“They have to be softcover.”
“I know. But it wouldn’t upset you more? It would help if you knew a bit more about what to expect. You wouldn’t be so scared.”
Tamara sniffled again and wiped her face with the backs of her wrists. “Yeah. Okay.”
“It’s scary, but you don’t have to go through this alone. I’ll help however I can. And so will others.”
“You can’t be here, though,” Tamara pointed out. “When I… when it… comes out.”
“I know. But I’ll prepare you the best I can and visit often. And after he’s born, I’ll still come see you.”
Tamara took a long breath, trying to settle the hitching sobs. “Okay.”
31
EVEN THOUGH TAMARA had been so impatient to get the baby out of her, labor still came too soon. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t finished reading all of the books yet.
At first, it was just back pains, like she’d been having for weeks, only worse. Tamara paced up and down the hall, arching her back and trying not to groan aloud. She stopped and pressed her back to the wall, trying to straighten out the bowing in her spine. She would never take for granted the comfort of not having a backache again.
“Go lie down,” Nurse Mary Anne urged. “You look beat. Get some rest.”
“I can’t.”
“Do you need a hand?”
“No. I just want to get this done with.” Tamara hunched forward, trying to ease a cramp. She squeezed herself hard, holding her breath.
Mary Anne looked at her with brows drawn down. “Are you okay?”
“Just… a cramp…”
“Come on. I’ll walk you to your bed. You should be lying down if you’re not feeling well.”
The nurses in the units were used to dealing with psychiatric symptoms and minor medical procedures. Tamara had seen Mary Anne and others react competently in situations that made the guards blanch. But they seemed to be squeamish about Tamara’s pregnancy. Tamara understood. She, too, was afraid of what was going to happen. What would happen once the invader was out of her. After all that they had done to make sure that she got pregnant and took the pregnancy full-term, they must have something terrible planned for when the baby arrived.
“I don’t want to lay down. I want to walk.”
“Well… that’s not exactly what you’re doing,” Mary Anne pointed out. “You’re kind of stuck here.”
“Just… until… it passes.” Tamara held her breath as the cramp grew, threatening to split her in half. She groaned.
Mary Anne was starting to look concerned. “Uh, honey…?”
“What?”
“Are you in labor?”
Tamara groaned again. She braced herself against the wall with one hand, her other pressed under her belly.
“No. Just cramps.”
The nurse hovered over her, not moving on to do her rounds or whatever other jobs she was supposed to be working on. The cramp started to ease and Tamara took a few deep breaths.
“Okay. Okay. It’s fine.”
“Come on, let’s get you to your room. I have a sneaking suspicion…”
Tamara walked back down the hall toward her bunk, Mary Anne right at her elbow, clucking over her worriedly. Tamara sat down on her bed, then lay down, easing her back slowly into the bunk. She breathed a sigh of relief.
“That’s good. I feel fine now. Everything is fine.”
Mary Anne stood with her hands on her hips. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Tamara hissed, exasperated. “I just said I’m fine. Get off my case.”
“I’ll be back to check on you.”
Tamara closed her eyes and waited for the nurse to leave. She’d only been gone for a couple of minutes when Tamara’s back started to ache again, so badly that she had to roll onto her side to rub it, trying to straighten it out and calm all of the muscles and nerves.
Then the abdominal cramps started again and she squirmed, holding herself and trying to find a more comfortable position. When Mary Anne came back some time later, Tamara had been through several more cycles of pain and had to admit defeat.
“I think… maybe I am in labor,” she admitted.
Mary Anne nodded. “I thought as much.”
“But… I’m not ready. I don’t know what to do!”
“Aren’t you the one who has been complaining for months that you just want this baby out of you?”
“Yeah… but… not like this.”
“That’s the way it works, hon’.”
Tamara moaned.
“I’ll call the infirmary. They can send someone down to see to you.”
“What about… going to hospital? Shouldn’t I go to the hospital?”
“There’s no point in rushing these things. Chances are, it’s going to take a day or two. Having you at the hospital is a security problem. We’ll wait until you’re ready to actually have the baby.”
“But I’m in labor now.”
“And probably for the next two days. There’s no hurry.”
“Two days?” Tamara demanded. “I can’t put up with this for two days!”
Mary Anne shrugged. “This isn’t TV. It’s not going to come in fifteen minutes. I’ll let the infirmary know. They’ll send someone down to monitor you.”
Tamara attempted to prop herself up, but was crushed by another contraction and fell back. “Tell them I want a C-section! I don’t want to do this for two days!”
The nurse shook her head. “You can talk to them when they get here. But they can’t do a Caesarian here. That’s surgical.”
Tamara groaned, both at her words and the contraction. It released its hold on her, and she lay still, puffing and groaning. Mary Anne walked to the door, but didn’t leave. She looked down the hallway for someone else. Tamara watched her with a frown, wondering why she didn’t go.
Mary Anne flagged someone down. Tamara couldn’t hear what they were saying in murmured voices, other than the line “keep an eye on her” as Mary Anne looked back at Tamara.
Burgess walked in. He didn’t look any too excited about watching Tamara have her baby. He stood as far from the bed as he could, but was faithful to Mary Anne’s orders and kept watch over Tamara.
When a couple of interns from the infirmary finally got there and looked in on Tamara, she was half sitting up, sweat pouring off her face, as she tried to breathe through the pain of contractions that seemed to come one on top of the other. She didn’t have the energy or attention to glare at them for taking so long to get there. She was wondering how she was going to get through the next two days. She was exhausted after just a couple of hours.
Burgess was mad enough for both of them. “What took you so long? I’m standing here thinking I’m going to have to deliver this baby myself!”
“We got here in plenty of time,” a black-haired woman said with unconcern.
She shuffled past Burgess to take a look at Tamara.
“How’s it coming along?” she asked cheerfully, moving close to Tamara.
“It hurts like hell!”
“I’m sure it does,” the woman agreed in a saccharine voice that annoyed Tamara like fingernails on the blackboard. “Maybe we could get the room?” she suggested to Burgess.
“You’re welcome to it,” he growled, and walked out. He pushed the door shut behind him.
The two interns helped Tamara out of her jumpsuit and pulled a sheet over her; then the black-haired woman was able to check how the labor was progressing. Her manner changed abruptly.
“Uh—we’re going to be delivering this baby,” she told her counterpart.
“I’ll call the hospital.”
“You can call them, but we can’t get her transported fast enough for them to deliver it. She’s having it here and now.”
Tamara gasped for breath. “I told you!”
“How long have you been in labor?” the male intern asked. “I thought the nurse said that you’d only been having contractions for a couple of hou
rs.” He turned to the woman. “I’m sure she can wait until we get her to the hospital. With an ambulance, it won’t take any time—”
“What am I supposed to do?” Tamara demanded. “Cross my legs?”
“Sh, you’re going to be just fine—” the woman started.
“I’d rather have Burgess deliver it than you! Can you just lose the lovey-dovey voice?”
The woman closed her mouth, looking at Tamara with a pronounced frown. Tamara didn’t care how mad she was. She just couldn’t stand to listen to the falsely sweet voice for another second.
“You can notify the hospital,” the woman told her partner. “That they will be getting mother and newborn, not a laboring mom. And then sanitize and get ready, because this baby isn’t waiting for anyone.”
The two interns went to work, faces serious. They had brought a couple of medical duffels with them, and had apparently packed well, as Tamara didn’t hear any complaints about their missing anything they needed. Not that they needed much more than clean hands, because the monster that had been growing inside of Tamara was soon to make its way into the world, ready or not. For a minute, Tamara lost her breath, worrying about what was going to happen to her after he was born, but she tried to buckle down and focus on the job at hand. She had desperately wanted the baby out, and at least she’d be able to be free of him and his poisonous influence.
“I want you to push the next time,” the woman intern told Tamara. “One or two more big contractions, and we’ll have him out.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing?”
“Push hard. It won’t be much longer now.”
Tamara swore under her breath. It was a wonder laboring women everywhere didn’t kill their doctors or midwives. She could think of little other than what she would do if she could get her hands on the woman.
“Push!”
“Shut up!”
The intern stopped giving Tamara instructions and just waited. Tamara pushed and labored, sure that she was going to split right open if she had to push any harder or longer.
“There we go,” the intern approved. “Here he comes.”
Tamara collapsed back onto the bed. She couldn’t see what the two interns were doing. It wasn’t like at the hospital where they had mirrors or monitors for her to watch.
The baby’s squall was hoarse and deep, nothing like Julie’s cries. Tamara tried to see him, alarmed by the noise. There was obviously something very wrong with him. But the intern was smiling as she bundled him up and held him in her arms, as proud as if she had delivered him herself. She didn’t give any indication at all that he was monstrous. But then, she was probably in on it. She wouldn’t give away to Tamara that there was anything wrong, so that they could go ahead and do whatever weird experiments they had in mind.
“I want to see it,” Tamara said. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s a little boy,” the intern said. “And he looks like he’s perfectly healthy. Here.”
She got closer to Tamara’s head and tilted the little bundle to show her.
Tamara stared at the baby. The intern was right, he looked perfectly normal and healthy. But Tamara knew that there was something wrong with him. He couldn’t have controlled her brain and given her hallucinations if he were normal. He was some kind of mutant or horrific experiment gone wrong. Just because he looked normal, that didn’t mean that he was.
The baby’s hair was very dark, his eyes blue, open and staring short-sightedly in Tamara’s direction. Tamara gulped and looked away, not wanting to get hypnotized or to let him control her mind, now that he was out.
“Do you want to hold him?” the intern asked.
“No,” the man snapped, “she’s not allowed to.”
The woman turned to him, rolling her eyes. “I really don’t think she’s going to do anything to hurt him. Everyone is just overreacting.” She looked at Tamara. “You wouldn’t do anything to him, would you?”
Tamara swallowed and nodded. “I probably would.”
The woman’s eyebrows went up and her eyes got wider. She looked at her partner for some kind of reassurance, but he just spread his hands in a shrug. “She tried to dig him out of her belly with her bare hands,” he pointed out baldly. “What is it about that that makes you think she’ll behave herself now?”
“But…”
“I don’t want to hold it,” Tamara said. She held up her hands to prevent any further discussion of the matter. “I don’t want it near me.”
“Once you held him, you would change your mind. You’d have completely different feelings about him.”
“No.”
“We’re not supposed to,” the male intern repeated. “I don’t know why you’re even discussing it. We were given specific direction.”
The woman obviously didn’t believe in obeying order just for the sake of it. She shook her head in irritation and headed for the door. “I’ll see how that ambulance is coming.”
Tamara watched her open the cell door and walk out into the hallway with the baby. She rested her head on her pillow.
“Thanks,” she told the man, who had stayed with her.
“We were given orders,” he repeated. “I don’t know what she was thinking.”
“I’d probably kill it,” Tamara said.
The man’s eyes widened at this assertion.
“But Zobel said I shouldn’t,” Tamara said in a quieter voice. She wasn’t sure if he even heard that part.
The ambulance didn’t get there for some time, and things were held up as the guards and paramedics discussed Tamara’s case and how to best keep her secure for the transport and while she was at the hospital. No one bothered to ask Tamara if she were going to behave herself and not cause them any problems, like they had when she was going to the courthouse in the prison bus. They knew better now. They knew they had to prepare for every eventuality, because her behavior would be unpredictable and she might try to do something to harm herself or the baby.
“I don’t like the four piece suit,” Burgess said, speaking of the shackles and chains that Tamara had worn for her courthouse transfers. “It’s just going to make it harder for the doctor at the hospital to examine her, and every time we have to unlock her to facilitate a doctor, it’s a security risk.”
“What would you suggest?” one of the medics asked.
“Handcuff to the side of the gurney. That’s the simplest, and it can be left locked while she’s attended to.”
“I don’t know…” Mary Anne said. “I don’t like the idea of her having the other hand free. When she gets violent… she could still do damage with one hand free. If she grabs someone or something that she can use to harm herself. She could even flip the gurney.”
Burgess looked at her. “What, then?”
“We should at least handcuff both wrists. One to each side, so she doesn’t have the freedom of movement to cause problems.”
“Can they still do an exam with both wrists chained?”
“I don’t see why not. And if they need to undo one handcuff, they can just undo one, and then do it back up again right away. It isn’t a big procedure like with the shackles and belly chain.”
“Does she really need to be transferred?” Burgess asked. “It seems like she’s doing just fine. Can’t they just keep an eye on her in the infirmary, instead of transferring her somewhere that’s not secure?”
“They are not experienced in post-natal,” the woman intern chimed in, shaking her head. “I don’t want to miss a blood clot or hemorrhage. If everything looks okay, they’ll be sending her back within twenty-four hours. I really wouldn’t want to take the chance of missing anything.”
Tamara drifted a little as they continued to discuss the pros and cons of each method of restraining her, until they finally agreed on the two-handcuff suggestion and transferred her to the gurney in question.
“What about the baby?” she asked. “How are you going to keep it secure?”
One of the parame
dics laughed. Everyone else just looked at Tamara, eyes wary.
“The handcuffs won’t fit him,” Tamara pointed out. “How are you going to make sure that he doesn’t do anything dangerous?”
“The baby isn’t a security risk,” Burgess said, shaking his head and rolling his eyes at the others to express how crazy she was.
“He came out of me. How could he not be?”
“You’re freaking nuts, French.”
“Exactly.”
Eventually, they were convinced that Tamara was secure, as was the baby, and the paramedics wheeled her out to the waiting ambulance. Tamara could see faces pressed to the windows of the General building.
To the paramedics’ consternation, Burgess insisted on entering the ambulance first to inspect the interior and drill them on any items that might be within Tamara’s reach, limited though it was by her handcuffs. He insisted on riding in back where he could keep an eye on her. It was technically against regulations, but he insisted, and the paramedics were getting so wound up over how dangerous a criminal Tamara must be that they conceded. Burgess was squashed into a corner of the ambulance so that he would be able to take action if Tamara did anything.
After they lifted the gurney up into the ambulance, Tamara closed her eyes to have a nap. Because she was just that kind of dangerous criminal.
As it turned out, the ride in the ambulance was too bumpy and her body too tender for her to get any rest on the way to the hospital. It was like riding in Gran’s old Chevy with no shocks or suspension, and appendicitis thrown in just for fun.
32
SHE WASN’T IN and out of the hospital in a few hours. The doctors there wanted to keep her under observation at least overnight. Social services was taking a long time to get there to deal with the baby, so the two of them were settled into a room in maternity to be watched over by the nurses and maybe looked in at by a doctor in the morning.
Tired as she was, Tamara was restless and anxious about being in the same room as the baby all night. She heard every time he moved. Her body, not in alignment with her brain, thought that she should be nursing him. She would lie still for a few minutes, and just start to relax or to drift off to sleep, when he would start fussing moving in the bassinet, jolting her into immediate awareness.
Tortured Teardrops Page 35