Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [146]
On the phone Rita said she was fine, pains coming every five minutes, no reason to leave the shop yet unless he wanted. By the time he reached home, though (for of course he came immediately), things had speeded up and she said maybe they should think about getting to the hospital. She was striding back and forth in the living room, wearing her usual outfit of leather boots and maternity jeans and one of his chambray shirts. His father paced alongside her, all but wringing his hands. “I’ve never liked this stage, never liked it,” he told Ian. “Shouldn’t we make her sit down?”
“I’m more comfortable walking,” Rita said.
For the last two weeks she had been allowed on her feet again, and Ian often felt she was making up for lost time.
It was the mildest February ever recorded—not even cool enough for a sweater—and Rita looked surprised when Ian wanted to bring her coat to the hospital. “You don’t know what the weather will be like when you come home,” he told her.
She said, “Ian. I’m coming home tomorrow.”
“Oh, yes.”
He seemed to be preparing for a moment far in the future. It was unthinkable that in twenty-four hours they’d be back in this house with a child.
At the hospital they whisked her away while he dealt with Admissions, and by the time they allowed him in the labor room she had turned into a patient. She lay in bed in a coarse white gown, her forehead beaded with sweat. Every two minutes or so her face seemed to flatten. “Are you all right?” he kept asking. “Should I be doing anything?”
“I’m fine,” she said. Her lips were so dry they looked gathered. The nurse had instructed him to feed her chips of ice from a plastic bowl on the nightstand, but when he offered her one she turned her head away fretfully.
She used to seem so invulnerable. That may have been why he had married her. He had seen her as someone who couldn’t be harmed, once upon a time.
It was dark before they wheeled her to the delivery room. The windowpanes flashed black as Ian walked down the hall beside her stretcher. The delivery room was a chamber of horrors—glaring white light and gleaming tongs and monstrous chrome machines. “You stand by her head, daddy,” the doctor told him. “Hold onto mommy’s hand.” Somehow Rita found it in her to snicker at this, but Ian obeyed grimly, too frightened even to smile. Her hand was damp, and she squeezed his fingers until he felt his bones realigning.
“Any moment now,” the doctor announced. Any moment what? Ian kept forgetting their purpose here. He was strained tight, like guitar strings, and all his stomach muscles ached from urging Rita to push. Couldn’t women die of this? Yes, certainly they could die. It happened every day. He didn’t see what prevented her from simply splitting apart.
“A fine boy,” the doctor said, and he held up a slippery, angry, squalling creature trailing coils of telephone cord.
Ian released the breath that must have been trapped in his chest for whole minutes. “It’s over, sweetheart,” he told Rita. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the racket.
The doctor laid the baby in Rita’s outstretched arms and she hugged it to her, cupping its wet black head in one hand. “Hello, Joshua,” she said. She seemed to be smiling and weeping both. The baby went on wailing miserably. “So, do you like him?” she said, looking up at Ian.
“Of course,” he told her.
It wrenched him that she’d felt the need to ask.
Eventually the baby was carted off somewhere, and Rita sent Ian to make phone calls. In the waiting room he shook quarters from the envelope she had prepared weeks earlier. He called each of the numbers she’d written across the front—first Bobbeen, and then his father, and then Daphne, Thomas, and Stuart (Agatha was still at work), and Rita’s two best friends. They all sounded