Night, Forgotten

CHAPTER 1

I watch my body giving birth from the outside. The obstetrician's hands reach into the cavern of my torso, which is pinned open like a science project.

My husband, Owen, sits on a low stool next to my head. He stares at my closed eyelids. With his wavy blond hair trapped beneath a creased hospital cap and sweat soaking into the neckline of his hastily donned scrubs, Owen looks like a character in a soap opera. Paler, though. In fact, he's much paler than usual. His jaw is visibly tense.

I want to hold his face in my hands and thank him for still being awake beside me, after everything that's happened. But my hands won't move.

A blue curtain hangs perpendicular to the horror show of my open abdomen. It's meant to shield Owen's eyes, mercifully, from this new angle of my senseless body in case he looks away from my face. He doesn't.

From above, though, I see everything. I try to scream. Wake me up! Put my body back together!

They must have given me the good drugs because despite my efforts, nothing happens. No one in the room reacts to me.

In addition to Owen on the stool and the surgeon, whom I don't recognize, four or five youngish people in scrubs—medical students, probably—gather in the corner near the door. One of them keeps twisting his shoulders away from the operating table in brief, nauseated jerks. Several assistants deliver tools or directions, type at computers sitting on rolling desks, and yank ream after ream of paper from humming monitors. Two nurses with pinched foreheads flank the doctor, who cups the baby above my open body. The baby is purple. Silent.

A hush falls over the operating room and smothers the passage of time. Everyone pools their breath for the sake of the new life among us, collectively inhaling and holding . . . holding . . . until we can be sure the baby has gotten the air it needs.

Finally, a whine escapes from its impossibly tiny body. The doctor hands the baby—a slimy fledgling person—to one of the waiting nurses to be cleaned, measured, incubated.

Owen's head snaps up. His gaze darts from my face to that of my son.

As he watches the baby, I recognize the emotion in his eyes. Anger.

• • •

By the time I come back into my body, the anger has retreated from Owen's face. He wilts now, hunched forward over his knees with his chin in his hands. The scrubs are gone; he's in the same faded Guster T-shirt and jeans he was wearing when we left the house. The fluorescent glare of a single rectangular light among a grid of Styrofoam ceiling tiles darkens the lines around his frown. It feels like we've been in the hospital for more than a lifetime.

We're seated across from each other on sanitized upholstery in a poorly ventilated, aggressively beige hospital waiting room. I assume we're next in line to be discharged. I wish they'd hurry the process along; now that I'm no longer pregnant, I'm anxious to be back home with Owen and our sweet mutt, Daisy. And the baby.

The waiting room's only other occupant, a young woman in a pink fluid-stained sweat suit, sleeps upright on the plastic bench against the opposite wall. From the angular slant of her legs, I can tell someone has propped her there. Her wheelchair, wedged behind the door to the hallway, will be inaccessible when she wakes up. Whoever pushed it out of the way might have intended to be helpful, but they've effectively stranded her.

If I can kick her wheelchair over so that it's within her arm's reach, she won't panic when she wakes up. She won't have to call someone for help. Numb from the persistent effect of postsurgical painkillers, I lunge forward. Making it over to the wheelchair feels like wading through viscous, sucking mud, but I manage to nudge it. Close enough.