The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,73
Adam and Granny Paynes peered down at the baby. I closed my eyes and saw a featureless face in the mud.
When I opened my eyes, Adam smiled at me. Tears ran down his face and he nodded. All I could see of the baby was the top of her wrinkled head and her waving arms as Granny Paynes held her between my legs. The skin on her scalp appeared strange.
“Tell me,” I said.
“The Lord have mercy.” Each word out of Granny Paynes’s mouth rang separate.
Suddenly, I felt very cold and dizzy. I held my voice as steady as I could. “Boy or girl?” I pulled myself up against the headboard to see. Adam looked to her and she shook her head.
Granny Paynes cut and tied the cord. They quickly dried the baby, wrapped her, and slipped a knit cap over her head. Adam brought her up to me. He gazed at our child enraptured. Everything still seemed fuzzy in the dim light, but I could see that the baby’s facial features were oddly flat. Still, all the parts were there—ears, nose, mouth, and, when she opened them, clear blue eyes. I counted fingers. Ten. I began singing “Amazing Grace,” but my voice cracked out from under me.
I lifted the blanket and tried, through the fog of exhaustion, to focus. “A girl?” I blinked. She looked like a girl, but in the shadowed lamplight, there seemed to be too much there between her legs.
“More girl than boy, I’d say,” Granny Paynes agreed. “We need to keep her wrapped against the cold.” She pressed on my belly for the afterbirth. “This is not a birthing problem. Nothing could have been done. You gonna have to let a doctor look at her. Maybe they can do something.”
“She’s beautiful. Our Grace.” The certainty and resonance in Adam’s voice calmed me.
My fear subsided as I surrendered to my fatigue. My child was whole and well. I touched his jaw, but he did not take his eyes off our baby. A strong final contraction hit me. The dense, thick odor of blood filled the room.
“A big, healthy afterbirth and all there.” Granny Paynes dropped it into a basin and turned her attention to the baby. She laid the baby on the bed beside me, unwrapped the blankets, and took a long look. “I have to tell you, I ain’t never seen nothing like this,” she said.
She lifted Grace up by her little fists, then turned her and looked at her back, her neck, and skull. Grace’s arms shot out when Granny Paynes laid her back down and she began a full-throated wail, her face flushing dark pink. Granny Paynes worked the baby’s arms and legs, looked in her mouth, and then announced, over Grace’s diminishing cries, “She might not be quite right when it comes to learning—only time will tell you that. But everything else seems to be working fine. Specially her lungs. She’s not at all early and she’s strong. Born so close to Christ’s day, she’ll be a good one.”
She diapered and swaddled Grace then pressed her against my breast. “We need to see how she sucks,” she said.
Grace latched on immediately. A visceral, sharp tenderness radiated up my body into my breasts. The three of us watched as she sucked and grunted, her fists working under her chin. I was happy. She looked better than I had feared, but I wanted to see more. I motioned for Adam to turn on the overhead light.
I fought an impulse to flinch and cover my eyes as the harsh yellow light flooded the room. Her slightly jaundiced skin did not have the rough swirled texture of her father’s when I first pulled him from the clay. Rather she resembled Addie on the second or third day. Every surface of her was oddly dimpled, like fat under the skin on a woman’s thighs. Her neck, face, shoulders. Individually, her features were normal. Tiny reddish brows, puffy newborn eyelids and lips. Bridgeless button nose. Toothless, shallow jaw. But the total effect was off. Was that my imagination? I held her close. Everything was there!
“She’ll be okay, Granny Paynes. I know she will,” I mumbled. Then, to Adam, “And, yes, she is beautiful.”
To him, she may have been pretty. The texture of her skin might have been deeply familiar to him. He now had someone who was truly his own flesh and blood, however much his flesh might now resemble another man’s.