“Help me move her,” I say. I remove my bloody gloves and pull on a new pair. “Come on. You take one side. I’ll take the other. Let’s get her into the bathroom. Tracy Anne, go inside the bathroom and turn the shower on full blast, very hot, as hot as someone can stand it.”

“But she’s bleeding, Lucy,” Troy says, his voice full of alarm with a touch of outrage.

“Just do what I tell you to do, for Chrissake,” I snap back at him. “Tracy Anne, go into the bathroom and blast the shower water up as hot as it’ll go.”

Tracy Anne rushes into the adjacent bathroom. Troy and I begin lifting the screaming, weeping Val.

“Lucy, have you ever done this before?” Troy says.

I don’t answer him.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

VAL IS ALTERNATELY SCREAMING and sobbing. I test the shower water with my hand. Tracy Anne has, as always, followed instructions. It is full-blast hot. I lower it to a still very hot, but not scalding, temperature. Then I slip Val’s hospital gown up and over and off.

No, I have never used this method before. But my mama was a practicing midwife in West Virginia, in a place and at a time when there wasn’t always a doc to do a C-section. Sometimes you’ve got to do whatever it takes to get the baby moving.

Val vomits on the bathroom floor as we try, as gently as possible, to get her into the shower stall. We three midwives are wearing disposable paper slippers. The soles of these slippers are so well engineered that you could walk on a frozen lake and not fall.

I ask Val to lean against the wall. She doesn’t move. I realize that one of us is going to have to get in there with her. It certainly won’t be Troy; he’s way too big. I step into the shower myself. I move Val’s hands onto the tiled shower wall.

“The shower helps with the pain,” I say.

“No, it don’t,” Val yells. Frankly, I bet she’s right about that. She is yelling a string of other nasty, angry sentences. Her outrage is aimed at us three midwives, and a man by the name of Alonso. Alonso seems to be married, and it is Val’s hope that Alonso and his “fucking wife” will die and burn in “fucking hell.”

Troy steps in. In his incredibly soothing voice, he says over and over, “Move with the contractions. Just move with the contractions.” The hot water is steaming up the bathroom, like it’s a bad day in the Amazon rainy season.

The contractions are coming much faster now, and Val is not cooperating with my directions or Troy’s directions. She is not moving with the contractions.