Before Sunrise

It was too soon, and I wasn’t ready. But life doesn’t care if you are ready, and on that cold winter evening, while the sunset at 4:30 pm, it began.

I was trudging through the snow from the bar at the end of my shift, cursing the cold. How could 17 degrees feel colder in Boston than it had in the Midwest? Maybe it was the clothing; no one wore long underwear in Boston.

“What I wouldn’t give to be in some long underwear now,” I mumbled, my breath rising in a plume in front of me.

It was a thought that brought the past into the present. I tried never to think of it, but saying it aloud changed everything.

In that moment, though, it was just a twisting pang in my gut, enough to make me double over to catch my breath for a moment.

It is nothing to worry about, I tell myself. It has been the stock phrase I have used to carry me through the last eight years—whenever it seemed scary or impossible, I would reassure myself there was nothing to worry about. So far, I had always survived.

In the half mile home, gut-wrenching pain stops me twice. I worry in spite of myself.

At home, I rush to the radiator in the kitchen as soon as I am through the door, kicking my boots off as I run. It hisses and clanks as I turn the dial up, and I whisper my gratitude to its metal form.

I train my mind only on thawing, but my body demands my attention. The pain inside me is growing in urgency. I cannot deny it—the baby I’ve mentioned to no one, the one I pretended wasn’t real, is coming. Now.

My mother had been a midwife in our little Midwestern community, and I’d been at her side for many births. I know what is coming—and that it is too soon.

My thoughts race but go nowhere.

I smell Aziza before I see her—the patchouli smell of her wafting towards me. I turn towards the door, expecting her usual nonsense. She is the sweetest girl I have ever met, but the strangest.

“Eve…I was just communing with the spirits,” she starts. I roll my eyes, but she continues. This is how many of our conversations start. “I was informed you need to go to the hospital? You know I don’t believe in Western medicine, but the spirits were clear. Do you need me to drive you?”

My breath catches. I have dismissed every spiritual message Aziza has given me as nonsense, but now this. I notice my mouth is hanging open and snap it shut.

I shake my head at her and try to change the topic.

“Are you going out tonight?” I ask, trying to sound casual. She ignores me.

“You know I cannot ignore a message from God.” I see she has her keys in her hand, twisting the key ring around her finger.

I worry she knows more than she is letting on.

Another wave of pain hits me, bringing me to my knees.

“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” I say. I sound more assured than I feel.

“Well, I did a rune reading, just to understand the message. And I know I shouldn’t have asked about you without your consent, but…are you having a baby?”

I see no way out of this question.

I rest my face on the linoleum floor, child’s pose. She comes to sit next to me and rubs my back.

“You can tell me; I won’t be mad.” She says.

My throat catches when she says that—a bubble of fear releasing, letting me breathe for the first time since I saw the test.

“Yes,” I say, my voice muffled against the floor.

Aziza keeps rubbing my back—quiet, waiting.

“I didn’t think it would stay. I helped a friend have an abortion once, and I assumed I would never be able to have children. That’s what my mom said would happen. I know it sounds stupid, but…Anyway, when I didn’t miscarry, it felt too late to tell anyone.” I tell the floor.

I hear the childish petulance in my voice. What Aziza must think of me.

“My mother was a midwife. Before I left, I helped her deliver a lot of babies. I can do this on my own, but you will want to leave. I can’t go to the hospital. They will accuse me of aborting the baby, but I didn’t. Also, I have -$77 in my bank account.”

The words come out in a rush. She stays quiet, keeps rubbing my back.

Her tenderness unnerves me. Curled on the floor, I feel bare and vulnerable. I need to shower—wash the confession, the mention of my mother, off me.

It was too much to say out loud. Even that little bit.

It feels like too much, and I’ve said almost nothing. I turn the water up as hot as I can and step in—trying to purify myself, boil away the memories.

But the boiling water seems to bring bubbles of memory rising to the surface. One after another, broken only by contractions.

I am five and riding in the bed of my father’s pickup truck on the way to church, my older siblings’ hands clutched in my own.

Ten—helping my mother deliver a baby for the first time. Antiseptic and soft whispers.

Thirteen—my mother tells my father she is worried about Leydia; he tells her to mind her own children. I watch Leydia closer, trying to see what my mother sees.

Sixteen—Leydia is pregnant. Her mother punched her in the face. For all our community’s talk of God, they punish her. They look away from her father, the father of the baby, but say nothing. We take a midnight bus out of town hand in hand, seeking safety.

Seventeen—alone in the women’s shelter, penniless.

I succumb to the memories and sit down on the floor of the tub. I let the scalding water pummel my skin. The memories come until the water runs cold.

I climb out of the tub and dry myself off. My fingers have gone pruney.

I know I cannot hide in the bathroom forever. I dread facing Aziza, who will be waiting, car keys within reach. She would learn to deliver this baby if I asked her to; that is just who she is. It makes me uncomfortable.

Less uncomfortable, however, than the wrenching pain inside me.

“Stay in there, little one,” I whisper to the baby as I pull on a bathrobe. “I am not ready yet.”

I don’t know whether the baby can hear me yet.

I wonder if this is how birth is for all women—memories flashing, body screaming. I wonder how anyone survives this.

I walk into the living room to find another woman kneeling over a basket of supplies, facing away from me. Aziza is hanging string lights, she pauses, arms stretched overhead when she sees me.

“Eve, I called a doula from my healing collective. She can help you deliver the baby and…” her voice falters.

The woman picks up where Aziza left off after a moment.

“I can bury your child up north. I was going up there in the morning with my sisters, anyway. I can give them a proper burial, with no hospital or police involved.”

The woman keeps riffling through the basket and does not look up as she says this. I wonder if she is feigning distraction to give me a moment to process what she is saying. But I can’t because the voice yanks me back in time.

Because she is not looking at me, she does not know I am reeling; she continues.

“If the baby breathes, we will have to call an ambulance.”

I cannot focus on what she is saying at all; her voice sounds exactly like…

“Leydia?” I ask the woman’s back. Her shoulders stiffen, then I watch her take a deep breath and drop her shoulders.

The woman turns to me. There is my friend, the person who brought me into, and abandoned me in this new life. The friend I was trying to wash out of my memory, now stood in my living room.

“Ah, Eve… you don’t go by Evelyn anymore,” she says, nodding.

My voice is so much smaller than I intend it to be when I ask, “How are you here?”

A flash of annoyance runs across Aziza’s face.

“I told you, Eve. I called her. She works at my healing collective.”

But I just stare at Leydia, waiting. I can see her weighing her words, but I am impatient. I have somehow summoned her from the past.

How. Is. She. Here?

My confusion and my resentment merge into hostility. I would like to blame the hormones… but whatever the reason, I am shouting before I realize it.

“I left my home, my community, to keep you safe. I traveled across the country with you, for you. And then, within days, you rob me blind and leave me at a women’s shelter, Leydia. And now you are here. Is this a curse? Have you come, a ghost of abortions past, to warn me about my sins?”

Aziza is standing on the ladder, gaping at me. I have never heard Aziza raise her voice at anyone in all our years living together.

Leydia is quiet.

I would have stormed away or grabbed her arm and shoved her towards the door, but a contraction ripped through me and doubled me forward. I vomited on the floor. Aziza seemed relieved to have something to do, even if it was cleaning up vomit.

Leydia reaches for my arm and, against my better judgement, let her guide me towards the couch. She and Aziza had cleared a space and set up a nest for me.

She sits next to me and takes my hand. They are shaking with rage and pain, but somewhere in me there is also an exhaustion—I am tired of running from myself, from her.

So I let Leydia hold my hands and look into my eyes.

“I went home.” She starts. I cut her off immediately.

“We took seven trains to Boston for you to have an abortion and then you went home? We could have taken a day trip to Indianapolis; we didn’t have to come all the way here.” I spit the words at her.

She acts as if she does not hear me.

“I was scared. You were so brave and willing to change, cutting your hair, leaving everything we knew behind. I wanted my old life. You were thriving in your new one.”

I drop her hands and stand up to pace, but within seconds I am on my hands and knees in pain again. She kneels in front of me on the floor, places her hands on my hands.

I want to accept her gentle touch, but I also need her to explain away all these years of resentment.

“How are you here?” I repeat.

“I went home, and I had the baby. He was born still and disfigured.”

There is a beat of silence in which we both think of my baby, its limited chance of survival.

She continues.

“My father didn’t change, no matter how hard I tried. I was pregnant again within months. That time, your mother gave me herbs to end it and invited me to apprentice with her in delivering babies, to heal my relationship with birth. I wanted out of the house, so I went. I learned. When I noticed my father looking at my younger sisters, your mother and I planned for me to return east with them. She found me a spot at the healing collective. Your father drove us to the train station, and then they bought our tickets. I live in the city with my sisters. We have been back for three years.”

I want to ask more, hear more about my parents. I want to hear her apologize more, explain more. There is a yearning inside me bumping against the ebbing frustration. All these things I have wanted to ask but have denied, but the baby has decided it is ready even if I am not.

“I am sorry,” she says, just as I say, “thank you.”

The birth is long and painful. I could not have done this without Leydia’s coaxing, encouragement or Aziza’s body behind mine, bracing against me. Each of us cries in shifts, though I imagine we are all crying for different reasons.

Grief. Healing. Loss.

When at long last the baby is out, I let Aziza cradle me softly. I have never been so tired. I feel I could drift off to sleep right then.

But Leydia is yelling.

“She wants to live, quick, call 911!”

There is a flurry of activity. Leydia is giving my daughter CPR. She is the size of Leydia’s hand.

“She has the same willful, stubborn energy as her mom!” Leydia says through tears.

“Mom,” I repeat back. “I am a mom.”

I want to hold her, this baby whom I did not believe in. Cradle her to my chest. But Leydia cannot stop the chest compressions, so I stroke her tiny head, touch the back of her little hand.

I have never seen anything so small. I think of how strange it is that she came into this world in a way that closed the circle on Leydia and my story. Her birth stymied the resentments and pain that had been fueling me.

Then there are the flashing lights outside, and the EMTs are rushing the baby and me into the back of the ambulance just as the sun begins to creep over the horizon.

“Prepare the NICU, mom and premie baby post home birth.” The EMT squawks into the radio.

“Hope,” I tell him. “The baby’s name is Hope.”