In Every Way by Nic Brown Read Free Book Online

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CHAPTER 3
    L ATE AUGUST. SCHOOL has already begun, but Maria is no longer attending. As her classmates gather in fluorescent-lit classrooms and play the name game around circular seating, she sits on the edge of her bed, groaning in the dusty afternoon daylight. The yellow shag carpet is clenched between her toes. When the contraction ends she falls back upon the bed and pants.
    Down the hallway she tiptoes. “Mom?” she whispers.
    Her mother is frail, yellow, and attended to by a bearded nurse named Hank. She is still alive is what’s amazing. There has been no change in weeks. Every few days, she tells Maria to drive her to the coast. “Let’s go to Beaufort, just for dinner,” she says, but Beaufort is four hours away and Maria’s mother knows she would not, at this stage, even survive the car ride. Maria feels certain that her mother has willed herself to stay alive long enough so that she can meet her daughter’s child and wonders why, if her mother could do that, why she cannot will herself to live forever.
    â€œIt time?” her mother says.
    â€œI just had a real one,” Maria says.
    Hank—a man who wears several colorfully beaded bracelets—steps out of the room, his finest qualification an ability to disappear. Maria’s mother places one papery hand on Maria’s abdomen.Blood has spilled in pools of blue and green under the surface of her mother’s skin.
    â€œCan you believe it?” her mother says.
    â€œHow can I not?” Maria says, looking at her stomach. Another contraction starts and the spaces between her breaths begin to shorten.
    â€œHere it comes,” her mother says.
    Maria crumples to the floor. There is nothing else her body can fall upon that is not plugged in, piped, or brittle. Hank peers into the room, only to relax once he has confirmed that the groaning is not coming from his own patient.
    â€œYou OK?” her mother says.
    â€œNo,” Maria says. She understands that this progression of events was always supposed to happen, but that does little to make any of it feel right. It seems possible that her body is breaking.
    â€œOK. She’s OK,” her mother says to Hank.
    Jack arrives seventeen minutes and one contraction later in khakis and a blue oxford, sleeves rolled up.
    â€œLook at you,” Maria’s mother says.
    â€œLike I just got a job at Kinko’s,” he says. “I know. But you gotta look like business if you want to do business.” He sits beside Maria on the couch and gently pets her head. Maria bats his hand away.
    â€œRelax,” he says.
    But Maria does not relax. Two nights pass without the gap closing to the four-minute window she has been instructed to wait for until going to the hospital. She has, since the beginning, been determined to have a natural childbirth and avoid the hospital as much as possible, but by the second night of labor, she begins to think this plan of action is folly. She is so tired that she starts to nod off in the moments betweencontractions, even if only for a few seconds at a time. She lays her head back and closes her eyes, the voices in the room passing like fog, until everything snaps into sharp focus as a new contraction begins.
    â€œI’m glad you’re not telling her to breathe,” Maria’s mother says, early in the third day of labor.
    â€œShe knows how to breathe,” Jack says.
    â€œTake me to the hospital,” Maria says.
    â€œI’ll deliver that baby in the kitchen if I need to,” Jack says. “Hank can do whatever it is he does if we need him. But you’re perfectly safe here until it’s time.”
    â€œIt’s time!” Maria says.
    â€œBreathe,” Jack says.
    â€œFuck you,” Maria says.
    â€œGod I love you,” Jack says.
    During the third sleepless night, the gap finally closes. At the hospital, the pain is worse than anyone had been able to explain. Maria tells