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Show Motherlunge a novel 125 Pavia buried her face in her hands. The bedside monitor dragged its needles across the paper, tracing the contractions and the baby's heart rate. It wove each tracing into the lines of the graph paper like Penelope killing time waiting for Ulysses. The used paper curled off the end of the machine and fell to the floor in a long, drooping loop; a regular epic. "I bet that's how Mom feels most of the time," I said as I watchedy(s the top line on the monitor climb higher toward the peak of the contraction. "What am I thinking? Who am I today?" "God, don't say that," Pavia said in a muffled voice. Then she started humming into the pain, her voice buzzing in her hands; the theme from Bewitched, Later that day, finally, I climbed into bed with my sister and knelt behind her. I leaned into her and the heat of her body came into me, and the pain pressed back as a slab. There was a nurse named Ellen with us during this part; she was holding Pavia's hand. And when Pavia finally began to cry Ellen stepped back looking fierce, as if she herself had had enough. With vengeful-seeming dispatch Ellen turned from the bed and snapped a latex glove on her right hand. How we loved Ellen for that!-because then she gripped Pavia's knee with the ungloved hand and went in with the other, her mouth making a hard circle as her fingers blindly climbed toward Pavia's cervix. |
