Cutting Teeth
Chandler Baker
PROLOGUE
It’s not true that nothing bad has ever happened at Little Academy. Not entirely. There was the boy last year whose hands slipped off the monkey bars. Next thing the mother knew his collarbone was popping clean out of his skin. （His father right there, he could have caught him!） At least once a school year, when the temperatures still reach well into the nineties, some mom or other accidentally locks her keys in the car along with her baby. The school is just around the corner from the fire station and the truck arrives within minutes, but the mother still sobs, unable to believe she’s been so careless; it could have been worse. Not that it ever is. Not here. Not at Little.
Maybe all preschools are designed to be adorable, but Little Academy is particularly so. Children’s handprints outline a cement walkway where on a typical day the baby classes ride around in covered hippo wagons. The children help to maintain a garden; in it grows an impressive display of knockout rosebushes and jasmine and other sorts of flowers that attract real, live butterflies. To step on campus is to feel your heart lift just the slightest bit in your chest, almost as if there’s less gravity there. A shrine to these final few glimmering months when none of the kids are too old for enthusiastic hugs at pickup, when big, fat tears are still cried while waiting for mommies.
Inside, the walls echo with the shrieks of tiny voices, muffled behind closed pony doors. Teachers clap—one, two, three—and announce that it’s time to change centers, to clean up, to keep hands to yourselves.
It smells like graham crackers. The memory of chubby wax crayons white-knuckle pressed between small fingers. That’s how it looks, actually—melted wax creeping shadowlike from beneath the door, out into the empty hall. The reflection of a fluorescent ceiling light wavers uncertainly on the puddle’s slick, red surface.
The door at the foot of the corridor hasn’t been closed properly. The way it hangs ajar feels lazy; somebody should put up a note, ought to be more careful. The supply room is where all the pointy things live—grown-up scissors, industrial paper cutters, letter openers. With all the tiny curious hands, it’s a bad situation waiting to happen.
The soft sound coming from the other side of the door is hard to place. A gentle wet sopping noise, like a puppy trying to suckle. A too-wet tongue. The smell of saliva like mouth sweat in the air.
The light flips back on, motion activated.
There is blood everywhere, but on the gray-flecked tile most of all. Viscous and slippery, it squelches and slides. Heat leaks out along with it and the room feels dank. Used up.
But even here, cold creeps across skin, puckering it into goose flesh. An electric current charged with disbelief hums in the deafening quiet. The wrongness of it, plain as day. Car seats, child-proof locks, Consumer Reports, swim lessons, they’ve worked so hard to avoid danger, to ward it off, and yet somehow, some way it’s snuck right past them.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby carriage. And now, now at last, the fear arrives.
ONE
The blood kept coming out of her. She was going to die. People died. She knew that intellectually and yet she couldn’t believe it was going to be her.
Rhea’s teeth rattled around in her skull like one of those wind-up chatter-jaw toys with the little feet.
“It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be all right now.” Behind her, the orderly with the James Earl Jones voice tapped the rubber grip on the wheelchair handle. She hadn’t seen his face before he whisked her down the corridor, following the intake nurse’s instructions.
How much blood was in her body? How much could she stand to lose? Of all the stupid things she’d been forced to learn in school, shouldn’t this at least have been one of them?
The elevator lurched up and Rhea felt her vision narrowing to pinholes, the whole world shrinking. When the orderly asked if she could stand to get into the hospital bed, she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her. He took her beneath an armpit and an elbow. As he lifted, she felt sure the bottom of her would fall out like the base of a soggy brown grocery bag and what would spill out was her own insides.
A new nurse came in and immediately started messing with the cords and tubes behind Rhea. Her back was on fire. Her body felt like it was begging her to evacuate, get out, leave now, before it was too late, but she found all exits blocked.
“How long have you been bleeding?” A female doctor looked deep into her eyes. She and Rhea were about the same age and Rhea had never seen this doctor before in her entire life.
Spit flew out from the corners of Rhea’s mouth as she forced the words through her teeth. “A couple of hours. I came as soon as it started, but I’ve been waiting.”
The doctor pressed a jellied ultrasound wand to her belly now. “Has it been about this rate since the bleeding began?”
A warm gush flowed between her legs. Rhea moaned. Her Walmart maternity joggers stuck to the inside of her thighs.
The doctor stopped moving the wand and looked gravely at the screen. “The placenta has completely separated from the uterine wall, Rhea, and I can see you’re hemorrhaging. You’re going to need a blood transfusion.” The doctor reached for a blue button on the panel above Rhea’s head and pressed it. “And we need to deliver that baby. Now. Do you understand?”
“I’m only thirty-six weeks.” She clawed at the nubby hospital blanket beneath her. Copper and earth tinged her nostrils and she registered, impossibly, that the smell was her.
More people filled the room. She could suffocate. She wasn’t even sure if she was breathing. “What are you doing?” She panted. “What’s happening? Wait. You have to stop. Wait.”
The nurse, who’d at some point stabbed her with an IV, now buzzed around her head. “I’m going to slip this mask on over your mouth and nose. Nice and easy. Very gentle.” She adjusted the rubber band behind Rhea’s ears. “How’s that? Comfortable. Breathe normally.”
Pain lassoed her stomach. Another giant gush of blood. She screamed into the hollow plastic.
“The baby doesn’t have oxygen.” The doctor moved so quickly around her. It was as if everyone were paying attention to Rhea and also no one at all. “We have to do a crash section.” This didn’t feel right. Wait. Wait. “We have seconds, not minutes, seconds.”
Rhea could feel her body shutting down. She hadn’t even asked about her baby yet. The fire burned up and down her spine, tearing through her ass muscles.
“No time for an epidural or painkillers. Rhea, you’ll be put straight to sleep. Do you understand?”
No. She was trying to tell them. No. No. She’d miss it if they put her to sleep. She would miss this thing, she would miss everything, everything she was promised. She would miss him. Hers.
“Take a deep breath.” She gasped, more a death rattle than an attempt to cooperate, but the world dissolved around her anyway. Down she sank. Down, down, down, down. Into a deep, salty darkness. Into a rotting cavity with no bottom, a medically induced black hole, bitter-tasting, like Advil with the sweet casing dissolved; she was swallowed alive. Rhea was plunged into motherhood the same way a cat’s drowned in water.