THE PAUSE

REBECCA WILLIAMS

It’s hot. Sweaty and fuzzy with exhaustion she groans and heaves her right leg up as she grasps the mahogany post of the bed. She groans again. Long and low and curved. Soft to loud at a steady rate, peaking at its loudest and holding there. I tell her to hold it there. Right there. Hold it longer than you think you can, I say and she hears and I know she hears because the groan does not change pitch or volume. Then it goes soft again. Sweat appears in tiny clear beads under her neck. They drip and join like little braided streams that flow into rivers down her back. They make tiny puddles on the floor near her feet where they mingle with drops of blood. I plunge my towel into the steel bowl of ice water and let it swell. I bring the soaked cloth to her shoulders as she settles, ready again for the cool relief of the water’s touch on her humid skin.

We have been at this all night, she and I. Occasional pauses in our work allow the midwife to come in, listen to the baby’s heartbeat, smile. And then we are back at it. Wave after wave brings her baby closer to shore and I remind her how to bear the force of the sea. When the sea comes to a rocky shore the waves are rough, violent, dangerous. When the sea comes to a sandy beach that slopes down to greet it, it comes in soft. I remind her to be soft. Permit the sea to come, let it swallow you. You will not die.

In a moment, she curls her hips under her body. She pulls down on the bed hard. She grits her teeth and I whisper in her ear: soften your jaw. Her face is red. I feel the heat coming off of it. Her jaw slackens and her mouth becomes a circle. The midwife places a blue-latex hand on her baby’s purple scalp. We pause. We breathe. She rests. Long, luxurious, drawn out moments go by. She is not asleep. She is not awake. She is slackened. No one speaks. We listen to each other’s breathing. Her long, slow, steady inhales and exhales ebb and flow and soon all the breathing in the room is like hers. Long. Slow. Waiting. Resting. I watch the heat that has settled on her evaporate off her shoulder in little translucent swirls.

A shift comes. Her rest yields to something else. She tightens and coils around it. Have you ever watched a constricting snake grasp and eat a rat? There is no tension in its squeeze. It holds its prey and narrows the space, but the snake does not narrow itself. It stays the same size. All its parts organize and coalesce around a single point of focus and holds until the rat, breathless, is swallowed.

Blood floods onto the towels on the floor, red, and damp, and slick. She stays where she is for a moment—hanging on to the bed. With her baby on the red floor, still attached to her, I place my arm under hers and guide her to sit where she is safe and cannot fall. Blood flows fresh. Her feet are stained with it, the inside of her legs streaked with red watercolor lines. She collects her purple child, damp and greasy and folded.

The placenta arrives. Dark and purple as a calf’s liver. The pale violet twists of cord fan out into it exactly as the roots of a tree coil around dirt and rock in their slow search for water and purchase. Their work is finished. She subsides, her belly soft and her baby nearby but farther from her than it has yet been. Blood and water are everywhere. There is much to do: cleaning and eating and nursing and making phone calls and opening gifts and signing paperwork and answering questions and taking medicines and sleeping and all of it waits. That’s on the other side. She is here. Midstream. A bifurcation appears where there was none. What was one channel flows in two. One there. The other, over there. The world is changed. She feels the current. Hers is here. Her child’s over there. They feel the pull of their own flows. They are swallowed whole.

REBECCA WILLIAMS is a farmer, painter, writer, outdoors-woman, mother, and sometimes birthworker who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. She is set to begin her MFA program in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University this August. Williams is interested in the relationships between the female body and landscape from a female perspective.