The Water That Took Aksel Vann Gave This Child Her First Breath, Twelve Days Later

Thirteen days of rain, by my own count tonight, which will likely disagree with Dusya’s by morning the way our tallies always do by a day or two. I was sent for at the Hollis house off Guild Row a little past the first bell, for a labor already sixteen hours old before anyone thought to send for me rather than wait it out on a neighbor’s word that it was going well. It was not going well. The waters had broken at midday. The child had not turned.

I found a breech presentation, buttocks first, one leg flexed and the other extended along the body — a frank breech, the easier of the two kinds to manage and still not a kind I would choose. The mother, Yeva Hollis, twenty-six years, second child, was exhausted past the point of pushing effectively on her own, her pulse quick and thin, the room smelling of a tallow candle already burned down twice. Her husband stood by the door with both hands pressed flat against the frame, not touching anything, the way men do when they have decided the room does not belong to them tonight. His palms, when he finally gave one to his wife to grip through a contraction, were rope-burned across the base of the fingers — a hauler’s hand, not unlike one I keep hearing described this week from the Chandler’s Wharf, though I did not ask him and he did not say.

I turned the child by hand, the buttocks eased free, then the legs, the cord checked and found free of the neck, the head the last part and rightly the slowest. She did not breathe at once. I cleared her mouth, worked her chest with two fingers, and on the fourth working breath she took one of her own, and then cried the way a child cries when the lungs decide, on their own authority, that they intend to keep doing this.

Aksel Vann’s lungs, eleven days ago, made exactly the same decision in reverse, and nothing I did or did not do changed it either way. I do not write this to make one death answer for one birth, or the other way round. Grief does not owe arithmetic, and neither does a good delivery. I write it because the water has been the same water the whole thirteen days, indifferent to which way a pair of lungs works. Only the lungs care which way it goes. Tonight’s did, and chose rightly, and I was glad of it in the plain way I am glad when a body does what it intends.