In the Heart of the Canyon - By Elisabeth Hyde Page 0,87
put it together. She watched Amy go rigid, watched how she dug her heels into the sand and made little gasping noises. She saw the long slow leakage underneath Amy’s hips on the sand. She thought back to the night that Sam and Matthew drank the margaritas, when Peter said something and Amy got mad and left. That walk. That waddle.
She told herself it couldn’t be possible. A girl would know. Her mother would know.
Then she remembered stories she had read in magazines over the years. Lack of education. Denial. Overweight to begin with.
Susan had gone off to get Amy some water. With Susan gone, Jill gave herself permission to look at Amy’s stomach. And she knew. She didn’t know how she knew; she just knew. She put her hand on Amy’s forehead.
“Could you give me a moment?” she asked JT and Peter.
JT seemed relieved. He stood up and went over and conferred with Dixie and Abo. Peter stayed and Jill didn’t argue.
“Amy,” said Jill, “is it your stomach?”
Amy nodded her head.
“How bad?”
“Really bad.”
“Amy,” said Jill, “would you mind if I felt your stomach?”
Amy opened her eyes and looked at Peter. Then she closed them again. “Fine.”
Jill laid her hand on Amy’s belly. The skin was warm and sticky, and there was a raisin-shaped mole just below her navel. She felt around. She was wanting to feel nothing so that her suspicions would be wrong. But just below Amy’s diaphragm, a little to the left, she felt a lump. It was roundish, maybe the size of a plum. Jill pressed, and it rolled beneath her fingers. An elbow, perhaps a foot; Jill couldn’t be sure.
She took a deep breath and, not knowing what else to do, gently began to massage Amy’s belly. She had never rubbed another woman’s belly before, she realized; in fact, it was possibly the most intimate thing she had done to anyone lately, except Mark.
“Does that feel all right?” she asked.
“It feels fine. Anyway, I don’t hurt right now. I’m not an epileptic, and don’t anyone call a helicopter.”
“The pain comes and goes?” Jill asked.
Amy nodded.
“For how long?”
Amy shrugged.
Jill was trying to keep her face calm, but inside she was in ER mode. ER mode was where she went when Matthew broke his leg up at Alta and they looked at the X-ray and said, Actually, it’s a lot worse than we thought, and see this little spot on the bone? ER mode was when Sam spiked a fever and got a stiff neck and then went limp in her arms; when Mark had chest pains, and they hooked him up to machines and wires and a counselor came and asked if he had a living will. She had always thought that ER mode was a place she only went when it involved her immediate family, but now she realized that was wrong.
She thought she could deal with telling JT what was going on, and she even thought she could deal with telling Amy. But she didn’t think she had it in her to deal with telling Susan—in whom she had confided so much on this trip—that her seventeen-year-old virgin daughter was going into labor on the Colorado River, miles from the nearest emergency room.
42
Day Eleven
Below Lava
Jill stood up in the hot sunshine. Her knees were stiff from crouching and her mouth was dry. She touched Peter on the shoulder and motioned for him to join her out of Amy’s earshot.
She’d noticed over the course of the trip an unlikely alliance between these two. She recalled meeting Peter back in Flagstaff the night before they left—noticing how he had a kind of snotty attitude toward everyone, especially Amy. Jill had left the meeting wondering how she was going to hold her patience for two weeks with this frat boy who was obviously more interested in getting laid than enjoying his time on the river—she could read the disappointment in his face when he looked around and saw the likes of Amy and Evelyn, Susan and Jill, little Lena and ancient Ruth.
So she wouldn’t have guessed that he’d have chosen Amy to spend so much time with. She wouldn’t have guessed he’d had it in him, to develop a friendship with a woman with whom the possibility of a sexual relationship was not the first thing, quite frankly, that leapt to mind.
Now Peter stood with his eyes cast downward, head cocked toward her, waiting.