Page 134 of Under Story

“How do we know that you’re telling the truth?” asks Eli.

“I always do,” the overtaker says, and for a moment, it seems a curse as torturous as theirs. Whatever is happening to Laurel and Eli and Silas will only happen once. The overtaker—life’s midwife, death’s witness—must watch it over and over.

“Just let me say this,” he says. “When Silas is ready, come to the cemetery. We’ll take care of you there.”

—

Laurel’s heartburn is constant. Her breasts make less milk. In the morning, she vomits her coffee.

Silas’s head softens. She can feel his heartbeat through the skull. She wants to protect him—to put him inside something.

One night, Laurel is in bed when a cramp radiates to her thighs. She girds herself, enduring it. The second is worse.

Silas sleeps strapped to her chest. Laurel hobbles to the bathroom, where Eli is taking a shower. He sees her through the glass door.

“Contractions,” she says, and gasps.

Hurrying toward her, Eli nearly slips, which could, in another universe, be funny later on—after the birth, Laurel holding the baby while Eli told the story to visitors. She doesn’t want to let go of Silas, not for an instant, but the pain gives her no choice. Eli unwraps the sling the way he might the dressing on a wound. Silas is wrinkled and pink, already crying at the suddenness of this transition.

Crouched, holding herself, Laurel has a desperate thought. The overtaker said that Silas couldn’t live for long outside her body—but if she withstands the contractions, could they buy another week? A month?

Laurel opens her mouth to tell Eli, but then she looks at her son. Silas writhes with discomfort. She is the solution, the end to his suffering. And only he can end hers.

“The cemetery,” she says.

Eli puts Silas in his infant car seat. Laurel staggers out of the house in a nightgown, too animal to stop for shoes. They drive for less than two blocks. The graveyard looks tidy as ever. Even at this hour, guards helm the white building, which glows in the light of the moon.

Laurel has wondered why she often sees pregnant women on the benches.

Oval, white, the dome rests in the ground like an albatross egg on its nest.

—

Rhythm of feet. Wheels, shouting. The car door opens, and nurses transfer Laurel to a gurney.

A rapid flight through cold night air before the rush of sliding doors. The ground beneath the stretcher turns from gravelly to smooth, the light from dark to bright: they have entered a waiting room. Laurel hears the rattle of carts, the rustle of curtains, the ringing of pagers and phones. Above a desk are four painted words: Newborn and Infant Clinic.

She is wheeled onto a ramp, which spirals upward. The skylight is dark at this hour, and reflective. She watches their small party: herself, on the stretcher; Eli, holding Silas; and the nurse pushing the gurney, her voice steady and warm.

On the lower floors, they pass ancient-looking men and women in wheelchairs. Some of these patients are alert as babies; others barely stir. “Excuse me—” says a different nurse, and Laurel sees an old woman on her own gurney, crying lustily, her frail hair matted with dirt. There is dirt, too, in the folds of her face, which looks shocked as a just-picked vegetable. Her arms and legs are covered in mud as if in the vernix of birth.

The old woman is gone, then, whisked to her own floor. After that, the ramp becomes quiet. The nurse leads them to the second-highest level.

When the door opens, Laurel hears the babies. They cry every kind of cry: screaming, whimpering, wailing. The frenzy galvanizes Silas, who adds his own voice to the chorus. As Laurel glides down the hallway, she can distinguish individuals. Behind most doors is a single baby, soothed by the nurses or parents. From one larger room, though, comes a cacophony of voices. With her senses heightened by hormones, Laurel perceives at least a dozen.

Where are their mothers? In her state, the atmosphere of that room—its forlornness and abandonment—is as intolerable as the fact that she cannot change it. For this, Laurel realizes, is no ordinary hospital. It has two purposes: beginning and end, nursery and morgue.

—

Her own room. Soft lighting, soft voices, soft hand on her arm. A doctor and a delivery nurse, knowing what is coming, meet Laurel where her knowledge leaves off. The nurse helps her into a gown. Laurel crawls onto the bed. Eli watches, helpless in scrubs, as the doctor measures Laurel’s cervix with her fingers.

“You’re already dilated,” the doctor says, and Laurel begins to cry.

“Can I hold him?” she asks. “One more time?”

The nurse peels the gown back from her chest, so that Silas can lie skin-to-skin. His bellows turn to whimpers when her eyes meet his.

“Bigger than the world,” she whispers.