Disclosure - chapter 8 (with images) (Patreon)

The dome doesn't fit under the desk anymore. I've stopped trying. I keep the chair pulled back a full foot now and lean forward to type, my forearms braced on my knees half the time.

Thirty-four weeks.

I rest both hands on the black nylon panel of my maternity slacks. I feel a hard push against the inside of my stomach. The intrusion still spikes my heart rate. A solid object, a growing human skeleton, displacing my organs and bruising my lower ribs.

I sneezed at my desk on Tuesday and wet myself. Not a lot. Enough. I sat there for a second doing arithmetic about how far it was to the restroom and whether the slacks were dark enough, and then I went and dealt with it, and now there's a liner in every day whether I think I need one or not.

The pelvic pressure is constant now. A grinding ache behind the pubic bone that doesn't let up whether I'm sitting or standing or lying on my left side with the body pillow wedged under the bump. The baby's dropped lower in the last week, settling into position, and every step I take feels like she's going to push right through the bottom of me.

My back is a line of fire from the base of my spine to the space between my shoulder blades. The lungs are so compressed I get winded walking from the parking garage to the elevator. I've stopped wearing anything with buttons because I can't reach them anymore. Maternity leggings and oversized silk tops, the same thing every day.

My shoes stopped working around week thirty. Both feet swell over the course of a day into something that doesn't go back down overnight, and the flats I bought in February go on in the morning and come off at four with the leather printing lines into the skin.

At ten-fifteen I head down to the women's restroom. Somebody's left a banker's box of client files on the floor outside the copy room, in the middle of the walkway, and I move it out of the way on my way past. I set my feet, take it low with my knees the way I've been doing since the belly stopped letting me bend at the waist, and swing it against my hip to clear the doorframe. It's on the shelf before I've thought about any of it. Nobody's watching. It weighs maybe thirty pounds and a month ago it would have taken me two tries.

Then I'm at the sink, leaning hard against the cool marble, out of breath again. The restroom door swings open, and I look up.

It's Catherine Merrick. She walks in wearing a charcoal dress and a strand of pearls, her hair pulled back.

"Catherine."

She stops halfway to the next sink, her purse slipping slightly on her shoulder. I realize, as she looks at me, that to her I'm a stranger.

"I'm sorry," she says, a puzzled smile forming. "Have we met?"

My pulse hammers against my ribs. I had dinner with this woman. She hugged me on a sidewalk and told me we should do it again.

But she's looking at a visibly pregnant woman she doesn't know, waiting for a mundane explanation.

I swallow hard, looking down at the tile. "No," I say, my voice trembling just a fraction. "No, sorry, I just get that a lot, I think I have one of those faces."

Her face shifts into something warm as her gaze drops to my prominent stomach.

"Oh, I know the feeling," she says, laughing a little, stepping up to the sink and turning on the faucet. "Well, it's nice to meet you, anyway. When are you due?"

The question comes just the way it comes from women in grocery stores and waiting rooms.

"May," I say, keeping my voice carefully steady. "Not long from now."

"A girl?"

"Yes."

She smiles. It's genuine. "I always wanted a girl. I had two boys. They're wonderful, but they don't call."

I watch our reflections side-by-side in the wide mirror.

"Is this your first?" she asks, reaching for a paper towel.

"Yes."

"You look wonderful," she says. She tosses the towel in the bin and pauses, giving me a gentle look. "Make sure you take care of yourself."

"Thank you," I tell her.

She turns and walks out. The solid wooden door clicks shut behind her.

Back at my desk I open the Merrick file on the second monitor. Joint account. Catherine's name second on the signature card.

The disclosure form is four pages and most of it is boilerplate. I fill it out standing, because sitting down and getting back up again is a project now, and I don't want to be in the chair when I hit send. The material facts section wants me to describe what I know and how I came to know it. I write that I have reason to believe one account holder intends to transfer assets ahead of an undisclosed divorce filing. I don't write how I found out. Compliance will ask. Compliance can ask.

I send it at eleven-forty. Then I sit down after all, carefully, one hand on the arm of the chair, and the baby rolls over like she's turning to face the other way in a bed that's gotten too small.

Megan is asleep when I get home. She's tired most evenings now, the nausea hitting at strange hours, the same metallic edge I remember from my own early months. She's on the couch, the television flickering blue across her face, a blanket pulled up to her chin.

I lower myself onto the far end of the cushions. The baby shifts, a foot dragging across the inside of my ribs. I put my hand on the spot and wait for her to settle.

Megan stirs, her eyes opening a crack.

"Hey," she says.

"Hey."

"What time is it?"

"Late. Go back to sleep."

She shifts, pushing herself up, and scoots across the couch until she's next to me. She rests her head on my shoulder, her hand finding the curve of my stomach the way it always does now, automatic.

"She's active tonight," Megan says.

"Always."

We sit there in the dark. The television flickers through a commercial for something I don't register. Megan's breathing evens out, but she doesn't fall asleep. Her thumb traces a small circle on the stretched skin of the dome.

"I'm scared," she says.

"Of what?"

"All of it. The birth. The baby. Yours, then mine, three months apart. Two newborns in the same apartment."

"It's going to be chaos."

"It's already chaos." She laughs, a soft sound against my shoulder. "But I'm not going anywhere."

"Me neither."

She turns her face up and kisses me, slow, her hand still on my stomach. The baby kicks against her palm, and we both feel it, and neither of us says anything about it. We just stay there, tangled on the couch in the blue television light, her head on my shoulder, my hand over hers on the hard curve of the dome, waiting for whatever comes next.

My stomach clenches at three-fourteen in the morning.

It starts right beneath my ribs and sweeps downward in a slow wave. Within five seconds my whole stomach becomes a hard rock. The skin stretches so tight it burns. I stop breathing. I grip the edge of the mattress with my left hand, burying my face in the damp pillowcase, and wait for the tearing to start.

I count the seconds in the dark. Ten. Twenty.

The pressure is massive, a vice crushing the breath out of my compressed lungs, but it lacks the grinding bite of the menstrual cramps from the early months. It just holds, a locking of the uterus.

At forty-five seconds, the tension begins to bleed away. The dome softens, returning to the doughy mass of the third trimester.

A heel immediately drags across the inside of my right flank, a violent reprimand from the fetus.

I let the breath go. Braxton Hicks. The fourth one tonight. False labor, Jenny calls it. It doesn't feel false. I roll onto my back, a mistake that immediately compresses my spine. A wave of dark dizziness washes over my vision, accompanied by an electric shock of nerve pain shooting down my inner thigh.

I roll back onto my left side, wedging the body pillow under the heavy overhang of the belly.

Sleep is a joke. It's been a joke for four weeks, starting a few days after I filed the Merrick disclosure. I exist in a gray exhaustion, waking every hour to shift the massive weight of my center or to empty a bladder that the baby treats as a trampoline. My skeleton feels like it's ungluing itself. The relaxin has dissolved the bones in my hips to the point that my pubic bone grinds audibly when I walk to the kitchen.

Megan shifts next to me, her breathing deep and even.

Getting out of bed at six takes two full minutes. I have to roll my legs off the mattress first, using the momentum to drag my torso upright, pushing off the sheets with triceps that tremble under the effort.

I stand up. The sheer gravitational drag of the belly pulls my lower spine into a deep, painful arch. I brace both hands against the dresser and catch my breath.

I haven't actually looked at myself down there since somewhere in February. The belly's in the way from every angle I can get to, and the one time I tried it with the hand mirror from Megan's dresser I gave up after a minute because I couldn't hold the position long enough to see anything. So Jenny's the only one who's had eyes on it lately. She and Megan both know more about the current state of it than I do.

I dress in the dark. A pair of black maternity leggings that stretch over the dome, ending just under my ribs. The nursing bra Megan bought me. My breasts are massive, a dense weight that leaks thick yellow colostrum if I brush my arm against them too hard. I slip two disposable cotton pads into the cups, pull an oversized gray sweater over my head, and find my keys.

The drive to Westside Women's Health takes twenty minutes. The seat is reclined as far back as it goes, the steering wheel pulled up to clear the projection of my stomach.

The clinic is quiet. I sit on the edge of the exam table wearing the blue gown. It doesn't close in the front anymore. The two halves part over the tight, pale skin of my belly, the dark line splitting it from my navel down to the waistband of my underwear.

Jenny walks in. No white coat, just scrubs, and she shuts the door and throws the deadbolt behind her the way she's done every time since August.

"Morning."

"Morning."

She washes her hands at the sink, the pink soap foaming over her knuckles, and dries them on a brown paper towel, working it into the webbing between her fingers. Then the stool, pulled close, and she sits.

"Lie back."

I lower myself onto the vinyl cushions, fighting the immediate wave of dizziness. The paper crunches loudly. Jenny pulls the two halves of the gown apart, exposing the whole moving dome of it.

She picks up a tape measure from the counter. She presses the zero mark against the top of my pubic bone, drawing the soft yellow ribbon up over the curve of the belly to the top.

"Thirty-seven centimeters," she says, letting the tape retract with a snap. "Tracking perfectly."

She squeezes a large dollop of clear gel onto my lower stomach, not bothering to warm it. She presses the handheld Doppler wand into the jelly, angling it downward. A rush of static fills the small room, followed instantly by the rapid, galloping whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the baby's heartbeat.

It's loud enough to fill the room. One hundred and forty-five beats per minute. A frantic rhythm.

Jenny stares at the digital readout on the wand, giving away nothing. She wipes the gel off my skin with a rough paper towel.

"Slide down to the edge," she says. She pulls on a pair of purple nitrile gloves. The rubber snaps against her wrists.

I bend my knees and drag my hips down to the break in the table. I let my knees fall open, exposing my swollen pussy. The extra blood down there leaves the lips permanently puffy, a bruised purple against my pale skin.

"I'm checking the cervix," Jenny says. "You're going to feel pressure."

She uses a heavy dab of surgical lubricant. She inserts two fingers deep inside me.

I gasp, my hands gripping the edges of the vinyl table. The intrusion is sharp. She reaches high, pressing deep inside. The ache radiates instantly into my lower back. She sweeps her fingers across the walls, checking the dilation.

She pulls her hand back and strips the glove off, dropping it into the biohazard bin.

"You are one centimeter dilated," she says, turning to the sink to wash her hands again. "Seventy percent effaced. The head is fully engaged in the pelvis. It's sitting right on the cervix."

"When?" I struggle to sit upright, my stomach useless, relying entirely on my arms.

"Could be tonight. Could be two weeks from now." She leans against the counter, crossing her arms over the charcoal scrubs. "The Braxton Hicks will escalate. If they hit a regular pattern, five minutes apart for an hour, you come to the hospital. Do not wait. Your pelvic floor doesn't have the standard muscular resistance of a lifelong female frame. When this starts, it might move very fast."

"Okay."

"Get dressed, Wes."

She unlocks the door and walks out. She leaves me sitting on the paper. I pull my leggings back up over the bruised ache down there and walk out of the clinic.

I try to shift my right leg to relieve the dull numbness in my lower hip, and the bone deep inside my pelvis grinds with a wet click. It aches. I stop moving and let the heavy, solid slope of the belly rest against the dense foam wedge tucked under my waist.

I'm on my left side because that's the only side there is now. On my back the weight of it lands on something behind the uterus and the room goes gray inside a minute. I found that out on a gym mat in February and I haven't tried it since. The mattress traps my body heat against my ribs.

Megan walks into the bedroom from the hallway bathroom. Her hair is wet from the shower, and she wears a plain, oversized cotton t-shirt. She drops a damp towel onto the laundry hamper and climbs onto the mattress behind me.

The bedsprings groan under her weight. She slides her body into the narrow space against my back, aligning her knees behind mine and pressing her sternum against my spine. Her chest against my spine is another blanket I don't need. Sweat pools at the base of my throat and runs down my collarbone. It's the only way this works now. The baby is a massive, solid obstacle taking up the space in front of me. I can't see past it to my own knees or bend forward at the waist. She has to reach around it.

Her left arm drapes over my side. Her hand rests flat on the stretched, drum-tight skin of my stomach. She breathes against my shoulder. She smells like soap and wet hair, mixed with the sour milk scent of the pads stuffed in my bra and my own warm animal smell.

She moves her hand higher. Her fingers hook under the bottom band of my gray nursing bra.

My chest aches, a constant, dull throb that stretches the skin tight. Megan pushes the cotton fabric up. The ambient air of the room touches my damp skin, and she cups the weight of my right breast, brushing her thumb over the center.

I flinch.

It goes through me as pain, not anything else. I reach up and grab her wrist to pull her hand away, but the pressure of her touch already forced it. A thick drop of yellow fluid oozes out, sticky and body-temperature warm. It pools on the swollen tip and smears across her thumb.

My face burns. Heat rushes up my neck, and I drop my chin toward the mattress, trying to pull my arm up across my chest to hide the mess. The absorbent cotton pads inside the bra cups are damp and sour.

Megan doesn't let me cover it. She guides my hand away with steady pressure, wiping it off her thumb onto the dry edge of the nursing pad and moves her hand down my ribs.

The leaking doesn't stop. A second drop runs down the curve of the skin and wets the sheet beneath me.

She reaches for the waistband of my boxers. It takes her two tries to get around the stomach. She pulls at the cotton fabric, and I have to lift my right leg to help her clear the hip bone.

The pelvis grinds again. The pain flares in the joint. She works the boxers down past my hips, pushing them awkwardly down to my knees. The air in the room touches my bare skin.

Everything down there has been heavy and swollen for a month and it doesn't take much. The skin is hypersensitive to the coarse friction of the sheets.

She reaches between my thighs from behind, her forearm pressing into the back of my hamstring and forcing her wrist into an awkward, bent angle. She works two fingers in past everything that's in the way.

I drop my head into the pillow, my jaw locking tight, as she presses between my labia. A sudden impact strikes the underside of my lower ribs.

The baby kicks.

It's not a flutter. It's a bruising shove of a heel directly into my internal organs. I gasp, curling forward and pulling my knees up as much as the rigid belly allows.

Megan stops moving her hand, holding still.

The baby rolls. The movement shifts its weight down against everything underneath, and the pressure on my bladder spikes. I grit my teeth until the movement stops and the baby settles back into the tight space in my pelvis.

We wait in silence for twenty seconds. My breathing is shallow in the quiet room.

"You OK," Megan whispers.

I nod, pulling her hand against me.

Megan resumes, sliding her middle finger lower. Nothing down there is the size it used to be. She pushes one finger inside, the walls gripping her finger while the wetness coats her skin.

She moves her thumb back up, finding a steady, blunt friction.

My heart rate climbs, and the blood pumps against the veins in my neck. My breathing gets loud as I inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth.

There is no room to move my hips. The solid weight of the baby prevents any rocking or thrusting. I can't meet her movements. I can only squeeze my thighs together, trapping her hand between my legs.

She maintains the pressure.

More fluid drips from my chest, soaking into the cotton under my ribs.

It builds low and stays there, a knot of it, and my toes curl against the sheets and the muscles in my calves lock up. The skin of my face flushes with heat, and sweat breaks out across my forehead and upper lip.

I think about the cardboard box of unassembled baby furniture sitting in the living room. The blister pack of screws. I need to find the hex wrench.

I bite down on the inside of my cheek.

It happens below the waist. A series of involuntary muscle spasms. The walls clamp down on her finger in rhythmic contractions, and everything under her thumb pulses with it. My breath catches. Stops in my throat. I squeeze my eyes shut.

It goes on for a while and then it doesn't, easing off in stages until there's nothing left of it.

I exhale a long, ragged breath into the pillow.

Megan leaves her hand there for a long moment while my breathing slows. Then she withdraws her fingers. The wetness on my skin feels cold in the open air of the bedroom.

She rests her hand on the curve of my hip, shifting her weight on the mattress. She reaches down and pulls the flat sheet up from the foot of the bed to cover my bare legs, tucking her face against the back of my neck. I wipe the sweat off my upper lip with the back of my wrist.

A contraction wakes me before the pain fully lands, a muffled, internal pull right behind the pubic bone that I feel a half second before I understand what it is.

I lie still in the dark. The digital clock on the nightstand reads two-forty in the morning. The radiator hisses in the corner of the bedroom. I wait for the digestion excuse, for the baby to roll, for a foot to drag across my ribs.

The Braxton Hicks from the last three weeks were a rigid, breathless tightening of the dome, over almost as soon as I noticed them. This is different. The vertebrae of my lower spine lock together, and pain sweeps violently around to the front of my stomach. The muscle seizes. It grabs the organs, the intestines, the lungs, and pulls everything downward.

I get a fistful of the fitted sheet and pull it off the corner. My jaw locks, and the sound that escapes is somewhere between a gasp and a curse.

"Megan," I say.

The word comes out as a harsh croak. My throat is dry. I clear it, pushing the sound up out of a throat that doesn't work the way it used to.

"Megan, wake up."

She sits up instantly. The change in my breathing trips a wire in her head, an alarm she set months ago. She looks at me in the amber light bleeding through the window blinds.

"That's not Braxton Hicks," I tell her.

She throws the covers off. She doesn't ask questions. The hospital bag has been sitting by the front door for twelve days. She checks the clock, checks me, already moving.

We time three more before we leave. Nine minutes. Seven. Six.

I roll onto my left side. The contraction holds for another twenty seconds before the vice finally begins to loosen, leaving a hollow ache in the pelvic floor. I drag my legs over the edge of the mattress. The weight of the bump pulls my spine into a severe arch. I brace both hands against the nightstand and push myself upright.

The drive to the hospital is a blur of wet asphalt and empty intersections. The streetlights strobe through the windshield, casting sliding shadows across the dashboard.

I sit in the passenger seat. I grip the plastic handle above the door frame. The seat is reclined as far back as it goes, giving the stomach room to exist. The contractions are ten minutes apart. Every time one rolls through, the car shrinks. The leather seat feels like concrete. I close my eyes, burying my chin in the collar of my fleece, and ride the muscle spasm out.

The relaxin flooded the joints months ago, but the actual, physical separation of the pelvis is happening now.

We reach the emergency bay. The automatic glass doors slide open.

The triage nurse is a woman in blue scrubs holding a clipboard. She looks at the sweat beading on my forehead, the soaked sweatpants clinging to my thighs, every visible sign of labor in a body that reads as nothing but female to her. She flags a wheelchair. I sit in the vinyl seat.

Megan pushes me toward the elevators. The wheels click rhythmically over the linoleum seams.

The labor and delivery room smells of iodine and institutional laundry. The lights are recessed fluorescent white. A different nurse hands me a faded hospital gown. It ties in the back. I strip out of the ruined clothes, my hands trembling violently, and pull the coarse fabric over my head. My breasts are swollen, aching with the sudden temperature change, the dark nipples visibly leaking colostrum onto the thin gown.

I climb onto the bed.

The door opens and Jenny comes in reading the top page of a chart, and she's at the sink before she's looked at me once.

"Let's see where we are."

I get my hips down where she wants them. The bed doesn't have metal stirrups. I just let my knees fall open, my heels resting on the flat vinyl.

Jenny's fingers are slick and fast this time, no ceremony to it. She pushes two of them deep and I make a sound I don't recognize, something between a grunt and a curse. She's not gentle. There's no reason left to be. The ache she leaves behind doesn't fade, it just sits there on top of everything else already tearing through me.

The nurse wraps two elastic belts around the stretched skin of the dome. She snaps the plastic buckles into place. One monitor tracks the fetal heartbeat. The other tracks the contractions. The machine next to the bed hums, spitting out a continuous strip of thermal paper. The rapid, galloping sound of the baby's heart fills the room, a frantic rhythm beating through the static.

"You're four centimeters," Jenny says. She strips the gloves off and drops them into a red bin. "Fully effaced. The head is completely engaged. You have a long way to go, Wes."

She leaves the room to check another patient. The door shuts.

The long middle begins.

Time compresses and expands, unmoored from the clock on the wall. The contractions stack up. Seven minutes apart. Then five.

The pain mutates. It loses the grinding character of the early hours and becomes a bright, blinding heat.

The pop comes without warning, a muffled snap behind the pubic bone like a rubber band giving out under too much tension. Then the heat, an uncontrolled rush of warm fluid flooding the space between my thighs, soaking instantly through the sheet beneath me. A nurse appears almost before I've said anything, changing the pad with the same brisk efficiency she's brought to everything else, and doesn't comment on the rusty pink tint or the smell of bleach and salt rising off the sheets.

The uterus bears down violently. I can't out-lift the contraction or run through the fatigue. I just have to lie on the damp sheets and let it tear me open.

Megan stands next to the bed. She holds a plastic cup of ice chips. The blue plastic straw is chewed flat.

She feeds me a chip between the peaks. The ice melts into a trickle of freezing water against the back of my dry throat. She wipes the sweat from my forehead with a damp washcloth. She anchors the room, holding my left hand while the monitor traces a long jagged mountain onto the thermal paper.

"Epidural," I say.

The word is a ragged scrape.

Megan presses the call button.

The anesthesiologist arrives twenty minutes later, a tall guy with tired eyes and a green surgical cap. He asks me to sit on the edge of the bed and curl my spine forward.

I drop my chin to my chest. The swollen breasts rest heavily on the shelf of the bump. The contraction hits while he's swabbing my lower back with cold iodine. The urge to straighten up, to pull away from the thing crushing my abdomen, is overwhelming. Megan holds my shoulders, anchoring me to the mattress, her fingers digging into the thin fabric of the gown.

"Hold still," the doctor says.

A stinging bite pierces the skin of my lower spine. A dull pressure follows, pushing deep into my back. He threads the line and tapes it down along my spine.

After ten minutes a numbness spreads down my outer thighs and the sharp edges of the contractions blunt into a breathless pressure. Then a nurse tells me she's putting a catheter in, and does, and the one thing I feel through the whole procedure is a thin cold line going up into me. It takes the fire out of the skin, but it does nothing for the sheer downward weight of the descent. The baby's dropped low. It feels like a bowling ball resting directly on my rectum.

The afternoon bleeds into the evening.

The lights in the room are dimmed. The machine hums. The thermal paper piles up in a messy fold on the floor.

I drift in and out of a shallow, exhausted sleep. My jaw aches from clenching. The body just keeps finding new reserves, burning muscle, hoarding oxygen for the uterus.

Jenny returns at seven o'clock.

She checks the cervix again. Her hands are rougher this time, focused on the mechanics of the exit.

"Eight centimeters," she says. "We're stalling slightly. I'm going to start Pitocin to strengthen the contractions."

She adjusts the IV drip hanging from the metal pole near the headboard.

The synthetic hormone hits my bloodstream fifteen minutes later.

Transition arrives like a freight train.

The epidural fails on the right side. The warm numbness evaporates, leaving a gaping hole in the chemical armor. The contractions hit one after another, offering zero recovery time between the peaks. The monitor traces a continuous, jagged line.

My body begins to shake uncontrollably.

The shivering is deep, everything in my nervous system overloading at once.

The nausea arrives with it. The chemical revulsion from the first trimester returns, flooding the back of my throat with hot saliva. Megan grabs a curved plastic basin from the bedside table just as my stomach heaves. I vomit dry bile into the pink plastic, the convulsions tearing agonizingly at my rock-hard stomach.

I fall back against the pillows, hauling air. My nipples brush against the damp hospital gown.

The pressure stops crushing and starts driving. The baby hits the pelvic floor. The urge to push is a blind instinct, an involuntary bearing down that bypasses my brain. The uterus locks, forcing the baby down into my pelvis.

A raw sound tears out of my throat. A scream that comes back off the walls.

Jenny walks into the room. She moves quickly now, pulling a sterile paper drape over the bottom half of the bed. She breaks down the foot of the mattress, dropping the bottom section away. She positions the metal stirrups.

"Put your feet up," she says.

Megan and a delivery nurse grab my legs, lifting my dead, numbed thighs into the metal rests. The exposure is total. They swing the light down.

"You are at ten," Jenny says, sitting on the rolling stool at the foot of the bed. "The head's right there. Next contraction, you push."

The monitor spits a continuous, curled strip of thermal paper onto the linoleum. The machine hums an electrical drone that burrows into the base of my skull.

The pause between contractions lasts exactly ninety seconds.

It's barely enough time to drag oxygen back into my compressed lungs. My jaw aches fiercely from clenching. I stare up at the ceiling. The air smells of iodine, old sweat, and the metallic tang of blood.

"Another one's building," Jenny says.

She's on the stool at the foot of the bed behind a plastic face shield, and her gloves are slick to the wrist and streaked dark. She's watching the monitor, not me.

The rigid, locking tension starts high at the top of the uterus. It sweeps violently downward and takes the whole dome with it. My stomach hardens into stone.

"Deep breath," Jenny instructs. "Tuck your chin. Pull your knees back."

Megan grips my left hand. Her fingers are cold. She slides her right arm under my shoulders, physically hauling my upper body forward against the crushing gravity of the fatigue, saying nothing because there's nothing left to say that would help.

I pull my thighs back, fighting the deadened weight of my left leg. The epidural is still functioning on the left side, leaving the limb numb and uncoordinated. But the right side has failed.

"Push," Jenny says.

I bear down. The physical exertion burns the last reserves of density in my eroded muscles. I force the pressure downward, driving her down. The right side of my pelvis screams, the two halves grinding apart to make room for what's coming.

Another sound rips out of me, higher and rawer than the last, nothing left in it that sounds like the man I used to be. It vibrates against the plastic oxygen tubing hooked behind my ears.

"Hold the push," Jenny says, leaning forward. "The head is crowning. Keep the pressure steady."

The ring of fire ignites. It's an agonizing heat burning through the failed epidural on the right side. The skin between my legs, a frame built for this only months ago, stretches past its limit. It feels like it's unzipping itself.

I run out of air. My vision goes white. I collapse backward against Megan's arm, gasping. The dense mass of the breasts shifts under the coarse hospital gown.

"You're right there, Wes," Megan whispers, her breath hot against my sweaty temple. She reaches over with a plastic cup and presses a chewed straw to my lips. I suck a sliver of melting ice into my dry mouth. The cold water trickles down my throat.

"I can't," I gasp. The words come out scraped and thin. "It's tearing."

"It's supposed to stretch," Jenny says. She doesn't look up from the slick, swollen mess between my spread thighs. "One more contraction. You need to empty your lungs into the push and push through the burn. Don't pull back."

I close my eyes. The entire lower half of my body is a trembling, hollowed-out ruin. I just have to go where it's taking me.

The monitor hums louder. The contraction peaks with no ramp at all, a ferocious downward drive and no room left for thought.

"Now," Jenny says.

I drop my chin to my chest. I pull my right knee back with my free hand, my grip strength failing, my fingers slipping against the sweat on my own skin. I bear down. The heat at the exit spikes into a blinding, searing fire. I push directly into the center of the agony.

A sharp, distinct giving-way occurs at the bottom of my pussy. The skin and muscle tear. Then, a sudden release of pressure.

The bowling ball vanishes. A heavy slip of wet limbs and thick fluid slides rapidly out of me, splashing onto the sterile paper drape beneath my hips. The emptiness inside my stomach is a physical shock. The pain in my lower spine evaporates in a single heartbeat.

I fall back against the pillows. The room shifts. The light overhead blurs.

For three seconds, the delivery room goes dead quiet. The frantic, galloping rhythm of the fetal monitor is gone. There's only the low hum of the air conditioning vents and the sluggish, wet sound of Jenny shifting on the rolling stool.

Jenny and the nurse are bent over something I can't see past the drape, and there's a stretch of five or six seconds where the only sound is suctioning, a small wet mechanical noise, and someone murmuring come on under her breath. I lie there not breathing either, waiting.

Then it comes. Thin at first, a startled rasp, and then furious, a wet, frantic sound cutting straight through the sterile air.

Megan's grip on my left hand tightens until the bones in my knuckles grind together. She lets out a jagged sob. "Wes," she says, her voice breaking.

I force my eyes open. I push myself up onto my elbows, fighting the exhausted shaking in my arms.

Jenny stands at the foot of the bed. She holds a small, slippery body in her gloved hands. The infant is purple-red, smeared with white grease and streaks of dark blood.

She doesn't smile or offer a warm congratulation. Her eyes stay on the baby a beat too long before she looks away. She works with a practiced efficiency. She clamps the blue-white umbilical cord with two rigid plastic clips. She picks up a pair of surgical shears and cuts the pulsing cord in a single motion.

A delivery nurse steps forward with a coarse, warmed white towel. She wipes the infant down roughly, stimulating the lungs, clearing the fluid from the small mouth. The crying escalates into a steady, furious wail.

"Here," Jenny says.

She walks around the side of the metal bed frame. She doesn't wait for me to reach out or adjust my posture. She places the screaming, wet weight directly onto my bare chest.

The baby is hot. She feels dense, a block of shifting bone and muscle resting against my sternum. I bring my shaking hands up, my forearms trembling so badly I can barely control the movement. I touch the dark hair sticking to the fragile skull. My grip is gone. I hold her loosely, terrified of crushing the small ribs working against my own.

I look for him in her. Six-two, hazel eyes, structural engineering. I don't know what I expected to find in a face that's twenty minutes old and swollen shut from being squeezed through my pelvis, and I don't find it. What I find is a chin. My mother's chin, which was my chin before the fat came in and softened it, sitting on somebody who's been alive for less time than it takes to drive to work.

Megan leans over the plastic side rail. She presses her cheek against my sweaty temple. She's crying openly now, the tears hot and wet tracking down my jaw. She reaches out with a shaking hand and strokes the baby's slick shoulder.

I drop my head back against the pillow. A hollow ache throbs in the center of my pelvis.

The torn skin burns, an open wound at the bottom of me that keeps bleeding. The bottom of me feels permanently hollowed out, the muscles and ligaments destroyed by the descent. The bones of the pelvis ache with a grinding fatigue.

Jenny steps back to the foot of the bed.

"I need to deliver the placenta," she says. "And then I need to repair the laceration. You tore a second-degree margin toward the rectum."

She presses her hands into the deflated dough of my lower stomach. The pushing on my uterus is agonizing, an aggressive kneading of my bruised stomach.

I bite the inside of my cheek, tasting copper. A soft mass slips out, followed by a warm rush of dark blood. It hits the metal catch basin with a wet slap.

She asks the nurse for a suture kit and a local. The needle goes into the torn flesh between my thighs, a sharp sting, and then the dull work of thread pulling skin closed, and she does it looking down, and I lie there with my daughter on my chest and the woman who put her there stitching me up, and the whole time neither of us says one word about any of it.

The baby squirms against my chest. Her crying slows to a jagged hiccup. Her small hands, slick with the remnants of amniotic fluid, push against the pale skin of my collarbone. She roots downward, a blind bumping of her mouth against my flesh. Her head bobs against the dense globes of my right breast.

She doesn't find it on her own. She turns her head the wrong way twice, mouth working against nothing, fussing louder each time she comes up empty. A nurse leans in and repositions her with two fingers, tilts my breast, guides the baby's chin down.

"There," the nurse says, and steps back.

The nipple is wider than her whole mouth looks like it should manage. The third attempt takes. It's a sharp pinch. The gums clamp down hard on the sore nipple, pulling it into her small mouth. The pain shoots sideways into my armpit, a sharp sting.

The milk drops. The wiring, built over the last nine months, does what it's supposed to.

The baby begins to suck. A rhythmic pull drawing the fluid out of a chest that used to be flat. The sensation is bizarre and uncomfortable.

The hospital room smells of the abrasive pink soap Jenny used at the sink. The overhead fluorescent light hums. Megan leans her weight against the side of the mattress, her hand resting over mine, her thumb tracing the knuckles I can barely keep closed. The surgical thread pulls tight between my thighs. The baby swallows loudly, the rhythm frantic and demanding, her small ribcage expanding against my own.

They move me to a room on the fourth floor sometime after midnight. The nurse gets me upright at the edge of the bed first, one hand under my arm, not rushing it, and when I stand the whole floor of me lets go at once. It comes out in a rush I have no way to stop, hot and heavy, down both thighs to the knee. I make a sound. She doesn't react at all. She waits until it's finished and then hands me a pad the size of a paperback and a pair of underwear that turns out to be blue surgical mesh, stretchy, disposable, cut like something you'd bag a chicken in, and she holds my elbow while I get one foot through and then the other.

"Sit," she says, and builds me an ice pack out of a clean diaper and a jug of crushed ice, folds it into the mesh, and hands it over like she's handing me a coffee.

The relief is immediate and total and I make a different sound.

"That's the good part," she says. "You'll want two of those in the freezer at home."

Then the bathroom, where she runs through it standing in the doorway with the door open, unbothered, and I sit there with my knees apart absorbing instructions like a man being briefed. There's a plastic squeeze bottle on the tank. Warm water, front to back, every time, while I go and after. No wiping. Not once, not for weeks. Pat.

"Never?"

"Never. You've got stitches in there and paper will find them." She's already restocking the pad shelf. "Pat, don't rub. And don't look at it. There's nothing you can do about what it looks like right now and you'll only upset yourself."

"How long."

"The bleeding? Weeks. Four, six. Some for longer." She stops at the door. "Nobody ever tells them either."

Back in bed the baby wants to eat again, and thirty seconds after she latches something clamps down low in my abdomen and squeezes, hard, a full contraction with nothing to push against. It goes on for maybe forty seconds and then lets go, and then it happens again on the next feed, and the one after that, and apparently this is a feature. The uterus emptying itself out. Every time she eats, my body pays for it.

At four in the morning I get up on my own to use the bathroom and I catch myself sideways in the mirror over the sink.

It's still there. Most of it. The dome's gone but there's a soft loose weight hanging off the front of me from the ribs down, jiggling when I shift, the skin above the navel gone slack and finely wrinkled like something left in water too long. Nobody mentioned that either. I put a hand flat on it and it gives all the way in, and underneath it there's nothing hard left at all.

I stand there for a second longer than I need to. Then I get the ice pack from the nurse's station myself, because I'm not going to ask twice, and I go back and lie down next to her.

The birth certificate lady comes in at nine-forty with a clipboard and a pen on a string.

She's maybe twenty-five and she has forty of these to do before lunch. She sits in the vinyl chair by the window without being asked and reads the top of the form off to me in a voice that's done it a thousand times. Date of birth. Time. Weight. Place of birth, which is this building. Sex of child, female.

"Okay," she says. "Parent information."

The form is two columns. The left one says MOTHER at the top. The right one says FATHER. Underneath each of those there's a box for the full name, and one for date of birth, and one for state of birth, and one for the highest level of education completed.

I've filled out ten thousand forms. I've built my whole life out of the correct box. There's a version of me from ten months ago who'd already be on the phone finding out who designed this one.

"Can I go in the other one?"

She looks up for the first time. "Sorry?"

"The right-hand column. Can my name go there?"

"Oh." She turns the clipboard back around and looks at it like she's never seen it before. "No, that's - the person who delivered goes on the left. That's just how the state does it. It's not a…" She stops. Starts again. "It goes off who gave birth. That's the field."

"Is there a way to change it after?"

"I honestly don't know. You'd have to call the county." She's already turning it back to me. "I've only ever done it the one way."

So it's the left-hand column, under MOTHER, in the block capitals the instructions ask for. Wesley Alan Frederiksen. The letters take up more room than the box allows and I have to squeeze the last N in against the border.

Then the state and the date and the education, which is a master's, which is the only question on this document I've been able to answer without thinking.

"And the baby's name," she says.

She's asleep on my chest with one hand out of the swaddle and her chin doing the thing it does. Megan is in the chair on the other side, awake for about ninety seconds now, watching me over the top of a cup of hospital coffee she has no intention of drinking.

I write NORA JEANNE FREDERIKSEN.

Megan doesn't ask. If she does I'll tell her Nora was my mother's name, and I won't say anything about the chin.

The clerk takes the clipboard back and reads down the page and stops for about a second and a half in the left-hand column. Then she keeps going.

"The certifier's the physician who delivered," she says. "Marsh?"

"Marsh."

She writes it in. Jenny's name goes onto the bottom of my daughter's birth certificate in ballpoint, next to mine, where it'll sit in a county records office for the rest of both our lives, and the girl with the clipboard blows on the ink and clips the form to the back of the stack.

"Somebody'll bring you the copy before you're discharged," she says. "Congratulations."

She's out the door and into the next room before I've got my arm back around the baby.

Megan sets the coffee down. "What'd you put?"

"My name."

"I know. Which box."

I don't say anything. She looks at me for a second and then gets up and comes over, careful of the IV line, and puts her hand flat on the top of Nora's head the way she used to put it flat on the bump.

The stitches pull when I shift. The ice has gone soft. Somewhere down the hall a cart goes by with the same bad wheel it had last night, and my daughter, who is twelve hours old and has my mother's chin, gets a fist free of the blanket and puts it up against my collarbone and holds on.