Unending Nora

Chapter 30

Unending Nora 264 Chapter 30 Caroline’s labor began in the middle of the night, a nagging at her insides while she dreamt she was barrel riding down a waterfall at Magic Mountain holding her breath, trying to convince herself that the ride should be fun. The clock read 3:16, but it took a minute to realize where she was. “I think there’s something happening ,” she said, turning over and nudging Wade. “There is?” Sitting up in the dark, Wade rotated his neck, then, reluctantly, opened one eye. “I don’t know.” She stared down at her belly lit by the red glow of the clock numbers. “I think so. Maybe.” Wade disappeared into the bathroom and after flushing the toilet came back to the bedroom holding a stopwatch. A few minutes passed in which neither said anything, and then Caroline gasped. “Eww, that’s one.” Wade turned the stopwatch from side to side to catch light from the bathroom, then set it off with a click. Less than an hour later, the contractions appeared to be getting closer together and increasingly stronger, and after returning to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face and pulling on a pair of jeans and a shirt, Wade decided it was time to leave for the hospital. Caroline was ready to go even before him, her overnight bag by the door to the nursery where it had sat for over a month. It held everything she could possibly need, checked off from a list that she’d been adding to for days, upon the advice of her mother Julie Shigekuni 265 and friends. Having heard horror stories of hospital stays, she wanted her labor to go smoothly and comfortably—not unlike her wedding, which had taken a lot of work to plan, but had been a resounding success. Unfortunately, however, when the triage nurse checked, Caroline’s cervix was only one centimeter dilated, which caused an argument between the nurse and Wade, and then between Wade and Caroline, over whether she should be admitted. “The contractions are two minutes apart,” Wade explained to the nurse in order to defend his wife. But the nurse’s comeback was to attach Caroline to the fetal monitor, and when the sporadic contractions appeared in wavy black lines, even Caroline could see that the activity had subsided. “I told the nurse they were two minutes apart,” Wade scolded while Caroline packed up to leave. Caroline didn’t understand why Wade would accuse her of imagining what she’d been feeling, or why the contractions, so regular at first, should slow down. “I’m sorry, Wade,” she said. “I really don’t know what happened. But you were timing them, remember.” “Well, at one centimeter and contractions five to ten minutes apart the nurse is right. It’s possible to hang on like this for days. Let’s go.” It wasn’t yet light when they left the hospital. Back in bed, Wade fell asleep almost instantly, leaving Caroline to time her own contractions and worry over the progression of labor. Twice more that week she considered waking Wade. Once the pain was so intense it caused her to double over. But each time she held off, and in the morning was glad she did. In this way, her due date came and passed, and Wade went to work early each morning reminding her to page him if anything changed, and each morning at eight the phone rang. “Hi, Mom,” Caroline spoke into the receiver without even needing to ask who it was. “Just checking in,” Teru said. “No baby yet?” Unending Nora 266 “You’d be the first to know if there were.” Teru’s failure to grasp the obvious was annoying, but Caroline tried to be nice, knowing that her mother’s excitement about the baby exceeded her own. Besides, she was grateful to Teru, whose daily visits to check on her and keep the house in shape helped pass the hours. Not the world’s most tidy person, Teru undertook light housekeeping as an excuse to visit, the real purpose being to resolve an issue outstanding between them before the baby could be born. “I hope you have a boy,” she’d say each time she entered the nursery to dust the crib and refold items from the layette. Teru had wanted Caroline and Wade to find out the...