“Ohhh . . .” Bess released a deep sigh. “I don't know.” After a while she turned to Heather and asked, “Do you have one child who's harder to love than the others? Or is it just me? Because I feel very guilty sometimes but I swear, that younger one of mine is so distant.”
“It's not just you. I've got one who's the same way. My middle one, Kim. She doesn't like being hugged—never mind kissed—never wanted to do anything with the family after she reached age thirteen, disregards Mother's Day and Father's Day, criticizes the radio station I listen to and the car I drive and the movies I like and the clothes I wear and only comes home when she needs something. Sometimes it's really hard to keep on loving a kid like that.”
“Do you think they eventually grow out of it?”
Heather replaced a bowl on the shelf and said, “Oh, I hope so. So, what's wrong between you and Randy?”
Bess shot Heather a glance. “The truth?”
Heather continued her dusting indifferently. “If you want to tell me.”
“He caught me in bed with his father.”
Heather started laughing silently, her mouth open wide, the sound at first only a tick in her throat until it crescendoed and resounded through the store. When the laugh ended she twirled the dustrag through the air above her head. “Hooray!”
Bess looked a little pink around the edges. “You're spreading dust all over the stuff you just cleaned.”
“Oh, big deal. So fire me.” Heather returned to her task, smiling. “I figured it was getting serious between you two. I knew you weren't spending all that time on business, and I for one am glad to hear it.”
“Well, don't be, because it's only caused problems. Randy's been bitter about the divorce ever since it happened, and he finally told his father so but I stepped in and things got out of hand. I slapped Randy and he's been withdrawn and unaffectionate ever since. Oh, I don't know, Heather, sometimes I hate being a mother.”
“Sometimes we all do.”
“So what did I do wrong? His whole life long I loved him, I told him so, I kissed and hugged him, I went to school conferences, I did everything the books said I should but somewhere along the line I lost him. He just pulls farther and farther away. I know he's drinking, and I think he's smoking pot but I can't get him to admit it or to stop.”
Heather left her dustrag on the shelf and went around behind the counter. She took Bess in her arms and held her caringly. “It's not always us doing something wrong. Sometimes it's them, and we just have to wait for them to grow out of it, or confide in us, or hit bottom.”
“He loves this job so. His whole life long he's wanted to play with a band but I'm so afraid for him. It's a destructive way of life.”
“You can't make his choices for him, Bess, not anymore.”
“I know . . .” Bess held Heather tighter for a second. “I know.” She drew away with glistening eyes. “Thanks. You're a dear friend.”
“I'm a mother who's tried her damnedest, just like you but . . .” Heather raised her palms and let them drop. “. . . all we can do is love 'em and hope for the best.”
* * *
It was hard to concentrate on work knowing Lisa was in labor. There were designs to be finished in the loft but Bess felt too restless to be confined upstairs. She waited on customers instead, tagged some newly arrived linens and hung them on an old-fashioned wooden clothes rack for display. She went outside and watered the geraniums in the window box. She unpacked a new shipment of wallpaper. She checked her watch at least a dozen times an hour.
Mark called shortly before 3 P.M. and said, “We're at the hospital. Can you come now?”
Bess barely took time to say good-bye before hanging up, grabbing her purse and running.
Lakeview Hospital was less than two miles from her store, up to the top of Myrtle Street hill and south on Greeley Street to the high ground overlooking Lily Lake. Though there were other hospitals closer to Lisa and Mark's apartment, her pregnancy had been confirmed by the physicians she'd known all her life, so she'd stayed with the familiar names and faces who practiced right here in town. Bess found it comforting to be approaching the hospital where Lisa and Randy had been born, where Lisa's broken arm had been set, where both of them had been given their preschool physicals, and countless throat cultures, and where their height and weight and periodic infirmities had been recorded and were still safely filed away in metal drawers. Here, too, the whole family had seen Grandpa Dorner for the last time.
The OB wing of the hospital was so new it still smelled of carpet fiber and wallpaper. The hall was indirectly lit, quiet, and led to a hexagonal nurses' station surrounded by a circle of rooms.
“I'm Lisa Padgett's mother,” Bess announced to the nurse on duty.
The young woman led the way to a birthing room, where both the labor and birth would be carried out. Lisa and Mark were there, along with a smiley nurse wearing blue scrubs, whose nametag read JAN MEERS, R.N. Lisa was lying on the bed holding up a wrinkled patient's gown while Jan Meers adjusted something that looked like a white tube top around her belly. She picked up two sensors, slipped them beneath the bellyband, patted them and said, “There. That'll hold them.” Their leads dropped to a machine beside the bed, which she rolled nearer.
Lisa saw Bess and said, “Hi, Mom.”
Bess went to the bed, leaned over and kissed her. “Hi, honey, hi, Mark, how's everything going?”
“Pretty good. Getting me all hog-tied to this machine so we can tell if the baby changes his mind or something.” To the nurse, Lisa said, “This is my mom, Bess.” To Bess, “This is the lady who's going to put me through the seven tortures.”
Ms. Meers laughed. “Oh, I hope not. I don't think it'll be so bad. Look here now . . .” She moved aside and rested a hand on the machine where an orange digital number glowed beside a tiny orange heart that flashed in rhythm with a sound like a scratchy phonograph record. “This is the fetal monitor. That's the baby's heartbeat you hear.”
Everyone's eyes fixed upon the beating orange heart while beside it a white graph paper began to creep into sight, bearing a printout of the proceedings.
“And this one”—Ms. Meers indicated a green number beside the orange one—“shows your contractions, Lisa. Mark, one of your jobs will be to watch it. Between contractions it'll read around thirteen or fourteen. The instant you see it rising you should remind Lisa to start breathing. It'll take about thirty seconds for the contraction to reach its peak, and by forty-five seconds it'll be tapering off. The whole thing will last about one minute. Believe it or not, Mark, you'll often know there's a contraction starting before she will.”
Ms. Meers had scarcely finished her instructions before Mark said, “It's going up!” He moved closer to Lisa, his eyes on the monitor. Lisa stiffened and he reminded her, “Okay, relax. Here we go now, remember, three pants and one blow. Pant, pant, pant, blow . . . pant, pant, pant, blow . . . okay, we're fifteen seconds into it . . . thirty . . . hang on, honey . . . forty-five now and nearly over . . . good job.”
Bess stood by uselessly, watching Lisa ride out the pain, feeling her own innards seizing up while Mark remained a bastion of strength. He leaned over Lisa, rubbed the hair back from her forehead and smiled into her eyes. He whispered something and she nodded, then closed her eyes.
Bess checked the clock. It was 3:19 P.M.
The next contraction came fifteen minutes later and by the time it arrived, so had Mark's mother. She greeted everyone, giving Mark a quick squeeze.
“Is Dad coming?” Mark asked her.
“He's at work. I left a note on the kitchen table for him. Hi, Lisa-honey. Today's the day you get your waistline back. I'll bet you're happy.” She kissed Lisa's cheek and said, “I think it's going to be a boy. I don't know why but I have the strongest feeling.”
“If it is we're going to be in trouble because we haven't thought of a boy's name yet. But if it's a girl it'll be Natalie.”
The contractions came and went. It was hard fo
r Bess to watch Lisa suffer. Her child. Her precious firstborn, who had, as a youngster of five, six, seven, mothered her baby brother the way little girls do: held his hand when they crossed the street together; lifted him up to reach the drinking fountain; soothed and cooed when he fell down and scraped a knee. And now she was a grown woman and would soon have a baby of her own. No matter that the pain was the means to eventual happiness and fulfillment, watching one's own child bear it was terrible.
At moments Bess wished she'd decided to delay coming here until the baby was safely born, then felt guilty for her selfishness. She wished she were needed more, then felt grateful that Mark was the one Lisa needed most. She wished Lisa were a little girl again, then thought, No, how foolish; I really wish no such thing. She was enjoying having an adult daughter. Nevertheless, often during those minutes of travail, she pictured Lisa as a kindergartner, walking bravely up the street alone for the first time—absurd, how fragments of those bygone years kept insinuating themselves into this hour that was so far removed from the days of Lisa's childhood. Perhaps it was peculiar to the stepping-stones of life that at those times an underlying sadness was rekindled.
Sometimes when the contractions ended, both Bess and Hildy released their breaths and let their shoulders slump, then glanced furtively at each other, realizing they'd been copying Lisa's breathing pattern as if doing so could make it easier on her.
At 6:30 Jake Padgett arrived, and Bess left the birthing room for a while because it was getting too crowded. She walked down to the pop machine by the cafeteria, got a can of Coke and took it to the family room, adjacent to Lisa's birthing room, a spacious, restful place with comfortable chairs and an L-shaped sofa long enough to stretch out and nap on. It had a refrigerator, coffeepot, snacks, bathroom, television, toys and books.
Bess found her mind too preoccupied to be interested in amusements.
She returned to the birthing room at five to seven and watched two more contractions, before rubbing Mark's shoulder and suggesting, “Why don't you sit down awhile. I think I can do this.”
Mark sank gratefully into a recliner and Bess took his place beside the bed.
Lisa opened her eyes and smiled weakly. Her hair was stringy and flat, her face looked slightly puffy. “I guess Dad's not coming, huh?”
Bess took her hand. “I don't know, sweetheart.”
From his chair, Mark murmured sleepily, “I called his office a long time ago. They said they'd give him the message.”
Lisa said, “I want him here.”
“Yes, I know,” Bess whispered. “So do I.”
It was true. While she had watched Lisa laboring she'd wanted Michael beside her as strongly as ever in her life. It appeared, however, that he was avoiding the hospital, knowing she was there, just as he had the pool party at Barb and Don's.
By ten o'clock there'd been no change, and the anesthesiologist was called in to administer an epidural, which made Lisa woozy and a slight bit giddy. The baby was big, probably close to ten pounds, and Lisa was narrow across the pelvis. The epidural, it was explained, would not stop the contractions, only make Lisa unaware she was having them.
Mark was napping. The Padgetts had their eyes closed in front of the TV, and Bess went out to find a pay phone and call Stella, who said she wouldn't clutter up the proceedings but wanted to know the minute the baby was born, even if it was the middle of the night. After the phone call, Bess returned to the obstetrics wing and ambled around the circular hall. On the far side she wandered into the solarium, an arc-shaped room with a curved bank of windows overlooking the treetops and Lily Lake across the street. Only a glimpse of the night-dark water was visible and from inside, where climate was carefully controlled and trees were potted, it was impossible to tell if the night was warm or cool, still or noisy, if crickets were chirping, water lapping or mosquitoes buzzing.
The thought of mosquitoes brought the memories of warm summer nights when Lisa and Randy were little and the whole neighborhood resounded with the sounds of squeals from a dozen children playing starlight-moonlight and kick the can. When they were called for bedtime, the kids would whine, “Come on, Mom, just a little while longer, pleeeeze!” When they were finally coerced inside, their bare legs would be welted with bites, their hair sweaty, their feet dirty. Then she and Michael would bathe and dry them and put them in clean pajamas. How good they would smell then, with their faces shiny and their pajamas crisp. They would sit at the kitchen table and gobble cookies and milk and scratch their mosquito bites and protest that they weren't a bit tired.
But once in bed they'd be asleep in sixty seconds, with their precious mouths open and their sunburned limbs half above, half under the sheets. She and Michael would study them in the wedge of light from the hall as it picked out their lips and noses and eyelashes, and often their bare toes protruding from pajama legs rucked up about their knees.
Remembering, Bess felt her eyes grow misty.
She'd been standing a long time, staring out the window, weighted by the bittersweet tug of nostalgia, too weary to uncross her arms, when someone touched her shoulder.
“Bess.”
She turned at the sound of Michael's voice and felt an overwhelming sense of relief and the awful threat of full-fledged tears.
“Oh, you're here,” she said, as if he had materialized from her fantasy. She stepped into the calm harbor of his arms as she had longed to step into that shadowy bedroom where her younglings slept. The pressure of his embrace was firm and reassuring, the smell of his clothing and skin familiar, and for a minute she pretended the children were young again, they had tucked them into bed together and at last were stealing a moment for each other.
“I'm sorry,” he said against her temple. “I'd flown to Milwaukee. I just got back and my answering service gave me the message.” The strength of Bess's embrace surprised Michael. “Bess, what's wrong?”
“Nothing, really. I'm just so glad you're here.”
His arms tightened and he let out a ragged breath against her hair. They had the solarium to themselves. The indirect lighting created a soft glow above the black windows. At the nurses' station beyond the door, all was quiet. For a while time seemed abstract, no rush nor reason to refrain from embracing, only the utter rightness of being together again, bolstering each other through this next stepping-stone in their daughter's life and their own.
Against Michael's shoulder Bess confessed, “I've been thinking about when the children were little, how simple everything was then, how they'd play games after dark with all the neighborhood kids and come in all full of mosquito bites. And how they looked in bed when they fell asleep. Oh, Michael, those were wonderful days, weren't they?”
“Yes, they were.”
They were rocking gently. She felt his hand pet her hair, her shoulder.
“And now Randy is out on the road somewhere with some band, probably high on pot, and Lisa is in there going through all this.”
Michael drew back but held Bess by the upper arms while looking into her eyes. “That's how it is, Bess. They grow up.”
For a moment the expression in her eyes said she wasn't ready to accept it. Then she said, “I don't know what's come over me tonight. I'm usually not so silly and sentimental.”
“It's not silly,” he replied, “it's understandable on this particular night, and you know something else? Nostalgia looks good on you.”
“Oh, Michael . . .” She drew away self-consciously and dropped into a chair beside a potted palm. “Did you stop by Lisa's room?”
“Yes. The nurse explained they gave her something to help her rest for a little while. She's been here since three, they said.”
Bess nodded.
He looked at his watch. “Well, that's only seven hours. If I remember right she took thirteen getting here.” He smiled at Bess. “Thirteen of the longest hours of my life.”
“And mine,” Bess added.
He sat down in a chair beside her, found her hand and held it on the hard w
ooden arms between them, rubbing her thumb absently with his own. They thought about their time apart, their stubbornness that had brought them both nothing but loneliness. They studied their joined hands, each of them grateful that some force outside themselves had brought them here and thrust them back together.
After a while Bess said quietly, “They said the baby is really large, and Lisa might be in for a hard time.”
“So we'll stay, for as long as it takes. How about Stella? Does she know?”
“I called her but she decided to stay home and wait for the news.”
“And Randy?”
“He knew she was in labor before he left. He'll be home tomorrow.”
They waited in the solarium, alternately dozing and waking. Around midnight they went for a walk around the wing, discovering a new shift had come on, gazing into the empty nursery, passing the family lounge, where Jake Padgett was stretched out on the sofa, sound asleep. In the birthing room Hildy was the only one awake. She was sitting in the wooden rocking chair doing cross-stitch and waved at them silently as they paused in the doorway.
Lisa's new nurse came by and introduced herself. Marcie Unger was her name. She went into Lisa's room to check the digital readings, came back out and said, “No change.”
By two o'clock things had picked up. Lisa's contractions were coming every five minutes and the anesthesiologist was called to cut off the epidural.
“Why?” Lisa asked.
“Because if we don't, you won't know when to push.”
The birthing room came to life after that. Those who wanted to witness the birth were asked to don blue scrubs. Marcie Unger stayed beside Lisa every moment and Mark, too, holding Lisa's hand, guiding her through her breathing.
Jake Padgett decided to wait in the family lounge but Hildy, Bess and Michael donned sterile blue scrubs.
For Bess it was a curious sensation, looking up to find only Michael's attractive hazel eyes showing above his blue mask. She felt a momentary current the way she had when she was first falling in love with him. His eyes—stunning beyond all others she'd ever known—still had the power to kick up a reaction deep within her.