Chapter Seven – Wade
I stepped onto the porch steps with the truck keys in my hand. She had her canvas bag already over her shoulder, and her hair was pulled back soft and loose the way she wore it when she wasn’t expecting anyone to have opinions about it. I liked it like that. Her flannel shirt bulged, showing her baby belly, and she looked at me with eyes that were awake but had not finished becoming so. She stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind her.
I took the bag from her without asking. She let me, which told me something about the morning.
She put both hands on the porch railing as she came down the steps, careful, her weight distributed and deliberate, and I moved beside her without crowding her, one hand ready at her elbow. She didn’t need it until the second-to-last step, where the frost had gotten into the grain of the wood and made it slick, and then my fingers closed around her arm and she steadied and we kept moving.
The truck cab was cold from sitting. The heater came on reluctantly when I turned the key, a low fan-noise building slowly into a mild warmth. The truck was old, with seats that were cracked along the backs and at the corners, and leather that had gone stiff in the cold. I adjusted the heater vent toward her side.
She had her bag in her lap. She set it on the floor after a moment and rested her head back against the seat and looked out at the world.
I pulled out of the yard and we were soon on our way.
“Sleep alright?” I asked.
“Some,” she said.
I nodded. “You eat something this morning?”
“Crackers.” She turned her head slightly toward the bag on the floor. “I have more in there.”
“Good,” I said.
I put both hands back on the wheel and kept my eyes on the road. The heater had found its rhythm. The frost on the edges of the windshield softened at the corners as the glass warmed. Outside, the fields rolled past in the grey early light, and she watched them go with the unfocused attention of a person whose mind is somewhere ahead of the road.
The silence between us was not a silence that needed managing. I had spent enough of my life in cars and trucks with people who couldn’t let quiet be quiet to know the difference… Rhett for one. But I did enjoy hearing the way the words eased off her tongue when she spoke.
The clinic sat on the edge of town where the highway widened and the buildings came apart again into scattered shapes: a gas station, a grain supplier, and then the low-built rectangle of the clinic with its fluorescent windows and its near-empty parking lot and the hand-painted sign above the double doors that someone had touched up recently enough that the edges of the letters were still sharp. I pulled into the lot and stopped close to the entrance and cut the engine.
She was already reaching for her bag.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
She looked at me. She let me take it.
The waiting room was the particular kind of room that exists only in rural clinics and small-county offices: plastic chairs in a row against the wall, a rack of pamphlets that had not been updated since somewhere around a decade prior, awindow with a sliding panel where a woman behind a desk looked up when we came in. The wall clock above the pamphlet rack ticked with the mechanical insistence of something that had been told once it was important and had never reconsidered that information.
I went to the desk and gave her name while she lowered herself into one of the plastic chairs. She pulled her journal from the bag and set it in her lap but didn’t open it. Her hands rested on the cover.
I went and sat beside her, forearms on my knees, and looked at the clock. It was loud enough that I understood why the pamphlets hadn’t been replaced. No one stayed in here long enough to want to read anything.
When the nurse appeared in the inner doorway and said Lila’s name, I stood first. I held out my hand, and she looked at it, and then took it and I helped her to her feet, and I gave the bag back to her as she settled her weight.
She paused in the doorway. “Come in,” she said, without making a question of it.
I followed her in.
The exam room was small and cool, tile floors and a paper-covered table and a monitor on a wheeled cart in the corner, its screen dark. The midwife was already there, a compact, efficient woman with reading glasses pushed up into her grey hair. She moved through her preliminary checks with the calm of someone who had done this ten thousand times and found it no less important for that. I stood near the wall with my hands at my sides and said nothing.
Then the midwife dimmed the lights.
She applied the gel with the brisk impersonality of a professional who has made peace with the awkwardness of the act, and she positioned the probe and turned toward the monitor, and the screen flickered to life. Blue-grey, grainy, a field of static that organized itself into shapes by degrees.
I walked over to get a closer view of the screen, and Lilas hand found mine.
She didn’t look at me when she did it, and she didn’t say anything. Her fingers just came across to where my hand was hanging at my side, and she found it, and I closed my fingers around hers and we both looked at the screen.
The image resolved. A curve of spine. It was small and articulated and unmistakable, each segment of it distinguishable in the grey light of the monitor. Then the flutter of the heartbeat, a rapid and absolute movement at the center of the image, a thing that did not slow and did not stop, the insistence of it was like a runaway train. Then, as the midwife angled the probe slightly, a face in profile. A forehead. The line of a button nose. A mouth, slightly open, the suggestion of a chin.
