by Victor Koman
Suddenly, she stood upon a glacier. Trapped within the ice lay hundreds of frozen sacs. Inside the sacs rested tiny, indis-tinct embryos. Evelyn experienced their patient expectation, longing to help them find a way out of their frozen limbo. Their whispered cries grew audible, distinct.
"You've opened the Door," they said with that portentous significance found only in dreams. "You can free us now."
"Free us now."
"Neither you nor anyone can close the Door," they mur-mured.
"Can't close the Door."
She realized that she was chanting with them in a mystical rite. White-robed surgeons, arms dipped to the elbows in crim-son, chanted with her and the dead-before-life. Scarlet flames appeared on the blue ice.
"Bring us through the Door. Open for us the Gate of Life."
"The Gate of Life," she repeated.
The ice cracked like a thunderbolt.
Evelyn's entire body quaked. She lay in bed staring into dark-ness. The dim blue light from the alarm clock glowed in the corner of her field of vision. The sheets stuck to her, wet with perspiration. The Door in the dream, she realized, was a one-way exit from her life as a respected physician. She had crossed its threshold that evening and could never return.
VI
In the weeks after the operation, Valerie knew that her deci-sion had been the right one. She was back at work the follow-ing Monday. Ernie Sewell had told everyone that she had taken a couple of sick days for the flu, so she had no need to concoct a cover story. Most people avoided her the first few days back, carefully sympathizing at a distance.
At home, Ron seemed even more loving and tender. As soon as she was able, they took long walks around Lunada Bay, hand in hand, briskly or languidly. They spoke about their future, made plans, looked at larger, more expensive homes around where they strolled.
Her security in her new position grew with every day of ac-complishment. She found that she had an undiscovered talent for dealing with the many petty rivalries that surfaced in the office environment. At the end of the day, she and Ron would meet for dinner in Redondo Beach or at the little Italian res-taurant in Lunada Bay's small shopping center to share the day's adventures with each other. When it was finally safe to make love, they did so with an unbridled intensity that was just clearheaded enough for them to use at least three of the many precautions against preg-nancy. That summer, she took nine days of her vacation time right after the long Independence Day weekend and traveled with Ron through the Bahamas. They took their contraceptives with them. Over the months, though, she discovered that she would stare for an instant whenever she saw a pregnant woman, sizing her up, estimating her term. For a while this mystified her, until she realized that she was trying to envision how she would have looked had she not had the abortion. It troubled her to be in an island paradise such as Eleuthera watching pregnant young women, wondering if this one was six months along, that one seven, and was that one exactly six and a half?
In late September she began to wonder when she would have given birth. She estimated that it would have happened some time in mid-October. That's when she stopped looking at preg-nant women and started to observe women with babies.
She said nothing about this to Ron, but one day in October he caught her staring for longer than usual at a blond woman with a tiny red-haired baby in her arms. Its little face peered out over its mother's shoulder, watching the world with the stunned, unfocused expression of every recent immigrant.
"Sweetheart?" he said, reaching across the restaurant table to touch her hand.
"Hmm?" She looked back at him, realized why he seemed concerned, then blushed lightly.
"Don't think about what's past," he said. "Whenever you want to, we can go ahead." Valerie nodded. Her tension relaxed a bit. The woman and child had moved on into the depths of the mall. She smiled with embarrassment. "It's silly. I feel sometimes as if I'm look-ing for my baby. It's the way I felt when my uncle Lanny died. My mother thought I was too young to attend the funeral, so I never fully accepted that he was dead. I always thought that he had vanished for some reason but that I would someday see him on a local street or in some place far away. Maybe a face in the crowd in a newspaper photograph." Her voice dropped. "I never did."
Ron grasped her hand more tightly. "It's natural to wonder about the way things might have been. Don't let it detract from what we have right now. We-"
"I'm not," she said quietly, looking up into his dark brown eyes. "It's just that if I'd stuck with it, the baby would have been born by now."
Ron said nothing, held her hand. His concern for her re-flected in his face.
"I'll be all right," she said. "I sometimes just wonder how it might have been."
"Remember, Valerie, what your doctor said about regrets. They're pointless."
"I know," she said. "I'm fine. Really."
A woman walked past the restaurant patio with three chil-dren in tow. The one on her shoulder wailed loudly as the two older ones orbited around her legs in the midst of some sort of disagreement. The woman's face was haggard with annoyance. Bitterness radiated from her like the sputtering light from a street lamp ready to burn out.
This sad vignette comforted Valerie in a small way. The might-have-beens could always be far worse.
"
The Metagram pager beeped insistently.
Evelyn's hand groped in the darkness over her nightstand. Finding the offending device, she squeezed it until it shut up. She switched on the light to read the liquid crystal message strip. Call re K. Chandler
Picking up the telephone, she punched star-zero-one on the glowing keypad and let the autodialer do the rest.
"This is Dr. Fletcher," she said when a young man's voice answered at the other end.
"Karen Chandler's husband called," the voice said. "Her water broke. They're on their way in."
"Page Nurse Dyer. I'm on my way." She rolled out of bed.
Two A.M. on a Sunday morning, she thought. It never fails.
"
The blue Saab roared into life eight minutes later, breaking the residential quiet of the complex. Headlights illuminated the dark alleyway lined with fences and cinder-block walls over which grew ivy and bougainvillea. Even in the bright beams the colors had the grey look of late night. Evelyn sped through the rear entrance of the apartment building, wended toward Normandie, then turned south. Though she might have had an excuse if pulled over for speed-ing, she found that she lost more time identifying herself to police than she gained by breaking the limits. At that hour, forty miles per would get her to the hospital in a matter of minutes. And at 2:00 A.M. the lights were all with her. She slammed the Saab to a halt in one of the reserved park-ing slots right next to the emergency room doors. The bars were just closing; it looked fairly busy. Two paramedic vans were in the bays, both unloading simultaneously. One man with a minor gunshot wound walked out drunkenly. An old, disoriented woman on a gurney displayed the classic symp-toms of myocardial infarction. She rushed past the receptionist. "PACE" was all she needed to hear as she went by. The patient assessment center was a large room compris-ing several beds divided by curtains. Women occupied two of the beds. One, a girl in her teens, looked frightened. Her par-ents and a boy who didn't look old enough to shave clustered around her, murmuring assurances. Two beds down lay Karen Chandler, her husband standing at her side. A fetal monitor strapped across her swollen abdo-men sent signals to equipment at bedside. She had obviously taken the time to brush out her deep brown hair before arriv-ing. She looked lovely.
Nurse Dyer wore her lab coat over a pink-and-black mini-skirt that occasionally peeked through the button front when-ever she shifted around. Evelyn had seen the outfit-and oth-ers-before on late-night calls. She hoped the pager hadn't interrupted anything too sizzling.
"Dilation four centimeters. Contractions every ten minutes." Dyer's voice had the distinct buzz of someone fighting fatigue and a couple of drinks. Fletcher knew it would not harm the woman's performance but
made a mental note to take the fact into account. She was certain that the Chandlers were too oc-cupied to notice.
"Hello, Karen," she said. "Hello, David." Karen wore the all-purpose hospital robe, hiked up over her belly. David wore beige slacks and a rumpled royal-blue cotton shirt.
She looked at Karen's husband. "Remembering your part-ner exercises?" He nodded and tried to sound steady. "Ready when you are."
Dr. Fletcher smiled. "I think it's a matter of our being ready when the baby is." She bent over Karen to check her pupils with a penlight. "What time did your water break?"
"Around one," she answered, looking up at the doctor with concerned eyes. "I was asleep, and I woke up and felt this wetness, but it didn't feel like my bladder cutting loose. There weren't any labor pains, so I figured we'd call Patient Assess-ment and they'd tell us to come in whenever the contractions started. I thought I could just go back to sleep."
Evelyn smiled again, shaking her head. "Whenever the wa-ter breaks, we bring you in. If labor hadn't started soon, we'd have had to induce it. If we wait too long, infections can hap-pen." She slipped on two right-hand gloves and gently inserted a finger to touch Karen's cervix. "Lucky for you that things seem to be progressing." She turned to Dyer. "Fetal heartbeat?"
"One fifty and strong."
"That's good." She grasped Karen's free hand and smiled reassuringly. "Everything's fine. I'll be back when you're a bit more dilated." With that, she turned to leave.
"
It was dawn when the contractions finally came five min-utes apart and Karen was fully dilated. They had moved her to the homey environ of their Natural Delivery Unit, where she lay on an old-fashioned brass bed amidst soothing Victorian furniture, wallpaper, and curtains. The music they had cho-sen-one of the Brandenberg concerti, though she couldn't remember which one now-played softly from hidden speak-ers. At the moment, she had no idea whom they were trying to soothe. The pain overwhelmed her, at times slamming her onto an ocean of agony that crested every few minutes in waves of incomprehensible torment. She tried to describe the wrench-ing feeling to her husband through red-faced, sweating puffs of breath. Several times she had asked for something to numb the pain, but Dr. Fletcher had reminded her that they could not take chances with the baby.
In his own hell of pain, David watched his wife suffer while he could do nothing but coach her breathing.
"I don't want to do this," she moaned, her face straining crim-son and wet. Her fingernails dug into David's hand as a con-traction drove pain straight through her.
He did not know what to say. Nothing could stop what was happening. She must know that. How to console someone suf-fering the inevitable who pleads for the impossible?
At last, Dr. Fletcher relented and told Nurse Dyer to admin-ister a mild hypnotic. It did nothing to reduce the pain, but Karen seemed to notice it less.
"It takes the edge off," she murmured to David a few min-utes later.
"That does it," Nurse Dyer said, looking up from between Karen's legs. "I see the head." Dr. Fletcher took over, positioning herself at the end of the bed, instructing Karen to scoot toward the edge, ordering David to concentrate on getting her to breathe with him.
"Okay. Push now."
"I can't," Karen screamed. "It's too much."
"Don't worry. You'll make it." She cut a minuscule episiotomy with surgical scissors. Blood flowed on the sheets.
"Breathe like this, sweetheart," David said, panting and puff-ing like a dog.
"I can't," she screamed, her entire body convulsing. She fell back, exhausted.
"That was good," Fletcher said calmly. "The head's almost through, so one more time ought to do it. Wait until I tell you, then push as hard as you can."
"I can't."
"You will."
The contraction came. David lifted her up and forward by the shoulders.
"Push," Fletcher cried. "Now!"
"He's tearing me up!" Her voice became a straining animal grunt. David cried out, "I see its head!" His voice, ringing in her ear, sounded so full of love and wonder that she began to cry.
Dr. Fletcher gently cradled the head in her hand. "Not yet. Stop straining. The shoulders are next. Coordinate it with the next contraction."
While Dr. Fletcher held the unbreathing baby in her hand, Nurse Dyer battled with sponge and gauze to keep other bodily fluids away from the newborn.
The baby rotated about, cradled firmly in Fletcher's grasp. Another contraction loomed. "Push now!" she said.
"Come on, honey," David cried. "Push!"
Wordlessly, Karen leaned forward with David's aid and pushed as hard as she could. This time was easier than the last. David's voice was near tears.
"There she is! It's a girl! God, Karen, she's beautiful."
"Eleven-oh-seven A.M.," Fletcher said, glancing at her watch. Dyer made a quick note of the time. The little purple-red, blood-smeared, vernix-coated figure rested in Dr. Fletcher's hands. She gently ran a finger through the baby's mouth to remove the mucus plug. Dyer used a tiny suction bulb to do the same to the infant's nose. Fletcher ten-derly transferred the newborn to the belly of her mother. She took her first breath. Intrigued by the change in proce-dure, she tested her new equipment with a healthy, hearty wail. Her parents wept with joy seasoned with not a little exhaus-tion. Dr. Fletcher gripped the swollen grape-purple corkscrew of umbilical, gently holding tension on it to guide the afterbirth farther out with each uterine contraction. At the same time, the baby received added blood from the placenta, topping off her circulatory system.
Nurse Dyer registered the baby's Apgar score-a nine in her first minute. That was nearly perfect, since out of superstition nurses rarely gave babies a ten. Only the newborns of pedia-tricians ever received the top mark, and only then because the doctor would worry if her own child were not pronounced perfect. Dyer put down the clipboard to mop the doctor's sweaty brow. That done, she turned her attention back to the baby, placing erythromycin drops in her eyes.
"Now, Karen," Fletcher said calmly, "in births such as yours, the placenta doesn't all come out, so I'm going to go in to get the last of it after you've expelled the main part." They heard none of what she said. The couple watched the pulsations of the umbilical cord, mesmerized. They gazed at the squalling child on Karen's stomach. It turned from purple to a radiant shade of ruddy pink.
A series of contractions expelled the afterbirth into a shal-low tray held in place by Fletcher. The cord collapsed, lost its candy-swirled shape and shiny gloss. Taking her cue, Fletcher used a yellow plastic clip to seal off the umbilical as close to the baby's navel as possible. Nurse Dyer handed the husband a pair of scissors.
"Would you like to do the honors?"
Crying, he took the scissors and allowed her to guide his hand within an inch of the clip. A quick snip severed the cord. Blood pulsed out, dark red, further collapsing the cord into something that resembled a limp crimson noodle. Fletcher put the tray aside.
Nurse Dyer gently snatched the infant away from Karen, tak-ing it to a scale for weighing. She measured the circumfer-ence of the baby's head, her length, and fastened an ID tag on her wrist.
"Six pounds, eight point four ounces," Dyer called out. "Nine-teen point five inches." Karen wept happily at the news, taking her baby back to hold her.
"Doctor?" David asked, remembering something from his classes. "Shouldn't you count the veins?" Dr. Fletcher smiled and reached over for the tray. David watched with curiosity, splitting his attention between the doc-tor, his wife, and his new daughter. She picked up the end of the umbilical, nipped it between two fingers, and spread the edges back to examine the interior.
"All three are there," she said simply. "Nice to know you're checking every detail." David let go a relieved breath. His hand squeezed firmly the weak one it held. He was not sure what the danger was, but he knew that three veins was good, two veins bad. Karen had not even noticed the exchange. She gazed lovingly, exhaustedly, joyfully, at the little person on her stomach.
"You may give her a drink if you wish." Nurse Dyer smiled with a warm tenderness. Carefully, she helped Karen lift the tiny bundle to her left breast, showing her the way to cradle the head and neck. Karen held the child in one arm. David stuffed pillows behind her to raise her into a sitting position. Dyer cleaned the new mother's nipple, which Karen offered to the baby's cheek. Feeling the stimulation, the tiny light blond head rotated, sensitive lips searching. In a matter of seconds, her mouth found a new source of nourishment and happily began to feed. The room fell silent for a moment.
"Pardon the intrusion," Dr. Fletcher said, picking up a hyst-eroscope. "As I suspected, I've got some cleaning up to do. Don't mind me." She took only a few moments to examine Karen and remove a few bits of tissue that had remained at the surgical attachment points of the transplant operation. Karen hardly noticed. David pulled a Canon camera from beneath his hospital garb and shot half the roll. After a few minutes, Dyer announced that nursing time was up and that the baby needed to be cleaned. She poured an inch or two of tepid water into a bright yellow tub and placed it on the table next to the bed. Urging David to observe carefully, she inserted a finger alongside Karen's nipple to break the baby's suction. The baby began to cry, jerking her arms and legs, her eyes tightly shut. With a sponge almost as big as the baby, Nurse Dyer softly dabbed away the blood, leaving just enough of the waxy coat-ing of vernix to keep the newborn's skin from drying out.
"Now," the nurse announced, patting the child dry with a bright white towel, "you both need a rest, and so does she." She put the baby in a Plexiglas tray under a warming lamp. David watched Nurse Dyer lay a small green bottle of oxy-gen next to the baby, a tiny little mask placed about two inches away from her ruddy, drowsy face. "Where's she going?"