“Push” by Liz Johnston

Push

“You have to push, Lilah.” Dr. Fong strove to make his voice a soft pillow to fall into, his face a warm blanket of understanding. “This is happening. You’re going to do this.”
            By Lilah’s side, Manny was whispering please, please. He squeezed her left hand between his palms then keeled forward to press his forehead against their interlocked fingers. Lilah closed her eyes and listened to him weep.
            She wouldn’t push. She would stay inside her mind, breathe shallow, resist the moment.
            The veil of her eyelids helped. She couldn’t block the harsh lights of the hospital room completely, couldn’t escape the weight of Dr. Fong’s expectation and Manny’s hope. She couldn’t ignore the sterile hospital smell, undercut by a scent akin to sex or menstruation. But she could back away from it, retreat behind thin folds of skin. She could imagine herself not so many years ago, when all talk of babies was entirely hypothetical, when she and Manny had been through nothing together.
            She remembered herself at twenty-seven, ducking out from Lady Marmalade after the brunch rush to meet Manny outside the AGO. Her Latin lover she called him then. They were going to see the Expressionists exhibit he’d mentioned on the date before this one. Slimmer, springier, she’d worn a bright dress of blue and yellow flowers and worried the whole way over that it had absorbed the restaurant’s reek of eggs, bacon, and coffee. If it had, Manny hadn’t noticed or cared. He embraced her when she stepped off the streetcar and didn’t let go of her hand until they’d come through the exhibit and were sharing a half-litre of wine at a small French restaurant on McCaul.
            The wine opened up talk about what they wanted from the future: real careers, for one, he as an artist, she doing communications for a prestigious non-profit. She didn’t have a specific organization in mind, just pictured herself somewhere with an international reputation and moral integrity. They both wanted an end to serving fellow millennials overpriced pancakes. They wanted dates like this to be unending. They saw themselves going weekly to plays, concerts, art openings. Neither of them imagined they’d ever leave Toronto.
            It would be months before they first talked about the kind of family they might want, their ideas about raising children, favorite names for boys, for girls. As their love for each other evolved from sex in the park and 2 a.m. conversations about Basquiat and Benjamin into the stable, real thing they had even now, even in this inescapable hospital room, so did their vision of the future. They wanted a home together, children, maybe even a car.
            They left Toronto for Belleville but still couldn’t afford property. Their parents helped them buy a fixer-upper backing onto train tracks on the outskirts of town. Lilah got a job working for the city, and Manny started managing a local photography store. Not the life they’d talked about in those early, breathless months, but they’d found happiness in it. Within a year of their move, so much work still to do on the house (a fence to build, walls to paint, cupboards to replace), they’d started trying to conceive. After one early but no less devastating miscarriage, Lilah got pregnant again. Before she turned thirty-one, Mateo was born.
            Squeezing her eyes shut did nothing to erase the memory she’d conjured. Mateo’s newborn face blazed on her eyelids, his scrunched, red features, his surprising head of thick black hair. Her whole body contracted, her abdomen crunching despite willing herself not to push.
            “Good,” said Dr. Fong. “That’s it. Here comes another one.”
            She opened her eyes, now scared less to take in this room than to see the face of her absent little boy. Manny sprang half up when she did, leaning close to whisper, “You can do this. We can do this.”
            She breathed again, telling herself, don’t, don’t, don’t. Manny almost smiled as he joined in with the doctor’s timed command to push. She hated being against him. But she couldn’t do this. She couldn’t push to hasten another swift son into the world.
            If it had happened earlier, she would have gotten herself out of this situation. But she was already seven and a half months pregnant when her first son bolted out the back door. She’d left it wide for fresh air while cleaning the kitchen, out of concern for how even her gentle, natural cleaners might affect Mateo’s unborn brother. It was Saturday, and Manny was upstairs retiling the shower, a home-improvement chore he’d turned into a mosaic art project. Mateo was on the kitchen floor playing with Duplo when she turned away from him to start wiping down the cupboard under the sink.
            Her back was turned for all of a minute. When she leaned back, dropped the cleaning rag to the floor, and sighed, “Well, that’s done,” Mateo was gone. “Matty?” she sang into the empty room. “Baby?” She stood and popped her head into the living room, glanced at the entryway. Five, six seconds of scanning the main level before she turned to the open back door. She heard the hollow hoot of the train whistle and ran. Her seven-and-a-half-months-pregnant legs skittered across the just-cleaned floor, out the door, over the small paved patio, and into their still-unfenced yard. The chain-link the railway had put up a lifetime before they moved in was all cut-out gaps or fallen-over poles. She screamed her son’s name.
            Lilah collapsed onto her lawn, screaming No! — the train screeched to an emergency stop — the body inside her kicked and squirmed, battering the walls of her uterus.
            Her toddler’s timing had been exquisitely horrible. Whether he’d been oblivious to the train or running to meet it, he reached the track the instant the train was hurtling through. He didn’t give the conductor one hundredth of the time he needed to stop the cars of steel and momentum. Lilah witnessed only the aftermath, and the train screeching — far too late — to a stop.
            Manny came running to her side. He stopped with her for a fraction of a second before he realized what was happening, what had happened. He took in the slowing train, the dropped Tonka, and ran even faster away from her.
            Afterwards, when he asked her how Mateo had gotten out on his own, he never let accusation flavor his voice. His blame he hid impeccably. She overheard him tell friends and acquaintances, “Her back was turned for all of a minute,” repeating her words for fact. Her bereavement leave turned into mental-health leave until her maternity leave started, and he took as much time as he could to stay home with her, taking care of her while he himself grieved. He brought her soup in bed, picked up ice cream, chocolate, got DVDs out of the library when she said she’d reached the end of Netflix. He called his parents in from Toronto to help hers, who lived nearby, organize the funeral. And in the dead of night when he didn’t think she could hear him, he’d sneak off to Mateo’s room and howl.
            The noise at her side now was more of a whimper. “Please look at me,” he said. Her head locked straight, she sent her gaze out the corner of her eye. He’d sculpted his face into a twist of entreaty. She thought she’d hate him if he told her again that she could do it. Instead he mouthed, “I’m sorry.”
            Her body squeezed, again of its own volition. It was tearing itself open to make way for her second son. Her only son. She accepted the pain as a penance. She no longer heard Manny or Dr. Fong. Her body and the body escaping it were everything. In three more unwilled pushes, she’d given birth.
            The room came back to her. The baby wailed, and the sound rent Lilah’s heart. Her son’s tiny lungs, like a tuning fork for his parent’s impossible grief, protested more than the trauma of birth.
            A moment later, Manny was tying his hair back and accepting the infant the nurse handed over to him. Lilah’s Latin lover, domesticated, then broken. Trying to smile down at his screaming son, he looked ten years older than he had when he first held Mateo. Had she aged as much? She thought again of her radiant twenty-seven-year-old self, stepping off the streetcar.
            Before she could catch her breath, the contractions started again. Minutes passed. Her new child, no longer taking life and protection from her body, naked in the dangerous world, settled into bearable bawling. With a final automatic push, Lilah’s body expelled the placenta. The nurse immediately moved in next to Dr. Fong to clean up the mess. Everything was over, and just beginning.

Liz Johnston

Liz Johnston lives and writes in Toronto. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Grain, The Antigonish Review,  and The Cardiff Review, among other publications. She is an editor of Brick magazine. Her first novel, The Fall-Down Effect, will come out with Book*hug Press in 2026.

Headshot: Nathan Iverson

Photo Credit: Staff