After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

APRIL 2014

Julie grunted and screamed on her living room floor. She lay in a pool of her waters. Her insides were trying to burst free of her body. The pain was incredible.

Jake, kneeling helplessly beside her, said, “I still think we should go to the hospital.”

Between contractions, she glared at him; almost she spat at him. The hospital! She couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but push. She gasped, “I’m shitting a pumpkin here!”

“But at the hospital—”

She screamed again and he shut up.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Last night Jake had flown in from Wyoming, arriving a full week before she was supposed to go into labor. He would drive her to the hospital and then wait decorously in the waiting room. Linda would coach Julie in the labor room. The first baby, her OB had assured her, always took a long time to come; Julie might even have false labor pains, similar to Braxton-Hicks contractions but “a little bit more intense,” for several days. The baby nurse would come every day for two weeks after Julie came home from the hospital. It was all meticulously planned.

Then came these sudden, wrenching pains that woke her in the middle of the night; apparently she was already many more centimeters dilated than she should be because now the pumpkin was moving inexorably through her body, trying to kill her. Julie writhed and screamed, Jacob’s terrified face looming over her. She would die, the baby would die, nobody could do this, nobody—

A final scream that brought neighbors pounding on the wall and a terrified oath from Jake. Linda, in a coat thrown over leopard-print pajamas, threw open the door and burst into the room. The pumpkin slid out and stopped torturing her, although everything on her still hurt and apparently always would. Julie burst into tears. The neighbor pounded harder. Jake cried, “What do I do now?” And the answering machine burst into life.

If the phone had been ringing, she hadn’t heard it. But now she heard Gordon’s voice, almost as if the relative cessation of pain had somehow created a pool of silence.

“Julie, this is Gordon. We’ve had another kidnapping. Three-year-old boy disappeared from his bed in southern Vermont. I remember that was on one of the projections you—”

Julie wasn’t listening. Her baby had started to cry, and the sound filled the entire world, joyous and alive, leaving no room for anything else at all.