A Good House (17 page)

Leaning there, looking with Margaret at all these things that obviously had some meaning for her, Bill put his hand on her sturdy shoulder. “This has been a good summer for all of us,” he said. And then he moved his hand to the crown of her head, turning her face toward a perfectly common but good-sized snake that lay curled on the slope of the bank, resting in the damp shade after a hard day of snake work, its long, curved body the boundary, the asylum, for a dozen slithering offspring.

I
N
their last week at Dunworkin, late on a Tuesday afternoon, lying on the couch in the porch and breathing deliberately, using all of her discipline to relax, Andy tried to describe her cramps to Paul and Margaret. She said they weren’t really much different from what she’d been having for the past week, from what her doctor assured her were just fairly common bouts of false labour, except that she was positive they were lasting longer now.

Margaret sat close to Andy in one of the Muskoka chairs, reading Andy’s finished copy of
The Feminine Mystique
which, until now, she had been enjoying thoroughly because, as she’d told Bill, in her opinion there certainly was something to it. Paul stood at the screen door.

“You’re the only one who knows how it feels,” he said. “You have to say one way or the other.” He moved over to the couch, leaned down to put his hand on Andy’s stomach. “I’m ready to take you in right now.”

“If it comes now, the baby will be nearly a month early,” Andy said. “I think I should try to hang on. I’m supposed to be able to hang on.” She gave into it then, her soft eyes filling with streaming tears, as if the concern expressed by this loving man was itself the cause of her discomfort.

Margaret closed the book. “I think you’ve got your answer,” she said. “She shouldn’t have to go through any more of this. And they’re promising a change in the weather so it might be a good idea to get her in now anyway.” She was up out of the chair. “I’ll pack her a quick bag.”

Paul helped Andy into the truck and took her straight to Sarnia without stopping in town at the doctor’s office. He said he was afraid they’d be told the same old thing and he was real tired of hearing it.

At the hospital, after the paperwork, they put Andy in a wheelchair and took her up into the stage room right away. Paul stood back as a nurse in a white turban and a scrub dress helped her into a johnny shirt and up onto a stretcher, asking as she eased her back on the pillow, “How are we doing?”

“Not all that well,” Andy told her.

“Which baby is this?” the nurse asked.

“Our third and last,” Andy said.

“Are you in labour?” the nurse asked.

“I’m not sure,” Andy said. “This time it seems to be going differently. I’m not due until next month but I’ve been having cramps for weeks. And they’ve been a lot worse today. They’ve been bad today.”

The nurse ran a hand over Andy’s stomach to determine the position of the baby’s back and then she used her stethoscope to find the heartbeat, counting the rate with a watch pinned to her scrub dress. She put her hand on Andy’s stomach again, gently, to time the frequency of the contractions.

Then she asked Paul to leave them, to wait out in the hall. He did as he was told but he didn’t go far, he didn’t go out of earshot. The nurse pulled the privacy curtain around the bed and put on her mask. “We’ll just see how many centimetres,” she said, “if any.” She pulled down the sheets, arranged Andy’s small, shaking legs into the frog position, snapped on a glove, and lubricated her index finger. Andy took a deep, quivery breath as the nurse inserted the finger into her rectum.

“I must be nearly ready,” she said.

The nurse peeled off the glove and tossed it into the wastebasket on the floor beside the bed. “Your cervix is two fingers dilated,” she said. “And the baby seems to be on a bit of an angle, seems to be coming not quite square. I’m going to call the doctor at home. He should be able to tell you more.” She pulled Andy’s johnny shirt down, smoothed and tidied it, and then brought the covers up and folded them across her chest. Just before she left the room she turned and said, “You shouldn’t drink anything, just in case.”

Paul passed the nurse on his way back in and she didn’t stop him. He lifted the curtain, ducked under it. Andy was quiet, not quite so apprehensive now that things seemed to be under way. She pushed the covers off, asked him, “Is it hot in here?”

Paul said no, he didn’t think so but then he wasn’t doing any work.

The nurse returned in a few minutes to check the baby’s heart rate again and soon after she left them the doctor on call came into the
room. He let Paul stay, which worried Andy, although she didn’t say this out loud. The doctor moved his hands over her belly, his fierce blue-black eyes concentrated on her taut, mounded flesh as if the small dips and lumps could be read, could be comprehended. He told them that he didn’t think it was a case of anoxia in utero, he didn’t believe the baby was in any difficulty. He said Andy could deliver normally, and because the baby was relatively small and not far off true in its position, he should be able to give it a slight turn. He said he was sure a turn was all that was needed and that they would take her into the delivery room in an hour or so, depending.

They waited together through the contractions, which Andy said were the real McCoy now. She said she’d know them in any dark alley. When it was time to go she leaned up to kiss Paul goodbye. “If the baby is born tonight,” she said, “it will be Tuesday’s child, like Krissy, full of grace.”

Meagan started to come just after midnight, which made her Wednesday’s child, full of woe, although in the throes of labour Andy would not be able to remember this next line of the verse. Paul sat down the hall in an orange plastic chair with his head in his hands, waiting as he had waited before, ready to wait out the night, but Meagan didn’t take long getting herself born.

While the doctor stitched Andy up, good and snug this time, he said, winking, as if consideration for a husband’s lifelong pleasure was one of the hospital’s policies and certainly one of his own, certainly worth an extra tug or two on the sutures, a nurse took Meagan to the other side of the room to bathe her. After she’d got her cleaned up and wrapped snugly in a receiving blanket she laid her on Andy’s already aching breasts, allowing them a couple of minutes before she took Meagan down to the nursery. Andy couldn’t see much of her new daughter, could see only her fuzzy scalp and her odd little face and her tight-fisted hands, but by all appearances she was a healthy baby.

Paul spent a few minutes with Andy in the recovery room, just long enough to assure himself that she was all right, and then he went to the nursery to get a look at Meagan through the glass. After they pulled the nursery curtain shut, he drove out to the lake to
wake Bill and Margaret and Daphne and Sally, to tell them. They all got up and sat around the big table in their pyjamas and nighties to listen to him tell it.

Just before dawn Andy was deemed recovered and taken up to another floor where she was put into a room with three other patients, two of whom still had the slightly mounded bellies of recently delivered women, the third not a woman at all but a girl of no more than sixteen. She rested, dreamed, talked a bit to the woman beside her who had just had her first baby at an astonishing and likely dangerous forty-six. The nurses appeared regularly with thermometers and blood-pressure cuffs and Andy drank all the juice she could get her hands on, which meant she was soon up to the bathroom on her own.

Paul ate Margaret’s celebratory breakfast of bacon and French toast and after he’d held Neil and Krissy on his lap to tell them about their sister, he drove back into the city. He sat out in the waiting room while Andy slept, went down to the gift shop to buy her a small bouquet of cut flowers, helped her with her sponge bath. The first time they brought Meagan down he waited in his mask and gown until the nurse was gone and then he laid Meagan out on Andy’s stomach, unwrapped her blanket, and took off her tiny shirt and diaper to expose and examine her, to run his hands over every inch of her long bones, her bright pink skin.

That night he went back out to the lake to tell them everything all over again and to say that Andy was in a normal room now and that he’d had a good look at Meagan and she was just as she should be. He slept alone upstairs on the sleeping porch, his dreams filled with the fishy smell of a boat after a storm. In the morning, Margaret and Sally took Neil and Krissy for a long walk down the beach, leaving the cottage quiet so Paul could sleep through until his body had had enough.

While Paul slept, Daphne drove in to the hospital. She came into the room just as a nurse was finishing up her examination of Andy’s sutures so she stood quietly outside the curtain, waiting until it was yanked open. The nurse hadn’t heard her and as she was leaving she backed into her and yelped in startled surprise. She told Daphne she
should wait in the hall next time. She wasn’t much older than Daphne herself, maybe twenty-five, but she did not lack confidence, she was in fact just the kind of nurse people liked. Finished with Andy, she walked quickly over to the girl by the window, who was lying curled on her side with her back to the room, pulled the privacy curtain around the bed, and asked the girl to please roll over.

When Andy saw Daphne standing there with her skin so tanned and her body so fresh and trim and tight and angular and jumped-up with energy, she said, and immediately wished with all her heart she hadn’t said, “Oh, Daphne, you look like a slightly different species of woman. Maybe vaguely related to the species in this room, but not really the same, not the same at all.”

“And hello to you too,” Daphne said, smiling, meaning to let it go.

“It’s just because you look so strong,” Andy said. Which was the truth.

“I’ve been down to the nursery,” Daphne said. “They brought her to the window for me. She’s lovely. She’s small but it looks like she’s got Paul’s bones so she won’t stay small for long.” She sat down in the chair beside the bed. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Sore bum? Sitz baths helping the sore bum?”

Andy was thinking, I do love this woman. “Yes,” she nodded.

“Although sore hardly says it.”

The nurse who had been examining the girl by the window yanked the curtain open again. “Today makes it three days,” she said firmly and loudly. “If you won’t do it yourself, we’ll have to haul you out of that bed. And we’ll do it, believe you me. You’ve got to get up and get walking and not just to the bathroom. It isn’t a matter of choice.”

The girl didn’t answer. The nurse left the room, shaking her head, fed up.

“Have they had you up and down the hall yet?” Daphne asked. “It’s chock-full of slow-walking women in really awful housecoats.” She looked at the two empty beds. “Your roommates must be out there already.”

“No, I haven’t,” Andy said. “But it’s my understanding that today is the day.” She started to sit up, pulled herself up straighter
in the bed. “The doctor is going to give Meagan a once-over this afternoon and he’s supposed to come to see me first thing tomorrow morning. Then maybe we can come home.”

Daphne was just about to tell Andy how pleased Bill and Margaret and Sally were when the nurse who had just left returned with another, much larger woman in a different uniform. They walked quickly over to the girl by the window, pulled her up by her arms, turned her, lifted her off the bed, stood her upright, and walked her out the door, not a word said.

“Oh,” Andy said, covering her mouth with her hand so she wouldn’t be heard. “For the love of God.”

“I don’t see why they think they have to keep her on this floor,” Daphne said. “If they gave it two minutes’ thought, they might figure it out.” She shook it off, stood up from the chair. “Are you ready to give the hall a try?”

Andy brushed through her wet hair with her fingers to tidy it. “I guess,” she said. “I’ve showered and, after much repeated encouragement, pooped. So what else is left?” She turned and dropped her legs over the side of the bed, wincing. She stopped moving for a minute, looked down at her bare feet. “It’s a mighty long drop to that stool,” she said.

Daphne eased her down. “We’ll find someone out there to challenge,” she said.

Andy tried to hold her johnny shirt closed while Daphne helped her into her housecoat. “Your day will come,” she said. “And I’ll be there just as soon as I can to inquire about your bum.”

They went out into the hall to join the flow and halfway down to the nurses’ station they passed the girl and the woman in the different uniform who held her up. The girl’s eyes were shut and she was walking close to the wall, hugging it. The other women who were up working off their various discomforts looked only briefly and then took care to avoid bumping her.

Daphne and Andy continued slowly past the nurses’ station and down to the nursery. All the babies were being transferred to a kind of trolley, a long row of little rolling beds, and Meagan had already been moved, she was lying snug in her receiving blanket waiting to
be delivered to her mother. “She has your face,” Daphne said. “Your forehead. And your chin.”

Meagan stirred a bit, stared and blinked at the ceiling lights high above her. “I saw one of the older nurses pinch her arm and watch to see her reaction,” Andy said. “Almost like a test. But she didn’t react. Neil and Krissy could raise a complete stink by the time they were a day old but she doesn’t fuss at all.”

“Paul told us,” Daphne said. “I say good for her. There’s already too much fussing in this sorry world.”

They walked down the hall with all the other women who were making their way back to their rooms, and after Daphne got Andy up onto the bed, she asked if she wanted her new nightie from the suitcase. The nightie had been Daphne’s gift. It was a beautifully soft cotton print with two discreet nursing slits, two secret little passages. While Andy unbuttoned her housecoat, Daphne found it and handed it over.

A nurse came into the room pushing the two other babies, and after she had them safely in their mothers’ arms, she brought Meagan and parked her close to Andy’s bed. Without looking at Daphne she told her she would have to leave now. This was no surprise to Daphne. She thought about asking for a mask and a gown but then thought no, she’d leave them their privacy. “I’ll be back in a little while,” she said. Just before she stepped back to pull the curtain around them, while the nurse was busy admiring Andy’s nightie, she reached out to touch her fingers to the top of Meagan’s fuzzy head. “This, my little love,” she whispered, “is called breakfast.”