Eleven Minutes Past Nine

Four minutes past nine.

“Would you stand over here, Mr. Paige? That’s right, just here, thank you, Mr. Paige.”

It had never occurred to Andrew Paige that his wife would give birth as late in the day as past nine o’clock at night and, until Lisa, his wife, had gone into labor only several hours prior, he had always thought of childbirth as the sort of thing that happens only in the morning, or perhaps in the middle of the day, leaving plenty of time for tea and supper after the baby had been delivered. At odds with this strange notion, though, was the very scene in before him, comprising a bustling cast of doctors and nurses, and assistants, a host of screens and shining machines, and in the middle of it all his wife, a mousy-haired, somewhat timid woman several years his junior. She wore the same green plastic gown over her front that everyone else did, but unlike everyone else, Andrew thought to himself, she was naked underneath. It was a strange thought, for him, that she was naked in a room of strangers, she who covered herself from head to toe every morning with beige flecked sweaters, high-waisted tweed coats, and dark walnut stockings, and whom even he had never seen completely naked in the light of day.

In fact, none of the day had gone as he’d expected, and although a busy few hours of driving frantically through the streets of Surrey and running about the hospital had rendered him a tired and cranky father-to-be, the privilege of being in the room with his mother-to-be wife thrilled him. Standing there in front of it all, he tried to take note of and record mentally as many details as he could so that he might remember it years from then when his wife and children asked about the day. He had brought the camera to the hospital but after some consideration thought better of bringing it into the delivery room, and he stood obediently at the corner of the room where he was told to stand, his nose twitching under his mask at the sickly smell of latex.

Six minutes past nine.

Andrew watched the clock avidly so that he would know his son’s time of birth down to the second, making a point of it to glance up at it every twenty seconds or so, just in case whoever at the hospital was in charge of recording the time of birth should forget to do his job and then resort to guessing the exact time later when asked for the time by a clerk or a doctor. Such inexactitude simply wouldn’t do, and Andrew, with his persnickety sensibilities, wanted to be precise in his measurement—more precise, if possible, than the hospital employee in charge of record-keeping—but as he stood in the delivery room he found himself puzzling over what he should write down if the removal of the child from the birth canal were to take more than a single second. What, he wondered to himself, if the head should come out in one second and the body the next? And if the head should come in one second, the body the next second, and the legs in a third? Surely these sorts of things happen, he thought, so what is the protocol for them? Although he had not reached an answer to these questions that he deemed satisfactory and did not want to disturb all the hard-at-work medical professionals, he decided that he would just pay particularly close attention to the delivery and make a note of when each part of the child’s body was removed from the mother and then worry about what the official time to be recorded was later, when there was not so much commotion. He had brought in a small notepad and a golf pencil, both in his side pocket, to mark the time.

Seven minutes past nine.

“All is well, doctor?” asked Lisa through deep breaths.

“All is well, Mrs. Paige. We’re just clearing a few things up and we’ll have that baby out in no time at all. You just sit back and relax, Mrs. Paige, just sit back and relax.”

The doctor’s friendly and unworried tone eased her nerves slightly, but Lisa was halfway through her forty-first week and had lately been tormented by the spectre that something might be wrong with her pregnancy. She had taken the last few days off from her job at the library so as to keep her mind off of the overdue books and the insufferably loquacious patrons and the book orders and whatever other worries might adversely affect her health, choosing instead to spend them in bed, upset at the thought that something might be amiss with the baby, and although a house doctor (and her husband) had assured her several times over that all was well in her tummy, she could not avoid the apprehension that comes with being a late-term mummy-to-be. Even as she lay there on the table she worried.

“It’s late, doctor. Eleven days past due.” She continued to breathe heavily.

“Well, Mrs. Paige, better late than never, they say.” He looked her in the eyes as his cheeks lifted the top of his facemask, indicating a smile. “Better late than never.”

Lisa leaned her head up to look at her husband at the side of the room. She gave him a weak smile, and excitedly, he nodded several times, smiling back.

Nine minutes past nine.

The delivery had begun, and a team of doctors now surrounded the bed where Lisa lay. She was as red as a tomato, redder than Andrew had ever seen anyone, and she seemed to be holding her breath.

Amid the hubbub, Andrew had strayed slightly from his designated place in the corner and was standing behind the head doctor peeking over his shoulders to get a better glimpse of the baby as it came through the birth canal, and although he briefly considered asking the doctor to move just a bit to his left, he thought it an ill idea and through all the commotion kept his distance from the doctors and the table, letting them all perform the jobs they were assigned. His eyes ticked nervously back and forth between the clock and the doctor’s hands as the excitement of it all made the simple task of writing down the time of birth an exceptionally difficult affair.

The examination light above the table shone a bright orange onto Lisa’s short brown curls, and her face glimmered with sweat as she felt the tightening of muscles across her abdomen. She let out a high-pitched yell and gasped for air, the sweat trickling down the side of her face as the nurses encouraged her and the doctor repeating, urbanely, “Push, push, that’s it, Mrs. Paige, push.”

In the next several moments Andrew’s awareness of the goings-on around him seemed to become shrouded by a large blanket of confusion, and he could not focus on the clock, the delivery, the baby, or anything else around him and so stood still, staring blankly at the wall across the room until the commotion around him congealed into a thick, insidious silence.

Taking the silence as a cue, Andrew raised his eyebrows excitedly and jerked his head spasmodically around to look at everyone around him in the delivery room, but none turned a head to look at him, and each met his gaze only with a staid shift of the eyes.

“Well?” he asked cheerily. “Well? Come on, then, is it a boy or a girl?”

His eager nodding and looking all about the room continued for several more turns until he thought to follow the gaze of everyone else in the delivery room looked down to see the limp, still figure of an inert newborn flopped over the doctor’s hand, a human form so devoid of motion and of breath and of life that it might have been nothing more than a doll made from rubber or leather or some substance with heft and weight. Its red skin glimmered brilliantly under the orange examination light.

Eleven minutes past nine.