Free The Bitch Posse by Martha O'Connor Page A

with thoughts,
CallieCallieCallieCallie,
the name of her dead sister, thumps through her brain.
    Amy’s next-door neighbor Catey drove her here last night. They talked little in the car, Catey straining to see through the small patch of windshield she’d scraped clean.
    It must be morning by now.
    Bits and pieces come back. Amy hemorrhaging all over the car and crying. Catey stroking her hair as she drove. The blood warming the car even more than the heater. A Rorschach of blood against snow as Catey helped her to the emergency room. In an instant they hooked her up to monitors, and that was probably when they put this goddamn wristband on her, and when they told her that the worst-case scenario was that the baby could be born not breathing and be put on a ventilator, have a hemorrhage in her skull causing brain damage or death, be blind, mentally retarded, handicapped for life.
CallieCallieCallieCallie.
Amy swallowed the words like pills, downed them by herself since Scotty wasn’t there to sweeten them and hand them to her one by one.
    She won’t think of Callie, won’t think of the lack of air, even though she herself is suffocating now. The hospital is stuffy and smells like someone’s dumped a container of cleaning fluid over the floor, and when she breathes in, the odor stings her nostrils, burns them, lights them on fire.
    Catey stayed by her side for a long time, bless her, watched them try the terbutaline pump until the baby’s blood pressure started to drop, until they decided there was no other choice but to do an emergency C-section. Catey couldn’t stay for that, of course, so she left her number with the hospital and went home to her own babies, at Amy’s insistence. As she left she pulled a cross off her neck and latched it around Amy’s. Amy doesn’t go to church, quit believing in God a long time ago. But she believes in Catey, and the cross rests now on her collarbone, where once rested a blue Czech glass necklace, made by Amy herself. But those days are over, of course.
    She glances down for a minute, but the big green curtain means she can’t see, and her eyes have gone all blurry anyway. Tears roll down her cheeks, but she can’t feel the place the anguish comes from, and she realizes suddenly that her big sobs always start in her uterus. She feels foolish for not figuring this out before, and imagines life beyond the curtain. They’ve sliced open her belly, yanked her half-full womb from her body, and sliced it the other way, trying to pull out her baby, her little girl, her second chance.
    The baby is lifted into the air, not much bigger than the doctor’s hand, the tiniest baby Amy’s ever seen, bright and red and not crying, gasping like a fish for air.
My daughter . . . My daughter . . . I have a daughter. . . .
She’s all skin stretched over bones, and right away they’re hooking her up to a million monitors and wires, taping her here and there, attaching her to nasal tubes. In an instant she’s in an incubator or an isolette or whatever that plastic box is called, and they wheel her toward the NICU and she’s gone.
    Her baby is gone.
    Tears stream into Amy’s hair, and
Where the hell are you, Scotty?
And she can’t heave those deep sobs that make her feel good, because her womb is her pit of tears, her source of everything. Someone says, “You have a beautiful little girl. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her. You can see her later.” Frustration oozes through her. She wants to get up fromthe operating table, run down to the NICU to see her baby, her little girl without a name, her little girl who was born the day after Scotty’s birthday, her little girl who needs her, who’s crying without her mommy. Amy’s whole being aches with yearning for her child, the child who’s been torn from her, the one who only moments before was a part of her. They need to be together, why don’t the doctors understand that? She’s going to jump up and bolt, but the problem is the only