Precious and Fragile Things Read online

It’s going to happen, finally. Nine months of waiting, six months of trying before that. The baby’s coming.

  A little boy? A little girl? She and Seth have both agreed it won’t matter, though in her deep and secret heart Gilly has prayed for a daughter. It’s important to her, to have a daughter. To be a mother to a daughter. A son would be fine; she will love a son. But she really wants a daughter.

  She quit her job last month in preparation for the baby coming, already planning to stay home and raise her child because, after all, she wasn’t bearing this baby for someone else to raise. She’s spent the past month getting the nursery ready, even if Jewish tradition says you’re not supposed to do anything until the baby’s born. Bad luck or some such thing, but Gilly doesn’t believe in luck.

  Little socks, little shoes, tiny little caps and blankets in yellows and soft greens. Things suitable for either boy or girl. Seth doesn’t know that Gilly found a perfect little dress outfit complete with matching cap and ruffled diaper cover on a trip to the baby outlet, or that she bought it and tucked it away here beneath the stacks of burp cloths and onesies.

  It was only a few dollars, less than ten. On sale. But perfect, just the thing she’d buy to dress her daughter in. If she has one. And as another contraction tightens across her stomach and echoes deep inside her, Gilly puts her hands on the dresser she’ll use as a changing table, and she prays once more to whoever will listen that the baby on its way is a girl.

  Seth is at work. She won’t call him just yet. The pain isn’t bad and she’s had Braxton Hicks several times already. Gilly folds tiny clothes instead. She tests out the rocker and imagines how it will be when she sits there at three in the morning with her baby in her arms.

  She plans to nurse and now she cups her breasts, thinking how heavy they are. What will it be like to feed a child from them? It’s sort of a disgusting idea, actually, but it seems the right one. Just as she’s not having this baby for someone else to raise, knowing that her body naturally will make something to sustain her child seems the right choice to make.

  Oh, she knows it won’t be easy. She’ll have to be the one getting up at all hours since Seth won’t be able to feed the baby. But it’ll be all right. It’s going to be marvelous.

  By evening she’s sick to her stomach and has been on the toilet all day long. Everything in her guts wants to come out. The midwife assures her this is normal, her body’s way of getting ready to give birth, but to Gilly it feels like a bad case of food poisoning.

  When Seth gets home unexpectedly late, she’s already packed and ready to go. She snaps at him when he takes too long changing his clothes and making a sandwich. When he fumbles with the suitcase they’re taking to the birth center. When he pulls out of the driveway without putting on his seat belt.

  This is a time when they’re supposed to feel closer to each other than ever, but everything he does is a splinter of glass in all her tender places. The way he laughs with the midwives, joking about the drive. How he lingers in the hall instead of bringing her suitcase to her so she can get into the soft nightgown she’s going to wear. Gilly presses her lips together and makes fists of her hands, wanting to tell him to move his fucking ass, but instead she breathes in deep. Out slowly. In and out, concentrating on the pain, willing herself to get through it.

  Nothing she has read or watched or listened to prepared her for this. Natural birth? What a fucking joke. What is natural about being torn apart from the inside out? What is natural about stinking fluid gushing out of her as she squats once more on the toilet, groaning and pale faced, her hands gripping the metal railings.

  Birth is slippery and smelly, coated in blood. Labor takes forever. The contractions consume her—this pain doesn’t sting like a wound, not an ache like a break or strain. This pain is white-hot, lava, it rips through her with dreadful regularity every minute and gives her no time even to breathe in between.

  “Do you want something for the pain?” the nurse asks.

  Stubborn, Gilly shakes her head. “No.”

  “You can go ahead and push,” says the midwife sometime later, Gilly’s not sure how long, from between Gilly’s legs. The midwife’s just used her fingers to decide if it’s time. The intrusion was worse than the pain.

  Push? Gilly pushes. Nothing happens.

  “From your bottom,” the midwife says unhelpfully. “Push from your bottom.”

  Gilly has no fucking idea what that even means. Exhausted, she strains. Nothing. The baby isn’t coming. Not moving. The contractions keep coming and she bites down on the inside of her cheek to keep from screaming…but no baby.

  There is the hush of whispered conversation that’s not quiet enough for her not to overhear. Hey, morons, Gilly wants to say. I can hear you. They talk of a C-section, of calling in the on-call obstetrician for a consult.

  She is going to have this baby no matter what. Not by cutting it out of her. She is going to push this child out of her body and make this pain stop. Gilly’s never been more determined to do anything in her life.

  But no matter how hard she tries to push from her bottom, whatever the fuck that means, what does that even mean? No matter how hard she pushes, or strains, how hard she grips the bed railings, no matter how many times Seth squeezes her hand and offers terrifically unhelpful encouragement, this baby will not come.

  “I can’t do it,” Gilly says.

  She’s failed.

  “You can do it,” Seth tells her, patting her face.

  She almost bites his hand. She wants to. Bite his fucking fingers off and spit them in his face for touching her now.

  “I can’t do it,” she says again. She thinks she’s shouting but really, it’s only a whisper.

  “Breathe,” Seth offers.

  She wants to kick him in the face for that.

  The nurse beside her says to him, “The next time she pushes, you hold her knee back.”

  Seth looks confused. It’s not fucking brain surgery, Gilly wants to tell him. She gets it. Hold her knees back so she can open up her birth canal and push this baby the fuck out of her vagina. But Seth doesn’t get it, even when the nurse shows him.

  The next contraction comes. The nurse puts both hands flat on Gilly’s belly and pushes down. The midwife makes a tutting noise but doesn’t stop her.

  “Push now,” the nurse says. “The baby will come.”

  And…it does. Gilly can feel the baby moving down and out of her. Something rips inside her. She wants to scream and bites it back, still stubborn. Her hand clutches Seth’s so hard it goes numb and he winces. She doesn’t care.

  She pushes. The nurse presses down. The baby is coming, finally, and the midwife eases the child into the world as she’s done with hundreds already.

  But this baby is not like those. This is Gilly’s baby. The midwife coos and there’s a scuffle of activity as they clean the baby. Seth goes around to the foot of the bed and makes strange, excited noises. He might be saying something, but all Gilly can hear is the sound of an ocean roar.

  “She’s passing out,” someone says.

  There comes the insensitive and insulting sting of a needle. A rush of clarity. The pain eases, and she thinks she was crazy for not taking this sooner. Why would it have been a failure to take even this small comfort?

  Then they put the baby, wrapped in a blanket, on her chest. Nobody’s told her if it’s the daughter she wanted or a son she’ll love just as much. She stares with tear-blurred eyes at a tiny, ugly face, blotchy red and still coated in places with white, waxy goo.

  “Who is it?” she asks. Not what. But who.

  Her husband puts his hand on the baby’s head, the other on Gilly’s shoulder. “It’s a girl. It’s Arwen.”

  And Gilly trembles in the aftermath of birth, barely twitching as the midwife between her legs stitches her intimate places. Gilly stares in wonder at this small creature she created and carried and has now ejected from her body. She touches tiny eyebrows with the tip of her finger and waits to feel…som