Chapter 22: Labor

The hospital was a different one.

I had picked it myself, a small place by the river, with no yellow hallway.

Word got out anyway.

By midnight there were reporters across the street, and people with candles, and a woman holding a sign that said *WE BELIEVE HER*.

I did not see any of it.

I was in a room with a white ceiling, and a contraction had just taken my whole body in both hands.

"Breathe," the nurse said.

"I am breathing!"

"Breathe differently."

Quincy had not left my side in eleven hours.

He sat on the edge of the bed with my fist in both his hands, in a wrinkled shirt.

He had not complained once about the way I'd crushed his fingers.

"You're doing it," he said.

"I hate you."

"Okay."

"I hate you and I hate this and I want to go home."

"We are home, almost."

"Shut up."

He laughed, and I wanted to hit him, and then another contraction rolled up my spine and I forgot everything.

I screamed.

I had been quiet for five years, in a garden, in a cellar, in a cathedral.

Now I screamed until the nurses laughed, and I did not care who heard.

It was my voice.

It was mine.

The nurse opened the blinds an inch.

Across the street the candles had multiplied.

A woman in a nightgown held up a sign that said *WE BELIEVE HER*, and under it, in a child's handwriting, *GO SUZETTE.*

At two in the morning a man in a dark suit came to the door, and a nurse stopped him with her arm.

"Mrs. Reichart," he said over her shoulder. "I represent Mr. Stockwell. I have a court order."

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