Sheehan I

CHEATERS INC. & DUMB LUCK LTD. Part 5 From The Chapter – The Dream

1.

Lindy felt the early tugs, her womb becoming tidal and loud, the fetus, turning, crying out a tiny beast. A braying sigh.

He calls to her. He calls to her.

And his voice moves against her flesh, an undulation, his kick a caress. His moment moaning, a lover’s groan of touching, trying to find that home, that light, he swims his lament to be.

2.

From the hospital room in January, I watch the ice, the city in ice sinking below us, and I watch the strangers in rubber gloves slip their hands inside Lindy, slip their fists and wrists into her, feeling for him.

The night passes into daylight, daylight into anxious night. Their hands are translucent in rubber gloves, her slime glistening along their fingers, her vulva, purple, swollen like a black eye or a cut deep on the scalp.

The baby’s pulse races and screams at all those hands probing.

I hold Lindy close and I count her breathing. I feel her breath in my face. I think about the baby’s breath, try not to think it, force a jovial patience, wait, eat sandwiches, watch the ice of the city watch the smoke stacks of the city and cars moving slowly over snowy roads.

I dream a remembering of Lindy, crossing the living room, bare feet padding across our blue carpet; I dream her moving in slow strides, strands of blonde hair shifting across her face, her smile, her breasts jiggling under her tee-shirt. She glides to me, deliberate and certain. After eight years of marriage, she takes my hand, whispers, “it’s time to make our baby.” I follow her.

I dream this baby to hurry, slowly, to take what it needs and hurry, slowly, so that nothing will stop our coming together.

The baby cries out, still inside her, and I watch and wait, slowly, slowly, I watch and wait.

3.

At the end of two days they take Lindy away, into the room where they might have to cut her.

I follow, confused, swept into a nightmare of red and black and running in place while the bogeyman comes.

The forceps are silver and shiny, and he holds them near that hole in her.

He says things to us and we nod, numb, exhausted, dumb as beasts, dumb as can be.

I am at her head speaking softly, it will be all right, our baby’s coming, it might be a boy, it will be a baby, baby, oh baby, just breathe. You’re doing so goooood oh baby, baby.

Nurses in blue uniforms move around us, circle like stupid birds around the doctor, his voice thick with authority.

He slides the silver steel inside her. I cannot see, but I guess her hole looks like an animal wounded, red, blue veins on an old man’s hand.

I watch and wait, whispering to Lindy, trying to be there but feeling my failing because I keep remembering other women. I remember them in cheap motels. I remember in an alley off city streets, and I remember, even, making this baby. I pushed myself hard inside Lindy, wanting to feel her feel it come. I remember my mother, drinking, bouncing off the walls, bunny-hopping off to bed my father drinking with her, both of them gone, gone away.

I always remember my grandfather hung himself in the back room of our house. I was four and in my jammies and Grandpa was swinging by his neck.

The steel is inside Lindy, and she breathes like an animal, and the doctor buzzes and the nurses hover, and I don’t want to remember anymore.

And they make him come.

He is purple and covered in muck, his face pinched from the steel he cries out, sucking air and begging, and I gasp, laugh, ride the light and love and dream of no more pain or loss– no more grandpa swinging from the light fixture, neck the color of a swollen vulva, no more Mommy giggling away away away, no more women I don’t know, wrapped around me in blind escape.

I dream hard the dream of knowing him, this baby boy coming to us;

Sheehan, Sheehan, of knowing and only remembering, And being with Sheehan.

He is out, hanging in the doctor’s hands, slick and red as a skinned animal.

I hold scissors and in the blue bright blush of surgical lights, I set the blades to the puce-white cord still connecting him to Lindy.

Something spins slowly around us, doctors, nurses, friends, Lindy, me, this new life blinking, confused, covered in meconium skin purple-white as a dead man’s forearm flesh.

When I press the blades together a single drop of blood, almost black in the blue light, seeps along the stainless steel and I hear the flesh separating, feel it ripping along the sheen of silver smeared barely waxen.

A single bird, small, leaps inside my chest, turning to pure spirit to pure joy as we watch, crying.

Could my father have felt this when he first saw me? Could his father before him? My grandfathers? Sheehan’s grandfathers?

The snip of my scissors sets him free. Sheehan, he becomes Sheehan now, and that bird inside me wings free too, wings, wings its way inside me.