In the Midnight Room by Laura McBride

Author:Laura McBride
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Her contractions started in the morning.

They continued all day, and when she called the doctor’s office, they asked her to time them, and when she said they were coming every three minutes, they told her to go to the hospital, not to delay, and did she have a bag ready?

She had a bag.

Honorata had had little to do but prepare for this day for months, so she had a bag for herself and another for her baby, and on the top of that bag were the blanket and the cap the parishioner had knitted. She called the number of the taxi company she always used, but when she said she was having a baby and needed to go to the hospital, the dispatcher hung up. Frantic, she found the phone book someone had left under the brown leatherette couch in the main room. The front cover was ripped off, and Honorata was not sure how old it was, but there was an ad for a taxi company on the back cover. Shaking, she dialed it carefully.

When the dispatcher answered, she gave her address slowly, said she was ready right away, but not why she was going to the hospital. Then she stood outside on the sidewalk, and waited, and the taxi came in just minutes. The driver, from some African country—she couldn’t quite understand what he said to her: something about the baby, something about his wife—dropped her off at the emergency entrance, and she walked in by herself, doubling over when a contraction came, and carrying the two bags, one in each hand, like ballast.

The birth was easy.

Nanay had told her it would be easy—that her births were easy, and her mother’s too. When she said this, a look had passed across her face, and Honorata knew she was thinking that Honorata’s baby might be different, might not be like any other baby they had birthed. Her mother had this thought and decided not to say it, but Honorata had seen it, and her mother had seen her see it, and they said nothing of this to each other.

So Honorata was not counting on an easy birth, and yet it was.

Malaya was born just after midnight. When the nurse, a Pilipina, handed her the baby, already wrapped tightly in a pink blanket, with a pink bow fastened to a lock of hair that looked quite black, with her eyes squeezed narrow—from the antibiotic, the nurse said—and her face wide and red as a beet, Honorata experienced something she would later think of as the only true religious moment of her life. It was awkward to hold her, lying there almost flat in a bed, and the baby’s body wrapped too tight to fit naturally against her own, and yet the instant that she had the weight of her in her arms, the moment she looked into those ointment-smeared navy eyes, Honorata felt her own body begin to grow, as if the edges of her were expanding and then loosening,

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