The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls Read Free Book Online

sake, this has gone on too long. Good night, people, good night, get out. You get my hopes up and you crush them like ants underfoot. This night couldn’t have ended any worse.
    “Oh God, um . . . Bess?” she hears from her bedroom. A guy with a scared look on his face beckons her from the bedroom doorway. She rushes into the room to see Gaia sitting up on the side of her bed, wringing out the bottom edge of her sundress. Water has spread out from Gaia to darken Bess’s baby alpaca blanket and her Egyptian cotton weave sheets and is now dripping down Gaia’s pale legs toward Bess’s antique Turkish rug. “Oh God,” the guy repeats, pacing back and forth from the bed to the door. “Is there a doctor here ?” he yells into the living room. People are now coming into the bedroom to see what’s going on.
    Bess chides herself for thinking of her personal belongings and tries to think straight. The glass of water she poured for Gaia feels ridiculous in her hand, as if she could just as well dump it onto her bed as watch someone drink it. “I’ll get a towel,” she announces. She hides for a moment in her bathroom, checking herself out in the mirror. Sometimes people think she’s Italian—the near olive skin, the dark eyes, the dark hair that falls just below her neckline. Her nose is slightly hooked, but not too bad. She’d trade in her large ears if she could, but not her long eyelashes nor, if truth be told, her B-cup boobs. She fixes her bra straps, which frequently slip down over her narrow shoulders. Then she takes an allergy pill.
    So Gaia’s water broke, that’s no big deal, right? It doesn’t mean she’s going to have the baby right then and there. But then there have been stories. She read about that woman on the subway in Boston whose water broke and out popped a baby a minute later. That seems like a Monty Python skit but it can happen, other women go through forty-two hours of labor and some drop in minutes and what if Gaia had to give birth right there in her own bed? She can just see it: the blood, the head, the fingers, the tiny feet, the writhing, crying kidney bean of life right there in her own bed on the very spot where some mornings she stays under the covers and presses the snooze alarm seven times because she is dreaming of a day when she doesn’t have dreams of the things she wants because the things she wants she has, tiny fingers and feet to call her own.
    In her bedroom she sees towels everywhere, strangers leaning on her dresser, and a woman she just met a few hours ago in her bed with her legs spread open.
    “What are we going to do?” says a guy in a high puppet voice, his hand maneuvering one of Bess’s sock monkey slippers that she must have forgotten to hide.
    Bess looks around for Sonny. He’s not in the bedroom. He’s not in the living room or the kitchen or the hallway or outside the building. She can’t believe he’s gone. “You’ve got to be shitting me!” she cries out to the street. Is there some sort of black hole in my place? She doesn’t know what to do or what to tell Gaia. The girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend (a label she keeps repeating in her head) is about to give birth, and the only people around to help are a bunch of drunken singles. She needs to call an ambulance.
    Everyone in her bedroom, it seems, is offering opinions from Relax to Do something! The ones in the relax camp are amused, have found reasons to pour more drinks. “Hey Bess, looks like someone else is going to have the same birthday as you,” calls out a man over the din.
    Others are bouncing around words like doctor and breathe and ambulance and Bess finds she is more in this camp, but she can’t get a read on Gaia. Gaia is sitting quietly, watching, until she sees Bess and motions for her to approach. Bess kneels at her side.
    “It’s okay, Bess,” Gaia almost whispers, so that only Bess can hear. Her hand is on Bess’s shoulder. “He’ll be back.”
    Bess nearly jumps back as