like…”
“They give you chemicals to make you go into labor.”
Carmen nodded solemnly.
“But I told them we can’t do it until…I can’t have the baby until…” Carmen watched in agony as the tears brewed in Christina’s eyes. “I can’t do it until David gets here.” The tears spilled over, and Carmen pulled her mother into her arms. Christina let herself cry for real, and Carmen wondered if this had ever happened before in her whole life.
Christina always took her mothering so seriously, she hardly ever let herself cry or act scared in front of Carmen. Carmen felt scared too, but at the same time she felt grown-up. She felt proud that her mother was letting Carmen take care of her this time.
Holding her mother, Carmen wanted, really wanted, to be brave this time.
“I’m going to go get David,” Carmen promised her. “I’m going to get him and bring him home so you can have the baby together, okay?”
Carmen sat in the hospital lobby trying to calculate. The timing was bad on almost every front. Grandma Carmen, Christina’s mother, was still in Puerto Rico with her aunt. Everybody, David included, was getting travel engagements out of the way in time for when the baby arrived. But the baby apparently had little consideration for anyone else’s plans. Carmen was beginning to wonder if this baby was going to have a few things in common with its big sister.
Carmen couldn’t leave her mother alone while she got David. It could take a while. Her mother was not yet in labor, true, but who wanted to sit in the hospital without someone who loved you?
The thing to do was call one of the people Carmen trusted most in the world. Of those three, Bee was out of town, and Carmen had misgivings about Tibby and hospitals. She called Lena. Lena didn’t answer her regular phone or her cell. Not surprising, since she often didn’t carry the cell. Carmen didn’t feel like leaving another crazy-girl message. She called Tibby. By some act of fate, Tibby picked up after the first ring.
“Can you come to the hospital?” Carmen begged, her voice runny with tears. “My mom’s water broke, and David is out of town, and I have to find him before my mom’s doctor gives her medicine to get the labor going. Can you keep her company until I get back?”
“Yes,” Tibby said instantly. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Keep your cell with you, okay? I’ll call.”
“Okay.”
They both hung up.
Carmen’s call came not long after Tibby woke up. It had been a long night. It was tiring, after all, staying up till dawn watching a tree, climbing down that tree, and then getting locked out of your house for a few hours and not getting into bed until after seven in the morning. It was. Ask anybody.
And it was surreal sitting in a chair next to Carmen’s mother on a bed in a labor room at the hospital listening to the fetal monitor bleep. It was made even more so on three and a half hours of sleep.
Tibby wondered at the mountain that was Christina’s belly. She remembered pretty well her own mother’s pregnancies with Nicky and then Katherine. She was thirteen for the first and almost fifteen for the second. She hadn’t found the whole thing at all amusing at the time.
But fear not, she reminded herself and, silently, Christina. We at the Tibby Corporation have a new policy toward younger siblings and even babies generally. We like them and like for them to be safe. We even admit that we love them, though not more often than is necessary.
“How are you feeling?” Tibby asked. She somehow felt that, much as she cared about Christina, she wasn’t the best person for this job.
“Just fine,” Christina said, through a mouth that was tense. Her eyes were distracted.
“Are you sure?” Suddenly Christina was doubled over.
“I think so,” Christina said grittily, clenching her jaw.
Tibby was on her feet and fluttering nervously. “Should I…get the midwife, do you think?”
“I—I don’t…”
Christina couldn’t talk, which said to Tibby she should get the midwife.
The midwife, Lauren was her name, was filling out papers at the nurses’ station. “Uh, Lauren? I think Christina is maybe having some trouble.”
Lauren looked up. “What kind of trouble?”
Tibby raised her palms skyward. She was not a doctor. She was not a nurse. She wasn’t a mother or anybody’s husband. She couldn’t even vote yet. “I don’t know,” she said.
Lauren followed her into Christina’s room. “Are you having contractions?” she asked Christina.
Christina sat up holding her stomach. “I’m not sure.”
Lauren looked at the paper spooling out of the monitor. “You, my dear, are having contractions.”
“But I’m not in labor.” Christina said it half as a statement and half as a question.
“I would say you are in labor.”
“But it’s too early,” Christina said. Her eyes weren’t focusing quite right. “I thought tonight—”
“Tonight we’d induce if you didn’t go into labor naturally. You are going into labor naturally from what I can see.”
“But David and…” Christina closed her eyes and put her chin to her chest.
“Another one, right?” Lauren said. “You’re getting into a pattern—every seven minutes or so. Let me check your cervix, okay? Lie back and open your legs.”
Tibby did not like the sound of this. She floated toward the door.
Lauren was one of those plain-faced, plainspoken people who liked to say and do embarrassing things as flatly and as often as possible. Like Tibby’s eighth grade health science teacher, who said the words breast and anus so often you’d think she’d never heard of pronouns.
Tibby loitered in the hallway until Lauren appeared at the door. “She’s at three centimeters,” Lauren announced.
“I don’t know what that means,” Tibby said.
“It means her cervix is opening. That’s what happens when you’re in labor. When her cervix is all the way open—that’s ten centimeters—she’ll be ready to push the baby out.”
Tibby had one more question and Lauren couldn’t very well answer it for her: How did I get here?
“How long will that take?” Tibby asked.
“Hard to say for sure, but it’s still early labor. It’ll probably be a few hours at least.”
Tibby hoped, really and truly hoped, that Carmen and David would be back by then.
Lauren was looking at Tibby seriously. She actually had very pretty brown eyes. Her no-nonsense look was countered by a streak of dark purple liner under her eyelashes.
“Tibby, you need to get in there with her. She’s a little freaked out. S
he could use some support.” Lauren turned to go.
“Um, excuse me,” Tibby said politely, “but I am, uh, Christina’s daughter’s friend, if you see what I mean?”
Lauren shrugged. “Yeah. But you’re who she’s got right now.”
Frantically Carmen called David’s cell phone again and got his voice mail again. She paced up and down the sidewalk at the entrance to the hospital. She called Irene, David’s secretary, and got her voice mail. Why did important things have to happen at lunchtime? She called the family number at Lena’s house and barked out a message that she couldn’t come for Valia today. Somewhat hopelessly, she called David’s cell phone again and hung up on his voice mail. She threw her bag on the sidewalk.
“Carmen?”
She turned around and saw Win. Of course it was him. He took in her general dishevelment and her teary eyes. “Are you okay?”
“My mom’s about to have a baby and I can’t find her husband,” Carmen burst forth. “Her water broke and the baby isn’t supposed to be born for a month. But now they want her to have the baby tonight so she doesn’t get some kind of an infection.”
Carmen couldn’t quite believe she was talking particulars about her mother’s amniotic fluid with a boy on whom she had a crush. But she was scared and she wanted to do the right thing and she didn’t even know how to do it. Win’s concern was so apparent it was heartrending. “I promised her I’d find David.”
“Her husband?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have any idea where he is?” Win asked.
“He’s been traveling a lot for work,” Carmen explained balefully. She was walking in a tighter and tighter circle until she was basically spinning on the sidewalk. “We weren’t on high alert yet, because the baby wasn’t due yet. I have to find him right now!” Her voice was climbing, tinged with hysteria.
“Okay. Okay. Does he have a cell phone?”
“It’s not even ringing! He might be on a plane or something.” Or it might have run out of batteries, and someone who offered to lend him her recharger might not have done so, she added miserably to herself.