Free The Scream by Craig Spector, John Skipper Page A

unanimous that she was one of the ten cutest people ever born.
    Rachel didn't feel especially cute right now. She was on her knees on the hardwood floor, chunks of a mangled turkey frank in one hand and a sopping sheet of phone bill in the other. All around her was debris of the most terrifying sort. Directly in front of her was the cause.
    "D-dah-dah-dah," little Natalie informed her. "Dah-dah-dah PFTHHH!"
    "That's charming," Rachel assured her. "That's what I think of Daddy, too."
    "PFTHHHH!" Tiny pink tongue abubble, slipping past pursed lips and toothless gums to waggle in the breeze. "PFTHHH! PFTHHH!" The state of the art in nine-month-old communication.
    "C'mon," Rachel provoked, sliding closer. "Can you say 'antidisestablishmentarianism'? Of course you can." The hand with the savaged shreds of wienie gestured encouragingly.
    "Dah-dah-dah," Natalie insisted, and then began to chew on the remote control unit for the VCR. Natalie was like that: the mouth was the doorway of perception.
She must have learned that from Jake and me
, Rachel thought, and then beamed at her baby daughter.
    At nine months, Natalie Guinevere Adams-Hamer was fourteen pounds and twenty-three inches of miniature human beauty, even in baggy disposable diapers. Her eyes were huge and grayish-blue, like her mother's; her fingers were long and delicate, like her father's; her body, not quite grown into proportion with her head, was petite and cuddle-demanding. She was one of those babies for whom laughter comes as easily as tears: she had a great sense of humor, also inherited from both her parents, that made the joy of being around her transcend the obvious pain-in-the-butt qualities.
    "Oh, boobie-boobie-boobie," Rachel cooed, dropping the damp phone bill and sliding closer. "Gimme that. And come here." She pulled the remote control out of Natalie's hands and mouth-not the world's easiest task, as the kid had a powerful grip-and hoisted the midget to her no-longer-lactating breasts for a deep and abiding hug.
    It had not been an easy birth; comparatively, Ted had been a piece of cake. Thirty-four and a half hours of labor do not a picnic make, especially when you throw in three rejections from the hospital (you're not dilated enough, the rooms are full, don't come back until you're ready), coupled with a one-boy history of Caesarian delivery and the fact that she was thirty-seven years old.
    Lots of fear.
    Twelve times as much pain.
    But the worst was the waiting, the seeming eternity of it. Nine months and four days had evidently not been long enough. God and Mother Nature were clearly taking some cues from Hitchcock, masterfully dragging out the suspense without ever once letting it get close to boring. All the questions she and Jake had been nursing since conception-boy or girl, dark or pale, bright or retarded, and so on-flared brighter than ever in the moments between contractions, when what passed for rational thought was, if barely, even possible.
    And then, on the thirty-first hour, when the seconds between the screaming pain had all but evaporated, Beth Israel Hospital had finally opened up one of their puke-green rooms to her. They had stripped her, enrobed her, slapped her on the comfortless bed, drugged her, greased her up, and strapped on the monitors: one for the baby and one for her. They had turned on the machines, transformed the heartbeats of mother and child into shimmering waveforms that looked as if they belonged on Jesse's keyboard oscilloscope.
    Then the three more hours of waiting for the doctor to arrive, with Jake nearly collapsing from lack of sleep, and the nurses saying Don't push, Don't push in direct contradiction to everything her own body was telling her. . .
    . . . and then the doctor arriving, looking freshly golfed (though she knew it wasn't true, it just felt nicely cruel to think so in those fleeting seconds of sanity now allowed between contractions), checking out the elastic sprawl of her distending vaginal lips