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Outside it snowed, fat heavy flakes, and as she had every other day for the past three weeks, Marta wished today would be the day. Traveling the snow-covered highways to the hospital would be exciting, a story to tell later: a slippery ride to the emergency room, Darren avoiding a near accident or sideswipe that would make their pulses race, cause the contractions to quicken, make them worry their baby would be born on the side of the road—the way the grocery store cashier’s baby had been, delivered by the cashier’s own father, who had to stop the car on the busy highway, and the cashier had to lay across the back seat, skirt hiked up, not pushing at all, and the baby slid right out onto the green vinyl. The cashier had stopped moving the carrots and potatoes and onions across the scanner to tell her this, and now Marta thought it could happen to her, too. Hoped it could happen that fast, that easily—in the antiseptic safety of the hospital.

Marta had been pregnant for forty-one and a half weeks. It was time. Beyond time. She was impatient with the boredom. The baby needed to come out and occupy some of this endless space of time. Marta was no longer working; her belly got in the way as she pushed the residents around in their wheelchairs, helped them in and out of bed, on and off the toilet. The day she fell, in her thirty-ninth week, she officially started her maternity leave. It wasn’t a bad fall, more of an awkward tumble. Then a few contractions—false labor, they called it at the emergency room, but there was nothing false about the feeling. The baby could come any day, they promised, as they sent her home. Two and a half weeks later, here she was, still pregnant.

At home, she shuffled the same piles of mail and receipts on the shelf in the tiny nook where they paid bills. Old notebooks and college textbooks were lined up under the window in orange crates, kept in case they needed to reference something they had once learned. A few paperbacks, read two or three times each, stood alongside, and the hand-me-down parenting magazines and classic what-to-expect type books from her coworker whose kids were in school now. A few fat childbirth books from the library, too. She’d read all of them, was overprepared.

She scrubbed the kitchen—at least the parts that didn’t require bending at more than a thirty-degree angle from the waist. She wiped down the surfaces, polished the mirrors, and pushed the broom around before she allowed herself to go into the nursery and touch the plush sleepers and onesies in the drawer. “Don’t you want to wear this one?” Marta fingered a fleecy footed sleeper covered in lambs. She had found that one at a summer garage sale, tags still on. All of the blankets and soft things were laundered, with an extra rinse, and folded to look new. She closed her eyes. If she could coax the baby by sending cozy pheromones . . . the baby kicked. Marta smiled. The baby knew her, knew what she wanted, and was willfully resisting. She admired this strong will. It was needed in this harsh world.

During yesterday’s appointment, she learned her mucous plug was still firmly blocking the baby’s passage. Her uterus was still soft, without contractions (other than those false ones, eons ago, that did “no work,” according to her midwife). The baby had dropped lower toward the cervix, giving some hope that the birth would be this month, this month with thirty days left in it. Every day was a calculation of how much maternity time was being used up without the baby in her arms. Because this wasn’t maternity time at all. Family leave, medical leave, saved-up vacation time. Whatever the official name, it began the minute she took off work, was forced to take off work, baby or no baby. True maternity leave ought to start when the baby was born and not a minute before.

She tried to shovel the driveway, but the shovel kept catching on the puckered concrete and bumping into her belly. She wanted to go shopping, but the groceries were bought and the layette for the baby had been prepared for weeks now. She wanted to have the baby, but no twinges spurred her to call her midwife. Nothing was happening and nothing was about to happen. “The baby knows the right time,” the midwife, and everyone else, freely told her.

Marta had researched how to stimulate labor. Every single wacked-out idea was worth trying, one per day: mineral oil, sex, spicy food. How about stimulation of the nipples for fifteen minutes on the hour, every hour? She set the timer for fifteen minutes, massaged her enlarged nipples—one hand for each side—then reset the timer and waited for forty-five minutes, during which time she went back to boredom. The timer went off, she set the timer for a second fifteen-minute round of mammillae self-massage; the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome pressed on the nerves inside her wrists. Marta imagined continuing nipple massage throughout the next five days—a whopping total of 1,800 minutes of nipple massage—before giving up at bedtime, only because Darren needed some sleep without the bloody timer going off.

Boredom loomed, pelting her with dark seeds of frustration. Frustration, boredom: both involve a lack of action. Everything she read told Marta it wouldn’t be long now. How could she believe it? It all seemed so elusive rather than imminent. Time stretched as thin as the taut skin of her belly. Forever. She was living forever in anticipation of a baby that refused to be born. The glossy two-page spreads were wrong. Pregnancy was forever and Marta decided to boycott all of it and coast along on instinct instead.

“Come out, Babyface,” she singsonged, “come out. It’s time to get moving and vacate my body. It’s time. The time has come and the time is now—Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now!” Marta rubbed spirals on her belly. “Come out and I’ll read you the whole book.” A kick, softer this time. Marta sang of warm baths, tummy time, soft blankets, board books—anything that might coax the little neonate out of her body. She lifted her sweater and rubbed her belly.

The baby moved, something softer than a kick, a shoulder shrug maybe, or a leg stretch. Her belly skin stretched with the baby’s limb. Marta sighed. “You’ll have so much room out here to do that! This whole wide world is waiting.”

And that was it, wasn’t it? The world outside was waiting.

Marta bundled up—that took some time—and headed outside to beseech the universe for release. Darren had asked her to call if she went out, but he meant with the car. She had her un-smart cell phone packed in tight against her hip in case of emergency.

The wind bit at her face. She covered her nose with her scarf and surveyed the snowy vastness under which lay the driveway. She stomped through to the semi-cleared street. She passed the single-level cottage-style homes, that either had the one floor plan or the inverse. Houses built in the 1940s for those working at the nearby steel mills. But the steel mills weren’t booming anymore. Nothing was booming anymore.

If Marta pounded her heavy-soled boots against the snow-packed concrete, surely the baby would shake loose, cause her membranes to rupture, stimulate delivery.

Marta waited at the crosswalk, fresh snow thickening over the intersection. After the snowplow passed, Marta crossed Highway 8 and entered the historic homes section.

Large, graceful trees held sleeves of snow over the street. This neighborhood had sidewalks. This was where she’d walk and dream and plead for the baby to come out.

Marta stopped in front of a Victorian brick, watching the snow collect on the edge of the front porch. She closed her eyes and imagined living there, her baby peeking out of the narrow lattice window, waving to passersby. She imagined the Christmas wreath she’d hang on the heavy mahogany door, the tiny white lights she’d wind around the wrought iron railing, the evergreen garlands she’d drape on every post.

“Excuse me.” The gruff voice interrupted her reverie, startled her. Before Marta could squeeze to the side, the person brushed past her. Her eyes opened wide and her hands flung outward to steady herself. There was nothing to hold. All she registered was the person’s coat—a long, dark wool coat, the kind she’d want if she’d gotten the teaching job at the community college. She tipped forward. The coat marched onward. Gravity pulled Marta toward the tread marks imprinted in the snow, the tiny circular emblems, the miniscule snow clumps that had fallen from the tread crevasses—closer, closer, closer. She landed belly down on the sidewalk like a raw egg whose yolk squished around when cracked into the bowl. She twisted into a muffled heap, half on the sidewalk and half on the snow piled alongside. Sharp, iced points of shoveled snow, softened only by the fresh snowfall, dug low into her abdomen. The baby shifted heavily onto her left kidney. Marta rolled to her other side, holding her belly, and pushed herself up to sitting with her hands. Taking a mittened swipe at her forehead to wipe away the snow, she forced herself to her knees, then to her wobbly feet. She wasn’t hurt. She’d fallen before and nothing had happened. This was the same. She brushed the snow off her stomach, caressed the baby through the layers of her jacket, clothing, skin, embryonic fluid. “You all right, Babyface?” she said, and was answered with a nudge from within, an in-utero high five.

She squinted at the coat, shrinking smaller and smaller as it continued down the sidewalk, now only the size of her thumb. She reached up and blotted him out. Who brushes past a pregnant woman and then doesn’t turn around? Sure, the snow had silenced her fall. She hadn’t made more noise than a sharp intake of breath. She was used to holding in her surprise, from work. Didn’t the gruff-voiced stranger with the long wool coat know how physically unbalanced pregnancy made her? She marched after him, intending to inform his ignorance. The coat became pin-sized, then a speck, then was completely gone.

Good riddance, Marta thought. Good riddance, you damn coat.

The baby kicked sharply and Marta put her hand on her belly. “Sorry, oh sorry.” She didn’t mean to send adrenaline to the baby. She took a deep breath, then exhaled a cloudy lion’s breath up at the snowy sky. She trudged onward, up the winding streets, admiring the fretwork on one home and the snowy mansard roof on another. She rounded another corner, and there it was. The most majestic house of all, the one with wide sweeping tree limbs on either side of the front door, as if even the trees knew how to honor this house. A for-sale sign stood proudly in front, and next to that, a red and white sign: OPEN TODAY: 2–6 PM. On a Tuesday? Marta wasn’t going to argue with serendipity. Pulling back her mitten, exposing her wrist to the cold, Marta checked her watch. It wasn’t there. Oh yes, she’d stopped wearing it—her wrist had swelled and the watch Darren gave her years ago no longer fit. The light above the entrance was on, glowing dimly through the falling snow. She walked up the freshly shoveled walkway, which had already collected a lacy veil of snow. Cautiously she mounted the steps, making sure to hold the railing. Though, what the hell? Another fall could induce labor. She let go of the railing.

A small, spectacled man appeared and greeted her briskly. “Welcome! I didn’t think anyone would come in this weather, but we already had it listed in the paper. This one is a beauty no matter what.” Salesmanship oozed out of him. His thin veneer of hair glossed over his forehead, barely concealing his bald truth. “Come on in. I only ask that you remove your boots to protect the hardwood floors from that nasty salt they put on the sidewalks.”

“Sure,” Marta said, forcing a smile. Taking off her boots had become one of her most difficult tasks. Her feet pulsed. Her anger at being toppled had increased the swelling, and she was sure her feet were Velcroed to the thick, slightly torn, winter lining of her boots. At home, she could wander around, boots on, waiting for Darren to come home and yank them off. He’d offer a foot massage, too. She turned to leave.

The marble fireplace flashed over the real estate agent’s shoulder. A marble fireplace! Damn serendipity. Dutifully, she eased herself onto the second lowest step of the staircase, spreading her legs apart to make room for her distended belly. She reached forward for her boots. The real estate agent watched silently, rocking on his heels. Marta struggled. She shifted, pulled, wiggled. Finally, her boots, and socks along with them, disengaged from her hot feet.

The real estate agent stepped forward; Marta shifted to stand. He pulled her up by the wrist—didn’t he know you could dislocate a joint that way?—and her bare feet splashed into the melting slush puddled on the tile entry. “Well! The previous owners did a fine job restoring the hardwood and updating the kitchen and baths. The wood here at the entrance was replaced, as you can see, with classic slate.” He rambled through the list of updates and selling points as he led Marta through the main level: the 1.6-gallon flush of the toilet, the mold-resistant paint, the original crown molding. Marta nodded, scanning the layout of the kitchen, the height of the windows. By avoiding the eyes of the real estate agent, she remained noncommittal, not that she had any fear of committing to a sale. She and Darren were not in the position to buy a house this glorious, a house with the perfect mesh of old and new. They had a house and that was enough.

“The bedrooms are generous, and all of the upstairs floors have been refinished as well.” The real estate agent climbed the wide stairs.

Marta followed, slowly, with heavy steps, taking in the open space, the high ceilings, the walnut banister. The flower in the stained-glass window above the doorway matched the purple hummingbird in the transom window above the landing midway up the staircase, tinting the neighboring rooftops purple. If she lived here, she would take time each day to watch the landscape through her purple glass. When her whole body tensed involuntarily, beginning at her navel and simultaneously radiating both up and down until she was sure she’d implode from the incredibly tightening grip, Marta first thought it was due to the intense desire to own something she couldn’t have, and then she thought maybe it was indigestion. Silly. Silly to not know what this was. Her ears pushed themselves tautly against her skull. Her bare toes clutched at the slatted wood. The real estate agent noted her staring out the window and expounded on the history of the stained glass, enthralled with his own monologue, oblivious to Marta. “Moving along,” he said. He disappeared somewhere upstairs.

Marta stayed on the wide landing between the twisting flights of stairs, immobilized.

The real estate agent popped back to the top of the stairs. “Everything okay?” he called down to her.

Marta leaned into the banister.

The real estate agent rushed down to the landing. “Are you okay? Is it the baby? Shall we go down the stairs?” He pranced in and out of her line of vision. “Are you okay?” he said again, as if she were ill.

Marta took a deep breath—a cleansing one—she remembered that much from childbirth class. “I’d better get going.” She took another deep, cleansing breath. “I’m fine.”

She stepped down and then clutched the banister, her knuckles whitening. The vise tightened, tightened, tightened. She stood teetering on the step. The real estate agent’s sudden support kept her from pitching forward. He had somehow jumped or squeezed or ducked around her to the step below and had both hands on her belly, pushing upward, countering the force of her forward lean. “Can’t have a fall,” he said. Under any other circumstances, Marta would have been appalled at the intimacy, his hands pushing on her baby, but the clench of her uterus was too sudden, too intense. And then it was over. Marta breathed a cleansing breath. It was what she remembered to do. “I really need to get home.”

“Let’s get you down these stairs, Miss.” The real estate agent squeezed her elbow. Marta hated him taking charge, guiding her as if he knew best. But what choice did she have? She did need to descend the stairs. She shook off his grip. She eased down two steps before the next contraction held her hostage. In the throes of this unparalleled uterine spasm, Marta seized the real estate agent’s shoulder and pushed down hard. His feet slipped on the polished hardwood. He fumbled downward, his feet sliding to the next step down, landing flat-footed on the tread. “The pains are worsening?” His voice tremored, and somewhere in Marta’s prefrontal cortex the synapses sparked as if to start a fire, because why should he be afraid? Every person alive should know something about childbirth. All of us were born out of another human body, every one of us. And what was with this antiquated terminology? “Pains”? “Worsening”? “Miss”? Was he going to boil a pan of water next?

Marta groaned. The contractions, this forced reliance on a stranger—this particular real estate agent stranger—on this everlasting staircase was too much. She trained her mind on breathing through this lengthening contraction. “Oh, oh! I’m supposed to be timing these!” She grabbed the real estate agent’s wrist, twisting it to lift his watch to her face. “Two seventeen. Remember that!” The real estate agent nodded and prompted her down three more steps before her face tightened into a grotesque grimace—she could feel her facial muscles mimicking the oncoming contraction. “Quick! What time is it?”

The real estate agent looked at his watch. “Two nineteen.”

“Two minutes? Two minutes? They cannot be that close. The labor just started!” Marta screamed. “I don’t believe you.” She felt for her phone, tucked away in her sweater pocket beneath her jacket. Darren’s jacket. Hers didn’t fit. It was difficult to reach under the bulk to wriggle out the phone, and when she finally got it loose, she couldn’t focus on the numbers. “Tell me what it says.” Marta thrust the phone in the real estate agent’s face.

“Two fourteen?” the real estate agent said. “Impossible! Time can’t go backwards!” Marta took a breath. She tensed, though the contraction had passed for now. She creaked down the last step and stood next to her boots. She smiled. She’d made it. “Your watch must be wrong,” Marta said calmly, now that she didn’t have a contraction binding her. “I’m not sure what’s going on here. Everything is happening too fast.” As if her words brought it on, the tight wave rolled forward, and her next words raced out before the next full-on contraction stifled her thoughts. “I need to get home!”

“Okay!” the real estate agent said. Enthusiastic to get her out of the way, off his hands.

Marta imagined him guiding her out the door, off the property, bootless, contracting all the way down the sidewalk on her way home. Alone. “Call Darren,” she demanded. She held out her phone. She wasn’t going to leave until Darren came.

He looked at her phone as if it were a foreign object. Yes, it was old. She flipped it open for him. “Darren. My husband. He’s in—” The next tidal wave washed over her. She stood, half crouching in the entry way, breathing heh-hehheh-heh, then edging past the real estate agent, shuffling to the middle of the living room, pressing on her knees, amazed at her own strength. She didn’t buckle. She didn’t explode. She didn’t do anything except endure.

Finally, finally, she made it to the edge of the couch. She sat. She twisted her hair out of her face, sticky with sweat. She tugged one arm out of the jacket, then the other. The real estate agent held her phone and peered at the buttons. “Hold down the 1,” Marta said. “Speed dial.” If Darren could come get her, if he could transport himself somehow and be beside her this very moment, he could make their birth plan happen. The well-researched plan they wrote together included notes on perineal massage, episiotomy prevention, cutting the cord, immediate skin-to-skin contact. He’d call the midwife. He’d get her to the hospital. Everything would work out if Darren—she closed her eyes with the effort of hope, and her water broke. The deluge of amniotic fluid poured out of her, soaked the inside of her jeans, drenched the couch seat cushion, pooled at her feet. Marta shouted at the real estate agent, who was talking into her phone, to her husband. “Hey—” She didn’t remember what the real estate agent’s name was, or if he had introduced himself when she had arrived.

“1580 Belcourt, right off Standale,” the real estate agent said into the phone. His eyes grew wide at Marta’s puddle. “Come right away!” He hung up and immediately dialed another number.

“Is Darren on his way?” she asked. Her voice sounded panicked, as if it were someone else—someone flustered, someone afraid—talking.

“I left a message.”

“Where was he? He said he’d be at his desk!”

“I have no idea,” he said. He spoke into the phone, her phone, “Yes, it’s an emergency. I have a woman here who’s about to give birth. There’s water all over the hardwood floor—” he flipped up the wet edge of the area carpet and rolled it away from the amniotic fluid— “and she’s been having extreme birthing pains. Extreme.” He paused, then gave the address a second time. Another pause. “Okay.” He set the phone down on the mantelpiece. “Let me—” he said, and he grabbed Darren’s jacket and two couch cushions from behind her. He arranged them on the gleaming hardwood floors in front of the marble fireplace. “Lie here,” he said.

Marta didn’t want to lie down. The next contraction came on and she squatted, her back pushing against the couch. It screeched back and bumped the wall. She jerked back. Her thighs gave out.

She went on all fours, panting. Such tightening, such squeezing. Her belly swayed beneath her, heavy and uncomfortable, her skin stretching like plastic wrap. If only the baby could poke through and relieve this strain.

The real estate agent talked rapidly into the phone. He looked at Marta’s face, then turned away, his finger pointing down on the mantel, as if to say Now, right now.

Marta groaned, rocking side to side. Such pressure. Such immense pressure. It was as if one of those exercise bands she tried during a demonstration at the mall, eons before she was pregnant, wrapped itself around her hips, her thighs, her lower half of her belly—wrapped so tightly no other part of her body existed, an intense pressure that pulsed toward her perineum, as if the band was also somehow inside, bearing down on her from all angles, within and without.

The real estate agent ran into the kitchen and Marta heard water running. She rolled her eyes. Boiling water.

The real estate agent came back into the living room, shaking his head. He said into the phone, “Thirty seconds.” Another brief pause. “You want me to do what? I don’t—no, no, I don’t want that to happen. All right, then.” The real estate agent walked over to Marta and said, “The ambulance is on its way, but the roads are slippery. They are about fifteen minutes away in good weather. I’m on the phone with a paramedic. She wants me to check and see if—” He looked down.

“Are you crazy?” Marta shouted. “The baby is not ready yet! This is not happening!’”

The real estate agent went back to the phone. “Did you hear that?” he said. He handed the phone to Marta. “She wants to have a word with you.”

In the midst of another contraction, Marta’s response was strained. “I’m—not—taking—off—my—pants.” She pushed out her stilted words as strongly as she could.

The paramedic spoke in her calm, non-emergency voice that belied the dire consequences she spoke about. “Honey, I gotta tell you like it is. Your baby’s welfare has got to come first. You’re not taking your pants off for just anyone—you’re taking your pants off for the only person that can help you right now.”

Marta shook. “Oh no. Oh no.”

“Sweetie, I know this isn’t what you wanted, but you can’t give birth in your pants! The baby will—you know, you’ve just gotta let go of your inhibitions. Let the man check, and then, if I’m wrong, you can put your pants right back on. If I’m right, this will be the best thing you ever did for your baby.”

Through the soothing voice of the paramedic and under the averted gaze of a real estate agent she didn’t know an hour prior, Marta flipped herself sideways and writhed out of her elastic-waist maternity jeans, the only pants that still fit, and the cotton underwear, too.

The real estate agent’s eyes bulged and he lunged for the phone. “I see it! I see it!” he shouted. “That’s the head!”

The pressure increased and released and a leaden heaviness in Marta sheathed low, low. Low. Pressing. Incredible pressing.

She pushed, involuntarily. The sudden raw burning of what must have been a vaginal tear ripped through her.

“What do I do?” the real estate agent cried into the phone.

The fuck she’d let this guy have the first contact with her baby. She willed herself up against the couch, braced herself, leaned forward, stretching her spine further than she had when taking off her boots, further than any yoga pose invented, over her knees and there, bent and twisted, she saw the back of the baby’s head, right there, between her spread open thighs. Dark, dark hair with a thin waxy layer of white substance—there was a name for that white rime. She couldn’t think of what it was. It wasn’t important, except that it was normal. Perfectly normal. She reached around—the baby was facedown—and gently wiped at the baby’s face with her hand, though she could barely reach. She had to clear away the mucous, keep the airways free. Her hand came away with white cottage cheese chunks on it and the baby gasped a raspy breath and then snorted a tiny, sweet snort.

“One more push!” the real estate agent cried, the phone at his ear. “She says give it one more push!”

Marta stretched more—the impossibility of it and yet more—and when she saw the tiny shoulders sliding out of her, she grasped the baby under those little arms and pulled. The baby slid out and she turned him—it was a him—high above her, saw his pink hotdog skin covered with patches of that sticky white stuff, and then hugged his slippery body to her chest, the umbilical cord trailing behind, thick and heavy across her stomach and on her thigh.

The baby sputtered and squirmed on her chest. He wobbled his head side to side until Marta spoke and calmed him with the voice he already knew, had always known, and he nuzzled his head into her throat, at the place where her voice vibrated against his fuzzy slick forehead, and sighed his phlegmy newborn sigh.

Darren arrived and then the paramedics arrived. It wasn’t until the placenta delivered and she was mostly wiped up and blanketed on the gurney, about to be rolled out of the house and into the back of the ambulance, that Marta saw it, hanging neatly on the coat rack. Long, dark, and woolen. The coat.

laura mccoy

it Will taKe many years

The wheel ruts end at the house’s north corner.

Two strips of dry dirt and everything else, alive.

We close our eyes. The house disappears.

We are in a field. Chicory, tansy, yarrow, they ask us, they expect us, they weave us into their braid of stalk and leaf and human.

We go to seed. The days become fireflies that shine just past where they should. The snow falls, bends our bodies to the dirt. We kneel knowing the weight will splinter us.

The spring runoff will drown us.

We must prepare for children as if we would have truly met them.