Another contraction. Though Lore focuses as usual on her voice, on expelling sound as the pain rises, she has the sensation this time of standing slightly outside of herself, and she is aware, now, of other sounds in the room: the speeded-up heartbeat the monitor broadcasts (lub-lub-lub-lub-lub-lub-lub), Franckline’s deep, heavy breathing as she presses hard into Lore’s back. She is fascinated to hear the baby’s heartbeat slow as the pain recedes. There are sounds of the wind outside, erratic rattlings of the window, and a dog’s sharp bark, one-two-three-four, stopping abruptly. Footsteps in the hallway outside.
Then she is asleep again.
When she wakes she has the sense that it has been several minutes. Her body is quiet; she detects no pain moving in. But it can’t be far away. When another few minutes pass and nothing happens, she tells Franckline she would like to get on her feet. Franckline helps her off the bed, holds her arm until Lore is steady. Lore walks back and forth a few paces to restore the sense of ground under her, then moves to the window. The sky is still dark and the snow doesn’t look as pretty as she had hoped; rapid footfalls are already disrupting the thin layer and pushing it into the street, where cars that seem to be driving too fast return it from their tires as dirty spray. She watches as another ambulance pulls up, this one silent for some reason, but turns away before she can see what its back doors will discharge.
The pain hasn’t abandoned her. It is coming toward her again, and she reaches out for Franckline.
“Show me your hand,” says Franckline. It is past three. Lore lies on her side. There was a good half hour, forty minutes, of more frequent contractions, and now she is waiting again. The dark air outside washes in and mutes the bright fluorescents, creating an under-the-sea effect. A short time ago she cried out in frustration and disbelief, and Franckline said that some labors are just like this, start and stop, start and stop. “But the baby comes eventually, believe me,” she said.
She rests Lore’s palm in her own and tells her that the finger with the ring seems to her more swollen than before. “Your blood pressure could be up — I want to check that. We need to take this off,” she pronounces firmly, touching the silver band. “Is it something special?”
“No,” says Lore.
“You haven’t wanted to take it off.”
Franckline gazes down at her, waiting. Lore likes her silences; she can look at her then, study her long, smooth face that has a small scar below the left eye.
“We can save it,” Franckline assures her. “They will cut it in just one place, and you can have it repaired later.”
The ring cost Lore a good deal, nearly three hundred dollars. Of course that was much less than Asa must have spent on the one he bought her, a teardrop emerald flanked by two diamonds. She flushed it down the toilet six weeks later, the day after she sent him back to Julia. It could have been sold for good money.
“Lore. Can you feel it when I press your finger? I didn’t think so.”
She never figured out how Asa paid for the ring. Probably only a loan from his parents could have made the purchase possible, but at the same time she can’t imagine proud Asa ever asking them. She was appalled when he first gave it to her — she was even more frugal, in some ways, than he was. He had come home with a louder than usual clatter of shoes and satchel, gripping the day’s takeout coffee that he wasn’t going to finish — because tossing it would be profligate. He seemed hyped up. They sat down to bowls of a lentil soup they’d made over the weekend and he nudged the ring box in her direction. She opened it and looked at him. He was silent.
“Is this an engagement ring?”
“Mmm,” he said.
A proposal seemed uncharacteristically old-fashioned of him. She’d figured the inevitable decision to marry would be a joint one, something they’d come to one night after a talk about the apartment and their bills. That was their style. Lore’s first thought was that the money he’d spent on the ring would have better gone toward their wedding. But when she started to say this, and to protest that he should return it for something simpler, he became agitated, and told her that if he couldn’t spoil her over an engagement ring, whenever would he?
She should have been suspicious then. In fact she was suspicious. When had Lore ever needed or wanted to be spoiled? When had their lovers’ vocabulary ever included the word spoiling? One evening a few weeks earlier, she and Asa and Julia were sitting over dinner in the apartment, and she was pricked by a wordless thought. She looked from Asa to Julia and back again. The thought escaped her, and what occurred in its place was that Asa and Julia were looking more and more alike. People had sometimes taken them for brother and sister despite the difference in their physiques — because of the olive skin, the long narrow noses, the curly hair. Their height, their long fingers and the way they had of thrusting them up in the air when excited. People guessed: Jewish? Black? Italian? But related to each other, surely. Now it seemed to Lore that even their ears had the same shape, and that they cocked their heads at the same angle and cut up their vegetables in the same slow, overly attentive way. The words coming out of their mouths, for several fugue-like minutes, had the same timbre, the same intonations. And then Lore came out of it and reached for another helping of spaghetti bolognese, and took a sip of red wine.
Lore had flushed the emerald ring away, her pride beating loudly in her ears, when she could have sold it. Then she bought herself this silver band, in an absurdly expensive boutique in Soho, to celebrate the fact that she did not need a fiancé to have a ring. The woman in the shop explained that the pattern was Native American and meant everlasting love and life. “It will bring you good luck. You see how the L shapes repeat? There’s no beginning or end.”
Now she would be her own fiancé; she would marry herself. She would be both father and mother to this child. It was, really, one of the most ordinary stories in the universe.
She waits with dumb patience as Franckline applies the pressure cuff and puffs it tight around her upper arm. The reading is normal, 120 over 90, but Franckline takes it twice. Then she says that the ring must still come off, she is going to call an orderly. Let her take it off then, Lore thinks. She commits an exaggerated shrug of surrender. She is tired. She is very tired. The ring, Franckline has promised, can be repaired.
“And I’ll check in with Dr. Elspeth-Chang,” Franckline says, to reward her.
This time Lore closes her eyes so as not to notice the absence in the room, the fact that Franckline is gone. The place behind her eyes winks with pricks of light, interior stars, and, slowly, location retreats. There is no room around her, no hospital, no busy street with cars shushing by — just the faint sound of a horn, blocks away. She is untethered, a blurry presence smudged across a dense atmosphere. How good to be this blurred thing within a muted hum. The horn sounds again. The ache in her neck dissolves; her heavy belly is a great buoyant ball. How, mostly, she had liked moving through the streets of the city, even in her fatigue, with the great belly before her. Her slow, ponderous strides, and the way knots of people sidestepped and fanned out to give her way. Some timeless instinct that people still had of respect and humility toward a woman carrying new life. Lore stopped into the small, cunning baby-clothing shops on Madison Avenue — she could afford almost nothing in them — and tears misted her eyes at the tiny organic-cotton onesies and socks. There were embossed wooden blocks and certified toxin-free bottles and swirls of board books that would expose your baby to fascinating colors and textures for twenty dollars apiece. Lore thought it all ridiculous, a way of extorting money out of people who had too much of it, but at the same time she longed for all this apparatus of purity and improvement. Less ridiculous to her was the purity of the birth itself: the dignity of labor without intrusion — without monitors, injections, forceps, stitches. She painted in her mind a picture of a mattress on the floor and candles on the windowsill. Quiet music playing in a corner, and strong hands. A baby’s lone wail in the busy silence. Then she erased that picture because who would stay up with her, whose would be the hands? It would have to be the hospital and its dark competencies after all. But still she would keep her child and herself as safe from the meddling world as she could. Offered the AFP test and the Tay-Sachs, she refused. She would accept this child in whatever condition it arrived. Dr. Elspeth-Chang shook her head. A single mother, Lore might be financially ruined by caring for a child with a serious disability. Lore replied that she knew how to make do, had come from people who always made do.