A Pain Like That

The girl leans her head back into the pillow, tries breathing the way she’s probably seen pregnant women breathe on TV. Her boyfriend slouches in a plastic chair beside the hospital bed. He has a lip ring at the side of his mouth that he touches at intervals with his tongue, bulging out his lip. His spine curves below his chest, giving him a cool, cobra-like posture.

The nurse, Maggie, makes a note on the chart, time of admission: 1:07 am. The boy reminds her of her son. The lip ring and his posture, too, although her son, David, had a sharper bend in his back. Maggie remembers him slouched against the kitchen counter like that, like a broken kite, lifting a bottle of her wine to see how much was left.

“There’s nothing we could have done,” her husband has said, putting his hands to the sides of his head. “We are unfortunate,” he says. “Unfortunate.”

Maggie can see that the boy and the girl are unfortunate people. It makes her feel close to them. It makes her loathe them.

“How are we feeling in here?” she asks. She scans for the name on the chart. “Cindy, how are we feeling?”

Cindy tries a smile. “Okay,” she says. She touches her stomach and reminds herself that this baby is going to save them. It’d happened for her friend Angela. When Angela’s son was born, her parents paid off her debt; her boyfriend moved in and stopped using. At a year old, her baby has a curly head of blond hair and blue eyes clear as marbles. She carries him around in a kind of backpack, and he waves to everybody, and they tell her how beautiful he is because he is.

The nurse checks Cindy’s progress, takes her temperature, blood pressure, pulse. She straps two round sensors onto Cindy’s stomach. “Fetal monitor,” she says. Her hands are tough, her movements quick and formal. Cindy tries to catch her eye but finds that the nurse does not want to look at her.

Cindy tells herself: I will be a good mother. She says it silently to the nurse: I will be a good mother. Not like her own mother, always making her feel like a burden. No. And Cindy won’t smoke in the house, and she won’t get fat, and she won’t hate her life. She refuses to hate her life.

“Another one’s coming,” she says. She braces herself, curls in. “Hold my hand,” she says to Nick.

She knows he doesn’t want to. She knows what he’s thinking because he’s said it, and he said it again, under his breath, when she made him drive her in: totally fucking fucked.

“Good,” the nurse says. “Call me Maggie,” she says. The nurse has a shaggy head of tawny-gray hair and receded, greenish eyes. She coaches Cindy through the contraction. Then helps her out of bed, has her pee in a cup, helps her back in bed, does a vaginal exam—“About five centimeters. Halfway there,” she says.

Nick keeps looking at his phone as if waiting for a call. Cindy watches the nurse’s eyes on him. She sees for certain that the nurse doesn’t like them. She normally would notice this and tell herself not to care, but she does care. She sits up in bed.

The nurse asks a barrage of questions: how many contractions, how long, how far apart? Had her water broken, had there been blood? “Do you know what you’re having, boy or girl?” she asks. No, they don’t. Cindy wanted it to be a surprise. Cindy wants it to be a girl.

“We usually administer the epidurals at five or six—”

“Oh, no,” Cindy says. “I’ve changed my mind about that. No drugs.”

Nick looks up. “CC, those drugs don’t count,” he says.

“No drugs,” Cindy says. The nurse lifts her eyes from the chart. Cindy sits up a little more in the bed. This baby will show them all what real...