Can You Feel This?

by Julie Orringer

Blood. Just as the doctor said there would be. It’s five in the morning; you’re on the toilet. Thirty-six weeks pregnant. A week before your scheduled C-section. Blood is trouble, the doctor said. Any blood means an emergency. Call Labor and Delivery. If it keeps up, get to the nearest emergency room. What are the chances that’ll happen? you asked her. One hundred percent,

What they said in childbirth class: If you gave birth by C-section, you wouldn’t bond with your baby. He’d be whisked off to the NICU at once. Laid in an incubator. Threaded with tubes. Fed formula. You might not see him again for eighteen hours. When at last you did, he wouldn’t recognize your scent.

What they didn’t say: When your baby was born, when your husband put him into your arms, you would recognize him immediately.

that was something. More than nothing. Maybe love.

You’d never worn your trauma like a badge. It was something you carried alone.

he was, it seemed to you, honorable, a person who didn’t cheat and didn’t lie, came home when he said he would, took care of you when you were sick,

Your mother’s organs, someone told you, saved at least three lives.

What you want is to be alone, figuring things out.

Where is your mother? Where is she? Shouldn’t there be exemptions? Shouldn’t the dead be allowed family leave for emergencies, like soldiers get in the military?

He’s nice and fat, she says. Looks fully cooked. But how are you? I don’t know, you say. He finally nursed. He slept. I said how are you? Without warning, you cry disastrously. Raw, jagged sobs. You want to say, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do it. No one’s telling me. Why is it such a goddamned secret? Why will no one tell me? But you can only make these ragged sounds, animal noises.

Women whose partners knew their histories. When you found out about placenta previa, when you understood that your baby could die, it felt like punishment for your years of untruth.

What will you bring him home to? An apartment trying to defend itself against his existence, against the possibility of his nonexistence.

You don’t say you hate her for all she’s done and hasn’t done. But for a moment you think it. And that’s when she goes.

He doesn’t stop wailing, but he knows you’re there. His fingers close around your thumb. A reflex, but you take it to mean what you want it to. Clever biology, deceiving you with this small and powerful grip.

Someone else’s life.