It wasn’t that she hated Ohio. Or even her hometown of Peters. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of it, even. It felt more like being born into her community, where having your first baby by seventeen was something that didn’t raise eyebrows and having three before the age of twenty-one was all too common, had been some colossal cosmic accident. Her entire goal in life for the first twenty-four years had been to right that giant wrong. Whether she would still go on to struggle with the many life issues that she’d seen her mother, her aunt, her cousin Darla go through…that was something she didn’t bother to contemplate. She just focused on the fact that having children too young meant that she would have to stay. Now, having spent the last thirteen or more years of her life trying desperately not to get pregnant meant that thinking about doing it on purpose gave her massive pause.
Her best friend was about to have a baby; colleagues in their late twenties and early thirties were finally setting aside their own birth control and changing patterns that were more than a decade old. It made her feel as if she were missing some sort of alert that every woman but her could hear. Beep beep beep—time to have a baby! Josie didn’t like change unless she initiated the change. While she had control over her own body, right now she was watching her best friend lose complete control of hers, managed and manipulated by a tiny little being within who wielded power like a sociopath in an amnesia ward.
“Two miles it is,” she said as brightly as possible, trying to point them in the direction of the nearest hospital.
“You think I’m crazy.”
“No, I don’t,” Josie said, plastering on another fake smile.
This one, apparently, was a little too fake because Laura could see through it and she frowned. She stopped, forcing Josie to come to a screeching halt. Laura planted two angry hands on two very lush h*ps and then lifted one finger and pointed it right at Josie’s nose. “You have no idea what I’m going through right now, so wipe the fake smile off your face and give me a real one.”
Josie’s face muscles twitched and tinged, and did all sorts of weird things that they’d never done before as she tried simultaneously not to scowl, frown, laugh, or sputter. Whatever mask came out was enough to make Laura burst into uncontrollable giggles and then whoop in a loud, strangled, weird respiratory sound that made her double over again.
Three minutes.
Three minutes this time. As Laura struggled to let her muscles go loose and to release the tension through her breath, Josie counted the seconds, hitting thirty, then forty, then fifty. If she didn’t do something to convince Laura to get to the hospital, whatever thin thread of control Laura hoped for in planning her birth, in having it at the hospital she wanted, with the midwife she wanted, with Mike and Dylan and Josie at her side, was about to evaporate. The baby would be delivered here, outside one of the ubiquitous cell phone stores littering this part of the city. And then Josie’s own inner loss of control would begin its lonely process.
“Laura.”
“Yes?” she gasped.
“I think it’s time.” Infusing that statement with as much empathy as possible, Josie felt her voice crack, could hear the change in her tone, and hoped Laura could feel all of the things that words failed to say. A pale hand reached for Josie’s and grasped it, fingernails digging hard into her palm. Josie needed her own breath to control the transfer of pain.
“I know. I know,” Laura said simply. “I just needed to pretend it’s not about to happen.” Tears started to pour down Laura’s cheeks and dot the fabric of her knees as she rested in a crouched position, her, bloodshot eyes so bright and green they made Josie think of Caribbean waters reflecting white clouds and the air of possibility.
“Baby’s coming,” Laura said simply.
“Yes, honey, she’s coming,” Josie said.
“What have I done?” Laura asked. “Nine and a half months ago I sat in my apartment making you the nine thousandth pot of coffee ever and you made me go on this dating site—”
“I didn’t make you.”
“You made me. Don’t try to pretend you didn’t make me.”
“Okay,” Josie said, humbled. “I did.”
“You made me write this stupid want ad to go whore myself out.”
“You didn’t whore yourself out.”
“To go whore myself out. Hey—I’m the one having the baby, I get to pick what I say. Quit interrupting.” Josie couldn’t argue with that. “To whore myself out and then I go and find Dylan and…and then it turns out that Dylan and Mike...and…”
Silence.
Laura stopped talking as yet another wave hit her, and Josie felt the kinetics of the contraction kick into her through the strength of Laura’s fingers, her fingertips pressing their tension into Josie’s wrist and hand. Josie could even sense the layers of her uterus cramping and clamping and pulling, the fibers all acting in whatever strange pattern the body needed to weave in order to push this baby out into the world. If Laura had teleported Josie’s mind into her body she couldn’t have transferred that feeling any better.
Closing her eyes, Josie saw a red, blooming mist behind her lids, like the audio that Laura sometimes listened to, training the brain to perceive pain in a different way with hypnosis. Josie thought that was a big load of shit, and yet, somehow in this moment of intensity, this pinpoint of biological destiny, that was where her brain went—to that stupid, insipid, ridiculous image of a misty cloud blooming. Maybe, though, just maybe, it was her own internal pain receptors panicking and not some new-agey bullshit…because damn, did Laura know how to destroy her hand or what?
“We’re going to get you back to my car,” Josie said.
“Where’s your car?” Laura cried.
“It’s back near Jeddy’s.”
“That far?”
“It’s a block, Laura.”
“We only made it a block?”
“Yeah, hon, we did.”
“No, I was walking…was…no.”
“It was a long block,” Josie reassured her as they slowly, step by painstaking step, made their way back.
“Why does it feel like I have a bowling ball between my legs?” Laura said, widening her stance and walking like a toddler with a heavy load in a disposable diaper.
Because you do, Josie thought, except it’s coming out of your front door later on today. Laura came to a grinding halt and gaped openly at Josie. Oh, shit, she thought, did I say that aloud?