The Elevator

Nick Maxwell walked into the lobby of his apartment building holding his basketball in one hand and his gym bag in the other. He had his headphones over his ears, and they were so loud that the faint pounding of some kind of hip-hop beat could be heard if you walked past him. He pressed the button for the elevator and felt a little bubble of relief inside of him, in that part of him that was still a scared little kid who had heard all of the stories at night about the guys getting jumped or the fights in the park. The light hadn't turned on yet and he swore under his breath. "Damn building. Been tellin' Joe to get this fixed for years." He pressed it again a few times until it lit up and he heard the old machine whir into action. The doors opened with a lurch and he stepped into the graffiti-covered elevator and pressed 9.

 The doors were about to close when he heard a voice from the lobby cry: "Hold the door, please!" Nick's reflexes were quick, and he got to the open door button in time. A harried woman stepped into the elevator, trying to catch her breath. She slid against the back of the elevator and breathed, her enormous belly in front of her; she was very pregnant.

Nick slide his headphones down, the beats still slapping, and asked, "Which floor, Ms.?"

The "Ms." in question was still catching her breath but managed to get out the word "12". Nick pressed the button and moved back to the other side of the elevator.

"You okay, Ms.? I've got some water in here if you need. If you don't mind the germs, I guess."

The women smiled or at least attempted to smile.

"Thanks... but it's okay. I... just need to... use the bathroom."

Nick smiled and put his headphones back over his head. He noticed just how big her belly was and thought that the human body was pretty amazing. The fact that there was a living, breathing human inside of a pregnant woman would never not blow his mind. And he was only 17. He had a long way to go before he even started to think about this stuff. He hoped. The woman was still breathing heavily and was gripping the railing behind her. Nick felt like asking her if she was okay again, but decided against it. He didn't want to be a pest. And so, the elevator went up. And up. And up. Until it stopped.

...

When it stopped, it was just one of those things that you knew wasn't supposed to happen. Even in an old elevator like this one, it wasn't supposed to stop between floors. It was so abrupt that Nick was sure he caught some airtime. The seconds that followed the stop were nothing short of horrifying: Nick swore, the woman screamed and both of their minds went reeling through that extreme emergency response mode the human mind has where everything we have ever wanted to do, every mistake, every regret, every time we should have called our mom and said I love you... every one of those moments and a hundred more came flashing before their eyes, even in the inky darkness of an elevator in a power outage and sat right on top of them. Right on their chests. After a few more seconds, the emergency lights turned on. That relieved a bit of the tension. The woman was crouched in a corner. She was crying. Nick was holding onto the rails behind him, his headphones now dangling. They looked at each other for a few seconds but didn't say anything. They didn't need to. The message was pretty clear: we're in big trouble.

...

Nick slid down to the floor and felt panic fighting rationality inside of him.

"Ms. Are you okay? Is the... baby okay?" he asked.

The woman had her eyes closed and was breathing steadily.

"I'm okay. The baby... the baby is okay. I think."

Nick stood up and went to the elevator push buttons and found the one for emergency. He pressed it. Nothing happened. No noise, no alarm, no intercom activated. Nothing. He pressed it a few more times and sat back down, convinced that somewhere, in a room with camera and intercoms and speakers, a group of guys in blue overalls were looking around and saying: "Men! Quickly! A young man and a pregnant woman are trapped in an elevator. We must save them!" But Nick knew this wasn't actually going to happen. Someone would need to call...duh. I'm an idiot. He grabbed his phone from his pocket and muted the music. He dialed 911 and pressed the call button... and again, nothing happened. His cell must be really and truly shut off. He looked across the elevator.

"Excuse me, Ms? I-"

"It's Annie. Call me Annie. Not Ms... Annie," she said.

"Oh. Okay. Excuse me, Annie, do you have any cell service? Because the emergency call button doesn't seem to be working. And I don't have any cell service..."

Annie stood up and dug in her purse for her phone. After a few moments and some expletives that Nick was sure his mother would not have approved of, she pulled out an iPhone with a pink case. She dialed a few numbers and swore again.

"God damnit! This damn building!" She jammed the phone back into her bag and began pacing around the elevator. Nick stared at his shoes.

After a few minutes of pacing, she sat back down.

"Look. I'm sorry I snapped at you, okay? You seem like a good kid. I'm just... kind of the in the middle of something," she said.

"Oh, that's okay. I think it's safe to say we’re both in the middle of something here," Nick said.

This brought a laugh as Annie closed her eyes again and breathed. "What's your name, anyway?" she asked.

"It's Nick, ma-.... Annie."

She spoke with her eyes closed.

"Nick... do you know what contractions are?"

Nick continued to stare at his shoes. "You mean like... You're, they're and don't?"

This time, Annie really laughed; it was long and hard. And then her breathing quickened and she closed her eyes again.

"Ah, you're a sweet kid. No, Nick, not like the word contractions. Contractions during pregnancy. See, when a woman is getting ready to get birth, the muscles in her uterus tighten up like a fist and then relax. They start out pretty far apart... until they get closer together. The closer they get, the closer that baby is to coming out."

Nick listened raptly to this explanation of the incredibly sublime nature of the human female; he had missed a few Health lessons last term because of basketball games and made a note that if he were to ever get out of this elevator, he would need to start paying attention.

She continued: "Well, I was out getting some snacks. Mint chocolate chip ice cream, to be precise... when I felt something. It was like a wave, an intense wave all through my body. I knew what to expect, of course. We have a midwife and everything. I dropped the ice cream and booked it for the door. My husband is at work... I thought it was one of these fake ones... Thought they might just be pre-term.... I wasn't due for another few days...And I didn't want to disturb him at work."

 An uneasy silence settled over the two of them. Annie stood up slowly and looked around, her eyes widening. A gentle sound of rushing water, like a barely running faucet, could be heard in the elevator, and Annie's face turned crimson red.

"That's my water breaking..." she said. Nick didn't know what that meant either, but he sure saw the mess it made. He pulled out a clean t-shirt (he was a sweaty guy, so he always brought a spare to play) and laid it on the floor so that she could sit down. Her eyes thanked him.

...

Nick stood up again and held his phone near the ceiling.

"What are you doing?" Annie asked.

"I saw it in a movie once... I'm looking for a signal. Something about the frequency of the electromagnetic waves or something."

Annie nodded, her question answered satisfactorily, and began the arduous process of getting up to help. Nick turned around and rushed over.

"No, no. Don't get up. Here, give me your phone."

She did, and he held them both up to the ceiling, his six-foot wingspan doing well to nearly cover the entire ceiling's width. He looked at one after the other and saw no change. A change in Annie's breathing brought Nick's attention away from the cell phones; it had become shallow and rapid, and her face had tightened into a grimace. He knelt down beside her, both of the phones in one hand, and put his hand on her shoulder. She gritted her teeth and kept breathing, until after a while, her breathing relaxed.

"Was.... was that one?" Nick asked.

"It... sure was," she said, as she looked at her watch. "And I'm at 30 minutes now." This was, unbeknownst to Nick, something relevant, and Annie's head hung down, her chest still rising and falling from exertion. Nick didn't know what to do, so he kept his hand on her shoulder for a while and waited for an idea to come to him.

...

If cell phone signals were being kept from leaving the elevator that night, then life-saving ideas were being kept from entering it too. After two hours and four more contractions, Nick had only managed to think of yelling really loudly near the door and banging his fists, though he stopped the latter quite quickly as it became apparent that the doors might in fact break off if he continued. He even worried about shouting too loud with the baby so close to being born; he thought that the baby might hear his voice and think he was shouting at it... Annie hadn't told him if it was a boy or a girl yet. And he didn't think it was his place to ask.

She had just finished another contraction and was sitting on the floor. Nick had all but given up trying the emergency call button and checking the phones for a signal.

"So Nick," she said. "Tell me... You some kind of hot-shot basketball star or something?"

Nick laughed and said: "Not exactly a hot-shot. But I know what to do when I'm on the court. Got a few looks this year from some universities. Would love to hear from a few down south. The NCAA. The big leagues..."

Nick's eyes got wistful for a second as he found himself in a world he usually only visited before bed: his positive visualization world. Annie spotted his reverie and asked: "What are you looking at? Imagining your name up in those shining lights?"

"Nah, actually, I'm doing some positive visualization. About us right now. I'm imagining us getting out of here, and you having that baby. And your husband, he's there. And we're... okay, you know?"

Annie looked at Nick and smiled a smile that acknowledged his naivety and innocence without wanting to hurt his feelings.

"Oh, Nick. I want you to prepare yourself for something. We might not get out of here until the morning. It's...." she looked at her watch. "About one in the morning now. No one is coming. So the truth is, I might need your help."

Nick looked at her directly in her eyes and, for the first time that night, felt really and truly scared.

...

Nick looked at his phone with resignation: 5:00 AM and no signal. The contractions had begun to come faster and more intense than before. Annie had drunk most of the water, germs be damned, and Nick had started to feel lightheaded; the air in the elevator was stale and smelled sweet with sweat and body odor. There was blood on the floor that had stained the t-shirt and was pooling around her body. Annie's face was frozen in a grimace of pain as she tried to sit up.

"Nick. I need you to do something for me. You aren't gonna like it."

She went on to explain the concept of dilation and what it meant for the baby; Nick's face went from fear to horror. But he knew he had to do it. The question of privacy came to him quickly, so he improvised and stripped off his shirt. He tied it together with the other shirt he had put on the floor and provided her a make-shift changing stall so she could slip out of underwear. Annie lay mostly on her back, with her shoulders against the metal of the elevator, with her knees apart, the t-shirts covering her. Nick looked under the shirts, recoiled, and looked again, trying to measure the centimeters like Annie had told him. He estimated it was about 10 centimeters and told Annie. She took a deep breath and started to grit her teeth again. By now, Nick was getting good at timing the contractions, and noticed that it had barely been five minutes.

She looked at him, her eyes wild and fierce: "It's time, Nick. Listen. I'm going to push with every contraction. I'll be squatting. I need you to be ready, okay? You need to look. And once you see something, a little head, you need to be ready. That's called crowning, okay?" She was speaking between rushed breaths, her words clipped short from the lack of oxygen. "Once I'm pushing and the baby is coming, you need to guide it. Just go gently. Let nature do the rest."

Nick was listening and nodding, nodding and listening. He wondered why she was the one giving him a pep-talk; shouldn't it be the other way around?

"You can do this, Annie! You got this!" he said.

She nodded and closed her eyes as if to say you have no idea. A few minutes passed until she tensed again. Annie had tied the shirts around her waist, like a post-shower towel, but now it didn't seem to mean much. Her breathing came in short bursts as her entire body clenched and Nick continued to give encouragement. Once the contraction finished, she looked at him.

"You know to wrap him up right away, right? Use these t-shirts or your jeans, shit, I don't care. Just keep him warm. And check if he's breathing, okay? I won't be much help."

Nick nodded, but for some reason, the most important piece of information he seemed to have received was that it was a boy.

His eyes lit up with congratulations, only to be doused from the searing hot daggers being shot by hers. In the time between the next contraction, he finally got a good idea: he slid his backpack behind her, cushioning her against the metal. He kicked himself internally for not thinking that earlier. He stripped down to his boxers, placed his jeans beside her, and waited for the next contraction.

The baby came almost thirty minutes later exactly. After the crowning started, it wasn't long until the rest of the body came, and Nick, his hands moving with a life of their own, was guiding the slimy body from its warm home for the last nearly nine months. He was surprised at how quickly it was over, though he was sure Annie would have said differently. She had collapsed in a heap in the corner of the elevator, as Nick sat close by, the baby still connected by the umbilical cord. Nick was just about to ask her if she wanted to hold him when the main lights in the elevator turned back on. Both of them, temporarily blinded by the non-emergency lights, squinted around in confusion. Nick stretched an arm out and pushed 9, being incredibly careful not to damage the precious piece of his cargo in his other hand. Remarkably, the elevator started to move.

"It was a power outage," Annie said. "A god damn power outage."

...

Twelve months later to the day, Nick was standing outside of his apartment building. It had been a good year: Joe had had the elevator fixed and Nick had heard from a few scouts from down south. A car pulled up and honked: Nick spotted Annie's smiling face from the passenger seat, her husband's beard occupying most of the driver's seat. He smiled and walked over to the car.

When they got to Annie's parent's house, Nick knew they were in a different part of town. This apartment complex was actually called a condominium and had its elevators inspected more than once every ten years. As he walked into the lobby, he held the door for Annie's husband Jim, who had thanked him roughly three million times for his help a year ago. Jim was holding a portable car seat and Annie held the door for him. Their baby, Nick, was sleeping. Nick had tried to argue against the name but Annie wouldn't hear it.

They stood in front of the elevators and as Annie was about to press the button, she said: "Hey, maybe we should take the stairs instead?"