Fuck confidentiality, Margaret thought, but what she did was step close and whisper, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
The nurse considered her for a moment, then sighed. “I really don’t know all the details. Bowen said their progesterone levels must have been too high for the pills to work. You’ll have to ask him. Just don’t tell him I told you.”
“I won’t.” Margaret closed her eyes. “Goddamn.”
“There’s always surgical abortion, you know.”
“And have they tried that already?”
Kimball shook her head. “I don’t think so. I know one of the patients refused.” She paused to retrieve the Hershey’s bar beside her computer. She unwrapped it with trembling fingers. “If Detective Randall really told you everything, then you know we’re doing all we can for your daughter. I . . . I have a niece about the same age. A year ago, a boy raped her at a party. Got her pregnant and gave her herpes. I thought nothing could be worse than that.”
“Until now?”
Kimball nodded, her eyes shiny. She held out the exposed chocolate bar. “Want some?”
The candy’s aroma tap danced on her empty stomach, but Margaret shook her head. “I have to get back to her. We have a lot to talk about.”
She returned to Daniella’s room in a daze. The specter of a surgical abortion had moved to the forefront of her mind. Personally, she hated the procedure—and hated RU-486 as well, although she considered it the lesser of the abortion evils. Any form of abortion went against her life’s mission to enable pregnancies, but she found the surgical kind, technically called “vacuum aspiration,” to be especially barbaric. She wouldn’t have even asked Kimball about the pill unless she thought Daniella’s life was threatened. But the thought of Doctor Sharma cramming a cannula tube up her daughter’s vagina and switching on a suction machine, and afterward using a curette scraper to remove the inner lining of her uterus like it was a Halloween pumpkin—it was almost more than she could bear.
But it wasn’t entirely her decision. It couldn’t be. This was Daniella’s body, and the girl deserved to have some say in it.
Which meant Daniella needed to know everything. Now.
Her daughter was watching TV when she entered—eyes wide and riveted, mouth hanging open. Margaret wondered if Daniella had suffered a mini-stroke until she heard a familiar voice from the screen.
The black police officer whom she’d seen consoling Detective Randall that morning now stood behind a cluster of microphones, addressing someone off-screen. A News Four caption identified him as Sergeant Weston Lively of the McLean Police Station. A splitscreen image showed a grainy, slow-motion, nighttime shot of the monster leaping off a bridge to land on the train tracks running down the middle of I-66. The amateur footage was jerky and shot from far away, so the creature was little more than a shadow with a tail—but it was nevertheless enough to give Margaret a shudder.
“Yes, that’s correct,” Sergeant Lively was saying. “This individual—or wild animal—is one of a pair suspected in a series of sexual assaults throughout the McLean district. In just the last twenty-four hours, there’s been three such incidents. The first was of a sixteen-year-old female at approximately midnight last night behind the Fairfax Square movie theater. The second . . .”
Daniella turned to her mother, eyes wide with alarm. “Oh my god. That’s me! That’s me! That’s me he’s talking about!”
Nodding, Margaret sat down heavily to watch the press conference. She placed the crackers and soft drink on the bed without looking.
Despite Daniella’s terrible hunger, the food went untouched for another half hour. In that time, Daniella did go into hysterics again, but Margaret found she didn’t blame her.
✽ ✽ ✽
Four floors below, in Labor-Delivery-Recovery Room 6, Valarie Thompson remained unaware of the news conference. Nothing existed for her but the pain that was tearing her vagina apart.
“Breathe, honey, breathe,” the midwife said and continued to massage her back as she lay on her side. Val was thankful for the woman’s gentle ministrations. The rubbing didn’t ease the contractions so much as it distracted her from them. It was like that time as a girl when Daddy yanked her dislocated shoulder back into place after she fell from the pickup truck. Look over there, sweetheart—a rainbow, he’d said, diverting her attention at the crucial moment.
“Daddy. Where’s Daddy?”
“He just went out to the Coke machine, honey. He’ll be right back.” Rub, rub, rub. “Now keep breathing.”
Thank the Lord for this woman, whoever she was. Val couldn’t remember her name although she’d told her twice. The pain always pushed it from her mind. She looked like Val’s late mother: easily the same age and two-hundred-some pounds, with curly red hair and a mole on her neck the size of an olive.
She’d come just in time, too. Daddy was a sweet man, but he was about as helpful in the moral support department as a bump on a hound dog’s ass. Her boyfriend, Billy, had been at her bedside when she gave birth last year, but he’d just dumped her three days ago, claiming she was pregnant with the car dealer’s baby. Oh, well. He couldn’t have helped much anyway. These labor pains were far beyond anything she experienced in her first pregnancy.
“Come on, let’s get you up in that rocking chair.” The midwife hoisted her by the armpits, proving that at least some of her bulk was muscle. “You need gravity to help.”
Val nodded because it was too hard to speak past clenched teeth, and allowed the woman to pull her to her feet. She gasped when the baby shifted. The midwife—really a nurse with a stethoscope around her neck—pivoted her with professional ease and settled her into the chair.
Seconds passed, and the change in position did help. The pain receded from its high-water mark near the top of her head, allowing her to think about other things than the huge basketball forcing its way out of her. She took in her surroundings and again reflected that this wasn’t what she had expected. Her first child had been born at home, and she’d always assumed women in hospitals gave birth on operating tables—not this. Soft orchestral music, a Muzak version of Purple Haze, gave the sunlit room the comfy feeling of a department store. Her bed, although adjustable and outfitted with foot pedals for bearing down, looked like it belonged in a hotel, situated as it was between wooden cabinetry and shelving. A window presented a view of a lush tree canopy. Pictures of sailboats and balloons decorated baby-blue walls. A bathroom contained a shower. The only sign she was in a hospital was a fetal monitor on a rolling stand—it looked like a home computer—and the medical equipment tucked into an alcove, where the nurse would examine the baby in the minutes following birth.
It all helped her not to be so scared.
And she’d been nothing but scared since getting raped last weekend in the Sharky’s bar parking lot. You didn’t need the tenth grade education she didn’t have in order to realize this was abnormal—that women didn’t grow babies in a week flat. Normal pregnant women didn’t eat six huge meals a day, either, then demand more—but still drop weight like those Holocaust victims at the museum in DC. She didn’t even have tits anymore. What happened to those great milk-swollen sacs she’d sprouted in her first pregnancy? Now all she had were two deflated balloons that leaked a gummy fluid. The sight made her sad because she’d always considered herself a hottie.
The only places with meat left were her legs, but then that was only because they were swollen with fluid. Yeah, a great picture she looked now with her cheekbones showing through a face black-and-blue from being slammed into the side of her car. When Daddy held up a mirror this morning for her to comb her hair, she could’ve slugged him.
“I’m a freak,” she said as she rocked through the contraction, which just went on and on.
“Oh, come on now, hon.” The midwife smoothed Val’s sweat-soaked hair. “This is all normal.”
Val would have laughed if she wasn’t so busy grimacing. The woman hadn’t been told anything, or so Dr. Bowen s
aid. The woman wouldn’t be calling this normal if she knew how they’d tried to “normalize” (their word) her hormones earlier that week, and here she thought hormones were just things that made you have sex. They stopped noodling with her when the attempts made her violently ill.
That was about the time they gave her the abortion pill and not a damned thing happened. Secretly, she’d been glad it failed as she couldn’t imagine aborting a baby, even an abnormal one. So when they offered her a surgical abortion a couple days later, she refused. But now, in the throes of labor, she wondered if she’d been hasty.
“Oh God!”
The contraction made her double over in the rocking chair.
The midwife kept rubbing her back. “That’s it. Keep breathing. It’ll pass.”
The pain felt like one of those corset things she once saw on the History Channel—some handmaiden bracing a knee against her spine and yanking the straps to tighten it.
Slowly, slowly, at last . . . the pressure eased up.
The barrage of contractions started last night, gradually getting closer together, strengthening, and lengthening. The last time someone gave her the score, they were five minutes apart and lasting one minute each, but that was ages ago. Sometimes the baby kicked her inside with the force of Bruce Lee, making her scream.
The midwife handed her a tissue so she could honk bloody snot into it. “As soon as your dad comes back, I’m going to send him to find your doctors.” She sounded worried.
“My doctors are—” Val gasped to catch her breath, “they’re too busy yappin’.”
Doctors Bowen and Sharma: creation didn’t have two bigger dummies. They’d been fluttering in and out all afternoon like birds on a feeder. They’d watch the fetal monitor for a while, examine her, and step out into the hallway to talk. Sometimes, their voices rose in heated arguments, causing one to shush the other and tow him farther down the hall.
Daddy was a gifted eavesdropper, though. It’s probably why he was really out of the room right now. The latest intelligence report was that Sharma, who’d always advocated drugging her and messing with her, now wanted to cut her open. Bowen, who’d always been for letting the pregnancy run its course and giving her as much food as she wanted (thank God), wanted this to be a vaginal birth until they had reason to intervene. Sharma said her body wasn’t up to the strain—no contractions had so far conditioned her uterine muscles to give birth. Daddy said they were called B-H or B-M contractions or somesuch. Valarie thought he was wrong because B-Ms were for shitting, and you didn’t shit out babies. Giving birth was a million times harder than shitting.
Make that a billion, she thought as a fresh contraction started.
One time, the docs had returned from a hallway huddle to ask if she wanted an epidural to ease her pain. That had sounded just dandy until they said it involved injecting something into her spine. “Forget it—I can stand it,” she’d answered, but now wished she said yes.
“What’d you say, hon?” the midwife said. Rub, rub, rub.
She must’ve been mumbling. “Nothing, I . . . ooh!”
The pain exploded through her. This was the worst one yet. It was liable to knock her onto the floor. “I think . . .”
Shadows abruptly covered the room as if someone had shut the blinds. Val spun through vertigo and disorientation—heard shouting, felt herself being lifted, her legs being pried apart and oh God the pain and a voice, it was saying, “Valarie? Valarie. Come on, wake up.”
She opened her eyes. “I pass out?”
“It’s okay. It’s almost over.”
The speaker was Dr. Bowen, hands between her legs in hike position. He wore blue scrubs and a frown. Valarie was back on the bed, her feet in the stirrups. The lower third of her bed was missing, and she spotted it leaning against a wall. Her gown had been pushed up to her chest. A strap around her bulging belly held in place two sensors trailing to the fetal monitor. Daddy and the midwife stood on either side of the bed, helping her to sit up.
Dr. Sharma stood behind Bowen, his gaze darting between the show and the fetal monitor. One rubber-gloved hand hovered over a table that was draped in blue plastic and arrayed with basins, a large eyedropper thing, and blue and white cloths.
A tall adjustable light blinded her and seemed to swell along with the pain growing between her legs. Valarie realized she was in danger of passing out again. The midwife continued to rub her back and whisper meaningless things.
“That’s it—it’s crowning,” Bowen said. He pushed his glasses farther up his nose and leaned in.
Over the slope of her stomach ballooned a hairy mass. The pain became impossibly sharp, and Bowen was telling her to push, push, PUSH!
And the pain began to fade.
Looking relieved, Sharma handed the oversized eyedropper to Bowen, who jabbed it at the hairy bulb, saying, “And . . . a couple of squeezes to clear out the airway, and . . .”
A baby’s cry rang through the room.
A normal baby’s cry.
Thank God.
Then she passed out again.
✽ ✽ ✽
With an oxygen mask covering her mouth and nose and an IV pumping fluid into her arm, Val was eventually alert enough to hold her baby. “Just for a few minutes, then we gotta let you rest,” the midwife said as she set the swaddled form into her arms.
Val tried to ignore the queasy feeling of the slag-like afterbirth oozing out of her. She tried to ignore the way the doctors were snapping off their bloody surgical gloves and glancing into the hallway as if they were afraid of being caught doing something. She tried to ignore the sound of Daddy in the bathroom, attempting to conceal his weeping by splashing water onto his face.
She tried most of all to ignore the fact that she was holding an infant conceived only one week ago.
“He’s a beautiful boy,” the midwife said, touching the baby’s forehead with her fingertips. She had surprisingly tapered, delicate hands for such a large woman. “What will you name him?”
Val gasped deeply of the air flowing into her mouth. She felt like she’d run a marathon. “I don’t know. It didn’t feel real till now.”
The baby’s eyes were closed and juicy with whatever the midwife had dropped in to ward off infection. He had dark skin as if his father were black—and maybe the man was, for all Val knew. She’d been raped face-down in the parking lot and hadn’t seen him.
I don’t want this. It came from evil.
She blinked and tried to focus past the oxygen leaking from her mask. She pointed at the peach-fuzz body hair on the baby’s forehead and cheeks. “What’s all this?”
“It’s called lanugo.”
“What?”
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s normal. It’ll shed in a few weeks.” The midwife rubbed at some of the hair on the baby’s shoulder, but it showed no signs of coming off. “He’s remarkably healthy for a preemie. Testicles have descended and everything.”
To Val’s surprise, the baby opened his eyes and looked at her. He looked directly at her—none of the unfocused eyerolling shown by Val’s daughter when she was born. It was as if this one knew where he was and who she was.
He began to wail. Val thought she saw a flash of tiny teeth but knew that was impossible. She was just lightheaded from all the fainting.
“Can I breastfeed him? He sounds hungry.”
“Well, if your doctors say it’s okay.”
Val looked from the woman to the two doctors, who were watching from the foot of the bed. Dr. Bowen had put back on his white coat with the giraffe on the lapel. He smiled and nodded that it was okay. Dr. Sharma only crossed his arms.
“Do you know how?” the midwife said.
Grinning, Val stripped off her oxygen mask so she could see better, then hiked up her hospital gown over her breast. She was exposing herself to everyone but didn’t care.
The baby didn’t need any encouragement to start nursing. With a strength that surprised Val, he freed an arm from his loose swaddling blanket
to grip her breast. An I.D. bracelet labeled with her name and “boy” circled his tiny wrist. Something about his shape didn’t seem quite right. Maybe he was just a little scrawny.
Dr. Sharma finally smiled. “Arrey.”
Val nodded as the baby’s nursing intensified. “See? There’s nothing to it.”
And at that point, she learned her son really did have teeth because he bit her nipple. Hard.
Val screamed. She tried to pull him away, but that only made him bite harder.
The midwife and doctors were upon them in an instant. Sharma reached into the baby’s mouth, then yelped and jerked away, two fingertips sliced open.
Val shrieked as the tiny mouth started chewing. Blood welled under the pudgy cheeks and dripped down her stomach.
“It’s sharp—it’s sharp!” she said, meaning to say they were sharp, the baby’s teeth, but now she was beyond words, only able to sob, her screams lost in the din of the doctors and midwife all shouting at each other.
Sharma smacked the baby hard on its ass.
“You fool, what the hell?” Bowen said and pushed him away.
Daddy then charged in from the bathroom and shoved Dr. Sharma into the fetal monitor. Man and equipment toppled over with a crash.
Meanwhile, the baby dug in with sharp fingernails and finished tearing off his mother’s nipple. Val continued to scream.
Dr. Bowen grabbed the infant with two hands and yanked. Its fingernails tore red grooves into Val’s breast as it came away. Val screamed from the pain and then at the kid’s bloody face. It was still looking at her.
As it was free of its blanket and suspended in the air by Dr. Bowen’s hands, Val now saw the baby’s entire naked body for the first time. She pinpointed what had bothered her about his shape. Babies normally had big heads and stubby legs, but this one had a small head and long legs, more like an adult. Lanugo covered most of his body. His penis was as big as a grown man’s.
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