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Gabby has existed, insofar as she exists at all, for approximately thirty-four hours. William— though she doesn’t know if that will be his name, when it comes down to it— is her third, a blessedly easier and neater birth than either of his brothers before him.
She’s learned to count her small mercies. Also among them, that Gabby hasn’t been in active labor for all thirty-four of those hours— she’s had something like respite, time to pace the length of the dark room and think, which is, of course, the last thing she’s meant to do. Today, for instance, she’s stroking her stomach, wondering how long it’s been since the last time, when someone knocks on the door.
The woman who greets Gabby is equally heavily pregnant, with a crooked smile and a face that betrays every inch of her discomfort. She’s the first person Gabby’s seen since her doula disappeared with her last child— Andrew, she’d thought, though, of course, it hadn’t been Gabby’s decision— and she shoulders her way in with little hesitation. Gabby keeps a careful stretch of room between them, curious but alert. People don’t just show up in her life. It’s small and difficult, but it’s hers, and Gabby has memorized its crevices. She knows something has changed here, just by nature of this stranger’s presence.
Of course, like anyone else Gabby has ever met, the woman appears to have no regard for the door. She gives no indication that anything has changed as she steps over the threshold, same as the doula or the man with a stethoscope and a stern expression, who had showed his face when Gabby’s first birth had hit the twelve hour mark, all pain and viscera. It’s proof, as the others have been, that Gabby herself is the problem— that her existing solely between these four walls is not some inescapable fact of life, but perhaps, a punishment.
This stranger wants coffee. Every stranger wants something, in the end, from Gabby. At least this one is more polite about it— introduces herself with the hand from her stomach, a smile on her lips. Devon, Gabby commits to memory, though it’s not like she’ll have time to forget.
Devon is pointedly awkward, like she’s grown into it as a second skin, and Gabby envies her for the time it must’ve taken. Every comment she makes, regardless of intent, strikes somewhere upside Gabby’s ribs with the awareness that Devon will be allowed to leave. That Devon will hold her baby in her arms and walk out the door, none the wiser. She’ll be a good mother, maybe. Not that Gabby has a lot to draw on to make that guess.
Gabby hopes the woman who raises her own children is kind. She has a lot of time by herself, staring at the dark wood around her and counting the spaces between contractions, and she commits quite a bit of it to thinking about her, this other woman. Does she look like Devon? Like the doula? What does she have that Gabby herself does not?
There aren’t any mirrors in the cabin, but there’s reflective surfaces galore, enough for Gabby to count her stretch marks like rings in a tree. With Devon gone, once again, she’s alone. It seems most of her life exists in this state— quiet contemplation, muscles in her back spasming as she breathes. Eventually, she’ll be undeniably about to give birth— so close she may as well already be pushing— and then, and only then, will the doula arrive. Sometimes, Gabby wonders how she knows— how she times it so perfectly as to never miss the mark, how she knew to bring the dour man in a white coat in beside her all those years ago. Clairvoyant, maybe.
But as many times as Gabby circles the drain, she’s never seen hide nor hair of the babies’ father.
He must exist, right? Gabby certainly didn’t create her children out of nothing. She wonders, sometimes, if she had— if she’s some sort of medical marvel, the one-woman baby-making machine. If that’s why each one is bundled off in her doula’s arms, not to be seen again. Her children, miracles.
There’s a part of Gabby that thinks she must be failing some test. That the way she collapses into the mattress, drained and spent, after that final push is what proves to the doula— or whomever else is watching— that she’s unfit to be a mother. If she just pushes through this time, she can go home with her baby. In some ways, it’s a peaceful thought— it must mean whoever takes them has earned it. It’s easier to think that way, Gabby’s learned, rather than scratch at the walls and sob. Nothing can be done about it, after all— someone knows better than she does, otherwise, she’d be like the doula or the doctor or Devon. She must’ve been locked up like this for a particular reason.
She touches her fingertips to her stomach, where the pain is the worst. The other thing Gabby can’t help but think about, when she’s staring up at the dark logs lining the ceiling, alone in the center of the mattress, is that her body must be broken, somehow. She’s never experienced a day— an hour— without pain, and though she doesn’t have much to compare it to, Gabby is fairly sure that can’t be right. She has a sort of bone-deep certainty that this isn’t how it’s meant to be— that somewhere, somehow, there’s some other side of the tunnel. Painless and cradling her child, Gabby imagines. And it must be outside this damn cabin, out in the vast empty dark occupied by what seems to be everyone else.
Devon had mentioned other cabins— a cabin of her own. Gabby clings to the thought of it, of people just like her, confined to their own set of four walls, and lays back down.