Chapter 59: Natural Childbirth
Shortly after her father’s birthday, we were lazing around the house after work of an evening, not having a massage appointment, for a wonder.
A substantial shipping crate arrived a few days earlier, the wooden sort you have to open with a jemmy bar. It turned out to contain several framed photographs selected from the art nude photography sessions this spring, sent unsolicited by Carlo.
They were in all sizes and forms. Mugs, desk-sized tilt-up frames, huge wall-dominating things, long ones, square ones, round ones…crazy ones. Spill the wine indeed!
Included was a note saying where Carlo thought they’d go best.
What was not included was a bill for all this, not even for the big expensive framed prints. When I mentioned this to Carlo on the subsequent phone call, he asked elliptically, “I wonder how much they’re charging for kidney transplants these days?”
I let it go.
I was studying one of the larger framed prints, depicting Kaitlyn’s soft yet muscled bare backside nestled into the harsh contours of a dead weathered juniper trunk projecting from the ground, a bluff in the background. It was hanging on the kitchen wall across from the table. As we’d come to expect, Carlo’s eye for such things was impeccable: it did indeed go perfectly there, compositionally and tonally. That wall would forever look ‘wrong’ to us if we took that print down now.
My wife looked about to make a comment when her phone rang, the name and face of Miguel Gutierrez lighting up its screen.
Her brother almost never called!
“Miguelito?” she greeted him uncertainly.
She had the phone up to her ear, but I heard his urgent voice clearly enough: “It’s time! Come now!”
“You at the farm?” she replied in a calm businesslike voice.
“No, just crossed fifth street. We’ll be there in like 10 minutes.”
My wife spoke on the path to the door, “Drive careful, ’Lito. We’ll be about 15 minutes behind you.” She pressed the phone’s End Call button, scooping up a long tee shirt she kept on the side table’s bottom shelf as an emergency cover-up, calling, “C’mon, Davie, Carmen’s water broke!”
I grabbed my wallet and keys, chasing my wife out to mi burro, the nearer of the two vehicles, not bothering to dress or lock up behind us, jumping in as my wife slammed her passenger side door, slipping her oversized tee shirt on as I let the engine warm up and fastened the three-point seat belt Miguel had bought and installed for us as a wedding present, his sister’s safety in mind.
In emergency mode as I was, I didn’t consider wearing a thing more than that seat belt this trip. The more I delayed, the longer Carmen would be in pain.
As I drove, Kaitlyn opened the glove compartment and removed one of the few homespun loincloths we’d made. We found them to be rather impractical, but she handed it to me now, speaking in a calm, reasonable tone, “Last thing we need now is to be pulled over and hauled in for indecent exposure, Davie. And watch your speed!”
I set the garment aside on the bench seat between us until we got to a lonely stop sign on the edge of town. I put the truck into neutral, slipped the loincloth’s untied band around my waist before the truck could begin to roll, and got mi burro accelerating again in seconds, Kaitlyn leaning across to fasten the side tie.
I barely noticed, being fully engaged in nervous recapitulation of the checklist we’d rehearsed several times since agreeing to help Carmen give birth naturally. Driving? That was on full autopilot, nothing above my hindbrain operating the truck’s controls.
We made it through town without my toplessness catching any policeman’s eye, shirtless men in off-road vehicles a common enough sight in Moab during the warm months.
Half an hour after I closed our house’s front door, I was sprinting barefoot along the Gutierrez farm house’s side into the back yard, my flapping loincloth no longer sufficing to keep my man bits concealed. I didn’t care; I was at my second home now. It was the wailing in the retreat area that concerned me.
On opening the privacy gate, I found Carmen nude upon the sand, face red, legs apart, bellowing her pain to the sky, already dilated a few inches.
One of these days, I’m going to have to figure out teleportation, by Ritchie’s beard!
Too focused on the immediate problem to remember to greet anyone, I pulled the side-tie string of the loincloth as I ran, sliding upon one knee alongside Carmen, grabbing her forearm above the hand held by Miguel. Kaitlyn mirrored my movement on her other side above mama Mary’s grasp, healing my scraped knee almost before I noticed its sting.
“Let go, you two!” I barked at Miguel and Mary. “We can’t have you two clothed this close by! If you want to hold her hands, get naked!”
Kaitlyn and I were instantly in rapport as deeply as any we’d ever enjoyed in private together as soon as Carmen’s clothed supporters backed off to let us work the magic. We began working wordlessly on her, the correct sequence of actions obvious from our inspection.
Kaitlyn used her healing magic, specifically the skills that let us reshape our bodies to aid Carmen’s dilation, reducing the tearing pressure on her vaginal walls and labia.
Our patient quieted almost instantly, though she sobbed in relief for half a minute more until I worked out how to stimulate more dopamine production, giving her a natural sort of high, nature’s own analgesic.
While I took care of that, Kaitlyn sterilized the sand Carmen lay upon, but not Carmen herself, both of us knowing that the mother’s bacterial load becomes the baby’s starting microbiome.
The baby was well crowned by this point, the mother quiescent, Miguel and Mary once again holding her hands, as bare now as Carmen, so I moved into place between her legs and said, “Ready.”
Kaitlyn sent sharply, «No, not ready! The baby will tangle in her umbilical if we birth her now! Gimme a sec!» And without waiting for me to acknowledge the problem, she began probing magically at the cord, moving it up and around the baby’s feet to get it clear.
Satisfied with her solution, Kaitlyn asked her sister-in-law in a calm tone that didn’t betray that we’d already begun our work, “Ready?” got a nod, and helped me widen Carmen’s birth canal to ease her baby’s passage into the new world.
Inside half a minute, I had my hands filled with a naked squalling infant. With a push of power, I encouraged the cells along the umbilical cord near the belly to separate from their neighbors, creating a perfect painless cut, which I then magically healed, preventing any possibility of infection.
The tiny baby girl was breathing as I carried her into the pool, clearly healthy from my magical inspection. The pump was running per our prearranged plan, so I pushed out everything that wasn’t water, then nodded at Ramón to cut the switch, whereupon I washed the baby clean from the neck down. With gentle fingers, I cleaned her face and thin black hair as well as I could.
Kaitlyn meanwhile was finishing up with Carmen, helping the afterbirth out, then healing all of the damage that the baby had done, everything from vaginal tearing to stretch marks. When she finished, Carmen was as close to her pre-conception state as it was possible to achieve, given our skill. She still sagged in places, but her body would tighten that up on its own.
Miguel and Kaitlyn were helping the relieved mother up from the ground, holding her arms as she waddled over to the pool, then stepped down to a seat, where I handed her baby over as Miguel stepped down beside her.
The rest of the family joined us quickly, and we welcomed the new life into the world, the thing done as painlessly and quickly as it was likely possible to be done, given the distances we’d had to travel to achieve it.
Carmen said, “Thank you, you two! Thank you so very much!”
“Of course, Carmen,” my wife and I replied in unison, our rapport still extremely deep and strong at the moment.
“What will you call her?” I asked the couple.
“Erica María Ortiz y Gutierrez,” replied the new father, “after her grandmothers.”
“Awww!” chorused the whole group, and we laughed under the emerging stars.
Our wedding anniversary was a few days later, so we’d run Chanel out of the house, sending her off to spend the night with a friend on campus. I hoped it was a friend intimate, confident, and skilled enough to knock her sexual tension down a few notches, but we didn’t ask.
I was cooking dinner when Kaitlyn said, “Carmen just called. Their life is settling into its new pattern nicely. Little Erica’s reasonably happy for a newborn, and her parents are quite happy not to be buried under a new pile of hospital bills. Oh, and they say she has the smoothest little belly button you ever did see. We did a very good thing, Davie.”
I pulled my wife of one year into a hug, kissed her on the cheek, and asked, “Do you want one, too?”
She didn’t need to be told one-of-what, so she simply replied, “With our promise to Miki to go right back to school again, not soon.”
“As you wish, my love,” I replied.
We had a lovely dinner al fresco, under the stars.
I’d mage-crafted a tika for Kaitlyn, the rose gold chain supporting a single large sapphire pendant surrounded by tiny diamonds over her forehead, all of its gems made as byproducts of our magical workings over the past year. My wife wasn’t Hindu, and she had no interest in adopting my birth culture, but this was part of my concept of female beauty, so she willingly accepted the accent to her natural beauty, the combination bringing a tear to my eyes.
And Kaitlyn? She gave me a high-end bottle of cologne, very nice in and of itself, but the real gift was her anointments, dabbing a spot on her fingertip, touching it to my forehead, behind each ear, at the hollow of my throat, in my bellybutton, and on both sides of my scrotum before swallowing me down, inhaling the cologne deeply.
Things proceeded from there as we enthusiastically practiced our coital arts for the time that Kaitlyn would be ready to follow her sister-in-law into motherhood.