The nurse came in, looked up at the monitor, checked Yvonne’s contractions, blood pressure, her movements crisp and authoritative. The last shift we’d had Connie Hwang, we’d trusted her, she smiled and touched Yvonne gently with her plump hands. But this one, Melinda Meek, snapped at Yvonne for whining. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ve done this before.” She scared me with her efficiency, her bony fingers. I could tell she knew we were foster children, that Yvonne wouldn’t keep the baby. She’d already decided we were irresponsible and deserved every bit of our suffering. I could see her as a correctional officer. Now I wished my mother were here. She would know how to get rid of Melinda Meek. Even in transition she would spit in Melinda’s stingy face, threaten to strangle her in the cord of the fetal monitor.
“It hurts,” Yvonne said.
“Nobody said it was a picnic,” Melinda said. “You’ve got to breathe.”
Yvonne tried, gasped and blew, she wanted everyone to like her, even this sour-faced nurse.
“Can’t you just give her something?” I said.
“She’s doing fine,” Melinda said crisply, her triangular eyes a veiled threat.
“Cheap-ass motherfuckers,” the woman said on the other side of the white shower curtains. “Don’t give poor people no damn drugs.”
“Please,” Yvonne said, clutching at Melinda’s white jacket. “I beg of you.”
The nurse efficiently peeled back Yvonne’s hand, patted it firmly onto her belly. “You’re already eight centimeters. It’s almost over.”
Yvonne sobbed softly, rhythmically, hopelessly, too tired to even cry. I rubbed her stomach.
Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn’t catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They stopped caring whether or not the baby came. They knew if they didn’t die, they’d be going through it again the next year, and the next. I could understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne’s neck, her shoulders, I wouldn’t let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she’d have made Melinda Meek cough up the drugs, sure enough.
“Mamacita, ay,” Yvonne wailed.
I didn’t know why she would call for her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn’t seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn’t even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama.
It wasn’t just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. Mommy, ma, mom, mama. Even with husbands at their sides, they called out for mama. Nine hours ago, when we came in, a woman with a voice like a lye bath alternately screamed at her husband and called for her mother. A grown woman sobbing like a child. Mommy . . . I was embarrassed for her. Now I knew better.
I held on to Yvonne’s hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother? I imagined her screaming at my father, calling him worthless, a liar, useless, until he went out for a beer, leaving her alone with the landlady on a cold November morning. She had me at home, she’d never liked doctors. I could imagine how her screams and curses must have pierced the quiet of the walk street in Venice Beach, startling a kid going by on a skateboard, while the landlady smoked hash and rifled her purse. But did she call out, Mami, help me?
I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn’t imagine her calling out for anyone.
But then I realized, they didn’t mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn’t mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what’s in it for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn’t mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they’d never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.
They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.
Yvonne was sitting up, holding her breath, eyes bulging out. It was the thing she should not do.
“Breathe,” I said in her ear. “Please, Yvonne, try.”
She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back down on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, all the way back, inside and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day. And not only her. I wondered what my own inheritance was going to be.
“I wish I was dead,” Yvonne said into the pillowcase with the flowers I’d brought from home.
THE BABY CAME four hours later. A girl, born 5:32 P.M. A Gemini. We went home the next day. Rena picked us up at the hospital’s front loop. She refused to come in. We stopped at the observation window in Neonatal, but the baby was already gone. Rena wouldn’t let Yvonne take the baby home even for a few weeks.
“Better just walk away,” Rena had said. “You get attach, a loser game.”
She was right, I thought, as I pushed Yvonne’s wheelchair to the exit, though her motives cared nothing for Yvonne, she just didn’t want to become a foster grandma. She never had any kids, never wanted any. What’s in it for me? “Babies make me sick,” she was always telling Yvonne. “Eat, shit, cry. You think you keep, think again.”
In the hospital driveway, Niki got out of the van, gave Yvonne a bunch of balloons, hugged her. We helped her into the back. She was still tired, she could barely walk. There was a pinched nerve in her left leg, and stitches where the doctor cut her. She smelled sour, like old blood. She looked like she just got hit by a car. Rena didn’t even look at her.
I sat with her in the back on the ripped-out carseat. Yvonne leaned against me, her head on my shoulder. “Sing ‘Michelle,’ ” she whispered.
I held her hand, pressed my other hand against her forehead the way she liked, and sang softly in my tuneless voice as we bounced and clattered along, heading for home. “Michelle, ma belle.” The song seemed to soothe her. She rested her head against my shoulder and quietly sucked her thumb.
WEEKS WENT BY, and there was no call from Susan to let me know when I would see my mother. Now that she’d won my complicity, I heard no more about it. Not in May, not in June. I sat by the river’s edge, watching the white egrets and brown wading birds fish in the current. It was my graduation day over at Marshall High School, but I saw no reason to attend. Even if she were out, my mother would never have come. Ceremonies not of her own invention didn’t interest her. I would rather just let it pass quietly, like a middle-aged woman’s birthday.