Triage

The Long Saturday

Chapter 54: Triage

Winter returns at 2:11 in the morning with sleet on the windows and Norah saying my name in a voice that does not belong to ordinary life.

I am awake before my eyes open.

"What."

"There's blood."

Everything in me goes old and cold at once.

The lamp clicks on.

Norah is sitting up in bed, one hand pressed between her legs, face pale in the yellow light but not panicked yet.

"Okay," I say, already out of bed.

"Okay."

There is blood.

Not catastrophic.

Not nothing.

Enough.

We are on the road in twelve minutes.

Hospital bag.

Coats.

Insurance card.

Phone charger because modern terror still needs battery.

Outside, Mercer is all ice glare and dead streetlight halos.

I drive too carefully and still feel reckless.

Norah is silent in the passenger seat, one hand on her stomach, the other braced against the door.

"Talk to me," I say.

"About what."

"Anything."

"I hate the sound the windshield wipers are making."

"Good."

"And if you start saying everything's going to be fine in that voice men use right before they shatter glass, I will divorce you pregnant."

"Fair."

The hospital at night looks less like a place of healing than a machine that does not sleep because bodies refuse good manners.

We check in.

Clipboard.

Questions.

Wristband.

Upstairs to obstetric triage where the nurse has the extraordinary calm of a woman who has seen eight versions of disaster already and does not care for dramatics from amateurs.

"How far along?" she asks.

Norah answers.

"How much bleeding."

Norah answers.

"Any cramping."

"Some."

The nurse nods.

"We'll get you monitored."

We enter a curtained room that is just private enough to make fear inconvenient.

Monitor straps.

Hospital gown.

The machine begins its work.

One line for contractions.

One for the baby's heart.

At first all I can hear is static and my own pulse behaving without accountability.

Then the heartbeat comes through.

Fast.

Present.

Not reassurance exactly.

Presence.

Norah closes her eyes.

I sit in the chair beside the bed and lean forward until my elbows hit my knees.

"Okay," she whispers.

I realize she is not speaking to me.

She is speaking to the room.

The child.

Her own body.

Whatever.

After a while the nurse comes back, checks, asks more questions, leaves again.

Time becomes triage time.

Elastic.

Badly lit.

One in which every minute arrives dragging an IV pole.

Norah opens her eyes and finds me staring at the monitor like I could maintain the line by force.

"Hey," she says.

"Hey."

"You left your body."

"Only partially."

"Come back."

I sit up.

She studies me for one beat too long.

"What are you doing in your head?"

There are ways to dodge that question.

Tonight would be a poor night to use them.

"Making contracts," I say.

"With whom."

"Everybody."

She nods once.

"Stop."

"I know."

"No, I mean now."

The monitor keeps printing its little paper truth.

The baby heart still rapid and regular.

One contraction.

Pause.

Another.

"I can't help it," I say quietly.

"You can help feeding it."

She reaches one hand out from under the blanket.

I take it immediately.

"Stay here," she says. "Not in the imaginary court case."

"Okay."

So I do.

Or try.

When the doctor comes in she is brisk in the efficient merciful way of people who understand that kindness does not require padding every fact with gauze.

The cervix is closed.

The baby's heart rate looks good.

The bleeding may be one of several things, none ideal, none immediately catastrophic.

They want to keep monitoring a while.

They do an ultrasound.

The room dims.

Gray screen again.

Curve.

Spine.

Movement.

One foot that kicks as if insulted by observation.

Norah starts crying then, not hard, just enough to make the rest of me sit down inside myself.

When the doctor leaves, the room is quieter than before.

"You okay?" I say.

Norah laughs once without humor.

"No."

"Fair."

"Also yes. Some."

She squeezes my fingers.

"I hate that there are no ways to earn outcomes."

"Yeah," I say.

"I know."

She turns her head on the pillow and looks right at me.

"I miss certainty even when I know certainty was fake."

"Yeah."

Outside the curtain someone else's machine chirps.

A nurse laughs softly at something down the hall.

The building keeps doing what buildings like this do: holding terror and relief in adjacent rooms without commentary.

Around five the contractions have eased.

The bleeding has slowed.

The baby, apparently offended by all this attention, begins kicking hard enough that Norah actually curses once under her breath and then apologizes to nobody.

The nurse grins.

"That," she says, pressing one hand where the movement leaps under skin, "is what we like."

When they finally discharge us, dawn is only beginning to admit itself at the edges of the parking lot.

The sleet has hardened into a white crust over everything.

Mercer looks sanded down to essentials.

In the car Norah leans her head back and closes her eyes.

"Home," she says.

"Excellent theology."

"Drive."

At home the house is freezing because old radiators believe in trial by character.

I make tea neither of us wants.

Norah curls on the couch under two blankets with one hand over the place where the child has apparently decided to practice martial arts.

I kneel by the couch and set my palm there too.

The kick comes sharp and immediate. Just the body's answer to the night.

Norah opens one eye.

"Still here," she says.

"Yeah."

Outside the first plow of the morning grinds down Alder.

Inside the kettle starts to shudder on the stove.

The day arrives whether or not anyone is ready.

This time, exhausted and grateful in the thin light of our living room, I do not ask it for more than company.