Page 26 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

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“But,” Murr says, his cheeks suddenly flushed, “we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, we must find a woman to carry this pregnancy.”
ing Agnes of running through the backyard sprin- klers all through the heat of summer when she and Beth were small.
Agnes’s obstetrician expected her to go into labor early given the extent of her dilation at thirty- eight weeks, but it doesn’t actually begin until two days after her due date. She is standing in her white nightgown in her sister’s kitchen fix- ing breakfast for her niece and nephew when she feels a warm whoosh of fluid down her legs. “Oh, oh,” six-year-old Tulia says. “Aunt Aggie had an accident.”
For a time it seems as if the two women are breathing together, and all the while Rochelle,
her fine flaxen hair grazing Agnes’s cheeks, keeps sponging Agnes’s forehead with a cool cloth that smells of lavender. And then it gets agonizingly hard again, and the nurse and Rochelle help Ag- nes into an almost upright position, and the nurse tells her “to push with all you’ve got.” Agnes doesn’t remember much after that, until, at eight pounds two ounces, Joshua Leo Goldman comes crying into this life just before dawn on May the twenty-fourth.
Staring down at her soaked gown, at the puddle on the floor, it takes a moment for Agnes to regis- ter what’s happening. “No, Tuli dear,” Agnes says, “my water broke. The baby’s coming.”
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These images are pierced by wave after wave of contractions that cut deep into her, so that she screams with a primal force. Fourteen hours later, she doesn’t think she can hang on any longer, but Rochelle squeezes her hand, and speaks in the most soothing tones, “You’re almost there. Just keep breathing.”
Tulia stands there blinking in the bright light, and then she says, “Should I get Mommy? Maybe you need Brown Bear to help. Are we going to go to the hospital now? I can get your pink suitcase.”
How much time passes before Agnes is gazing at the wrinkled, purplish face of this tiny human being who grew inside her for nine months,
she doesn’t know. All she knows—all she re- members later—is the love that fills her when she nurses him that first and only time, a love
Agnes smiles, relieved it’s happening at last, de- spite the fear that courses through her. “Yes,
we are,” she says. “Wake up your mom, and yes, please get my suitcase.”
Within the hour, Agnes is admitted to her hospital room which looks more like a hotel suite with its pull-out sofa, gilt-framed pictures, not to mention the television opposite the hospital bed, as if she could even think about television right now. Leo and Rochelle Goldman, whom she phoned before leaving the house, are already waiting for her.
so complete she almost forgets that she must surrender to this couple this brand new person whose kicks and turns she felt for so long they became a part of her.
“The baby’s coming,” Leo says to Agnes, who nods, smiles, allows him to take her hand. His own is warm, sweaty. Rochelle, a wispy blonde with pale skin and equally pale, green eyes, takes Agnes’s other hand. And soon the doctor is there, and the nurses, and within the hour she is squatting on the floor in the throes of an experience she will never be able to describe afterwards. Eight hours in, Rochelle produces popsicles for Agnes to suck on, the too-sweet grape and strawberry remind-
Three days later, Agnes is back in her garage apartment at Beth’s house on an un-gentrified street on the fringes of Westlake. Friday evening, Agnes stands at the stove making scrambled eggs for eight-year-old Zach and little Tulia, who loves Aunt Aggie’s comfort food far more than her har- ried mother’s crock-pot chili and crunchy salads.
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“But where is the baby?” Tulia asks again, once