Mary and O’Neil

A fresh energy fills O’Neil, and he decides he can make it; there’s a candy machine in the hallway, and he asks Rachel-back for the night shift, still with her happy smile and jokey button-if she’d mind getting him something, anything, to tide him over. O’Neil telephones Mary’s parents in Mi

In bed Mary raises her thighs with her hands and bends her chin to her chest. “Can I push now? Oh please… I… want… to… push.”

O’Neil takes her hand. “Can she?”

“I’d say you already are,” Dr. Sullivan says.

Mary in labor, dreaming of crows: she is on her knees, vomiting into the snow and corn stubble, and when she looks up she sees them-their glistening beaks and dark eyes on her, on the terrible thing she’s done. Her car idles on the side of the road behind her. At the clinic they told her she should not drive. A baby, she thinks; I am twenty-two and it was a baby.

The vision scatters; her next contraction comes, obliterating her, every memory she has ever contained. It bears down on her in a black cone, a roar enveloping her like a subway bursting from its tube into the station, only the train does not stop. It roars and roars, full speed past the platform, the air around her shuddering with the heat and weight and noise of it. A chorus of voices tells her to push, and Mary knows she is. Like a flock of birds, every atom of her body turns and points itself toward pushing, but the place where force must be applied is deep within her, a point of light that moves whenever she looks at it. If she can find it, she knows, the light will become a face, her daughter’s face, and the baby will be born.

How much time has passed, she does not know. Behind the drapes the sun has set, but Mary ca

It is after eleven by the time Mary and the baby are settled down in their new room, where a cot has been wheeled in for O’Neil to spend the night with them. Their little girl is small, just six and a half pounds, and wearing a diaper and T-shirt that looks to O’Neil as tiny as doll clothes. Propped up in bed with Nora in her arms, Mary opens her robe and guides her to her breast; the baby latches on at once, her pink mouth pulling at Mary’s flesh in a languid rhythm that seems to O’Neil a pure force of nature. He strokes Mary’s hair, then gives one finger to Nora, who wraps her fingers around it and squeezes. She tugs at it to match the cadence of her mouth. O’Neil feels his knees buckle. “Wow,” he says.

When Rachel comes to change the baby’s diaper, O’Neil leaves the two of them in the room and takes the elevator down to the ground floor to find something to eat. But the truth is, he’s too tired to eat, or even sleep. What he wants is a moment alone with the idea of the day and what has happened: that he has watched his wife have a baby, and that her name is Nora. He wouldn’t mind standing a minute outside, someplace quiet and ordinary, even if it means standing by the Dumpsters. He passes the cafeteria, which is closed, and beyond it a room with vending machines, and a small lounge where someone in a white coat, a doctor or nurse, is lying on a sofa reading a People magazine in the dark. Then someone comes through a door O’Neil hadn’t noticed, and he realizes he has found what he is looking for.

The door opens onto a little portico, with a wheelchair ramp leading down to the lawn and a large ashtray full of butts. More cigarettes are scattered on the ground. O’Neil looks around, and sees that he is at the back of the hospital. It would be the right time, he thinks, to smoke, but he doesn’t; he wishes he did. There is a stretch of grass beyond the portico, and what looks like a garden with beds of flowers and a bench. The moon has risen, and everything is very still.

In the little room of vending machines O’Neil finds a pay phone and calls his in-laws in Mi

“Hello?” It is a woman’s voice, groggy with sleep. “Honey?”

“I’m sorry,” O’Neil says. He thinks at first she is an older woman, then that she is young, then neither; old or young, he doesn’t know. “I didn’t mean-”

“Honey? What time is it?” He hears the woman turn over, and then the scratch of the alarm clock on her bedside table as she pulls it toward her. “Is it midnight?” she asks. “Where are you?”