by Jim Nelson
“What you did to Violette,” she said. “You can do that to me. So I don’t have my finality.”
“Paige, please,” he said. “You know I can’t do that.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said.
“Violette lasted six days,” he said. “Then she was gone.”
“You can do better,” she said. “My father says you are a genius.”
Dr. Blanchard grimaced at the word. “I failed. The evidence is plain.”
“I don’t deserve this,” she said softly.
“No bridge daughter deserves their biology,” he said.
“You told me of your oath,” she said. “I remember your speech.”
This was not the Paige of six months earlier. In January, as Dr. Blanchard prepared to cut into his bridge daughter, the blood in his words frightened shy Paige Doisneau. She felt then his speech was asking something of her, permission for his actions, absolution for his sins. Six months later, pons anno and the duties and obligations of surrogacy had matured Paige to a wisdom beyond her years. This was another aspect of bridge daughters Dr. Blanchard admired.
“You told me that speech so I would understand you,” she said. “You wanted me not to blame you for what you were doing. I understand, Dr. Blanchard. I think what you did was very courageous.”
Dr. Blanchard began to speak, then stepped away. He removed from the wall a framed photo, a grainy sepia-toned still. It was of Dr. Blanchard and her father at the river. Each held rod-and-reel and strings of trout. Each clasped the other’s shoulder.
Paige pushed away the photo. “Is my life cheaper than Renaud’s?” she demanded.
Dr. Blanchard returned the photo to its place on the wall. “No such thing as a coin with one face,” he said.
“Why do you turn your back to me?” she demanded.
“If I don’t, where does it end?” Dr. Blanchard produced a package of Gauloises and a steel lighter from his examination coat. “I can’t hide another death.” A gray shoelace of smoke hovered before his face as he waved his cigarette hand. “Violette, I could explain. She ran away, just like so many passerelles before her.”
No funeral, no ceremony, no period of mourning. For six months, Dr. Blanchard had affected the temperament of an outraged father abandoned by a disobedient bridge daughter. Rouen society demanded an aggrieved doctor and he provided it.
“You told my father you know what your mistake was,” Paige said.
“My mistake was to try to reverse nature,” he snapped. “To play God—”
“Those three needles you injected into Violette,” Paige continued. “You told my father she did not need so much.”
“A theory, at best,” he said.
“Test it on me,” Paige said.
Dr. Blanchard hovered at the wall of photos. He gently placed his fingertips on a framed photo of Violette. In the photo, she stood among the roses in the rear garden of the house wearing a bonnet to protect her skin from the sun.
The photographer had questioned the assignment. He reluctantly accepted Dr. Blanchard’s money shaking his head and muttering What a waste. Even the day of the shoot, between each exposure, the photographer repeated under his breath, What a waste. The money was better spent on baby photos and birth announcements.
What a waste.
“My little speech to you was not a confession,” Dr. Blanchard said. “It was not penance. I was practicing.”
“For what?” Paige asked.
“For the guillotine,” Dr. Blanchard said. “Final words.” He stopped her protests. “I will not escape judgment, passerelle. In time I will have to account for my actions.”
He began speaking with a low voice. “You’ll need to obtain your own gefyrogen,” he said. “I can tell you where to find it, but you’ll need to obtain it. And you’ll have to run away from here—oh, your father. Your poor, poor father.”
Dr. Blanchard took a heavy drag, shaking his head, silently damning himself for what he was talking himself into.
“Run to America.” He started talking quickly. “New York and Maryland. They prescribe gefyrogen there to avoid premature birth. If you can find a sympathetic doctor, or a chemist willing to—”
She dropped from the table and rushed to him. In her tight embrace, faint memories of Violette’s embraces snapped to the present, and Dr. Blanchard accepted what he must do.
Thirty-two
At three thirty in the afternoon, they crossed San Diego’s city limits. At half-past four, entering San Ysidro, Cynthia complained the pain was unbearable. Minutes later, she passed out.
—
The orderlies at the emergency room entrance took the staggering Cynthia under her arms and by her ankles. In one heave-ho, they lifted her onto a gurney. Another moment later, she disappeared into the blank white corridors of the hospital.
Hanna kept Ruby close. She couldn’t leave her in the car, alone. She whispered for Ruby to keep her complaints of cramps to herself. She filled out and signed the admission forms with a shaky hand while verbally answering the nurse’s questions.
“How long has she been on PGN?”
“She hasn’t,” Hanna said.
“Did her doctor not prescribe it?” the nurse said, amazed.
“She’s not taken any,” Hanna said.
“Taken any gefyrogen in the last forty-eight hours?”
“Twice a day,” Hanna said. She unsnapped her purse and dug inside madly for the prescription bottle. She handed it to the nurse, who peered over the top of her glasses to read the fine print.
“She has Hoff’s Syndrome?”
“A family history of it,” Hanna explained.
The nurse noted so on the clipboard before her. “Any painkillers in the last twenty-four hours?”
“No,” Hanna said.
“Antidepressants?”
“No,” Hanna said, head spinning.
“Alcohol, marijuana, narcotics?”
“Of course not,” Hanna said with thinning patience.
The nurse made more notes, ripped apart the triplicates, and handed three loose pages to Hanna. “Room 33E, right that way, follow the green line.”
Hanna hurried down the hall, wondering if she’d made a mistake not taking Cynthia to the Berkeley hospital. In the desert on the edge of the border, the modest hospital looked like a multi-office dental complex to Hanna’s eye. The worn tile flooring and scuffed-up paint on the walls did not reassure her of the quality of care. Her conscious kicked in and scolded her to quit being judgy—to quit being her mother—and to give these people the benefit of the doubt.
The nurses had stripped off Cynthia’s bridge dress, pulled a gown on her, and transferred her to a birthing station. When Hanna and Ruby entered, the nurses were strapping Cynthia’s wrists and ankles to the rails of the elevated bed.
“What are they doing?” she said to her mother.
“They have to do this, honey.” Hanna went beside Cynthia and stroked her forehead. “It will make sense soon enough.”
Cynthia tugged her thick right arm twice to test the straps. “Do they think I’m going to run away?”
The nurses asked for Hanna to step aside. They rolled the bed to the center of the room. One nurse felt around the crook of Cynthia’s arm and inserted an intravenous. Cynthia watched the needle slide in with a mere grimace across her face. Hanna knew this face: Cynthia’s look of determination.
Hanna pulled Ruby close. They stood beside the door and watched the nurses work with a quiet wordless efficiency. It reassured Hanna.
“I’m Doctor Mueller,” came a crisp voice behind them. A tall woman in a doctor’s coat greeted them. “You are the mother? Hanna?”
Hanna nodded. “This is my daughter. Is it okay she stays?”
“It’s…fine,” the doctor said, eyeing Ruby. She flipped through the pages on her clipboard. “No PGN?”
“We’re traveling,” Hanna explained. “We weren’t expecting it to happen this soon.”
“Well, the PGN
is only a precaution,” the doctor said. “The extra progesterone and gefyrogen make a cushion for the infant.” She held the button of her stethoscope to Cynthia’s exposed belly. She removed the device and slipped it around her neck. “There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“He’s not pushing,” Cynthia said. “It’s like a really bad stomach ache.”
The doctor studied Cynthia for a moment. She set the clipboard on a counter and approached Hanna.
“We do things here the way things have been done since time immemorial.”
“Cynthia,” Hanna said carefully. “Please remember to only speak when spoken to.”
The doctor studied Ruby again. “And how old are you?”
Looking up at the doctor with wide eyes, Ruby softly said, “Thirteen.”
The doctor considered her answer. After a moment, she said, “I see.”
—
While the doctor and nurses prepped, Hanna crouched down to Ruby. On one knee, she quietly explained there was going to be blood and cutting. Ruby needed to decide now if she wanted to stay or wait outside.
“I want to help,” Ruby said. “I can be brave.” Ruby said it with a kind of confidence Hanna was hearing from Ruby more now. Going through the Blanchard’s Procedure had matured Ruby, perhaps more than any experience a normal girl of thirteen could have experienced.
The doctor told the nurses it was time to begin. In a smock and surgical mask, she rolled a stool between Cynthia’s propped-up legs. She half-turned to Hanna and called out, “Conscious or unconscious?”
Hanna went to Cynthia, Ruby in tow. “There’s going to be a lot of pain,” she told Cynthia. “The doctor can make you go to sleep so you don’t feel a thing.”
“Will I wake up?” Cynthia said.
Hanna’s face flushed. “No.”
“Conscious,” Cynthia said to the doctor.
“There’s one more thing,” Hanna said to Cynthia. She put a hand to Cynthia’s cheek. “When they cut the cord, everything will go dark. Don’t fight it.”
Cynthia nodded with her square, outward jaw clenched tight. “I wish I could be there to take care of you both,” she said. “More than anything.”
Hanna, doing her best so far, collapsed onto Cynthia. She put her face into Cynthia’s hair. Ruby hugged Hanna about her waist. Together, they grasped Cynthia’s bound hand.
When she retracted and wiped the tears from her face, Hanna discovered the doctor and nurses staring with quizzical, suspicious expressions. Even in this day and age, such a display of emotion for a bridge daughter was considered inappropriate.
“Ms. Driscoll, if you would,” the doctor said crisply.
A bridge birth, a procedure where only the infant was of concern, was a far simpler affair than the birth of the bridge daughter herself, where the mother’s well-being had to be addressed. The doctor administered a shot into Cynthia’s womb, then swiped a scalpel across Cynthia’s midsection as though drawing a red line with a felt-tip pen. Splitting her open, the doctor reached inside and produced the infant boy covered in mucus and blood. A rich musky odor erupted into the room. The boy wriggled in the doctor’s gloved hands, his pinched lips mouthing mute protestations.
Hanna checked on Ruby, fearing she might be ready to faint. Ruby peered up with a warm glow and awe in her eyes. To witness the bridge collapsing and a new life emerging was intoxicating. She tugged her mother’s hand with a fervid smile, silently letting Hanna know she was ready for the challenges to come.
Cynthia fought the pain. Her blue-veined arms made taut the straps. Without warning, the doctor cut the funicular and detached the infant from Cynthia, breaking the symbiosis. A slap and the baby’s wail pierced through the room. The nurse whisked the boy to a wash basin in the corner of the delivery room.
“Cynthia, honey,” Hanna called out. “Don’t fight it.”
Cynthia buckled against the restraints now, blind and suffering spasms due to the severing of the tail of her spinal cord. The steel tube frame of the delivery bed shook and rattled with each spasm. A nurse threw a thick surgical blanket over Cynthia’s body and disengaged the bed’s brake. In one heave, she pushed Cynthia through swinging doors and into the attached finality room, the last dignity afforded a bridge daughter.
The nurse approached Hanna with the clean, dry baby in stark white swaddling. “He’s beautiful,” the nurse said.
Hanna took the warm bundle in her arms. Barry squirmed and kicked his little legs and cried out. Off his fresh skin came the welcome aroma of sour milk. Hanna reached forward and kissed him on the forehead.
“Can I?” Ruby said.
Hanna instructed Ruby to sit in a chair beside the door. Ruby extended her arms and received little Barry. She pulled him close and kissed him on the forehead as well, a second kiss to seal the bond. When she looked up at Hanna, she was crying.
“I didn’t know it would be like this,” she said to her mother.
Leaving Ruby with the wailing Barry, Hanna pushed through the swinging doors and into the dusky quiet of the finality room where Cynthia’s last moments played out. It was bare of equipment and completely dark save for a nightlight plugged into an electrical outlet. She approached Cynthia in the delivery bed, who continued to buck and fight the restraints.
“I’m here.” She gripped Cynthia’s restrained hand. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
Cynthia sputtered, “I—I wish—I wish I could be there for you. For you both.”
The spasms and shaking continued a few more seconds. Cynthia’s body went limp. Hanna pushed her face into Cynthia’s neck. She was gone.
—
“Hanna Driscoll,” announced a voice across the delivery room.
Hanna’s eyes needed a moment to adjust to the light. Three figures stood in the delivery room entry, the one in the center particularly imposing.
“I’m with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department,” the imposing figure said. “These people are with Protective Services.”
Mom— came Ruby’s voice.
“My daughter—” Hanna hurried forward as Ruby’s voice receded down the hall, carried away by a young man.
The sheriff held out two craggy hands to hold her from advancing. “Hold it now,” he said, attempting to restrain her.
“My son—” Hanna said.
Struggling to peer over the sheriff’s shoulders, she witnessed Barry in swaddling swept down the hall by a young woman. They disappeared from sight, Barry’s wail fading to a pinpoint.
“My children—” Hanna called out.
—
In the emergency room waiting area, Hanna sat hunched forward, head almost to her knees. The handcuffs chained through the chair’s frame pinned back her wrists.
A pair of deputies stood over her. They waited for instructions from the sheriff consulting with Dr. Mueller at the reception desk. Hanna offered no fight, no protests.
A television bolted to the ceiling broadcast the national evening news. Today across the nation more spontaneous bridge daughter marches erupted, the coiffed anchor reported. He listed arrests and disruptions in Portland, Denver, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Sources indicated protests were planned for Washington, D.C., Paris, and Berlin.
She gave San Fran PD some cock-and-bull story about her bridge daughter being kidnapped, one deputy murmured to the other.
The news report played a low-resolution Internet video from Piper. She urged all sisters of Hagar to action, to rise and protest. A commentator discussed how the Internet has played an organizing role in the bridge underground.
It’s one thing for a Hagar to get a Blanchard’s, the deputy muttered. But Hagar’s mother lending a hand?
The report switched to footage from the march in Baltimore. Pregnant bridge daughters and bridge daughters who’d undergone Blanchard’s Procedure marched the streets. Each protester carried a grainy poster-sized copy of Hanna’s face, thirteen years old and on her mother’s farm. It was the photo snapped by her Uncle Rick s
ix months before he took his own life, unable to bear the loss of another bridge daughter.
The innocence of the smile in the photo was foreign today. Hanna failed to recognize the inviting eyes of this girl, a farm girl protected from the cold, ambivalent world beyond the towering redwoods. A familiar stranger smiled back from the television screen.
Across each photo the bridge daughters carried was emblazoned in yellow print HANNA’S MOMENT. Hanna hung her head and cried out.
Jim Nelson's most recent novel is Bridge Daughter (Kindle Press, 2016). He lives in San Francisco.