Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer Read Free Book Online Page A

and folded the gown up over Sunny’s chest. Down on her great white belly there was still a hole, a little indentation from where she was attached to her mother in the womb. What happens to the pipe underneath the belly button, once the umbilical cord is cut? Sunny knew that hers was still there. It would be there forever, leading nowhere. Leading out. During pregnancy, the hole had turned inside out. It had done this with Bubber and it did it again now. The truth she had realized, while pregnant with Bubber, was that down deep at the bottom of that awful, shameful hole where her mother had been attached, roped onto her, was a small, small mole. This small, dark mole at the bottom of her belly button became real to her only when pregnancy turned her belly button inside out, and she saw it for the first time. This was something about pregnancy which research could not explain. How the perfect parabola of her pregnancy belly could be augmented by this extra bump, and how that bump could have its own bump. She said to Maxon that if she walked straight into a wall, that mole would make first contact. And Maxon said, “Babe, why walk into a wall, if it’s just going to cause you to question the integrity of your parabola?” And then she said, “Okay, a tangent line then. A tangent line.”
    The doctor powered up the ultrasound machine, drew it close to her side, and squeezed some clear lubrication onto her skin. He put the white wand down into the cold jelly and turned to face a grainy little monitor. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He moved the wand back and forth, back and forth, and turned it rhythmically. Lying down flat on her back, Sunny’s body felt better. There were no contractions. The grainy shapes on the monitor changed and flowed over each other pleasantly. Only a trained eye could have identified organs being shown. For Sunny, they could be lunar mountains. Fish guts. Dark forests. If Maxon were beside her, would he be squeezing her hand? If Les Weathers were beside her, would he really be Les Weathers, Channel 10 News?
    “Don’t you want to see your baby?” said the doctor.
    “Well, is it all right?” she said.
    “Look,” he said.
    If Maxon was looking at that moment into a computer monitor up in space, in the crew cabin of the spaceship that was carrying him to the moon, then maybe he was seeing what she was seeing. He could focus his eyes purposefully on the white noise on the monitor in the spaceship, and see the baby’s features blurring out to meet him. “Hey!” he would call out, his face creasing in a wide, toothy grin. He might shout. He might pump his fist in the air, full of joy, like with a high score, something unrelated to work. But he will not call his astronaut buddies to come and look, show off the screen like a wallet flipping open. No. He will not open her up to his friends and show off what he had put there, what was growing there because of him. No, no, he sits silently, shoulders hunched over, glasses askew, and takes it in all by himself. He would not call anyone over. He has to take a measurement, note a change in the diameter of the skull since the last reading. He puts out a finger to touch the beating heart. Covers it with his finger and uncovers it. Covers it and uncovers it.
    She finally turned and examined the screen. Her insides felt foreign, made out of plastic, manufactured elsewhere, implanted by strangers, distant.
    “There,” the doctor said, and pointed to a swirl of light. “There is the baby, and there is its heart. It’s beating, you know?”
    The organ that was the baby’s heart went black and white in a rhythm.
    “Your baby still has lots of amniotic fluid to move around in,” said the doctor. “But the baby is in breech position. Where we’d like to see the head down here, by the birth canal, we find it up here, on top.”
    “So?” asked Sunny.
    “We need to stop the labor.” The doctor paused. “You didn’t want to know your baby’s gender,