I drove past my house. It took me a while to find it, as it was two streets back from the beach.
It was in the middle of an extensive renovation; it looked like strengthening beams were being put in and I wondered if this was when the middle floor was opened up to create the room I so loved.
Booking into a hotel would have been difficult without my grab bag. None of my bank or credit cards were valid thirty years prior to their issue. Bless mom and her paranoid belief that a grab bag is empty without a tightly bound roll of hundreds stuffed into an emptied peanut tin.
In the room I lay on the bed, and gently rubbed baby. It started kicking against my hand and I smiled, wondering what they were going to be like. Mom said I was an active baby, and it looked like the trait was holding to the next generation instead of skipping.
I sat up. Baby objected to the sudden movement, but the realisation that I could see mom again made it secondary. If this really was twenty-forty then she was here, now, pregnant with me and near ready to give birth.
Recalling the medical center she went to proved difficult. I checked my tablet, hoping the information might have been retained in the internal memory, but no. When I finished my search, when I decided I’d run up against my final blank wall, I’d moved the file to my cloud file. Like my bank accounts, it existed thirty years in the future. My memory has never been strong for remembering individual details. Instead, I remember where the information is. Picking a book off a shelf in the library because it was the one which contained some mid-twentieth-century precedent was easier than remembering the details of the precedent that had been set.
Thankfully wireless protocols hadn’t changed too much to prevent my tablet from connecting and, once I added the cost to my room bill, internet became available. A search soon gave me a list of local medical facilities with maternal units. I recognised most of them. The top five were listed as paid adverts, those below followed an alphabetical listing.
Of those top five only three were in North Myrtle Beach. Most rang a bell, but which one was moms? Closing my eyes allowed me to try and reconstruct when I’d been looking at the names before, let me link memories. It worked, and I opened my eyes feeling mighty foolish.
Tucked into my baby bag, along with my insurance documents, and a few things showing my South Carolina residency, was a copy of my birth certificate.
The facility was third down the alphabetical list. I phoned, asking if Ursula White had registered for her upcoming delivery, claiming to be a cousin from California who’d lost her number. The receptionist saw straight through my bullshit and shut me down with a curt ‘We can’t disclose personal details of patients or clients, thank you ma’am.’ I almost admired her. I’ve gotten past more than one receptionist with stories weaker than that.
Still, I knew when she would be there. It was three days until my birthday. I ordered room service, put on the television, and watched worrying news reports about surging virus rates.
It was hard to concentrate. I knew about the disease from mom. I knew about it from Danny and June-Ann, and tried to not think about the long trail of sorrow my future friends were about to endure.
According to the pregnancy tracker I was ten days or so before my due date. It couldn’t come soon enough. Maybe it was three days of room service, but I felt significantly larger getting into the truck than I had getting out a few days before, I felt like the Goodyear blimp; heartburn had made ingesting anything more than soup or water a trial by fire, so it wasn’t over-indulgence. Baby had shifted and its feet felt like they may burst out from my ribs at any point.
It took fifteen minutes of circling the car park before I found a space close enough to the entrance that I could walk without thinking about calling a cab. The receptionist immediately pointed me to a sign for maternity.
‘Believe it or not, it’s not me I’m here for,’ I said, and smiled. ‘Looking for the room Ursula White is in. I got a message saying she’s in now. Baby daughter. Her first.’ Baby kicked, and I winced.
She typed and stared at her screen. ‘Are you sure it’s this hospital?’ I nodded, continuing to grimace as baby danced an upside-down tango. ‘Can you spell the name for me?’ I did. She looked at me. ‘Sorry, ma’am, there’s no Ursula White in the hospital. We don’t even have her registered for the maternity unit.’
‘Oh. Thanks, sorry.’
‘There’s a health centre a couple of blocks away which has a maternity unit. She might be there. We do get folks who’ve mixed the two of us because of the address being so close.’
I nodded thanks and headed back out.
The handle of the truck hadn’t quite lifted when my waters broke. One moment I was angry with myself for looking at the address wrong, the next there was a warm wash down my legs and I yanked the door open, reached over for my baby bag, and headed back to reception.
She saw me coming in. I could see her lips moving as she spoke to someone via her headset. The moment she figured out what had happened was clear. As I got to the desk she said, ‘Your waters?’
‘I nodded.’
She looked round, as if checking for anyone looking, then reached into a draw and gave me a mask in its wrapper. ‘Put that on. I’ll call for an orderly. Are you registered with us?’
I shook my head.
‘You have insurance?’
I nodded.
‘Okay. We’ll get details on the ward. Sit over there.’
Of course, I didn’t have insurance here and now. The only valid ID I had was mom’s old driving licence, which was dated five months from the date now. I put our address back west, and the name of the doctor from when I was a kid on the forms.
‘You’re not due until next week?’ The doctor asked, peering up from between my legs. At least she’d listened to the nurse.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, well, baby doesn’t want to wait until then. You’re already about halfway dilated. I take it you’re not having contractions?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you will soon. Boy or girl?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh, old school. Well,’ she glanced at the headboard, where my name was scrawled in marker on a wipe board, ‘Ursula, hopefully you’ll be out of here by this evening with a healthy baby to go with you. Sorry about the un-gloved hands, but as you’ll appreciate most of our PPE is over in the Covid wards. It’s back to old fashioned hand washing.’ She smiled, and it almost broke through the weariness in her eyes.
The nurse stayed. ‘You look a little shocked,’ he said.
‘Well, I came to visit my mom, sorry, a friend, whose due today. I wasn’t expecting to be in myself.’
‘Who’s your friend, I’ll see where she is and you can go say hello.’
‘Oh, I came to the wrong hospital. I was just about in my truck when my waters broke. I’m just glad my baby bag was there. I don’t feel so dumb about having it with me for the last month.’
‘Well, as the doctor said, you can lie here, but moving about may help things go faster. Are you sure there’s no one we can contact, what about back home?’
‘No, it’s fine. Maybe after.’ He nodded and was about to pull the curtains back. ‘Can you leave those for me, I think I need a little rest.’
‘Sure.’
I thought of mom lying a couple of blocks away, getting ready to give birth to me. ‘What’s it like, mommy?’ I’d asked her when I was little. ‘It’s sore,’ she said, never one to hide unpleasant truths, ‘but it’s also magical.’ ‘Well, I’ve looked, and I don’t see how a head could come of me even when I’m big. I think I’ll not have any babies. I don’t like being sore. And you always tell me that magic is a poor substitute for science.’ She’d laughed and agreed with me.
The mix up in address still bothered me. My bag was on the chair beside the bed, and I lifted it over and slid out the paperwork file. The green edging was pale where I’d left it on a desk in sunlight for a week or so one time, but the ink recording the relevant details were clear. I’d come to the right hospital. Sliding the certificate away I dropped the bag back and stared at the ugly pattern on the pull round curtain, though my sight saw far beyond it.
Like a light switch going from off to on everything was clear. There was an Ursula White giving birth in this hospital today. And I knew what I was going to call my daughter. And I knew that we’d leave and go to California, where they were at least attempting to control the spread of the disease which was about to rob Danny and June-Ann of little George. I think I knew why my head was full of sports scores. ‘Gambling isn’t gambling if you know the result,’ mom taught me. ‘All you have to do is remember the results.’ ‘Don’t be silly, mom, you can’t remember something that hasn’t happened.’ ‘Sweetie, everything’s already happened.’
Part One Here
Part Two Here
Part Three Here
Part Four Here
Part Five Here
I hope you've enjoyed following Ursula's tale.
Tomorrow I'll be doing a little 'about the story' post so, if there's anything you really have to know, ask away and I'll answer it best I can.
text by stuartcturnbull picture by AberrantRealities via Pixabay