“Why is it always me?” Rika asked. “You never take a bath.”
“Me and your mom do sometimes,” I said, grinning at Khadeja, the horror in her face. I chucked a few chords. “That’s how babies get made.”
“In the bath?” Rika asked.
“No,” Khadeja answered. “Well, sometimes. Listen,” she said, “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll draw you pictures.”
“Cool,” Rika said.
“Nainoa,” Khadeja said.
“Bath,” I said to Rika, practically giggling, then stepping out of her room, toward the bathroom, so that for a moment I was in the black of the hallway, looking for the door frame in the dark.
How many nights did we make like that? How long was I stupid enough to believe we were indestructible? But that’s the problem with the present, it’s never the thing you’re holding, only the thing you’re watching, later, from a distance so great the memory might as well be a spill of stars outside a window at twilight.
* * *
SEPTEMBER THEN, I flipped to the six-to-six overnight shift and somewhere after midnight we got the call, a mother thirty-six weeks pregnant in early bleeding labor, in a car accident on the way to the hospital.
“Great,” Erin said after dispatch broke away, after the static and just us in the rig, her hitting the switches to start the siren shriek again. “Sounds bad.”
“It’s only potential premature childbirth and high-speed blunt-force trauma,” I said. “What’s bad about that?”
“When we get back to the station,” Erin said, “remind me to have you push the water cooler through your anus. Then we can talk about childbirth and easy.”
“I’ve done that water-cooler thing before,” I said. “Ask Mike.”
“You’re disgusting,” she said. “Just drive.”
I drove and the rain came down in strange pulses, pouring, then spitting, then pouring. Traffic was already backed up on the freeway, a quarter of a mile before the accident, so slow to part we might as well have gotten out and walked. When we finally arrived the car was facing the wrong way on the street, accordioned and blistered with airbags, spatters of glittering glass, all of it soaked with rain. A much larger truck had skidded to the other side of the road, the front barely crunched by comparison. The driver of the truck was sitting with his back against the lane divider, his legs curled up close to his chest, muttering something to the interviewing police officer. We stepped out into the blare of all the traffic headlights, the night so strangely quiet in a pure way, the tap of the drizzle on our jackets, smell of pine mulch spilled from the pickup truck bed, the pink-orange blossoms of the road flares lit by the police. We approached the car.
We saw her, although even now it’s hard to recall as exactly as I’d like, the position of her body, and was she really still breathing, which was the frame of the car and the fabric and which was her own body, the tang of bile and the deep arterial blood, almost black, the poisonous smell of burning metal, electronics, but we were able to extract her, neck collar and get the gurney underneath her, even as some of her leaked onto the car seat, then the concrete, then the pure white of the gurney cloth.
Erin was murmuring to the mother and I had my hand on her body, trying to find the sources of the blood. There were raw, clawlike scrapes on her face and neck, her chest where the cotton shirt had been shredded through. Now I was sensing her, the life inside her body was like the center of a forest fire, all I could feel was the red evacuation and orange breaking and tearing of blood vessels and subcutaneous tissue, her torqued spinal column, then the sudden blue flickers of the child inside her, its infant essence fading already.
I was in the back of the rig, hands on the body, we weren’t more than half a block from the wreck before I screamed at Erin to stop the ambulance.
“Are you kidding me?” Erin said, turning to face me, her hands steering the rig in a lazing slalom between the vehicles on the road in front of us, even as she watched my eyes.
“We take her to the hospital and the child dies,” I said.
“Fuck that,” she said.
“They’ll have to choose between the mother and the child,” I said. “You know what they’ll choose.”
“That’s their job.”
“I can do more,” I said.
“No,” Erin said.
“I’ll keep them both here,” I said. “No one has to choose anything.”
Erin shook her head.
“Erin,” I said. “You know me.” It was all I had. I didn’t even know me, but I had to pretend to something greater, and to invoke all the gory hours Erin and I had been through. We lurched to the side of the road and stopped. Erin jammed her palms into her eyes, saying fuckfuckfuckfuck, which I suppose was the best she’d give me, us stopped near a building, and the ambulance lights whapped red and blue and red along the windows.
“Three minutes,” Erin said. She punched the steering wheel. “That’s all, you hear me?”
I returned to my examination, the baby’s essence fading, the mother’s as well, her body less a fire now and more a lava river, molasses and a soft hum, the vibrations churning through my hands. I couldn’t find the spark, the life’s desire. Everything was falling apart at once, it was too much to hold, I had the vague sense that both of their lives were ready for flight.
Again I let my mind enter her body, I searched for the spark, the same as what I’d seen before, it was there but going. I was trying to find them both, the mother and the child, to hold them at once and then shove everything broken back together, as I’d done with the dog in the alley. But nothing happened; it was quiet. My brain was clenching so tight that there was a tearing feeling below my waist, a sheet of something hot on my own quadriceps, only later was I able to identify it as urine, rusted with whatever had been beaten out of my kidneys by the force with which I tried to revive the lives underneath my hands. Still I couldn’t find inside the mother any source of light.
“Almost,” I lied.
“No time,” Erin hollered. “I’m driving.”
There, did it flicker, there was another, a distant lightning bolt at the edges of the mother’s horizon, I sent everything I had at it, every part of me that could wrestle with her life, convince it to contain itself, to begin the repair, even as I tried to imagine what that repair would look like: start with the gashes and ripped places, seal them, begin the amassing of platelets and the thatching of fibrin protein, clot please clot please clot, and your oxygen to the child, and the volts to their hearts and brains so that everything still has the hum and pump that I feel no longer, and the wounds again, stitch yourself, stitch yourself, the light went out.
“Wait, okay, wait, please, you’re cold. Not yet,” I said, “you’re cold. Not yet.” Then the vague knowledge that the rig was moving. The shrieking sirens. I was outside of her again, resident only in myself, looking down at the mother’s body and beginning the resuscitation techniques they train us in, the only thing left.
By the time we arrived at the hospital the mother’s blood had flowed arterial dark, then slowed, skin ashen, uterus wall still curved where the child was silent inside her. Every revival I’d attempted—defibrillation, chest compressions, rescue breaths—was met only with chill and limp apathy from the mother’s body. We’d jerked to a stop at the emergency room, Erin opened the doors and sobbed at the sight, it must have been the gray and blue colors of the mother, even as the crew of nurses rushed the rig, a wave of clatters and yanks and cracking voices that broke over us and pulled away the mother’s husk to what I already knew would be her final resting place.