Three hours later, it was only four, and the baby’s heart rate was slowing. The doctor called in another one. The two of them conferred in the corner, near a yoga ball that hung from the ceiling in a large mesh hammock.
“All right,” the first one said to Orla. She clapped her hands together. “We have to do a C-section. That means,” she went on in doctor singsong, “you get some anesthesia! Finally, right?”
When they were about to wheel her in, Mrs. Salgado bent over the gurney. “If this watch is right, it’s still Christmas,” she said to Orla. “Your baby will be here before midnight—you won’t believe how fast it goes. I had a C, too.” She reached down, tentatively, and smoothed the tiny curls at Orla’s hairline back. The lights went out again. The little OR-bound parade stopped and waited.
“I’m sorry,” Orla said into the darkness. “I’m so sorry.”
It was silent for a moment. Then the nurse over Orla’s left shoulder said, “Funny—it’s usually the husbands who say that up here.”
When the lights came back on, Mrs. Salgado was gone.
“It’s all right,” the nurse said, as Orla lifted her head, looking. “She’ll be there when you get out.”
But she wasn’t. Mrs. Salgado tried to stay. But she had to go when her mind filled with thoughts of Anna—Anna being lifted out of her, as she lay on a table just like the one they cut Orla open on, Anna’s first fierce sound, Anna’s slick and pumping fists, Anna’s reddish-purple chest, swelling with her first breath. No one told Orla any of this. By the time she woke up in recovery and let them put Marlow on her chest, no one had to. She was a mother. She understood.
All that was left of Mrs. Salgado was a neat stack of wool on the chair in Orla’s room: tiny pants, tiny sweater, tiny hat. Orla knew the yarn. She was sure it had been a scarf unspooling over Mrs. Salgado’s hands these last several weeks, outside her building. But she also knew, from having a mother who knit, that an experienced purler could change her design, if she just changed her mind in time.
* * *
On the first day of Marlow’s life, the world was still timeless and frightening. But in Orla’s room, everything was perfect. Marlow slept, prompting relieved looks from the overworked nurses. Marlow ate, prompting a grin and a loud “praise be” from the nosy lactation consultant. Orla beamed right back at her. Look what she had made. She would never be alone again.
Normally, they wouldn’t have left her alone with Marlow so much. Normally, there would have been baths and tests and admonitions that Orla stay in bed, so that the deep slit in her belly could heal. But under the circumstances, they kept saying, and what they meant was: they weren’t watching. They told Orla to be careful when she got up. They showed her how to remove and replace the canvas pumps strapped around her legs, coaxing her blood to flow evenly. They told her to buzz if she was light-headed, and to be patient if they didn’t come quickly. They told her to, above all, listen to her body.
Only because there was nothing to do, Orla figured out the outages. They happened every twenty minutes or so, and lasted for about thirty seconds. Each time the shadow and hush fell over the floor, the nurses would rush from their stations toward patients who had something crucial plugged into them. Then the generator would kick back up, the power would return, and everything would go back to normal.
Later that day, while Marlow slept in the clear bassinet, Orla swore that she heard the bouncing lilt of a cell phone. She went to her door, cracked it, and looked out at the nurses’ station. All of the nurses were huddled around the brunette with the feathered hair, the one who had made Orla blow into a cylinder just a few minutes before.
The brunette was holding her phone. Orla could see, from the blue light in the grease on the woman’s chin, that the phone was on, its image moving. A video. Behind the brunette, two nurses exchanged looks. They backed away.
“What?” the brunette shouted suddenly. She was talking to the phone like someone was on the other end. But clearly, nobody was. “Ava is seeing this?” she said. “What the—Oh, no, oh fuck!” She stood up. The other nurses scattered like pigeons.