Pawns

  She paused, gasping for breath, digging her grip into Teddi’s flesh. “Oh, it’s happening faster than I expected, oh, oh!”

  Teddi struggled to free herself. “I’ll call 911 and get an aid car right away to take you to the hospital. . . .”

  “No! No, haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying? No hospital! I don’t have any insurance, or any money, either! I’ll have the baby right here at home; thousands of women have delivered at home, or even out in the fields—oh, oh!”

  Panic swept over Teddi as she kept on trying to pull free. She never would have dreamed that Dora had so much strength. What would Mamie do if she were here? Wouldn’t she insist on an ambulance, or at least paramedics with an aid car? Where was Mamie? Surely she’d be home soon!

  Dora’s face, up close this way, had a greasy sheen, but she seemed more excited than frightened.

  “I read all about it. I can do it. Spread out the sheets on the bed, folded up so they’ll be thick under my hips . . . oh! OH!”

  Teddi managed to get one hand free and scrabbled for the telephone on the table just outside the bathroom door. She had punched in the nine when Dora struck her wrist a stunning blow, knocking the receiver out of her hand. It slammed against the wall, then swung free.

  Babies didn’t come within minutes, did they? Teddi looked desperately toward the front door, seeking Mamie. Mamie would know what to do, which was more than Teddi did.

  “Hadn’t you better lie down?” she asked anxiously.

  “No, no, not yet! My water broke, but I don’t need to push yet. It’ll go faster if I can walk around first. Walk with me, Teddi!”

  “I can’t prepare the bed if you’re hanging on to me,” Teddi said. “Look, Dora, I don’t know anything about delivering a baby—”

  “You don’t have to.” Dora was between contractions now, though still breathing heavily. “Having a baby is perfectly natural. Nature takes care of the whole thing.”

  To Teddi’s astonishment, the other girl reached out and pulled the phone cord out of the wall. “Now, forget about calling anybody, and just do what I say.”

  Did she have any choice? She could plug the phone back in, if Dora didn’t keep her from doing it, but Dora was determined. Teddi allowed herself to be maneuvered toward Dora’s bedroom door, muttering a prayer under her breath as she flicked on the light.

  Please, please, let Mamie come home quickly! Dear God, I don’t want to do this! I think Dora’s crazy!

  Crazy or not, Dora forced her inexorably toward the bed. Hands shaking, Teddi unfolded the sheets enough to spread them over the middle of the bed.

  What else were you supposed to do to get ready to deliver a baby? “Hot water, aren’t you supposed to heat water?” Teddi asked, perturbed beyond being able to figure out what it was for.

  “We don’t have to heat water these days,” Dora told her. “It comes out of the faucet as hot as you can put your hands in. Here, I found a bottle of alcohol. Hold out your hands and I’ll pour it over them, so they’ll be sterilized. Over the towel, like this.”

  Teddi felt as if she’d fallen asleep with her eyes open and was now caught in a whirlwind of nightmare. This couldn’t be happening.

  Yet she felt the cool wetness of the alcohol and the roughness of the towel, and again she tried to pull free.

  “I can’t do this, Dora, I don’t know how!”

  Dora doubled over with another contraction, gripping Teddi’s arm painfully, then gasping with relief when the pain had subsided.

  “I’ll do it. All you have to do is be here and catch the baby when he comes out, and make sure he starts breathing. You know how to do that, don’t you? Hold him up by his ankles and swat him on the bottom so he cries. You must have seen it in the movies dozens of times.”

  She had, but she didn’t want to do it. Only there was no opportunity to escape. The baby was coming, and there was only Teddi to do something about it, unless . . . “I could run next door and get Jason’s mother,” she suggested eagerly.

  “No. She’d only call for an ambulance, and it’s already too late for that even if I wanted one . . . oh, help me up on the bed!”

  Teddi went into a sort of trance from that point on. It was obvious that Dora was in pain during the contractions, especially when she began to push, but she stayed in control. And while in a way Teddi thought the whole procedure would never end, she found no way to free herself to go for help.

  By this time Mamie must have helped hang her friend’s curtains, and they’d had time for a cup of tea and some talk. Surely she would walk in any minute and take charge.

  But Mamie didn’t come.

  The baby didn’t come right away, either, though Dora seemed to be working hard. During the contractions she gripped Teddi’s hands painfully, and between them she continued to cling too tightly to allow for escape.

  “Please,” Teddi begged. “Let me call for help!”

  Dora, gritting her teeth and squeezing so hard Teddi thought her bones must be cracking, refused to consider it. “I can’t go to the hospital,” she gasped.

  “That’s crazy,” Teddi argued. “Mamie said they’d take care of you there. You can prove who you are, and even if social services hasn’t done any paperwork on you, they can see you’re having a baby! They’ll help you, Dora!”

  How long it went on, Teddi couldn’t be sure. Like Dora, she was sweating and breathing heavily, and she knew her hands and arms were going to be sore where Dora’s fingers had dug into them. Once when Dora’s grip relaxed momentarily, Teddi made it to the doorway. She grabbed for the disconnected phone, but she had no chance to plug it in.

  With a growl like an animal, Dora came off the bed and pursued her, slamming her against the wall as she snatched the phone out of Teddi’s grasp.

  She doubled over almost immediately, going to her knees with the telephone wrapped by her curling body. “Oh! Oh, Teddi, help me get back into bed! It’s coming! The baby’s coming!”

  Teddi felt helpless to do anything but help Dora get back into bed. There was no opportunity to phone because Dora was clutching it as doggedly as she was Teddi’s arm.

  This, then, Teddi thought numbly, was why they called it hard labor. Nobody could have put more effort into it, breathing quickly and rhythmically, fingernails digging into Teddi’s arm, straining to push the infant out of her womb.

  “Now!” Dora cried, and strained with all her might, finally releasing her hold on Teddi’s arm and on the phone to fasten instead on the bars at the top of the bed.

  Teddi had thought that the moment she could get away, she would run for help. But it was too late.

  Both repelled and fascinated, she watched the tiny dark head emerge, then the entire body slid free, bringing a gushing of blood and water onto the sheets she had prepared.

  At the last minute she remembered that she was supposed to catch the baby with the blanket.

  He was warm and wet and messy, but suddenly the mess didn’t matter. He was alive, moving between her hands, and he was the most extraordinary, wonderful thing Teddi had ever seen.

  “Is he all right? Lift him up so I can see him! Make sure he cries,” Dora commanded.

  The infant threw out his limbs in a wild spasm and let out a squawk as Teddi folded the receiving blanket around him.

  “Do I still have to hold him upside down?” Teddi asked. She was beginning to shake, unable to believe that it was all over.

  “Do it just in case there’s anything in his throat that needs to run out.” Dora was still trying to get her breathing under control. “Here, hand him to me, and you get the scissors, there on the stand, and cut the cord.”

  Teddi had not thought she could do that, but she did, and finished up by tying the demanded knot.

  Dora, pale and sweating and triumphant, stared at her. “I told you I could do it. Now I have to get rid of the afterbirth, while you clean him up and put him in the bassinet.”

  “Clean him up?” Teddi felt stupid, all thumbs,
but she finally managed to fetch a basin of warm water and a cloth. The baby cried the entire time she was washing him, lying beside Dora on the stained sheets. “Now what do I do?”

  “There are diapers and some little shirts in the top drawer. When he’s dressed, wrap him in a clean blanket. They like to be wrapped tightly, they feel more secure that way. Then put him in the basket, turned on his side.”

  Teddi couldn’t help being impressed with Dora’s knowledge. Clearly she had studied the whole process well ahead of time. Of course that had been essential, since she’d expected to deliver the baby without medical help. If it had been me, with no assistance except for an ignorant fourteen-year-old girl, I’d have been terrified.

  She had been terrified, just observing. She wasn’t scared anymore, but she was shaking in reaction to what had just happened.

  She dried the baby gently, put on one of the diapers that looked as if it had been intended for a doll, and then one of the miniature undershirts. He calmed down when she wrapped the clean blanket around him and picked him up.

  He weighed almost nothing, Teddi thought. She had never held a creature so small. Even the puppy she’d once owned had been bigger than this. She was filled with wonder, at the birth, at the baby himself.

  She almost hated to put him down in the white-painted basket. She swallowed hard, feeling her eyes fill with tears at the miracle of it all.

  “Teddi! Dora! I’m home!”

  Teddi turned toward the doorway as the hall light came on.

  “I’m sorry I was so late. We talked far longer than we’d intended, and it must have been midnight before I started for home. Then I had a flat tire and had to find a phone, and after that I waited practically forever for a man to come and fix it. . . .”

  Mamie came to a halt on the threshold of the room. “What . . . oh, dear heaven, have . . . have you had . . .”

  “A boy, just like I told you,” Dora said.

  “Oh, gracious, Teddi, you didn’t call anyone?”

  “She wouldn’t let me,” Teddi said, not mentioning how forcefully adamant Dora had been. “Come see, Mamie.”

  The wonder was not only her own, Teddi thought as she watched Mamie. Mamie’s eyes filled with tears, and at the same time a smile softened her face. She reached down and picked the baby up, cradling him against her shoulder. “Oh, isn’t he beautiful! He looks perfect!”

  “I couldn’t see anything wrong with him,” Teddi said, and wondered if that were the understatement of her life. “Except maybe he’s kind of red.”

  “That means he’s healthy,” Mamie assured her. “If he were pale, we’d be concerned.”

  Dora spoke from the bed, tired but satisfied. “Does he look like Ricky?”

  Mamie lowered him from her shoulder to look into the little round face. “Well, not yet. Give him time. He’s still a bit squashed from coming into the world. Look, he’s trying to suck his fist. Do you want to try to nurse him, Dora?”

  “I guess so. They say that nursing makes your uterus contract faster.”

  Mamie carried the baby over and put him in Dora’s arms, her touch lingering and tender. “I think maybe we’d better call Dr. Woods and see if he’ll make a house call, dear.”

  “No,” Dora said instantly. “It’s all over, and we’re both fine.”

  “I’m sure you are, but it can’t hurt anything to play it safe. Dr. Woods delivered both of my boys, all those years ago, and while he doesn’t usually make house calls anymore, I think I might be able to persuade him to make an exception in this case. Besides the possible health issues, you’ll have to have someone verify information for his birth certificate. Daniel Richard Thrane.”

  Mamie suddenly bent over the bed and kissed Dora’s forehead. “Thank you, Dora, for giving me such a beautiful grandson, such a wonderful blessing! I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have something of Ricky left, when I thought I had lost everything!”

  Dora guided the baby’s mouth to her breast, where he nuzzled frantically for a few seconds before finding the nipple. “He is cute, isn’t he?”

  Mamie stood beside the bed, watching, with a joy on her countenance Teddi had thought would never be there again.

  The telephone had fallen off the edge of the bed during those last frenzied moments. Unobtrusively, Teddi picked it up. She was not part of this moment, she thought. In the hallway, she plugged the phone back in and slowly climbed the stairs. Mamie could call now if she wanted to.

  Teddi couldn’t remember ever having been more tired in her life.

  It seemed as if eons had passed since she’d come home with Jason. His window was already dark. She opened her own window for fresh air and stood staring out, hoping he would still be awake and notice her light. She wanted to tell him about the baby.

  But . . . the house next door, and her mother’s old room, remained dark.

  As she was drifting off to sleep, Teddi wondered again, too weary to consider it for long, who Dora had been calling from the pay phone a few hours earlier, just before she went into labor.

  Chapter 7

  Dr. Woods came and examined both the baby and Dora, and pronounced them perfectly healthy. He raised his eyebrows over the decision to have the baby at home, but other than a wry comment about medical treatment being available for everyone whether they could pay or not, he let that part of things drop.

  Mamie was clearly ecstatic about Danny. She was undaunted by the washing of heaps of sheets, by a new mother who needed waiting on, by being awakened from sleep by the thin cry of a hungry infant.

  Teddi felt a bit like a fifth wheel—unnoticed and unnecessary. Yet she, too, was fascinated by the tiny boy who sucked so ferociously on his fist when he was hungry, who looked so angelic in his sleep.

  In the exhausted exuberance following Danny’s birth, she wanted enthusiastically to tell someone about him. She was delighted, then, when on the morning after Danny arrived, her friend Callie showed up at breakfast time.

  Callie had been on a trip with her grandmother to a family reunion in Kansas City. She didn’t know anything about Dora or the baby. She sank onto a chair opposite Teddi and accepted a sugared doughnut while Teddi told her all that had happened in the few weeks she’d been gone.

  Teddi felt closer to Callie than to any of the other girls she knew. During the months when her mother was dying, Teddi hadn’t had much time for friendships. She had had to help at home, with meals and laundry and what little housekeeping got done. There hadn’t been many opportunities to join the activities of the other girls in her class, and most of them seemed almost to have forgotten her. But not Callie.

  Once in a while, when Callie had been offered more than one baby-sitting job for the same night, she’d recommended Teddi in her place. Teddi had been glad of a chance to earn a little money. One time, with the Ross kids—there were six of them—they’d shared the duties. If Teddi hadn’t been tied so closely to home while her mother was so bad she’d have had more families calling her, she supposed. As it was, she was grateful to Callie for sharing, because there wasn’t much in the way of jobs for fourteen-year-olds.

  Callie lived only four doors down. They usually walked to school together, which at least gave them a chance to talk. Once in a while she had slept over with Teddi, which was fun even though they had to keep their voices low so as not to disturb Teddi’s parents. Callie had been Teddi’s principal support, aside from Mamie, when Stan Stuart committed suicide.

  When Dora, still in her housecoat, wandered into the kitchen, Teddi was brave enough to ask, “Can Callie see the baby?”

  Dora, yawning, poured herself a cup of coffee. “Sure. He’s sleeping, I think.”

  So they tiptoed into the room that had once been Teddi’s, to peer into the bassinet.

  “He’s so tiny!” Callie marveled. “Have you held him? I mean, except when he was first born?”

  “Just that once, so far.” The baby was none of her doing, of course. Yet Teddi felt a surge of pleasure and pride in Dan
ny, almost as if he were her own family.

  “He’s darling,” Callie murmured. “Are they going to stay here, living with you and Mamie?”

  Teddi shrugged. “It looks like it. So far nobody’s mentioned their going anywhere else. Mamie is so thrilled with him, she can hardly stand it. It’s nice to see her smiling again.”

  By the time they got back to the kitchen, Dora was seated at the table, eating a doughnut, while Mamie was frying eggs. Since Mamie had eaten earlier, the eggs had to be for Dora.

  “I hoped you could come over and see the new outfit Grandma bought me in Kansas City,” Callie said after greeting Mamie.

  “Well, if Mamie doesn’t need me here, the new guy next door offered to give me a tennis lesson,” Teddi said. “At ten.”

  Callie’s eyes grew round with interest. Teddi had known they would. She had once heard another girl remark disdainfully that Callie was so predictable she was boring. But Teddi liked her that way. She enjoyed knowing that Callie would take her side in any dispute, that Callie wouldn’t get into a snit over some minor issue, that Callie liked the same kinds of books and videos and music as she did.

  “There’s a new guy next door? Tell me about him.”

  So they went out on the back porch, beyond Dora’s ears, and talked.

  A few of the kids at school teased them about the disparity in their looks and sizes. Where Teddi was rather tall and fair, Callie was short and dark; they were as opposite as they could be. So Callie now said wistfully, “No boy has ever invited me to do anything. Do you think it’s just because I’m so little I look like I’m twelve instead of fourteen? Or is there something else wrong with me?”

  “It’s probably mostly because they’re intimidated by your brains,” Teddi told her, laughing. “Mamie says boys don’t appreciate brains until they get a little older.”

  Callie, who sat on the porch rail facing the house next door, said suddenly, “Is this Jason coming now? Wow, he’s cute.”