The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [93]
“But why now?”
“Because Lori was sure that if I didn’t, she was going to have Braxton Hicks contractions until the end of time. She said the baby wasn’t going to make an appearance until I looked like a father.”
“Very sensible,” Iona says. “She was probably right.”
“Now come in and tell her hello.”
“Into the labor room?”
“Really, it’s all right.” Without giving her a chance to protest, Jeff takes Iona’s arm like someone escorting her onto a dance floor. “This part of the building is a birthing center, not a hospital. It has its own set of rules. You can come in. You can stay the whole time.”
The notion of this, along with the wine Iona is sure is still active in her body, makes her light-headed. She lets Jeff guide her down the hall. “I tried to get you to cut that hair for years,” she says. “You never listened to me.”
“Sure I did. Not about the hair, but certainly about the earring.”
“Earring?”
“Don’t you remember? When I first got my ear pierced, I had that long, dangling earring?” He indicates a spot at his jawline to show the length of the offending jewelry. Yes, of course. It was appalling.
“Do you remember what you told me?” he asks.
“What?”
“You said anyone with something dangling between their legs doesn’t need something dangling from their earlobes.”
“Did I?” Iona laughs. She had. She’d said exactly that.
“Did you ever see me wear long earrings again?”
“Now that you mention it . . . no.”
“Well, I listened to you, didn’t I?”
Without her noticing until it is too late, Jeff guides her into the birthing room, where Lori is propped up in a hospital bed attached to an alarming number of monitors. Iona wants to flee but knows she’d look like an elderly, scampering rat. “Is there something wrong?” she asks, indicating the equipment.
“No, this is how they do it,” Lori says. “Welcome to the modern birthing experience.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Not at all. They gave me an epidural.” She sounds perfectly normal. “What do you think of Jeff’s haircut?”
“It was a shock.”
“He got to the barber on Wednesday just before the stores closed. I think we would have been here sooner except that it took the baby an extra day to realize the bum who’d been living with me had turned into a father figure. But at long last, here we are.”
“Well, you do look more like a father,” Iona tells Jeff. “Though I can’t quite imagine it. You.”
Jeff motions Iona to a chair. She’s too dazed to do anything but sit.
Lori points to what looks like an EKG graph being made by a pencil held by a robotic arm. The device is attached to a sensor on Lori’s belly, and to a monitor with numbers that go up and down. “It measures the contractions.”
Iona finds herself mesmerized by this. Over the next few hours, she watches Lori’s contractions on the monitor and the pencil sketches of their mountains and valleys on the graph. At regular intervals a nurse comes in, or a doctor wanting to check the dilation of Lori’s cervix, while Iona and Jeff wait behind a curtain the nurse pulls around the bed. Iona and Jeff take turns going down to the cafeteria for breakfast and later, lunch. They don’t want to eat in front of Lori, who can’t have anything but ice chips.
Iona buys a newspaper but doesn’t read it. She watches the graph instead. It hypnotizes her. Most of the day passes in this manner. Once in a while, Lori dozes off, even as her contractions rise and peak and fall. Jeff, sitting on the opposite side of the bed, also dozes, clutching his wife’s hand the whole time as if to ensure that she won’t escape.
Once, while Jeff’s eyes are closed, Iona registers that her stepson has rather nice, thick eyelashes. Probably she never noticed this before because she was too distracted by the ponytail. Maybe the baby will inherit them. She hopes so. Without makeup, Lori seems to have no eyelashes at all.
On her next visit, the doctor—a woman who can’t possibly be old enough to deliver a baby—mumbles an unintelligible sentence containing the words dilated and effaced. She gives Lori a beatific smile. Lori and Jeff exchange glances. “Let’s get