Daughter's Keeper (37 page)

Olivia put her hands on her belly and imagined, for the first time but by no means the last, what it would feel like to hold her four-year-old child in her arms after so many years had passed.

She shook her head before the tears could come again and hoisted herself to her feet. She'd taken Aida's phone call in her bedroom, and now she walked out to the kitchen where her mother sat, warming her hands around a cup of tea.

“It's all set,” Olivia said.

“They'll take the baby?”

She nodded.

“And they've agreed to give him back when you get out?”

She nodded again.

Elaine sighed. “Well, I suppose that's a relief,” she said.

Olivia caught her lower lip between her teeth and bit down, hard. “I suppose so,” she said, once she could trust her voice not to betray her.

Olivia woke one morning, a week before her due date, feeling a dull ache in her back. She tossed from side to side, trying to get comfortable, but finally got up to pee. She sat on the toilet, staring down at her distended stomach with its line of darkened skin leading from her protruding belly button to the top of her pubis. She wiped herself and was startled to see a clump of something, streaked yellow and red, on the toilet paper. She stared at the paper for a moment or two and then smiled. The baby was coming.

Olivia spent the rest of the day by herself. She didn't tell Arthur or her mother what was happening, and the two of them went to work, leaving her alone in the empty house. She sat down in her favorite chair with her legs drawn up under her and her knees spread wide. At some point she realized that the dull ache in her back had traveled around to the front of her body. She looked up at the clock on the wall the next time she felt the tug of pain and noted the time. Twenty minutes later, it came again.

Olivia slipped on a pair of her mother's old running shoes and tied the laces very loosely over her feet. She went out for a walk, stopping every few blocks or so to lean against a tree or telephone pole while her belly tightened in spasms that were slowly growing stronger and more intense. When it seemed as if the pains were coming closer together, she walked slowly back home and drew a bath. She tentatively lowered herself into Elaine's oversized tub and lay there, breathing through the contractions until the water grew cold. Only then did she call her mother.

Olivia felt as if the very moment after she hung up the phone her mother was there, standing next to her. By then Olivia was on all fours in the living room, doing the cat stretches her birthing instructor had taught her.

“What time is it?” she murmured as Elaine crouched down next to her.

“Almost five. Are you okay? Do you need anything? Do you want some water? Ice chips? Are you hungry? Remember, Dorothy said you'd need to eat to keep your strength up.”

“Five? Wow. It felt like just a couple of hours.”

“How long have you been in labor?”

“More or less since this morning.”

“Oh my God! Olivia are you out of your mind? Have you called Dorothy?”

“I'm okay, Mom. Really. You call her.”

Elaine rushed to the telephone where she'd prominently tacked up a piece of paper with the midwife's phone number. She punched in some numbers and then hung up. She hustled back to Olivia's side. Olivia, meanwhile, was crouched over, her knees bent and spread under her, her belly hanging between them, her cheek resting on the carpet. Every time she felt a contraction begin, she began a deep, slow inhale. She felt the pains; in fact, she sank deep into each painful wave, but she almost didn't mind them. She welcomed them, imagining her body gently pushing the baby out.

In the middle of the next contraction, Olivia was distracted by the sound of the telephone ringing. She shut her eyes and ears to the noise and tried to catch hold of her breath to think of softening and opening. Elaine began tapping on her shoulder, trying to hand her the phone.

“C'mon, honey. Dorothy wants to talk to you. Just take the phone.”

Elaine held the phone to her ear, but Olivia batted it away. Finally she gave in to Elaine's insistence and listened to Dorothy's voice. She tried to answer her the best she could, describing her contractions, how they felt, how long they'd been going on, but another one came just then and she began to breathe, shutting out the sound of the midwife's voice.

At the end of the next contraction, Olivia felt her mother pull her to her feet. “We're going to the hospital, honey. Dorothy's going to meet us there.”

Olivia began to protest. She didn't want to go to the hospital. What she wanted was to get back into her mother's tub, to give birth there. Elaine grabbed an old afghan from the couch and wrapped Olivia in it. She pushed and pulled Olivia to the door, and finally Olivia gave in. She let Elaine settle her in the front seat of the car, but when they had driven no more than half a block, another contraction overwhelmed her, and she desperately tried to get on top of it. She started fighting the contraction, beginning to cry as the pain became unbearable.

“Stop! Stop the car!” she screamed. “I can't get comfortable here!”

Olivia felt that if she didn't get out of the car in a minute she would die. She began to cry harder, so hard she didn't even notice that they'd pulled up in front of Alta Bates Hospital, which was mercifully close to the house. She saw Elaine toss her car keys at the parking attendant, and then felt her mother half-carry her to a wheelchair that was parked in front of the entrance. Another contraction clutched at her belly as they rolled through the doors of the hospital, down the hall, and to the elevator. She began crying again in the elevator, begging her mother to take her home so she could give birth in her own bed.

She was sobbing, and saying over and over again, “I don't want to be here, I don't want to be here,” when they arrived at the labor-and-delivery floor. A nurse in a pair of pale yellow scrubs took one look at Olivia weeping and writhing in the wheelchair, smiled, and said, “Looks like someone's in transition here.”

When Olivia's panic abated, she found herself in a small, dark room, lying on a bed. She was naked, and her mother was standing next to her, talking to the midwife who had her hand up inside of Olivia. Olivia had not passed out; she had simply been too caught up in her fear and her dread to notice what was happening to her. Now, as though a lightness had overcome her, her fear was gone.

“I want to push,” she said, surprised at how calm her voice sounded.

“So push,” Dorothy said.

After what felt like moments but was actually closer to two hours, the midwife said, “Okay now, Olivia. One more.”

Olivia tucked her chin into her chest and pushed one last time. She felt a slithering and a pop, and then Dorothy held something up and put it on Olivia's chest. She reached out her hands and stroked the pink and white creature with the shock of black hair. Its huge brown eyes were wide open and it stared at her, its mouth an
O
of surprise. Olivia picked it up and looked at the baby's kicking legs and its little gray feet.

“It's a girl,” Elaine said. Olivia looked at her mother, who was smiling and crying at the same time. “A beautiful girl. A perfect girl.”

Olivia brought the baby up to her face and inhaled deeply, smelling her strangely familiar scent, like the smell of her own body, yet sharper and more pungent.

The baby began pushing her head against Olivia's chest, and she took one of her breasts in her hand and guided the nipple to the baby's mouth. At first the tiny girl didn't seem to know what to do. She kept her mouth closed and rubbed blindly against the nipple. Then, suddenly, she opened her mouth impossibly wide and Olivia slipped the nipple inside. The baby gulped once and began to suck, voraciously, as though she'd been waiting for this moment for every minute of the nine months she'd been hidden inside her mother's body. Olivia felt a current run from her nipple down through the center of her body and into her womb.

Elaine stroked the baby's head and smoothed Olivia's hair away from her eyes. “What do you want to call her, honey?” she asked. “What's her name?”

“Luna,” Olivia said. “Her name is Luna.”

“Luna Goodman?” Elaine asked, doubtfully.

Olivia nodded, laughing, and after a moment her mother joined in. Olivia picked up the baby's hand and kissed her soft palm.

***

Olivia slept deeply, propped in the hospital bed. Elaine rocked in the glider, holding Luna and crooning to her. The room was dim—the shades were drawn and the lights were off. Elaine had spent the night on the pullout armchair, waking when Luna woke and helping Olivia get the baby on her breast. Now, mother and daughter were quiet, and only grandmother was awake. Elaine traced a finger along the baby's downy cheek. Her skin was softer than anything Elaine had ever felt, softer than silk, softer than fur, as smooth as water.

Luna's pursed lips made sucking motions as she slept, as though she were dreaming of nursing. She frowned, and Elaine slipped a pinky into her mouth. The baby sucked hard on it, harder than Elaine had imagined such a tiny mouth would be capable of, and settled again. Elaine stared into the baby's face, looking there for signs of her own self, of her genes and family history. Luna's dark hair was clearly her father's, and her nose had the faintest arch that looked as if it might grow into her father's hook. Elaine remembered how proud her own grandmother had been of Elaine's “shiksa nose,” insisting that its pert bluntness was a testament to the family's successful assimilation, although Elaine's father had always said it was more likely the legacy of a Polish pogrom. Olivia's, like her mother's, lacked the defined curve of caricature. The irony of Luna inheriting a Jewish nose from a Catholic father made Elaine smile.

Carefully, so as not to wake the baby, she unwrapped the end of the tightly swaddled blankets. She took one tiny foot in her hand and played her fingers lightly along the pearl-like toes. Olivia's own foot stuck out from under the covers of the hospital bed, long and thin with the sparkly blue toenails that she had asked Elaine to paint a few days before. The polish on the big toe was slightly chipped. Now, for some reason, Elaine was startled at the sight of that large, adult foot. It seemed like only moments ago she'd been able to fit baby Olivia's entire foot in her mouth. Moments, days, weeks, years; along the way, that baby had turned into a woman, and Elaine couldn't help but wonder if she had paid the slightest attention to the time as it passed. She could remember almost nothing about Olivia's infancy and early childhood. Brief flashes of memory were all that remained, and Elaine had little confidence even in those; they all seemed to coincide with the photographs she had snapped.

Elaine was startled from her reverie by a soft knock at the door. She raised her eyes and met Izaya's as he peeped in. She nodded, and he entered, laden with a ridiculously large bouquet of spring flowers in a cut-glass vase, a stuffed moose that must have been three feet long under one arm, and a dozen Mylar balloons tied to his wrist. Elaine burst out laughing when she saw him, and Olivia woke to the sound.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Did I wake you up?”

“No, no. It's okay. What did you bring?” Olivia asked, her voice languid.

“Um, a moose.”

Elaine laughed again. She gently laid the still-sleeping baby in her bassinet and held out her hands to Izaya.

He gave her the flowers and the stuffed animal and then untied the balloons. They floated up to the ceiling. Half of them had dancing blue bears and read, “It's a boy.” The other half had the same picture in pink and announced the arrival of a girl.

“Arthur called and told me you were in labor. I didn't know if it was a girl or a boy.”

“This is Luna,” Elaine said, picking up the baby and handing her to Izaya. Izaya looked startled at his burden, but then his face softened. He rocked back and forth on his heels, holding the baby in his arms.

“She's as beautiful as her mother,” he said, and then blushed. Luna woke with a soft cry and Izaya quickly handed her over to Olivia. Olivia settled the baby in the crook of her arm and pulled down the shoulder of her hospital gown. Elaine watched Izaya's face as the baby nuzzled her mother's full breast, rooting around until she found the long pink nipple, and then gulping greedily. Olivia smiled serenely down at Luna. Her hair was full and wild and caught the light shining though the slats in the window shades with a glint of gold brightness. Her cheeks were flushed, as was the full, round breast pressed up against the baby's face. She
was
beautiful. Izaya stared and then, suddenly seeming to realize that perhaps he shouldn't be looking, glanced quickly away.

Elaine pulled the rocking chair up to the edge of the bed. “Why don't you sit down,” she said. Then she walked to the other side of the room and busied herself arranging the flowers and gathering the balloons into a bright bouquet in a corner. She listened to the low hum of Olivia's voice describing her labor to Izaya, in perhaps more detail than Elaine thought was strictly necessary.

Elaine ached to see the almost timid longing she recognized in Izaya's face. She wondered, again, about the extent of his feelings for Olivia. His eagerness, his tenderness, gave him away. Elaine smiled ruefully to herself at the thought that Olivia might finally have found a man of whom even her mother could be proud. She couldn't decide, however, if she was really seeing something that was there, or if it were only her own desperate hope for a future for her daughter that led her to imagine a connection that did not exist. Lawyers were not allowed to fall in love with their clients, and if Izaya had, by some accident of chemistry or fate, then surely he would never act on it. Olivia was going to jail. What was the point of this impossible newborn love?

Elaine leaned heavily on the windowsill, closing her eyes against the tears that threatened to begin again. She, a woman who never cried, who had remained dry-eyed at the birth of her own child, in the courtroom where her marriage was dissolved, at her father's graveside, had wept so often and so freely since Olivia's conviction that sometimes she wondered whether the tears would ever stop flowing. She felt like a faucet whose washer had given way with a final groan, allowing a constant stream of water to come pouring through the tap. She didn't like anything about her tears. She ­didn't like the hot prickling in her eyes. She didn't like the red ache in her nose after her eyes finally dried up. She didn't like the pitying glances of those who saw her crying. She brushed angrily at her face and got up.

“I'm going to go get some breakfast,” she said.

Luna had fallen off the breast and lay in the crook of Olivia's arm. Olivia leaned back on her pillows, her breast still exposed, the pink nipple spilling a clear stream down onto the sheet.