The labor had started hours ago--how many, Lilly couldn’t say, but she had returned home to find the red message button blinking incessantly on her machine. Barb would be her first real friend to give birth. Her best friend. She had wanted to be there from the beginning, to be at her friend’s side before anyone else got there, but now it seemed that she would be among the last to arrive. At the present, her fingers ached from clutching the steering wheel tightly. She tried to keep her mind on the road as waves of light streaked past her like so many fireflies in the night.
“How wonderful to be a new mother!” Maria had exclaimed to Barb at the baby shower. “Your life will be changed forever, you know! It will all be new and beautiful.”
Lilly had balked. She saw nothing wrong with Barb’s old life. Maria was a friend of Barb’s and already had three children of her own. Despite the children, however, Maria’s life revolved around her husband, dinner parties, and numerous hair appointments necessary to keep her lustrous mane the perfect shade of flaming red that her exacting husband favored. Lilly had envied the grace with which Maria swished around the edges of her long polished dinner table, setting out the fine, gilded china, resplendent with roses and cherubs, and somehow managing not to trip over the hem of her long floral skirt as she did so. Lilly tried to imagine herself tipping a bottle of dark wine over the fluted crystal and saying something as insufferable as, “We find that this vintage goes well with the wild mushroom risotto.” But even in her imagination, she ended up tripping over her skirts, spilling wine her guests, and somehow ending up with wild mushroom risotto in her hair.
Lilly ineffectively smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand as she pulled into the parking garage situated next to the sprawling, whitewashed buildings that comprised the hospital’s maternity ward. She passed several open spaces until she found a cache of cars that she recognized as belonging to Barb’s family. She pulled into the closest space nearby and took a deep breath. Barb had a large family. And they would no doubt all be hovering around by now. Not to mention the numerous friends and people who would be strangers to her. It was paralyzing to think she would have to go in and spend hours with them when she had really only wanted to see her friend once more before motherhood took her even further away than marriage had. She wanted to laugh over memories of their last road trip, to discuss the last book they had each had the leisure to read, to whisper and gasp over new bits of gossip about ex-lovers and friends.
But she couldn’t linger there—time was short. Lilly swung the car door open, banging it against a short, ugly pole with a resounding ding. She growled to herself but didn’t have time to inspect the dent and so settled for slamming the door as hard as she could and sprinting to the elevator of the maternity wing. Or at least what she hoped was the maternity wing. Once inside, she had to stop several times to read the vague, color-blocked hospital maps, as she was unwilling to approach any of the bustling white or pink-draped staff as they rushed by, their faces drawn and serious. She was wandering somewhere between a little gift shop and what she hoped was the corridor to the maternity ward when she heard a voice call out to her.
“Lilly, is that you?”
The man’s voice startled her; men’s voices always gave her a moment’s pause when they spoke her name.
“Come this way!” Maria’s husband, John, smiled and gestured at her, taking her up by the arm as she approached. Lilly only smiled and averted her eyes from his. She studied the wide red and white checked tie around his neck and matching kerchief in his pocket as he steered her through the throng of visitors, patients, and doctors crowding the great passageways. A pack of candy-stripers nearly knocked her over as they rushed past in their neat, floss-colored aprons, their arms full of magazines and stuffed bears. John swerved her around the slow-moving, hunch-backed elderly patients, their spotted hands gripping their shiny chrome walkers, and through groups of phone-wielding teenagers. All around her, people rushed to get to this room or that, to fetch and carry to or fro, to wait or wander in the congested, venous corridors.
