Free Dream of the Blue Room by Michelle Richmond

different X rays, and each one seemed to last forever. So that’s my threshold. Nothing else has even compared.”
    “I’ve never heard that story before,” Dave says.
    “It was a long time ago.” I bite into a lotus paste bun. The seedy filling is sickeningly sweet and dense.
    Graham turns to Stacy. “Your turn.”
    “Nothing has happened to me.”
    “Come on. At some point in your life you’ve been in pain.”
    “Really,” she says. “I’ve had an uneventful life.”
    “Everyone has a story,” Dave insists.
    Stacy looks around the table uncertainly. All eyes are on her. “Okay. I’ll tell you a story, but it doesn’t leave this table. I’ve never told anyone.”
    “All the better,” Graham says.
    She takes a deep breath. “The worst pain I ever experienced was during childbirth. This was a couple of years ago. I’d not really been taking care of myself. I was involved with some dodgy people. Lots of drugs, even more drinking. By the time my due date came along the boyfriend wasn’t in the picture.”
    She’s picking at her fingernails, not looking at any of us. “So I’m there in the hospital, and I’ve been in labor for about eighteen hours, and nothing’s happening, and I just want it all to be over with. I’m pretty sure I’m going to die. The nurses are telling me to calm down, to breathe, to take it easy, and my mom’s in the room, holding my hand, trying to be supportive, but I’m on painkillers and she thinks I can’t hear her when she says to the nurse, ‘I can’t believe she got herself into this mess.’ And I can’t believe I got myself into it either, and I’m thinking about Jimmy and his goddamn Ducati motorcycle, how we rode it all the way from Detroit to St. Louis that time and slept in crappy motel rooms that charged by the hour and shot up heroin and didn’t use any birth control, because we didn’t think of it, because neither of us really considered being alive long enough for it to matter.
    “So finally it’s time, I know it’s time because the nurses are all talking in loud panicky voices, and my mom’s in hysterics, but the baby’s not turned in the right direction and I hear a voice say, ‘We’re going to have to cut it out.’ So then they put this mask over my mouth and nose and my mom’s face fades out, and everything is all wavy and blue, like I’m at the bottom of a swimming pool. And after that I come to and there’s this baby in the room, and my mom’s just looking at the baby like it’s some sort of alien.”
    Stacy is crying, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “So I tell the nurse I want to hold the baby and my mom says, ‘Sweetheart, we’ve discussed this,’ but I say, ‘No, I want to hold her,’ and the nurse hands her to me, and I’m thinking how amazing it is that here’s this perfect baby girl, and she doesn’t look at all fucked up like I expected her to, she doesn’t look like she could have come from me. ‘Just let me have her for a few days,’ I said. ‘Please.’ I was thinking about taking her home to my mom’s house, and putting her in a little crib. I didn’t want to keep her forever, of course, my parents and I had already discussed that, how I was too young, how I had to get my life together, all that. But I was thinking how perfect it would be to have her there with me for just a little while. ‘That’s not a good idea,’ the nurse said. Then my mom said, ‘Get it together, Stacy.’”
    Stacy is sobbing uncontrollably, and she’s looking at us as if we’re the jury, or the nurse, or her mother, as if we have some say over how things turn out. “I never took her home. I held her for a little while and then the nurse took her, and someone wheeled me back to my room. The next day I was back at my parents’ house, eating mashed potatoes and roast beef at their table, and every time I breathed it felt like the stitches would rip apart, and my dad was talking about stock options, and not once did