Free Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens

time, Franckline arrived here from another country: there, surely, is at least one story, a story of ambition or love or flight. Is she married? (Lore quickly scans Franckline’s hand. Yes.) Does she have children? Are they sweet-tempered, mischievous, shy, gregarious? Where does she live, what objects fill her home? Has she ever been betrayed by someone?
    Thirteen minutes.
    The girl watches the clock, and Franckline can sense her spirits plummeting. She has lost track of the monitor, and Franckline doesn’t remind her. Given the slowdown in the contractions, she wants to hear the steady thumping and be able to read the regular spikes and decelerations on the printout. In the meantime, what to do for Lore? Franckline might see if she could borrow a book from one of the nurses for her, or a magazine. But she is sure that Lore would wave them away. Perhaps if Franckline offered to read to her. A few of the patients like to be read to by friends or family members. Franckline listens in, trying to expand her notion of what her adopted language might be applied to. These are usually poems that Franckline finds obscure but pleasantly rhythmic, or Bible passages that she knows better in French but enjoys hearing transmuted into the chunky mouthfuls that make up English. Last week a woman read to her sister from a novel about Russians at a great formal dance, princesses and dukes and so on. The two of them got into a lively discussion about the attractiveness of two different types of females, the girlish and the womanly. The pregnant woman said most men preferred the girlish. Her sister said they just pretended to, but really wanted the womanly. Then the patient sighed and asked her sister to put the book away and said she just wished the goddamn baby would come.
    If—when—Franckline has this baby, she will not have her sister by her side. Gizelle, the only of her siblings she nearly stayed in Ayiti for. And, had she done so, would the ice in her mother’s heart have one day melted, would her aunties and cousins again have felt like the very thumbs and fingers of her hands? But she had been too young to understand about time—time seemed then so large and heavy, a boulder that would crush her. She could not stay and be ground under. She had no idea that time could ever move swiftly, as it does now, that people and their feelings might eventually change. Manman died ten years ago. Franckline had not been there, had not even known until weeks later, when Gizelle tracked her down. Gizelle will know when this child is born. There are neighbors with cell phones now; the country is not as far away as it once was.
    The child might mean a return to Basin Rouge, her village, to see Gizelle and her brother and her other sisters after all these years. She and Bernard have been to Port-au-Prince twice, to visit his mother and other relatives, but Franckline refused to travel to her home village. Her sister Athalie had written: Papa says you killed Manman. You, the oldest, abandoned us . But perhaps if she brought her father a grandchild to hold, he might forgive her. And Bernard, with his respectful ways, and his kindnesses, would win everyone over, even the brothers-in-law. They would not be able to help being impressed by his new clothes, his education, the life he and Franckline are living in New York City, with an apartment all to themselves on a street planted with rhododendrons and azaleas. They will bring gifts: new sneakers, deflated soccer balls, talcum powder, cologne.
    Sixteen minutes.
    â€œMaybe the TV,” says Lore.
    â€œVery good.” Franckline points the remote at the television. Two women and a man coalesce from a blurry panel of color. At first there’s no sound. The women sit on a couch and the man—the host, apparently—is behind a desk. The women, dressed in tight sleeveless sheaths and high-heeled pumps, laugh frantically over something the man has said, throwing themselves over