As She Grows (37 page)

The operating room is all steel and tile surfaces and bright lights. It’s freezing, but I don’t even care because all I’m thinking about is the baby and the cord around her neck. And it’s like I know what she’s doing. Strangling herself. My baby would rather die than be born to me. And she’s killing herself and I’m killing her, and it’s all the same thing.

Everything happens so fast. A bunch of people start moving about the room and I can’t tell who they are because they’re all wearing the same green scrubs and masks and caps. One nurse sticks an IV in my arm, and another starts shaving my stomach and some of my crotch. When the buzzing stops she looks up at me and asks, “You doing okay?”

“Just get her out!” I shout, panicking, because I don’t want the baby dying inside of me.

Then the IV nurse starts slathering my belly with yellowish brown liquid. Someone hoists a white sheet up in front of me so I can no longer see below my chest. “Tell me when you can feel a pinprick,” I am surprised to hear the anesthetist say from the bottom of my bed because I didn’t even see him enter the room.

“Just get her out!” I yell. “You’re taking too long.”

The doctor arrives with a mask and gloves on, and I start to get really scared. “Hi, Snow. How are you feeling?” He stands beside me, all relaxed, as if we’re chatting in a garden somewhere.

I’m shaking now and my head feels woozy.“Not so good,” I say as he moves down to the bottom of the table.

“You’re going to be just fine, Snow. Just take nice deep breaths. Everything looks good. We’re going to make an incision just above the pubic bone. You won’t even have to worry about a scar on the beach,” he says jokingly. “We’re going to get the baby out as fast as we can.”

“Hang in there, sweetie.” I feel Sharon’s hand on my forehead. I turn my head to see she’s all covered up as well. I had never noticed her eyes before. They’re almost the same colour as mine.

A nurse pops her face into my vision. “You’ll hear a suckingvacuum noise and that will tell you we’re close,” she says, before disappearing once more.

“I’m gonna barf,” I murmur so quietly I don’t think anyone can hear me, but before I know it, Aunt Sharon is holding a bowl beside my head and I’m puking my guts out.

I can’t feel a thing below my belly button. No pain, but I feel an unbearable pressure at my ribs. The doctor has a hold on one side of me, pulling, and the nurse has a hold on the other side of me, pulling. My body wiggles on the table. I look up to see a reflection in the metal lights above me, but all I can see is bright
red. I get this vision of a horror movie and I think of a monster flying out of my body.

“Congratulations! A lovely baby girl!” the doctor announces a few minutes later. And I see this bloody, goopy blur being carried over to the warming table.

“Is she all right?” I ask, and then I hear her cry, crackly and rough.

“She’s just fine. Just fine,” a nurse says. “What’s her name?”

I lie there, motionless, speechless. All my panic about the baby being alive and normal leaves me and I’m left with this blank and cold head. It’s like I’m just realizing, really realizing, that I have a baby. Only it feels like nothing’s changed. I don’t feel like an instant mother. I don’t feel anything.

“What’s her name?” Aunt Sharon repeats excitedly, and I see that she’s been crying.

“Betty,” I say.

“Betty?” the nurse repeats, looking up to Aunt Sharon’s nodding head for confirmation. “Well, that’s a beautiful name. Betty.”

Aunt Sharon follows the baby and the nurse down to another room while they take out my placenta and then sew me up. I can barely keep my eyes open, but I force myself to stay awake because I can hear the nurses taking inventory of their tools and I don’t want something to be left inside. When it’s all over, they wheel me down to the recovery room.

The nurse keeps appearing at my bedside, reminding me that as soon as I can wiggle my toes I can go and see my baby. So I lie there, hoping that my legs will remain numb. I concentrate on keeping them still. My eyes get heavier and heavier. And when the big toe on my right foot jiggles, the nurse gets all excited, but I pretend it was a muscle twitch. And she looks confused and stares at me in the strangest way.

“I just want to sleep. I’m so tired. Can I sleep now?” I ask and close my eyes, not waiting for an answer.

When I wake I’m in my room. I see a different nurse in front of me, holding my baby in a white blanket. I am still hooked up to IVs and my head is groggy. She tilts the bundle so I can see her face. “Your little girl!” she says, excited. “All six pounds and nineteen inches of her,” she announces, but I don’t even know how long that is. She extends out her arms to pass the baby to me and I panic, looking around the room for Aunt Sharon. “Your aunt told me to tell you she had to go to work,” the nurse says. “She’ll be by tonight.” She pushes the baby toward me and I have no choice but to reach out to take her tiny body into my hands.

“You’ll need to be careful of lifting,” the nurse warns. “It takes a while for the incision to heal.” She moves in closer and puts the weightless bundle into my arms.

“She’s so small,” I say, touching the baby’s tiny cheek with my pinkie. Her light hair is still damp, and she has Mark’s perfect little nose and his perfect little lips. There is a yellow plastic clamp on her belly button, all bloody and gross, which I cover up with the blanket. I pull out one of her hands, so tiny, with little pink-shell fingernails. I can’t believe such perfection came out of me.

Then she starts crying, this dry wailing, and her hands start flapping in the air. I quickly reach out to pass her back to the nurse, who simply smiles at me and retracts her hands. “You’ll need to calm her,” she says, and stands over me, watching. “It’s important to start the bonding right away.” She stays by my bedside, occasionally giving me directions:“Hold her close to your chest and try to relax a little. She’s not so fragile. You won’t break her.”

After about five minutes, my door opens and someone calls the nurse away. “I’ll come back in a while to start you breast-feeding,” she says, rushing out of the room.

“Wait!” I scream, not wanting her to leave.

“I’ll be back,” she assures me, halfway out the door.

I don’t know what to do. What if the baby stops breathing or chokes or turns blue in my hands? “Fuck!” I yell out in frustration. The nurse stops in her tracks and glares back at me. Her face is controlled, her mouth tight as if she’s literally biting her tongue.

“You’re not a little girl anymore,” she says, barely moving her jaw or lips. And then she leaves.

I hate the bitch for going. For leaving me with this baby I know nothing about. I am terrified. I want to throw Betty into someone else’s arms, anyone else’s arms. I jiggle her up and down a little until she stops crying and opens her eyes. I wait for that feeling of motherhood to come over me, wait for my face to nuzzle down onto her tiny head. I wait to feel something, anything other than this blankness inside. I wait for what must be at least ten minutes, then look away from her piercing eyes and whisper, “I’m sorry,” into her soft skin.

After three days in the hospital I’m back at Beverley. I lie in bed all day, wearing the nightgown Staff gave me, with a buttoned slit at the chest for breast-feeding. I can barely move. My insides feel as if they’ve been taken out of my body, jumbled up, and just shoved back in. I stare at the baby’s crib in the corner of my room, watching for the quick rise of her chest. Karyn’s words repeating over and over in my head:
Careful, because even a mere
blanket over her face could suffocate her
.

Staff is watching me closely now, concerned after the discovery of my scarred arms and chest. They tell me that I’ll need to talk to someone, immediately. They tell me they want me to be honest with the social worker, say how I feel, and not to worry about a thing because they’ll help me with the baby. They won’t let me shut my bedroom door, even at night. And I laugh at this, like it’s the most hilarious thing in the world. That after all this time, a few scratches in skin was what it took for anyone to notice me. That it all comes down to broken skin.

But there’s another cut on my body now. An uninvited one. The pain is not the same as when I cut my arms. The pain is not mine. It taunts me with each movement and breath. It won’t even let me laugh without stabbing me. When Karyn comes to change the bandages, I can’t bear to look at it. I am jealous of the privileged blade that sliced through my layers of muscle and flesh, layers I didn’t even know I had. I am mad that someone found a way inside and then sealed the entrance behind him.

Karyn finds reasons to pop her head in my doorway. “Your grandmother keeps calling. What do you want me to tell her?” she asks.

“Tell her about Betty. Say I’ll call her soon.”

“Would you like her to come by?”

“No,” I say quickly. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

Every few hours, Staff comes into my room, grabs my tit, and forces it into the baby’s greedy mouth. Even though they are more patient than the nurses at the hospital, they still ignore my squeals of pain and order me to relax. I reluctantly give in, kicking myself for never having realized that a tiny creature chewing on your nipple might not just hurt a bit.

“She doesn’t seem to be getting any milk,” Ms. Crawl says as she and Karyn move in on my dysfunctional boobs, tweaking and prodding. They try not to stare too long at my chest, and I’m unsure if this is because they’re being considerate or because they don’t want to see my scars.

“I’m not good for her,” I mumble, staring up at the ceiling. “Just let her use a bottle.”

“Don’t be so silly,” Karyn persists, “you’re her mother.”

Underneath my skin, milk prickles and buzzes like freshly poured Coke. I stare down at my stomach, saggy and lifeless, and
then turn my eyes to the baby’s sucking mouth, allowing her to consume me. I think to myself, if it weren’t for this milky evidence, I’d almost believe my body was dead.

Sky comes into my room and sits on the edge of my bed, updating me on her life as if she were filling me in on a TV show. She doesn’t look at Betty lying in the cradle beside my bed. She doesn’t even comment on her. Instead, she rambles on, her words so fast I only catch the end of her sentences. I try hard to focus on what she’s saying, but it requires such an effort. It’s like that time at the group home when I didn’t get out of bed for so long. When things were muffled and voices seemed so far away.

She says something about leaving the house, something about a psychiatrist, something about school. My eyes fixate on her thin fingers, twirling a strand of her newly dyed purple hair. Staff told her they can’t offer her the help she needs anymore and her refusal to receive any outside care is just unworkable. They said her needs have changed since she first came here, and because she’s seventeen, she’ll need to make room for younger residents. They are giving her a week to find a place to stay or she’ll be discharged regardless. If, on the other hand, she wants to go to Smithwood Health Residence, they’d be open to arranging a meeting.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“A place for wackos. They don’t tie you down or anything, but they have shrinks and shit.”