She was standing over me and slowly slid to her knees. Moving one of my legs, she parted it at the knee, and while it hurt, it wasn’t excruciating. She tried the other one, with the same results. “If I pull your arms, can you grab hold of my shoulders and get into a crouching position? It’ll help with delivery if it comes to that.”
“Delivery?” I asked, my voice an octave higher than normal. “No way.”
“Hon, we may not have a choice. We need to be prepared.”
“Like the Boy Scouts.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, I can try.”
“First we’re going to have to get your pants off.”
“Oh, hell no,” I said, suddenly self-conscious. “We have an audience.”
“And we,” she said, smiling at me, “have a sheet. Several, in fact.”
With Denise’s help, I got onto my knees and we managed to get my pants off me.
“Can’t the guys just lift me out of here with the sheets?”
“No, it’s too big of a risk. If you fall again—”
“You could have fallen on me. Why was that not a risk?”
“Charley, every risk has to be weighed. It was riskier for you and for the baby for me not to come down here and check you. But it’s riskier for you both if the sheets don’t hold and you fall again. What is that?”
She pointed to my left. I’d been sitting on a skull. “So that’s what that was. Killed my tailbone.”
“Is that—?”
“A skull. Yes, we have to tell people. There are two bodies down here.”
Even in the low light, Denise’s face paled visibly. It was awesome.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yes, We need to get a sheet under you, then I’m going to check you.”
It took some creative thinking, but we managed to get the sheet mostly underneath me.
She’d brought gloves from Katherine the Midwife’s stash and put them on. “Can you straighten up just a bit?”
I grabbed a protruding root and straightened as much as I could. A blistering hot pain shot through me. Every part of my body hurt, but she was able to get a hand between my parted legs. “Okay, you are at about a seven with ninety percent effacement.”
“Should I push? I don’t want to push too early. I’ve heard stories.”
Reyes’s heat felt good. I could feel it from where I sat.
“How long was she out?” she asked Cookie.
“About an hour.”
“An hour?” I asked, surprised. “It felt like minutes.” I fell onto my palms again, my head resting in her lap as a spasm of pain clawed at me and squeezed my midsection like I was a bottle of ketchup. I gritted my teeth and sucked air in and out through them. My hands curled around handfuls of the sheet until the pain began to subside.
“Charley,” Cookie said from overhead. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Me neither.”
“Do you remember that time we went to the movie and that woman went into labor but she wouldn’t leave because she didn’t want to miss the ending and then, bam, it was too late?”
“Oh yeah. That was crazy. That ending sucked.”
“Right?”
“Do you want to tell me what you were doing out here?” Reyes asked.
“I was following you.”
“Why?”
“You snuck out of the house and—” Anther spasm ripped through me and all I could wonder was why in the world had women been doing this for thousands of years? This was barbaric. This was torture. Never again. Never again as long as I lived would I have another baby, so Beep had better be pretty awesome.
“And what?” he asked me. I realized, of course, they were trying to take my mind off the pain. Off the situation.
“And you met with Angel again.”
“Don’t bring me into this,” Angel said.
“Angel!” I said, happy to see him. Or hear him, since my face was planted in Denise’s crotch. “Why were you meeting with Reyes?”
“I can’t tell you. He’s meaner than you are.”
I lifted just to glare up at him. “Clearly you don’t know me very well.”
“I would go down there to be with you, but I draw the line at childbirth.”
“Chickenshit.”
“And proud of it.”
“I would have told you,” Reyes said. “You’re holding my underwear hostage. I would’ve had no choice.”
“Does that mean you aren’t wearing any?”
“Your blood pressure is too high,” Denise said. She’d checked me with one of those wrist models that fascinated me. She looked up. “We need that rope.”
“Got it!” Amber called out. “He didn’t want to lend it to us. He didn’t believe we had a pregnant woman stuck in a hole. So he came to help.”
“Hey, there,” a man called down to me. A Native American, judging by his accent. “I’m thinking we might need to get some professionals out here.”
“So, yeah, I’m not wearing pants,” I said to him. “Sorry.”
“I’m okay with it if your husband is.”
Another spasm, this one harder than any of its predecessors, tried to tear me in half. I cried out between locked teeth and tried to breathe in a pattern. It didn’t work.