“I never did this, Maddie, not with any of my four,” Billie said. “Maybe you can help her out.” And then she added, “I’d sure appreciate it.”
Madeline briefly scanned the room. The aunt. The uncle. The cousins. A hospital room, a decent one: big, pastel-y. At least so far as you could tell with the black-out shades drawn and the lights mostly off. Billie darted around, picked up everything in the room, smoothed it out, elaborately folded it, smoothed it out again, then stacked the folded garments into piles, then re-organized the piles.
Savannah sat cross-legged at the head of the bed, looking even younger and smaller than usual. She stared up at Madeline, expressionless, and motioned Madeline to come closer for a hug. At Savannah’s knee, awake in that newborn state of wide-eyed, alert, perfect calm, lay the baby. The Baby. THE BABY.
The brand-new mother’s mouth fell slightly open as she looked up at Madeline. Savannah’s usual saucer-round blue eyes were glazed and lost, deep-set within purplish circles of sleep deprivation and the smudged charcoal remains of days-old eye liner.
“Um, you have to…kind of…give it to him from above. Get it into his mouth from…above.” Knowing that her words were meaningless, Madeline made emphatic hand motions of thrusting some imaginary object from a higher to a lower point in the middle of the air of the hospital room, as if this would explain everything. She looked over at Billie. A vein stood out on the side of Billie’s neck .
Savannah’s mouth opened a hair wider, a combination of determination and bewilderment that stabbed at Madeline’s heart.
Savannah lifted her baby, then grabbed her breast and bobbled it at the teeny newborn’s head as if it were a water balloon she was hoping to get through the eye of a needle.
“I think your nipple needs to be harder, for him to be able to latch on.” Pause. “I think you need to…sort of…pinch your nipple…a little.” Madeline made exaggerated pincers of her thumb and fingers.
There was a distinct gap between anything that Madeline said and Savannah’s response. It was as if someone hit the pause button for a second—the second it took to penetrate the layers of Vicodin for the pain of her vaginal tear, her exhaustion, her bewilderment, and the effort of trying like hell to soldier through. The pause, during which her face remained entirely blank, was then followed by a perfectly normal reply. Laughter at a funny remark. A nose wrinkle for something gross. After the pause, she was in every way herself. Whether it was the bizarre lag time in Savannah’s speech, or Billie’s perpetual motion, or the birth of a baby boy to a fifteen-year-old, an air of taut apprehension pervaded the room. Madeline felt as if she could wave the tension into eddies with her hand .
Savannah made game attempts to adjust the newborn into the crook of her elbow with one arm, while placing her fingers on the outermost edge of her nipple, all the while trying to figure out how to “give it to him from above,” like Madeline had said. “Like this?” she asked.
“Um, I’m not sure if he’s in a good position. I think his head may be a little bit too far away. From the breast. Your boob.”
Savannah looked from her baby boy’s head, to the breast that lay in her hand, to Madeline, and her mouth again fell open. She was exhausted, and not understanding, and trying so hard, and wanting to try even harder, and wanting to give up.
Madeline looked around the room, and said to Savannah, “Would it help…do you want me to get on the bed with you?”
“Yeah yeah yeah yeah,” she said. “Yes.”
“Yeah, you go head, Mad.” Billie waved Madeline toward the bed, her fists clenching and re-clenching as she spoke.
The aunt, the uncle, the cousins, who had been murmuring among themselves with downcast eyes, decided at this point that they would excuse themselves and get refreshments. Madeline edged over to the side of the bed and sat down with a tender tentativeness. Seated a respectful distance from Savannah, Madeline tucked one leg underneath the other, letting her foot dangle casually off the side, in an attempt to project calm confidence. And with the simple movement of raising her rear end slightly off the bed to tuck her leg, she got her first real glimpse of newborn Dylan Roy.
Tears threatened to well, pour, spring from her eyes. The sum of tears inside her threatened to flood the room. Billie, still holding a pile of meticulously-folded things, Savannah still cross-legged on the bed with her mouth agape—they would be swept up in a great salty tide and whisked down the corridor, past roomfuls of astonished new mothers cradling infants, while Madeline swooped up Dylan and saved him. She saves him. She seizes him and holds him and swaddles his blanket tight and rubs her cheek against his newborn hair and smells his skin and makes a pact, a pact that very instant that she will do anything in the world to protect him, anything at all, forever, she will do anything she needs to do for the rest of time as long as there is time, because he is there, and he is perfect, and he is new, and everything is possible for him, everything, he will have a good life, he will…
“MadMad? What should I do?”
Madeline fixed her gaze intently on Dylan, as if pondering the question quite seriously, until the dam inside of her that threatened to burst proved it would hold.
“Um, let’s try again.”
Savannah went through each step—positioning Dylan, squeezing her nipple, then maneuvering the outer third of her breast so it came down to Dylan’s mouth from above. After each separate move, she looked back to Madeline, and Madeline nodded.
Savannah squeezed her nipple and urged it toward Dylan’s mouth. Dylan instinctively nuzzled against it, rooting, moving his head from side to side, each time latching on for a mere second, only to have it slip from his lips.
“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” Savannah said.
“You’re both getting it. Really. You both just need practice. And time,” Madeline said.
“Can you help me?”
“Help you?” Madeline said. “Like, how?”
“I don’t know. Can you…show me?” Holding her breast in one hand and the infant in the other, Savannah gestured with her head.
Madeline shifted on the bed so she sat close against Savannah, whose nipple had softened and flattened once again. “OK you need to squeeze your nipple again. So it’s hard. Again.”
“Can you do it?”
“You want me to do it?” Madeline attempted to say casually.
Savannah nodded. “Yeah. Can you just…do the whole thing?”
“Do the whole thing?”
Madeline put a great deal of work, an enormous effort, into acting as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had done this a million times. Madeline reached for the breast of a fifteen-year-old girl. She squeezed the nipple, and she directed the breast from a position slightly above Dylan’s head into his eager, expectant mouth. For a few fleeting seconds, Madeline felt she had been given a magnificent gift. In a featureless hospital room, with an exhausted adolescent mother whose breast she held in her own hand, she had been granted a moment of profound grace.
“It’s starting to hurt,” Savannah said.
“Yeah. Well. Sure. It’s all new. It can hurt a little for a while,” Madeline recognized the voice she had used so many times with her own two children, when they were their most scared, their most in need of comforting encouragement—most in need of a mother.
“No, I mean, it really hurts,” Savannah said.
“Oh. Are you doing OK?”
“They gave me this cream to put on. In case it hurt,” Savannah said.
“Oh. Great.”
“I think I should put it on now.”
“Oh. You want to stop now?” Madeline asked “Sure. That’s fine. That’s totally fine. Everybody thinks it’s gonna be totally natural, like it’s instinct or something. It takes a while. I mean, you’re both doing this for the first time! It…takes a while.”
“I want to try this cream. Can you take him and try to burp him?” Savannah asked. “I’m going in the bathroom.”
“You’re asking me if I’ll hold him?”
Billie turned her back and marched to the far corner of the room. Savannah eased herself off the bed with her hands, and said, “Hey, MadMad, can you do me a favor? Can you ask them if I can have some more pain killers? Everything’s hurting.”
“Sure. Of course.” Madeline cradled Dylan in the crook of her arm, madly in love .
Barbara Monier has been writing since the earliest days when she composed in crayon on paper with extremely wide lines. She studied writing at Yale University and the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, she received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize. It was the highest prize awarded that year, and the first in Michigan’s history for a piece written directly for the screen. She has three completed novels, You, In Your Green Shirt and A Little Birdie Told Me (published and available on Amazon) as well as Pushing the River.
Preorder Pushing the River HERE.