I sat up and pulled my clothes about me, my thoughts a blur. I wanted my bed. I wanted sleep. I wanted to be anywhere but in this room with Truman Calvert lying there with his trousers undone.
As I rose unsteadily to my feet, Truman reached out to me. “You okay?”
I didn’t think I was, but I nodded.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Again, I nodded, and then turned to walk away.
“Hey. I’m sorry,” Truman called after me, but the phonograph was playing a happy tune, and I wasn’t sure what he was sorry for.
13
JUNE 1939
All is a blur of light and sound as Belle yells for Nurse Andrews to come. I bend forward as the sense of fullness I’ve been experiencing in the last few days turns to a peculiar churning.
Something is happening. Something not good for our plans.
“Belle!” The imagined escape begins to flit away in my mind like a panicked butterfly, and the room seems to tilt. We were so close. So close.
“Hush,” Belle whispers, mindful of our other roommates, all awake now. “You’ll be fine. We’ll go on Sunday just like we planned. You, me, and the baby. All three of us.”
“But it’s too early. It’s too early for the baby to come. Something has to be wrong!”
“Stop talking like that,” Belle murmurs urgently. “We’ll get out of here, just like I said we would. No more talking about it.”
Nurse Andrews sweeps into the room to see what all the fuss is about.
“All right, then.” She looks calmly at the puddle, as though I had merely spilled a glass of water. “Nothing to get all worked up about.”
“But I have three more weeks!” I say in a terrified voice.
“Babies come when they want to come,” Nurse Andrews replies. “You’re likely going to be fine and the baby probably will be, too. We just need to get you downstairs into the maternity ward. I’ll have Norman get a wheelchair. Just hold on to the footboard there. Don’t sit on anything and make a bigger mess.” She leaves to go find Norman.
Belle turns to me. “To hell with her. If you want to sit on your bed, sit.”
“I’m okay.” I grip the rail at the bottom of my bed. “I’m so sorry, Belle.”
But Belle gives me a quick shake of her head. The escape is not going to be discussed—all eyes in the room are on us.
Moments later Norman comes into the room with the wheelchair. As I’m wheeled away, I look back at Belle. I don’t know if it is the last time I will see my friend. What if they keep me in the maternity ward for more than three days? Will Belle leave without me? I want to tell her to go and I want to tell her to stay, but I can only stare at her as I am pushed out of the room.
I was told by the nursing staff that my labor pains would feel like monthly cramps, only much worse. The fiery twisting and turning inside me would be opening a door into my uterus through which the baby will pass, and I should not fight it. I am given an enema and shaved, and as the rest of the day wears on and the pains intensify, I try to remember the pain is a door. A door for my child to come through to me.
Dr. Melson comes late in the afternoon and pronounces that it is now time for the gas that will put me to sleep for the hardest part of the delivery.
“I don’t want gas!” I say through gritted teeth as a labor pain envelops me.
“Of course you do,” says one of the nurses.
“I don’t care if she doesn’t want it,” Dr. Melson says tonelessly. “It’s easier for me if she pushes the child out. And she’s narrow. The forceps might be a problem. Let her push if she wants to.”
For the next twenty minutes, all I am aware of are the door and the pain and the work. At the moment my baby slips from my body, I feel as if a long frigid winter has ended and at last spring is here. The infant girl the doctor holds up is tiny and beautiful. She is like a perfect bloom that has pushed its way up out of the dark ground, just like the amaryllis Helen gave me. Beauty out of nothingness, hope out of the darkness. The baby cries out, and the very room seems electrified with orbs of December red.
The name comes to me that same instant. The only name for my baby girl.
“Amaryllis,” I say as I gaze in awe at the flower that emerged from the dark confines of my body.
