Read Online Only Children by Rafael Yglesias - Free Book Online Page B

another preoccupation while he waited in the trench for the next round of shelling—namely, whether Gomez was back asleep in his chair or lying dead in a pool of blood on Ninth Street. Along with that came the humiliating memory of his own cowardice and passivity. He had been impressed with Nina’s behavior on the street, until, in a discussion while they waited for the nurse to give her an enema, he discovered that Nina had never seen the switchblade; indeed, she argued vehemently that it didn’t exist. Until then, because Nina and the cabdriver had been so casual at the scene, Eric assumed he had exaggerated Gomez’s jeopardy. But if Nina didn’t know about the knife, then perhaps they had made a fatal error. Eric didn’t want to bring his child into the world already owing God one life.
    Such thoughts were driven from his mind by the increased pace of Nina’s agony. He had a mounting dread of the end result. Ephron seemed nervous now. At first, her reaction to Nina’s pain had been impatient and stern. Ephron pushed Eric out of the way and took over coaching Nina, shouting at her, holding her head so she’d make eye contact, even scolding her. Eric got angry at Ephron, wanted to fire her on the spot, but of course, that was impractical. For a while Ephron’s brutality worked. Nina did the breathing, and it seemed to distract her from the pain. But when the internal heart monitor (a clear disk smeared with a sticky ointment) was inserted inside Nina onto the baby’s head—the thin multicolored wires running out of Nina to the beeping machine made it seem as though she had a phone inside—Nina had to lie flat on her back to avoid disconnection. The pain then overwhelmed everything, and Ephron started administering drugs.
    They’d been warned repeatedly that hospital procedures such as the internal heart monitor made back labor worse, that painkillers didn’t really stop the hurt; they simply disoriented the patient, making the memory less vivid in time, but not soothing it at the moment. Ultimately, what they had learned merely made it clear that with back labor everything would conspire against them. Eric told himself to insist to Ephron that they disconnect the machine and let Nina get on her feet so the pressure on her spine would be lessened, but he knew that the counterargument would be the danger of not tracking the fetus’s heart—that if something did go wrong, and the baby died, Eric would have to live with the responsibility for a lifetime.
    This situation, which made all the childbirth advice and training useless, reminded Eric of his work as an investment counselor. What was Nina’s pain worth? It seemed like a stock decision in the midst of a panic. If you hang on, you can come out a big winner most of the time, but there is always the once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe to fear, the slight chance whose consequences are so grave that no victory is worth the risk.
    So he let events topple on him, not wanting the burden of decision to fall on him, preferring someone else to take the responsibility of disaster. But he hated himself for this, knew that it was his worst fault, that it had been his father’s weakness, that it was what held him back from being a great man.
    And reliance on anyone else was always wrong. He could see Ephron’s confidence and resolve weaken. Nina’s wild thrashing and incoherent pleas got stronger and more urgent, rather than diminishing, and Ephron’s predictions of when the end would come, when Nina could begin to push, kept being wrong. It was over an hour longer than Ephron had originally guessed, and Nina hardly seemed human. Her skin was like translucent china; her pupils were huge, filled with terror and confusion; her rich brown hair was soaked, a colorless wet mop stuck to her skull. She seemed so weak, barely able to lift her head, that to expect her to have enough strength to push out the baby was absurd. Always, always, it had been Eric’s assumption that