Midwives by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online

in the corner shed just enough light for Sibyl to see clearly all of the things she didn’t understand.
    Fortunately, Alexis’s own mother had insisted that her daughter visit an ob-gyn, and Alexis had done some reading on her own. The woman was also blessed with a very short labor and a small—but healthy—baby. Yet no labor is easy, and while my mother never lost her belief that the process she was watching was incredibly beautiful, as the pain Alexis was feeling grew worse, Sibyl grew fearful that something was wrong. She would rub Alexis’s legs and massage her back, and purr that she thought Alexis was merely experiencing what almost every woman since creation had felt. But inside, my mother had her doubts.
    When the better part of an hour had passed and neither the men nor an ambulance had returned, those fears led her to wash her hands once again, this time with a thoroughness that would have impressed a heart surgeon. She took off her silver bracelets and the three different rings she wore on her fingers, including the one my father had given her after a rock concert near Walden Pond, and scrubbed her wrists and her arms up to her elbows.
    When her hands were as clean as she believed possible, she placed a finger as far inside Alexis’s vagina as she could, hoping to discover whether the baby was about to emerge.
    “Am I dilated?” Alexis groaned, rolling her head back and forth on the pillow as if the spine in her neck were made of Jell-O.
    At that point in Sibyl’s life, the word
dilation
had always been used in the context of pupils and drugs. She had no idea that Alexis was referring to her cervix. And so my mother looked up frombetween Alexis’s legs to scan her friend’s face, but the woman had shut her eyes.
    “I think so,” my mother answered; although she couldn’t see Alexis’s pupils, she assumed that anyone who had spent as much time with her mouth around a bong as Alexis had must have eyes that were dilated.
    “How far?”
    “Shhhhhhh,” my mother the emergency midwife said. She wiggled the tip of her forefinger inside Alexis and grazed something hard that she understood instantly was a skull. The baby’s head. Briefly she rolled her finger across it, astonished by how much of it she could feel.
    “Can you feel the head?” Alexis asked.
    “I can feel the head,” Sibyl answered, mesmerized, and slowly withdrew her finger.
    Just a few minutes later Alexis screamed that she had to push, and she did.
    “Go for it,” my mother said. “You’re doing great.”
    Without thinking about the logic behind her idea but assured on some primitive level that it was the right thing to do, she leaned Alexis up against the headboard of the bed and surrounded her with pillows. My mother thought if Alexis sat up, gravity would help the baby fall out.
    She then kneeled on the bed between Alexis’s legs and watched for a few minutes as the woman pushed and groaned and gritted her teeth, and absolutely nothing seemed to happen. The lips of her vagina may have grown more damp, but certainly no head had begun to protrude from between them.
    “Relax for a minute. I think you just made a ton of progress,” my mother lied. She wrapped her hands under each of the woman’sknees and lifted her legs up and out, hoping to widen the opening for the baby. “Ready?” she asked Alexis, and Alexis nodded.
    For the next thirty minutes Alexis would push and rest, push and rest. All the while my mother kept cheering Alexis on, telling her over and over and over that she could do this, she could push for another second, one more second, the baby was about to pop like a cork if she pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed.
    A little before one in the morning my mother nearly fell back off the bed when all of that pushing suddenly worked, and the dark swatch of hair that had been teasing her behind the labial lips for what had seemed forever suddenly punched its way out, and she was staring down into a baby forehead, baby eyes,