Excerpt of The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
(Page 7 of 10)
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"Yes," he said, "ten centimeters."
"Phoebe," his wife said. He could not see her face, but her
voice
was clear. They had been discussing names for months and had
reached no decisions. "For a girl, Phoebe. And for a boy, Paul,
after
my great-uncle. Did I tell you this?" she asked. "I meant to
tell you
I'd decided."
"Those are good names," the nurse said, soothing.
"Phoebe and Paul," the doctor repeated, but he was concentrating
on the contraction now rising in his wife's flesh. He gestured
to
the nurse, who readied the gas. During his residency years, the
practice had been to put the woman in labor out completely until
the birth was over, but times had changed—it was
1964—and
Bentley, he knew, used gas more selectively. Better that she
should
be awake to push; he would put her out for the worst of the
contractions,
for the crowning and the birth. His wife tensed and cried out,
and the baby moved in the birth canal, bursting the amniotic
sac.
"Now," the doctor said, and the nurse put the mask in place. His
wife's hands relaxed, her fists unclenching as the gas took
effect,
and she lay still, tranquil and unknowing, as another
contraction
and another moved through her.
"It's coming fast for a first baby," the nurse observed.
"Yes," the doctor said. "So far so good."
Half an hour passed in this way. His wife roused and moaned
and pushed, and when he felt she had had enough—or when she
cried out that the pain was overwhelming—he nodded to the
nurse, who gave her the gas. Except for the quiet exchange of
instructions,
they did not speak. Outside the snow kept falling, drifting
along the sides of houses, filling the roads. The doctor sat on
a
stainless steel chair, narrowing his concentration to the
essential
facts. He had delivered five babies during medical school, all
live
births and all successful, and he focused now on those, seeking
in
his memory the details of care. As he did so, his wife, lying
with her
feet in the stirrups and her belly rising so high that he could
not see
her face, slowly became one with those other women. Her round
knees, her smooth narrow calves, her ankles, all these were
before
him, familiar and beloved. Yet he did not think to stroke her
skin or
put a reassuring hand on her knee. It was the nurse who held her
hand while she pushed. To the doctor, focused on what was
immediately
before him, she became not just herself but more than herself;
a body like other bodies, a patient whose needs he must meet
with every technical skill he had. It was necessary, more
necessary
than usual, to keep his emotions in check. As time passed, the
strange moment he had experienced in their bedroom came to him
again. He began to feel as if he were somehow removed from the
scene of this birth, both there and also floating elsewhere,
observing
from some safe distance. He watched himself make the careful,
precise incision for the episiotomy. A good one, he thought, as
the
blood welled in a clean line, not letting himself remember the
times
he'd touched that same flesh in passion.
The head crowned. In three more pushes it emerged, and then
the body slid into his waiting hands and the baby cried out, its
blue
skin pinking up.
It was a boy, red-faced and dark-haired, his eyes alert,
suspicious
of the lights and the cold bright slap of air. The doctor tied
the umbilical
cord and cut it. My son,
he allowed himself to think.
My son.
"He's beautiful," the nurse said. She waited while he examined
the child, noting his steady heart, rapid and sure, the
long-fingered
hands and shock of dark hair. Then she took the infant to the
other
room to bathe him and to drop the silver nitrate into his eyes.
The
small cries drifted back to them, and his wife stirred. The
doctor
stayed where he was with his hand on her knee, taking several
deep
breaths, awaiting the afterbirth.
My son, he
thought again.
(c) 2005, Kim Edwards. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Penguin Group.
