Emerging from the bathroom, Rachel found her mother at the front window, holding a swatch of fabric against the frame. “Rachel! What a surprise. I didn’t know you’d be here. Do you like this one? The blue is nice with the ... darling, what is it? You look awful. Are you sick?”
Rachel held out a hand as if to ward off her mother’s solicitousness. Anxiously, she looked around for Kay, but her roommate had faded into the kitchen. Rachel heard the splashing of water hitting the old enamel sink.
“It’s nothing ... just a bug I picked up. I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will, but right now you belong in bed! Never mind about the drapes, they can wait. You go climb right into bed, and I’ll make you some hot tea. Is your stomach upset, too?”
Rachel stared at Sylvie, perfectly put together in a navy-blue rayon suit with a peplum waist and crisp white blouse. But the heady richness of her perfume, Chanel N° 5, was making Rachel’s stomach tip like an overfull bucket. If she didn’t lie down soon, she’d be sick again.
Then somehow she was in her room, and Mama was turning down the bed for her, pressing a cool washcloth to her forehead. Just like when she was little. And suddenly it was all too much. Tears welled up, then began leaking from the corners of her eyes.
Oh, damn it all! I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to be weak. If only she’d leave me ... leave right now, this very instant ... before I start telling her things I know I’ll be sorry for later. ...
“Rachel. Oh my darling girl, what is it? Can’t you tell me?”
Sylvie’s forest-green eyes now also glittered with tears, as if Rachel’s pain was hers, too. Her face, that skin fine and powdery pale as a moth’s wing, seemed to sag. She held a cool, Chanel-smelling hand to Rachel’s cheek.
“Mama, I’m pregnant.” The words came before Rachel could stop them.
Sylvie stared at her. Color rose in her pale cheeks. Her lips parted, revealing the moist pinkness beyond the line of her coral lipstick. But she wasn’t melting into hysterics, thank God.
[130] “What are you going to do?” Her voice sounded surprisingly firm.
Now Rachel felt stunned. This didn’t seem like Mama, no, not like her at all. How could Mama even imagine anything other than her having and keeping this baby? But then she thought back and remembered the last time her mother had so surprised her, that day Rachel had come to Daddy in the hospital, how strong, even sharp, Mama had been then.
“I don’t know,” Rachel murmured.
Mama’s hand slipped from her cheek, and she looked away.
Rachel followed her gaze. There, toward the corner, was the pine dresser Mama had found at a country garage sale, and had stripped and varnished. And beside it, the cheval mirror and bent-wood rocker from Rachel’s childhood bedroom. Mama had known they would look just right in this room, she had such an eye for the right thing. Could she actually consider the ugly act Rachel was contemplating now?
“Is he ... the father, I mean ... does he want this child?”
Rachel felt something inside her shrivel. “No.”
“I see.” Sylvie nodded, her coral mouth drawing into a firm but comprehending line. “How far along are you?”
“Not far. Six weeks. But, oh Mama, to me it’s already real. A real baby.”
“A baby ...” Sylvie’s expression grew wistful, then she seemed to pull herself together, and said, “Oh, Rachel, I wish I could tell you what to do. Or at least advise you. But how can I? The right answer for me could be the wrong one for you.”
“But Mama, what would you do?” Rachel cried out.
“It was different in my day. People were far less ... accepting. For women in your position there was no right choice, just the only choice.”
“But if I have this baby, it will change everything. Turn my whole life upside down.”
Sylvie, looking off toward the window, smiled faintly. “Babies always do.” Then she turned back to Rachel, still smiling, her eyes shining with tears. “You turned mine upside down.”
“You want me to have it.” Rachel, hearing the accusing tone in her voice, hated herself. She had no right blaming Mama.
[131] “No.” Sylvie shook her head. “I didn’t say that. Anyway, what I might want isn’t important. I meant what I said, I can’t advise you. But I do ache for you, my darling. If I had been in your shoes, I—” her voice cracked a little, “well, I’m not certain what I would have done, if I’d had the choice.”
“Oh, Mama ...” Rachel bolted upright, grabbing hold of the blankets with both fists, clutching hard. “I wish I knew what to do.”
“Whatever you decide, my darling, I’ll be here for you. I love you. Don’t ever forget that.”
Rachel felt a rush of gratitude that made her throat ache. And she felt something else, too. A new sort of admiration for her mother.
“Will you tell Daddy?” she asked fearfully.
“No.” Sylvie shook her head. “Daddy loves you, but men don’t always see these things the way we do.”
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Did you want me before I was born? Truly want me more than anything?”
For a long moment that seemed to tremble in the air between them, Sylvie was silent. Her cool hands came to rest against Rachel’s on the blanket. And there it was—that slow, sad smile Rachel had seen so many times.
“Yes, my Rachel. More than anything.”
David was looking straight through her.
Rachel felt as if she were just another part of the antiseptic landscape of the scrub room, as anonymous as the tiled walls and stainless steel sinks. She shivered, feeling chilled, her stomach beginning to cramp up again.
Please don’t do this. For God’s sake, don’t ignore me.
“Dr. Petrakis asked me to assist,” she explained lamely, hating him for somehow making her feel as if she had to justify herself.
Trying to curb her anger, she stamped on the foot pedal that controlled the faucet, and thrust her hands under the scalding water.
David’s eyes, when she looked up to meet them, were cool and remote, the flat green of the tiled walls.
“She’s his patient,” he said with a little shrug.
[132] And I’m a damn fool, Rachel thought, fighting tears as she grabbed the Betadine brush, scrubbing so hard she took the skin off her knuckles.
A week, seven awful days, and still she stood here like a moonstruck idiot, hoping, waiting for a word, a sign, some glimmer of feeling. A week of being ignored, and worse. She had caught him looking at her from time to time as if she were some bothersome loose thread left hanging from the neat fabric of his life.
Was he punishing her? Or did he really, as Rhett Butler said, just not give a damn? Either way, she would not go crawling to him. Screw him if he couldn’t see what he was giving up.
Rachel thrust her dripping hands into the air, letting the water trickle from her elbows. David had just finished scrubbing at the sink beside hers, and she turned away quickly so he wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.
She pushed ahead of him through the swinging doors into the operating room. More green tiles, stainless steel, cold white ceiling lights. Towel, gloves, then the scrub nurse was tying her into a gown. Rachel nodded to the circulating nurse, a lithe copper-skinned girl named Vicki Sanchez, who was busily laying out sterilized instruments on the Mayo stand. Scalpels. Hemostats. Suture needles.
Beyond Vicki, a hulking gray-haired figure in rumpled surgical greens partially blocked Rachel’s view of the operating table. Dr. Petrakis. He appeared to be leaning to one side. And as he slowly, with exaggerated care, turned himself around to face her, she caught sight of the fiery red suns of his eyes. A jolt of dread went through her stomach.
Jesus, he’s blasted out of his skull.
An emergency C-section to perform on a placenta previa, and here he was, three sheets to the wind. In med school, they didn’t teach you how to handle a situation like this.
Yet, amazingly, Petrakis see
med to be holding his own. Years of practice, she supposed. Still, she found herself murmuring a little prayer.
“Where’s Henson?” growled Petrakis. “Are we supposed to stand here and watch the patient bleed to death while that so-called anesthesiologist plays with himself upstairs?”
Coming from behind Rachel, David’s voice, cool, in control. [133] “Henson got hung up. I called Gilchrist, he should be up any minute. Pediatrics, too. I thought the PDs should be on hand just in case. What’s happening with the patient?”
Petrakis moved away, and Rachel saw her, a great beached mound of stomach rising from a swirl of green surgical drapes, her skin varnished a sickly yellow-brown with Betadine. Like the object of some grotesque pagan ritual in an H. Rider Haggard novel, she couldn’t help thinking.
“She’s holding at eight centimeters,” Petrakis answered. “Baby won’t be going anywhere for a while. But she’s lost a couple hundred cc’s of blood. And I don’t want to wait around much longer.”
Above the drapes, two dark eyes staring out of a white face, like cigarette holes burned in a napkin. Rachel felt a stab of pity for her. No general anesthesia in this case, bad for the baby. A light Demerol, maybe. This was one wide-awake, terrified young woman. And that raving idiot Petrakis, talking about her as if she were a Volkswagen in a garage having a new muffler put in.
Rachel moved closer, signaling reassurance with her eyes. “It’ll be over soon, Senora,” she soothed. “You’ll have your baby before you know it.”
The woman spoke, a reedy whisper Rachel had to bend close to, to hear. “I feel it coming,” she said. “I have to push.”
An alarm jangled in Rachel’s head. No, no, with the placenta slipped down over the cervix, pushing would be the very worst thing. It could cause a hemorrhage. Possibly fatal to her, to the baby, or both.
But Petrakis had said the cervix was dilated eight centimeters. Two more to go. That usually meant hours in a primipara. Still ...
Rachel looked up at Petrakis. “She says she has to push.”
He looked annoyed, she thought. Well, tough shit. Ten weeks on OB had taught her one thing, at least. When a woman said she had to push, she meant it.
“Impossible,” Petrakis barked. “I examined her myself not ten minutes ago.”
David looked dubious as well. But at least he wasn’t ready to dismiss what the young woman had said out of hand. “Let’s examine her again.”
Then Rachel saw something that made her heart turn a sudden [134] swift cartwheel. Knees up, the patient was pushing, face clenched in a red fist of pain. Between her legs, the baby’s head was crowning. A circle of glistening dark scalp the size of a quarter.
“Shit,” Petrakis said.
There was a split second in which everything seemed frozen, a scale hanging in balance, waiting to tip. Then Rachel felt shock. Nothing was happening. Jesus Christ. Petrakis was just standing there, mouth open, feet planted wide apart, swaying slightly, like a drunk in a detox ward seeing spiders and snakes.
Then everything seemed to happen at once. Petrakis shouting something unintelligible at the nurses. David lunging forward, taking charge, hands cupping to guide forth a dark scrunched head, then in a slippery rush of blood and amniotic fluid, a tiny pink body flopping at the end of a bright turquoise cord. A boy.
Rachel rushed to take him from David while he clamped the cord, balancing the blood-streaked bundle in her hands, its matchstick arms flailing, shriveled monkey face working into a squall as she suctioned him. Everything around her seemed to fade. She saw only the miracle of this new life, feeling as if a bright, hot band had fastened about her heart. Perfect. Precious. More precious than anything in the world.
My baby too. How could I bear not to have this?
Then she looked up.
Something was dreadfully wrong. The mother bleeding. A torrent of blood gushing between her legs, spattering the table, the sterilized instruments neatly laid out on the Mayo stand, and forming a crimson pool on the floor.
“Nurse!” Rachel heard a deep voice shout. “Open up the lines! Start those two units of A positive. Stat.”
David. He was ramming a fist between the patient’s legs, into all that blood, suddenly, shockingly. Dear God, what is he doing?
Then Rachel understood.
And she rushed in, pressing down on an abdomen that felt like tapioca pudding, pushing hard, helping David massage the uterus, trying to force it to contract.
“Get me some Ergometrine,” he snapped over his shoulder at Vicki. “And, for God’s sake, nurse, more blood on that line or I’m going to lose her. BP’s down to eighty. She’s looking shocky.”
[135] “I don’t feel anything!” Rachel heard herself cry. “She’s not contracting.”
“Damn it. I’m not going to lose her.” David’s green eyes above his mask flashed at her, so brilliant she felt blinded for an instant. Her heart leapt in response, her hands kneaded harder.
“Contract, damn it. Contract,” she muttered.
Then she felt it, tiny ripples, a tightening, oh Jesus, yes, yes.
“That’s it,” she panted. “Good girl. Keep it up.” Her mask felt wet. She was crying, she realized.
The bleeding was slowing. Now stopping. David looked up, met Rachel’s gaze. His eyes were bright with triumph, a dark stain like a rising moon on the forehead of his surgical cap. He withdrew his fist, and she saw that his arm was covered in blood all the way to the elbow.
He reached up with bloody fingers, tore his mask off. He was grinning. Rachel felt as if she’d been lifted off the floor several feet, then dropped down again. The room spinning, her stomach up where her heart should have been.
“Oh, fuck it,” he said, hugging her to him.
Rachel watched David strip off his bloody gloves, tossing them into the scrub-room bin. Words came to mind, none of them large enough to contain all she was feeling.
I saw you in there, she wanted to say, how you fought. And I saw the way you looked after you knew you’d won. No one who looked that way could ever truly want to destroy a life.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said lamely.
“What?”
“Petrakis. Doing nothing.”
She stepped around to help him untie his scrubs, mostly brown now with splotches of drying blood. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel the knotted tenseness in his shoulders.
“The man signed his own death warrant today. Too many people saw. Even Donaldson won’t be able to ignore this.”
But Rachel didn’t want to hear about Petrakis, or Donaldson, that popcorn-headed administrator.
“David,” she said softly. “I’ve missed you.”
He turned, and suddenly he was looking at her, really looking [136] at her as if she were the only thing that existed. She saw something bright flare in his eyes. Relief.
“Not here,” he said in a low voice, taking her by the wrist, gripping it hard. “Too many people around. Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”
Two floors down in the elevator, then the cafeteria, a sea of faces, steamy smells. She saved their seats while David stood in line, returning with a laden tray.
“I brought you a sandwich,” he said. “You look as if you haven’t eaten all week.”
As a matter of fact, David, I haven’t. They call it morning sickness, but it’s really morning, afternoon, and night sickness.
She shrugged. “Too busy, I guess. You know how it is.”
“Shit, yes. What I’d give for a decent meal and a night of uninterrupted rest.”
“That was some job you did on that girl up there.”
“I only wish Petrakis had been sober enough to see it,” he said and laughed bitterly.
“To hell with Petrakis. You were good. And you didn’t panic. If I were in that girl’s place, I would be thanking G—” She stopped herself. Heat rose into her face, searing, hot tears in her eyes. No, damn it, you’re not going to cry. No one is supposed to feel sorry for you.
She reached for the tea she had asked for instead of coffee—coffee was bad for the baby—but David caught her hand first, pressing it between both of his. Dear God, what she’d longed for, so simple a thing, yet oh how wonderful, him touching her. Now, there was no stopping the tears.
“Rachel. God. I’ve missed you too. I can’t believe how stupid we were, arguing like that. I feel like such a shit.”
Then why didn’t you call? Why did you avoid me? Making me feel like a goddamn leper.
No, no. She wanted to shut off that angry voice inside her.
“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I shouldn’t have dropped it on you like that. Telling you I wanted to keep the baby before we’d even talked it over. But let’s forget all that. Can we start over? Right now? Here?”
Tell me you love me. Please. That you’ll at least keep an open mind about the baby until I’ve explained how we can make it work.
[137] He squeezed her hand more tightly, almost hurting. He was smiling now, wearing the same look of triumph he’d had in the OR.
“I knew you’d come around. Christ, Rachel, there’s nothing I want more. And it’ll be that way again. Soon as we get this thing taken care of.”
“What do you mean, David?”
He was looking at her as if he couldn’t believe she’d asked. “Why, the abortion.”
Rachel felt as if she were sinking into a deep well, black water closing over her head, shutting off the air. And cold. So cold she was starting to feel numb. She tried to imagine herself going through with it, having the abortion. Easy in a way, only a little piece of her. And she could tell herself, See? That wasn’t so bad. And the next time someone wanted a chunk of her soul it would be that much easier to give in, because there would be that much less of her to fight. Until in the end, there would be nothing left of her. Nothing that counted.
No. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
Rachel rose, out of her blackness, getting to her feet, pushing her chair back. And in the hard light she looked down at David, and saw what he was.
“What is it? What are you looking at me like that for?” He laughed nervously, a good-looking man in a yellow double-knit pullover with a tiny alligator sewn over the right breast, and a silver I.D. bracelet loose about his left wrist. A man with the sour look of betrayal dawning in his handsome face.
Garden of Lies Page 16