The brunette walked to the stairs in her soundless shoes and slapped the door open with both hands.
“Was her phone working?” the girl in the room next to Orla’s called out.
“Back in your rooms, please, everyone,” another nurse snapped, and Orla realized that it wasn’t just her—everyone was watching. She got back in bed and strapped her pumps back on. Five minutes later, a nurse she hadn’t seen yet—baby-faced, with dime-tight black curls—came into the room. She didn’t look at Orla as she picked up the foam block from the ledge of the dry-erase board. She wiped away the brunette’s name and replaced it with her own. Then she left the room and went back with the rest of them, cloistered behind the high walls of the cubicles, whispering together—what the fuck just happened?
It had been two feedings, a change, and the better part of Marlow’s next nap when Orla realized that no one, not the young nurse or anyone else, had been in to see them in hours. She was sure she was overdue for her small white cup of pain pills; the flesh on her stomach was burning around her incision and aching underneath. It seemed, Orla thought, like she and Marlow had slipped through the cracks.
She was about to press the call button and beg for someone to bring her a painkiller when a thought shot through her. A crazy thought, an unthinkable thought. But that only meant it matched the state of things.
She took her finger off of the call button.
“Just ran right out of here,” her nurse was saying, outside the door, to someone who had just come on shift. “Something about a video, and Ava seeing it. Isn’t Ava, like, nine?”
Orla rose slowly, gripping the bed’s bars, and went into the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was thinking that maybe this crack they slipped through was actually an opening.
She winced as she pulled her clothes on, over the white medical corset and the bandages beneath it. She swept all the supplies from the bathroom into her bag, even the things she didn’t understand: cold packs that stretched the length of her crotch, the comically oversize maxi pads, the soft plastic bottle with its nozzle top. Then she moved to the bassinet and packed everything from there, too: the diapers, the wipes, the little snapped shirts that bloomed around the baby’s seven-pound body, the extra hat, the tiny comb, the bulb for sucking her nose clean. She stopped to lean over Marlow, to make sure she was all right. The closeness of her breath made the baby flinch and wrinkle her nose.
Orla went to her door, hung the laminated sign that said she was breastfeeding and not to be disturbed, and closed it softly.
She unwrapped Marlow on the bed, marveling again at the tiny limbs that sprang wide when she opened the blanket, at the firm little belly with its lingering nub, pupil black, of the cord that connected them. Marlow was still as Orla changed her diaper, fumbling the yellow tabs over and over. “Good girl,” Orla said.
The pants that Mrs. Salgado had made, she saw gratefully, were footed. She pulled the sweater inch by inch over Marlow’s head.
“We’re going home,” she whispered to Marlow. She put her back in the bassinet.
She hauled her overnight bag up onto the nest of sheets, the motion like a knife running straight across her middle. The things she had brought, the things she was taking—almost all of it, fortunately, amounted to padding. She pushed everything to the sides of the bag, making a well in the middle.
She picked up Marlow and waited for the next round of darkness.
The plastic bracelets both of them wore had matching numbers and a sensor. If either of them went through the swinging unit doors before discharge, the sensors would sound an alarm, a nurse had told her. The hospital would lock down. “Except,” the nurse said in a low voice, “during these goddamn generator fails. But we’re talking seconds at a time. What are the odds, you know?”
Finally, the lamp over Orla’s bed flickered out. The room cooled and quieted.
Orla opened the door and stuck her head out. She looked at the nurses’ station. All of the women were up and jogging toward the rooms that needed them. A chorus of “How we doin’ in here?” rang up and down the hall.
Orla shut the door, went back and picked up Marlow. She placed the baby gently in