All but one of the women in our little group rise off their mattresses and drape their blankets from shoulder to shoulder to offer Belinda the only privacy available to her. I situate Kat in the one-armed embrace of the lady whose other arm is in a sling on the outside of this curtain of women. I tell Kat that as soon as the baby arrives, I will show her the wee thing and won’t that be a lovely surprise.
I know enough about the birth process to know what Belindaneeds to do—keep breathing in and out, and bear down with the urge to push, not against it.
At the robust sound of Belinda bringing the child out of the safe confines of her body and into this complicated world, a nurse comes scurrying over with scissors and towels, and I move aside. With deft hands, the nurse massages the tiny infant’s chest and cleans out the mouth. She turns the baby upside down to clear the lungs and I see that the little fairy child is a girl. Tiny and perfect. The babe looks nothing like Martin.
“Is she all right?” Belinda gasps as we wait to hear the child’s first cry.
And then it comes, sweet and wonderful.
“She’s little, but she’s a fighter,” the nurse says, as she clamps the cord and cuts it. “Not more than five pounds, I’d say. But she’s a beauty. The only pretty thing I’ve seen today.”
The nurse wraps the child in one of the towels and hands her to me so that I can show Belinda. And then while the nurse attends Belinda down below, I place the babe in Belinda’s arms and motion for Kat to come to us, wanting her to look only at the baby and not at what the nurse is doing. I needn’t have worried that Kat’s eyes would be drawn to the afterbirth; she only has eyes for her little sister.
“Isn’t she a sweet, wee thing?” I say to Kat as I pull her to me.
Kat nods and reaches out to touch one of the infant’s tiny, perfect fingers.
The three of us continue to stare at the child as the nurse says she will be back later to check on Belinda. The women who held the blankets move back to their beds and I thank them.
“Is he dead?” Belinda whispers a moment later as she stares down at her child. “Are we going to jail?”
“No and no,” I whisper in return. “Everything is going to be fine. You don’t need to worry. Don’t speak of it now, Belinda.”
She says nothing more. An orderly brings us sandwiches and fruit donated by nearby restaurants whose kitchens survived the quake. Belinda is quiet and has no appetite, but I admonish her to eat for the child’s sake and she manages to consume half a sandwich. After we eat, I take Kat to a changing area—where in recent days pugilists and acrobats and skaters got ready for their exhibitions—so that we can change out of our soured-milk-smelling dresses and into fresh clothes. From her own case, Kat pulls out the doll who is wearing the frock I made from her old dress. She looks up at me.
“For baby?” Her barely audible words are the first I have heard from her since the night before.
I am about to say her little sister is too young yet for dolls, when I realize she is referring to the dress. She wants to give the new baby, who has nothing to wear, the doll dress made from her own clothes.
Tears prick my eyes and I nod. “That would be lovely.”
In our fresh clothes, we return to Belinda and Kat presents her with the tiny dress.
I explain where the material for it came from. Belinda looks down expressionless at the toweled bundle that is her child.
“Here,” I say, unwrapping the infant in her arms. “I’ll help you.” The babe’s limbs are tiny and pink, her mouth a perfect rosebud. One of the women in our little group hands me a large white handkerchief.
“It’s my husband’s. I brought it with me from home. And it’s clean, I assure you. You’ll need something for a diaper. And the baby’s so tiny, this will no doubt do.”
I thank her, take the handkerchief, and fold it over and over again into a small triangle. Then I wrap it around the infant’s little bottom, tying a loose knot on her small waist. I ease the doll’s dress onto her tiny form. She looks like a flower.
“Do you have a name picked out?” I ask.
Belinda just shakes her head. Her listlessness worries me. Maddens me. I keep forgetting she loved her husband. She loved the man I didn’t love. I keep forgetting that the husband she loved is gone, never to return, and it’s as though he was snatched up in the jaws of a leviathan, here one second and gone the next. A horrifying, violent death.
“Let’s think on some names, shall we?” I say. And I begin to list names for girls, starting with good Irish names like Aileen and Fiona and Maeve.
“How about Rosalie?” says the woman with the bandage on her eye.
“Or Helen?” says the woman with her arm in a sling.
“If I’d had a girl I would’ve named her Margaret,” says another. “But I only ever had boys. Six of them.”
The women in our set of mattresses continue to suggest names, but Belinda seems not to be interested in any of them.
“There’s all those names in the Bible,” the woman who looks like Mam says. “Ruth and Esther and Rachel and Sarah.”
“Sarah,” Kat says. So quietly, but she says it.
