“There’s been what we call a placental abruption, which is, uh, a tearing, of the placenta away from the uterine wall. That’s what’s causing the hemorrhaging. So our first concern here is to deal with the blood loss, and with getting the bleeding stopped.”
“What about the baby?”
Levine looked pained, which by now seemed like the height of compassion. One of his colleagues said, “I’m afraid there isn’t really anything we can do for the baby at this point, ma’am.”
“Not if you cut me open and scrape the kid out like something from a broken garbage disposal, obviously.”
The man opened his mouth angrily then shut it and shrugged, his meaning clear enough: it’s your funeral, sweetheart. The third doctor seemed inclined to weigh in, but before he could say anything Liz looked at Levine and said, “Could we have a few less cooks in this kitchen, please?”
Levine just looked at his shoes, stuck between a patient’s rock and a professional hard place. In the long moment of awkward silence, Liz’s head began to swim, a wave of dizziness and unreality, as if the room might wash away and leave some nightmare flotsam behind like wreckage on a beach. She could feel the wet heat between her legs as fresh blood started to seep through the gauze they had plugged her with. She took a deep breath and sank back into her body as far as she could, finding the edge of the pain and letting it keep her lucid. It was all she could do not to just close her eyes and moan.
Finally the second doctor turned and went to the sink. He ran the hot water and soaped up perfunctorily, literally washing his hands of her, then yanked a handful of paper towels down and left. The third man, who clearly did not like controversy, said to Levine, “Let me know what procedure you decide on, Doctor,” and hurried out too.
“Sorry about that,” Liz told Levine, when they were gone.
He shrugged: all in a day’s work. “We’re faced with very limited options, Mrs. O’Reilly. The hemorrhaging is serious and needs to be addressed immediately.” He hesitated, then said, “You could die. That’s what we’re talking about here. You have to understand that.”
“And what about the baby?”
“I really think it’s unlikely the baby will be viable at this point. Frankly. I’m sorry.”
“I thought you wanted to try to save it. That’s why I’m still listening to you at all.”
“The cesarean would give it the best chance, certainly. But—” He trailed off, frankly appealing for reason. Liz said nothing. Levine took a breath and said, “Mrs. O’Reilly, the baby has to come out, one way or another, or there is a real chance we’re going to lose you. It really comes down to that.”
Why couldn’t this have happened last July? Liz thought. It would have been almost painless, at that point; it would have been an actual relief. A nice spontaneous first trimester miscarriage, a bad day on the toilet. No one but Mike would even have known; she’d learned, after a miscarriage between Danny and Kathie, to hold off on announcements until the second trimester. It was just too ironic. She’d never been an unambivalent mother, but she’d made her tenuous peace with the goddamn war, with the idiocy of her husband shipping off to protect God and family at the expense of his actual wife and kids, and with the wreckage, yet again, of her own dreams of getting back into the theater. She’d lived with the loneliness and doubt, with the discomfort and exhaustion, and she’d come to love the daily miracle of the child developing within her, even with no one to share it with.
She said, “The baby’s still alive, right?”
Levine sighed. “Yes. But—”
“So what would it take for it to be…viable? For it to live?”
He shook his head. “At least another two weeks in the womb, assuming the disruption of the placenta is not already fatal. I’d prefer a month.”
“I thought babies were viable after six months.”
“Ideally, and with luck. This one seems underdeveloped to me. When was your last regular checkup?”
Liz tried to recall. It seemed like forever. She’d had an appointment scheduled for some time during the week after Mike was wounded, but she’d blown it off. She wondered now if that had doomed her baby. She’d taken her eye off the dot.
Levine said gently, “Maybe we should get your husband in here and—”
“My husband’s in Vietnam.”
“Ah.”
“He was wounded last fall, putting a man who had less chance than this baby of surviving onto a helicopter, under mortar fire. He’d back me on this.”
Levine was silent for a moment, then said, “Mrs. O’Reilly, if it were my wife, I would already have induced labor.”
The problem was, this kid had a name: Anna Marie, if it was a girl, for Mike’s mother, and Lawrence Charles, after Larry Petroski, if it was a boy. She’d been playing old cassettes of Mike reading Yeats to her womb so that the child would know its father’s voice.
Liz said, “Dr. Levine, I appreciate that. But I’m not your wife. So tell me what we have to do to give this baby another month inside me.”
HOTEL COMPANY had cleaned up most of the enemy dead, but there were still three North Vietnamese soldiers hanging in the concertina wire surrounding the Hump. The NVA had registered mortars on the spots and had snipers watching the bodies; there was no question at this point of removing them, and so they all had to live with the stench.
Otherwise, things had settled in to a bizarre routine of sorts. It was like living on the black dot at the center of a target. The daily mortar barrages were relentless; you couldn’t take a crap without drawing fire, and everyone moved around with one ear cocked for the sound of incoming. Mike had most of Hotel Company sleeping in their holes during the day, to keep casualties to a minimum; at night they were on 100 percent alert, just waiting to get hit.
They were still undermanned and undersupplied. It had been almost two days before the weather broke enough for choppers to get in, and the first helicopter landing on the hilltop had promptly been bracketed by 120mm mortar shells that killed three of the men loading the wounded onto it. Mike was losing a dozen or more men a day just receiving bullets and water, and they still didn’t have enough of either.
The worst of it was, there was no end in sight. Mike’s instinct, the basic Marine way, was to take the fight to the enemy, to get down off this hill and go kick some ass, but the higher-ups seemed perfectly happy with the Khe Sanh Marines’ defensive posture.
Mine not to reason why, Mike reminded himself. In Korea he’d just been a rifleman, a grunt; he went where they pointed him, tried to kill bad guys, and then went to the next place, and all the places were the same and it all seemed like a cluster fuck. Now he was an officer and they let him see the maps, so he knew the numbers of the hills they were dying for and knew a little more about tactics, and he even had an occasional sense of a larger strategy. And it was still, generally speaking, a cluster fuck. But he did think he could discern some method in the madness of six thousand Marines defending to the death in a place there was really no sense being in the first place. The first B-52 strikes had started, and they were turning the jungle around the base into a moonscape with a Niagara of five-hundred-pound bombs. The sky was full of planes waiting for targets. The heavy guns at Camp Carroll and the Rockpile were all pointed west, and the motto of the artillery batteries was “Be Generous.” The Marines at Khe Sanh were here as bait, pure and simple; Hotel Company was staked out on this hilltop like a goat on a tether, to draw the wolves out of the woods.
Well, so far, so good, Mike thought. There were at least two North Vietnamese divisions out there now, twenty thousand or more guys with “Born in the North to Die in the South” tattooed on their arms and “For Nation—Forget Self” written on their helmets. Maybe they could kill all the wolves they had drawn, and maybe not. Maybe the wolves would eat the goat. But in any case they were in for one hell of a fight. He could handle that, that was his job. He just wished he had more ammo and enough water to refill his goddamn canteen. It would be nice to s
tart getting some mail again. And Lord, those bodies in the wire stank.
[ PART SEVEN ]
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
W. B. YEATS,
“AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH”
CHAPTER 25
JANUARY 1968
LIZ WAS BORED long before she was beyond the immediate danger of dying. The worst thing was not being able to go home, and the second worst was not being allowed to get out of the bed. It was much like war, she supposed. She understood Mike’s maddening, nerveless nonchalance much better now. You really could get used to anything, including being a heartbeat or two away from death at any given moment, and after a while what you were going to eat for your next meal became much more interesting than the imminence of mortality. Marines, at least, got medals, for the occasional adventure of crawling around under fire to save a comrade; and Marines got to shoot back. All an embattled mother got was four walls and a little plastic name tag on her wrist.
She had spent three days in the ICU, and even now, in a regular room with a view of the parking lot, she was wired to a BP monitor that seemed to go off every hour or two just on principle, screaming abruptly like a wounded robotic cat when the numbers drifted too low. The nurses would rush in, there would be a flurry of activity, they’d put something else in her IV or change the flow rate. Later one of the doctors would come in and look at the clipboard at the end of the bed without ever meeting her eyes, mumble something, then shake his head at her continued recalcitrance and leave. Dr. Levine in particular was short with her; Liz had been given to understand that he’d stuck his neck way out on her behalf and that it would be a professional embarrassment to him if she died. She suspected he had set the blood pressure alarm needlessly high just to impress upon her the seriousness of the situation.
Liz felt sufficiently impressed. She was not allowed to get out of the bed. A catheter had been inserted to keep her from having to get up to go to the bathroom. She was on some kind of drug to mature the baby’s lungs, and with her belly wired up to track the baby’s heartbeat, she looked like a pregnant time bomb. Levine had told her ominously that if there were prolonged signs of fetal distress, there would be nothing to do but a cesarean, but the baby’s pulse was steady and strong. The doctors all seemed vaguely annoyed by that, as if the kid were thriving just to spite them.
The nurses were with her, though, thank God. Liz could feel their quiet support. They did all the little extras, including cheerfully putting up with the visits from the kids. It amounted to unspoken sisterhood. They wouldn’t turn off the blood pressure alarm, though. Sisterhood only went so far.
She hadn’t said anything to Mike about what was going on. Liz understood her husband’s letters much better now, indeed. There was a gray zone of life-danger it simply didn’t pay to express. Mike couldn’t do anything for her right now, he would just worry and hurt and feel helpless, and she wanted to spare him that until there was some real news. Like, Sweetheart, you have a new daughter, despite a few complications. Or, Darling, our child is dead. Meanwhile, she kept her letters chipper and blithe while the blood pressure Klaxon blared, as her husband kept his letters chipper and droll with two divisions of the North Vietnamese Army at his doorstep. What a chipper pair they were. What a couple of stone-cold liars.
Mike’s parents and his sister came down from Maryland to take care of the kids. The elder O’Reillys were also behind her all the way, though Liz knew it had never occurred to them that she would consider anything but saving the baby. She remembered how happy—and how utterly relieved—they had been the first time she had gotten pregnant and how uneasy they had been at the notion that she wouldn’t immediately drop all her school and theater nonsense and just settle in to being a mother.
And here she was, after all these years of trying to swim against the stream, doing exactly what a good Catholic wife should. The irony of that nearly overwhelmed Liz at times, but she was grateful for the senior O’Reillys’ presence. The kids, after a period of anxiousness, were delighted to have their grandparents around; it was almost like summer vacation, a series of museums, amusement parks, and special meals out. Only Danny really seemed to grasp what was going on.
The baby stirred inside Liz, a gratifyingly firm kick, and then a delicate series of taps. The child had wonderful rhythm; Liz was sure by now that it was a girl and that she would be a dancer. The heartbeat on the fetal monitor was steady at 113 beats per minute, at the low end of normal. If it went below 110, the damned bells and whistles sounded, but it hadn’t gone below 110 since Tuesday.
They also serve who only stand and wait, Liz told herself. It was a Mike-ism, a Marine-flavored variant on something from Milton. The phrase was usually applied to a tedious posting in some obscure place and tended to be spiced with cynicism or obscenity. But waiting seemed holy, here. Waiting was all she had to do; it was her only work now. Everything was covered, and everything was out of her hands, except the time this baby needed. She would wait, and wait some more. And wait some more, until waiting seemed like dying; and wait more still, until the dying finally seemed sweet.
GIVEN SO MANY empty hours, Liz found herself spending way too much time watching the room’s black-and-white TV. The world seemed to be falling apart out there, day by day, even aside from the fact that her husband’s current address was surrounded by twenty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers. North Korea had seized a U.S. ship, the Pueblo, and a B-52 loaded with hydrogen bombs had crashed in Greenland. The Vietcong had just attacked in hundreds of places throughout South Vietnam, launching a countrywide offensive during what was supposed to be the Tet holiday cease-fire. But Liz found herself impatient with all the crises; all she wanted at this point was news of Khe Sanh. She hadn’t been able to stand it when her husband’s foxhole was the lead story on every news show, and now she couldn’t stand it that it wasn’t.
The door to the hospital room swung open, and Betty Simmons breezed in, wearing a blue suit-skirt combo with black piping, the shoulder seams squared off to razor sharpness, and carrying a bouquet of daisies.
“How’s our girl?” she chirped.
Liz shifted in the bed to make sure the sheet was covering her legs, which had swollen with retained water and looked like giant sausages.
“Bloated, terrified, and trapped here for the duration, in constant pain,” she said. “But otherwise great.”
“That’s the spirit,” Betty said. She waved the daisies, which Liz acknowledged with a nod. Betty had been bringing flowers every day, and the room was starting to seem a little crowded. She’d also been bringing books, a relentless blend of the lurid and the sappily inspirational: Jacqueline Susann, Rod McKuen, In Cold Blood, and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Liz just let both the flowers and the books pile up. She was actually reading The Golden Notebook and Virginia Woolf.
Betty spent a moment looking for somewhere to put the latest blooms and finally settled on a spot by the window. Then she came back to the bedside, pulled up a chair, and peered at the ruins of Liz’s lunch. “You didn’t eat your vegetables, sweetie.”
“I’m on a hunger fast until they give me a color TV.”
Betty made a little tsk-tsk sound. “You’ve got to keep your strength up, honey.”
“I just want to wash my hair.”
On the muted TV screen, the afternoon news footage of the shattered U.S. embassy building, with bodies in the courtyard, had just given way to a South Vietnamese policeman putting a pistol to the head of a Vietcong prisoner on a street in Saigon and pulling the trigger. God help us all, Liz thought, and closed her eyes, to concentrate on the pulsing heart inside her. God help us all. But especially my husband and my baby.
“I wish they’d stop showing that,” Betty said. “You’d think that one ridiculous VC was the only person who had died in the whole damned country.”
She caught herself. “Oops, sorry.”
“Mike’s still alive, last I heard,” Liz said dryly.
“Thank God.”
“God’s on probation, as far as I’m concerned,” Liz said. “I’m just hoping Mike keeps his head down.” She had finally found out what Dien Bien Phu was. Danny had gone to the library and found a fat, grim book, by some Frenchman, called Hell in a Very Small Place. The book had a distinctive poppy red cover, and Danny’s math teacher had already sent a note home saying that he was reading it during class and would have to leave it home. Danny had solved this by re-covering the book in brown so that it looked like his math text. Liz would have liked to back the math teacher, but she counted too much on Danny’s briefings. Dien Bien Phu turned out to be the place in the mountains of northern Vietnam where, in the spring of 1954, thirteen thousand French defenders had suffered through a terrible fifty-six-day siege by the Communist-Nationalist guerrillas then called the Viet Minh. The garrison had finally fallen, and the defeat had marked the end of the French colonial rule in Indochina.
The parallels to Khe Sanh were obvious, as Walter Cronkite kept pointing out gloomily. The French had invited the fight at Dien Bien Phu, hoping to finally get the Viet Minh to mass in one place, and had gotten more than they had bargained for. Danny said that the Marines had infinitely better air support, more and better artillery, and that they were holding the high ground around the base. Also, the Khe Sanh airstrip was still open, while the French had been reduced to parachute drops for their resupply. Liz would have felt much better about her son’s analysis if it had not been so obvious that Danny felt the crucial difference in the two situations was that the Viet Minh had been dealing with a French army, not United States Marines. Walter Cronkite, not as schooled as her son in the myth of Marine invincibility, seemed much less sanguine.
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