In the Heart of the Canyon (29 page)

Amy looked off, like she was remembering something that amused her.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said—and her voice was cheery—“but I thought you said that Jill thinks I’m, like, having a baby. What did you really say?”

“That’s what I really said.” He waited. “Are you?”

“Uh,
no?”

“She thinks you’re in labor,” Peter went on.

“How could I be in labor if I’m not pregnant?”

“Are you not pregnant?”

“No,” said Amy. “Yes. I’m not pregnant. Look at me. Do I look pregnant? Oh god. Don’t answer that. Of course I look pregnant. I always look pregnant. Well, I’m not
preg
nant,” she said, emphasizing the first syllable, as though it would sink both the word, and its truth, into the river.

Peter wished Jill hadn’t chosen him to be the messenger. This should be JT’s job. JT was their leader, and he had all the authority. By this point in the trip, JT could tell them all to go run Lava on boogie boards, and they’d have done it, they trusted him that much.

He looked over at the boats, where Jill was talking to the guides. Jill had one hand on her hip and with the other she was shading her eyes as she talked to JT. JT glanced over at Amy, and Peter felt like he wanted to pull a curtain around her. She deserved privacy, in this land of giant openness. He moved to block their view.

“I guess it’s because you get these stomach pains, and they come and go,” he said. “She said she felt your stomach. She said it felt like her stomach when she was having Sam and Matthew. She’s had two kids,” he added, as though this were determinative.

But Amy had gone off into her other world now—or rather, Peter reminded himself, she was having another contraction.

“I think you’re having another contraction,” he told Amy.

Amy groaned.

Peter had seen women in labor only in the movies and on sitcoms. “Breathe?” he suggested.

But Amy held her breath. Not knowing what else to do, Peter held her hand, and she squeezed so hard he thought she might break his fingers. He prepared himself for this contraction to convince her that she was indeed in labor, but when it was over, she sat up and spat into the sand. She jerked herself forward with her arms, trying to stand up. But she couldn’t.

“This is all just bullshit,” she said. “I’m sorry I ever told you anything.”

“It was Jill who figured it out,” said Peter. “It wasn’t me.”

“Go get me some Tums,” she grumped.

Peter wiggled his finger in his ear. Part of him wondered why he was putting up with this. What tie did he really have to this fat girl? He could go over and horse around with Abo and Dixie, and let Susan (who was the girls mother, after all) take care of whatever was going on. And maybe Jill was wrong. Who gave her the final say?

But another part of him recognized himself as the same person who went over to his mother’s every Saturday and watered her peonies, who cleaned out the Weber grill and threw away the vegetables that were rotting in the back of the refrigerator, who picked up his mothers medicine at the pharmacy and made sure she had enough refills authorized for the coming month. That was the kind of person he was. He might complain about it, but he did it, because it was the right thing to do.

Had Miss Ohio not appreciated that?

“Be nice to me,” he told Amy.

Amy glared at him. He glared right back. Out on the river, a train of yellow rafts floated by, with everyone waving and shouting, and why shouldn’t they be? They had just run Lava without someone in their group going into labor.

Twenty feet away, Jill was still talking to JT. Peter doubted that JT would be as incredulous as Amy, but still, this couldn’t have been one of the things he routinely dealt with on his river trips.

“All I want are a couple of Tums,” said Amy. “Is that too much to ask for?”

“You know what? It is,” he told her. “It is too much to ask for. All
I
want is for you to admit that you’re pregnant, you’re in labor, you’re going to have a baby, and this is going to be a very big deal for the rest of us, because we’re down on the river, and there isn’t a hospital for miles around. And so a lot of people’s plans are going to be altered for you. Which I’m not complaining about, but you should give up on this Tums thing and help people help you. Because as I understand it from Jill, the last thing we want is for this baby to actually be born down here. I don’t know what can go wrong, and I don’t want to know. But I imagine it can be pretty bad. So quit asking for Tums.”

Amy didn’t reply. She looked over to where JT and Jill were talking to Susan now.

“Is Jill over there telling my mother I’m pregnant?”

“She is,” said Peter, and indeed, right at that moment, Jill put her arm around Susan’s shoulder as all three of them looked over at Peter and Amy. Peter tried to imagine what this must be like for Amy. He tried very hard but couldn’t come up with anything that would be quite so humiliating. And his heart went out to this girl whose sexual history was about to become the topic of conversation among a group of people who, until eleven days ago, had absolutely no connection with her. Lena the kindergarten teacher, wondering if it had been a serious, meaningful relationship; Evelyn the biologist, wondering how it could have possibly escaped a girl’s radar for six, seven, eight months; Mitchell, thinking this would make his book that much more interesting; and Mark, wanting to know how old the father was and whether statutory rape laws would apply.

And all of them who, against every last shred of conscience, would at some point in the next twenty-four hours find themselves shamefully yet inescapably challenged by the notion that somebody like Amy might have had a serious boyfriend.

Amy reached for her T-shirt, which was lying nearby on the sand, and laid it over her stomach. “Don’t let my mother come over here.”

But Susan, Jill, and JT were already walking in their direction. JT was carrying a beach umbrella over his shoulder, and when he reached Amy, he opened it to reveal dazzling panels of turquoise, pink, and purple. He twisted its post into the sand to shield Amy from the hot midday sun, and there in this small circle of shade, with her mother and three strangers looking on, and another ten wondering what the problem was, Amy covered her face with her hands and began to cry.

O
nce JT was able to grasp the full implications of the situation, he was able to act with astonishing speed. He told Abo to radio for a medevac. He told Dixie and Evelyn to string up a tarp for shade, for they would need more than a tiny beach umbrella. He told Mitchell to pump water and Mark to get out a kitchen table and set up the stove and start boiling whatever water they already had in the jugs. He told Sam and Matthew to go tell everyone pulling onto shore that they had a serious medical emergency and see if anyone was a doctor. He told Lena where the lunch materials were kept, in which cooler, in which boat, and asked that she set up the lunch buffet. He told Mitchell to put away his camera, please. And he told Ruth and Lloyd to find themselves a place in the little patch of shade by the tamarisk bushes, because it was going to be a long afternoon.

Lloyd recapped his water bottle and wiped his grizzled chin. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

“Lloyd, come and sit,” Ruth urged, taking his arm. But Lloyd brushed his wife’s hand away. He planted himself before JT. His tattered beige shirt was half tucked in and the shirttails sagged loosely around his hips. His beard was patchy and his eyes, when he removed his sunglasses to look directly at JT, were rheumy and yellow.

“If I can be of some assistance,” he said.

And JT, who was willing to grasp at any straw that appeared before him, told Lloyd about Amy’s situation.

Lloyd nodded. “Well,” he said carefully, “it’s not my area of specialty, but I might be able to be of some use.”

“Come with me, then,” said JT.

“I seem to remember a few things from my medical school days,”
Lloyd said, trudging along beside JT. “That and being on the reservation. Do you know how many weeks along she is?”

“I don’t think anyone knows.”

“Even her husband?”

It occurred to JT that this might not be a good idea, getting Lloyd involved. On the other hand, what harm could he do? Even a confused mind could offer comfort, at the very least.

“There is no husband,” he told Lloyd.

Lloyd nodded somberly, one doctor in on confidential information with another. “I trust this is her first child,” he said. “But babies can come quickly, even in a young primigravada. You never know. Ruth, for instance, delivered our first child in five hours.”

JT wasn’t happy to hear that. He also couldn’t help but think back to twenty-five years ago, to Mac’s labor with Colin at the hospital in Flagstaff and how they went for thirty-six hours before the doctors finally agreed it was time for a C-section. The memory of that C-section right now sent an electric zing up the backs of his legs. Mac had lost a lot of blood, her life was at risk, and they were both terrified. But all the doctor had to do was order up a few pints of blood, and they appeared like magic; the IV was already in place and within minutes the color returned to Mac’s face—all this while his newborn son was off being weighed and washed and swaddled in a soft, hospital-issue blanket. JT remembered how he had almost wanted to kiss the floor of the delivery room: for things could have turned on a dime, and yet in the end he had a happy wife and a fat squalling baby boy to take home.

And he looked at his surroundings here—the beach littered with all their equipment, the coffee-colored river, the band of cliffs, a hot white sun overhead—and wondered just what they were going to do if Amy’s baby decided it was going to go ahead and rush itself out into the world before a helicopter could get here.

“Has her water broken?” Lloyd asked.

“I don’t know. Have you ever delivered a baby, Lloyd?”

“On the reservation, I delivered a set of twins. But I might be a little rusty,” he said.

“Don’t be rusty, Lloyd,” JT told him.

“Don’t sue me,” Lloyd replied.

And JT marveled at the human brain, that it could become so entangled with the plaquey ropes of Alzheimer’s, yet still find a clear line to a quick, snappy retort.

By now a makeshift trauma station was taking shape on the beach. Using stakes and rope and a triangular nylon tarp, Dixie and Evelyn and the boys had constructed an open-air tent that provided both shade and ventilation. Mitchell had lugged one of the five-gallon water jugs over and set it in the shade, and Evelyn, in between helping Dixie with the tarp, had managed to find the unopened twelve-pack of cotton bandannas that she’d stashed in the bottom of her overnight bag.

In the meantime, another party had pulled in, and a motley crowd had gathered outside the tarp area—young strappy guides, lizard-skinned oldsters, throngs of passengers in their clownish rubber-toed sandals. And the kayakers, all of them. Unless there was a doctor, JT didn’t really want an audience, so he designated Mitchell to shoo everyone away.

“Tell them if we need any help, we’ll ask for it.” He was annoyed, even though he knew he had no reason to be. Anyone would be curious; anyone would want to help.

“What should I say?” said Mitchell.

Do you tell a crowd of strangers that a seventeen-year-old girl who didn’t even know she was pregnant was going into labor? This question had never arisen before.

“Find out if there’s a doctor,” he told Mitchell.

Mitchell marched out into the sunshine and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Is there an obstetrician in the house?”

JT groaned inwardly.

“Well, now they know,” Peter said.

There had been several times during the course of this trip that JT would have said that he was nearing the end of his rope. Back at Phantom, watching Blender get swept beneath the footbridge. Or two nights ago at Upset, when Mitchell and the dog went somersaulting down the hill.

Now it seemed that the rope had no end, that it was just a long
series of knots and tangles, a kind of Jacobs ladder into a bottomless hole. It had no meaning, being at the end of one’s rope; you were either on it or off; nothing much mattered, except keeping everyone alive. And he flashed on Mac once again, because Mac was one of those people who could always find another rope to grab, when all else failed.

They had once made such a good pair, JT thought. And he felt a sudden stab of grief, to think that his marriage hadn’t worked, that all his years on the river had passed without the one sweet love of his life by his side.

But obviously he couldn’t focus on Mac right now. Sitting back on his heels, he took a long drink of water from his Tropicana jug. At the same time, Susan returned with Amy’s water bottle. She hovered near the circle of people, not sure of herself. JT moved aside to make room for her.

Lloyd was in the process of taking Amy’s pulse. “One hundred and ten,” he called over his shoulder.

“Somebody write that down,” said JT.

Evelyn promptly recorded the number in her journal, and Amy began making little rocking movements with her hips.

“Here we go again,” Lloyd announced.

“Note the time,” JT told Evelyn.

Susan held one hand, Jill the other, while Peter, who was stationed by her feet, gripped her ankles.

“Breathe, Amy,” warned Jill. “Remember how I told you? Breathe before it starts to hurt. Deep breath in, long breath out. You can do it.”

“It already hurts!” Amy groaned.

“You can do it,” said Jill. “Come on. Deep breath in. That’s a girl. You can do it.”

Amy managed a deep breath in but couldn’t control her exhalation, and she exploded in a loud, ragged scream.

“Try it again!” Jill exclaimed. “Deep breath! Follow me!” and she wheezed in a long, noisy breath to demonstrate. Susan looked on, paralyzed. Amy ground her heels into the sand.

Then it was over.

“Two minutes,” Evelyn announced.

“Honey,” Lloyd said, bending over Amy. “You’re going to be okay. We’re going to take good care of you and your baby. Are you hoping for a boy or a girl?”