Souvenir (7 page)

Ten

W
HEN
K
YLE CALLED HER
S
ATURDAY NIGHT
, S
AVANNAH PRETENDED TO BE
busy with family—her dad’s birthday gathering, she lied. Rachel had taught her by example how to string a guy along at first, to get him more interested. “But thanks for calling! Sorry I can only talk for like ten minutes,” she said.

“Nah, that’s cool. Nice that they still like having you around.”

“Yeah,” she said, wishing they truly did. This morning it seemed like her mom wanted anything
but
her company, and her dad spent the whole drive to Rachel’s on the phone. “So what are you doing?”

“Thinkin’ of you.”

“Seriously,” she said, turning on her stereo, low, so he’d hear background noise.

“Way seriously. I think about you all the time. I feel like we…you know, like maybe we belong together.” He laughed. “You think I’m a dork, right? But it’s just…you have this amazing effect on me. I can’t wait to see you in person.”

She tried not to give away how flattered she was, though from the sound of it, he didn’t need more stringing along. From the sound of it, he was hooked. What a relief; she wasn’t good at all the boy–girl game-playing that came so naturally to other girls.

“Yeah, well, I’m really looking forward to seeing you, too,” she said. “Where should I get a room?”

They talked about hotels, and then he asked if she was getting a rental car from the airport.

“Oh—well…do I have to? Because, um, it’s kind of a hassle driving in Miami, right?” Especially without a license to allow a person to rent a car in the first place.

“True,” Kyle said. “I usually let one of my brothers do the driving. So whatever—we can pick you up.”

“Or there might be a shuttle.”

“Or you can, you know, bunk with us at my brother’s place, right? If you wanted to save some bucks, I mean.”

“I can afford a hotel,” she said. She knew enough to not plan to stay in an unfamiliar city with someone she’d met over the Internet, no matter how great he seemed. “Thanks, though.”

She asked him about his brothers (he had two, both older and both “making the parents proud”), and then they talked about what sorts of things they could do in Miami, including topless tanning, if that was her thing. Not that he was expecting it, not at all. And no, it wasn’t exactly
legal.
But girls did it. “If something like that appeals,” he said, “well, you’re so gorgeous you could fit right in with the other babes on the beach.”

Gorgeous.
No one ever called her gorgeous before.

She was savoring the compliment when Kyle said, “So, I want to make sure you really do have the bucks for the trip.”

“Yeah, definitely,” she assured him, wanting to sound independent, mature. “I’ve got tons of money in savings—’cause my parents, they’re paying for school.” This wasn’t a lie, they
were
paying for her private high school. And they’d be paying for college when the time came. “So yeah, money’s no trouble. What about you? If you needed, I could help you out.”

“What, me? Hey, no, I’m good.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. He sounded like he was trying to cover.

“I don’t want to take your money. Anyway, I’ll be bunking with my brothers and all, so it’s cheap for me.”

“Okay. But I’m definitely paying for my own food and stuff.”

He laughed. “One of those liberated girls, right? Hey, I’m good with that. I admire independence—which is why I’m not taking money from my parents anymore.” He and his parents didn’t quite see things the same way, he said, and so he’d broken ties with them. “Good that
you
didn’t have to go to that extreme.”

Savannah was impressed by his strength of conviction. She said, “So far. My parents don’t really get me either, though, you know? Luckily, if things get bad there’s always my trust fund to live off of.” Part of her dad’s obsessive financial-planning strategy, not accessible until she was eighteen—but of course she didn’t say that part.

“That
is
lucky,” Kyle agreed.

They talked a minute or two longer, during which he told her again how he couldn’t wait to see her, and how he already felt like they were so
right
for each other. “I’ve never felt this way about a girl so soon, you know?”

“Never?” she asked, skeptical but wanting to believe.

He said, “Trust me, you aren’t like everybody else. You’re special, and I dig that, I see it—bet every other guy does, too.”

When she got off the phone she was
glowing
—she went to her mirror and checked.

Eleven

S
UNDAY MORNING WASN’T GOING WELL
. F
ORTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD
C
RISTINA
Lang’s labor had slowed to a crawl after fifteen trying hours, and Meg watched the fetal monitor with narrowed eyes, her mouth a grim line on her pale face. The baby’s heart rate had been fluctuating for the last hour, and was now in a steady downward trend. In a voice low enough that only Susan, the labor nurse, could hear, Meg said, “You’re right: I don’t think we have any choice. Get her prepped.”

To the sweat-covered mother-to-be she said, “Cristina, you’ve worked awfully hard, but I think we’re going to have to take over. Your cervix doesn’t want to finish dilating, and I’m not sure why yet, but your little guy’s getting stressed. We don’t want to see him suffer any long-term effects, okay?”

Cristina’s husband Martin, a stocky man whose landscape company did Meg’s yard maintenance and many of her neighbors’, looked alarmed. “Take over? You mean she can’t do the VBAC?”

“I’m sorry,” Meg told him. “It was worth trying, but her failure to progress and the slowing fetal heart rate suggest that the baby’s having trouble.” She turned to Cristina. “Sometimes even the most prepared moms have to go with plan B. Susan is going to get you all set up, and I’ll see you in the OR in just a few minutes.”

Cristina reached for Meg’s hand. “He’s okay? My baby, he’s going to be all right?”

“He should be fine, as long as we get him out soon. Try not to worry.”

“Okay.” The woman nodded, and Meg read the relief in her eyes. “Okay, good.”

Meg squeezed her hand, then gave Martin’s shoulder a pat as she moved past him and out of the room to head to the OR. Her mind was focused on the task ahead as she walked down the hallway and around the corner. When she stumbled just before reaching the door to the OR suite, she recovered her balance quickly and went on to get herself ready to deliver the baby.

She ran the hottest water she could stand and scrubbed all along the ridges of her nails and the creases in her hands. Having to use a scalpel to finish Cristina’s job was regrettable but necessary, and she looked forward to the moment when she would lift the slippery infant out and hand him over to the nurse, a fresh miracle hot and pulsing with the force of all life. The regular opportunity to witness a child’s first shocked breath was why she chose obstetrics; nothing was more wondrous, more startling or fantastic. Every healthy child was a symbol of
possibility.
All these new tiny people she helped enter the world reminded her that her own life was not terribly significant—and made it easier for her to forget her own disappointments.

Keith, the portly scrub nurse whose own wife was due to deliver their first any day, pushed open the door. “We’re just about set. You ready, Doc?” he asked.

She turned off the water with her elbows. “Be right there.”

He nodded and stepped back into the operating suite. Meg glanced through the window as she dried off, considering the baby’s position, previous scar tissue on Cristina’s uterus, how much time had passed since she’d made the decision to operate. Emergency C-sections were her least favorite part of her occupation, the riskiest of all procedures just by their nature. The mothers required general anesthesia, the babies were always in distress—these surgeries felt like crapshoots
despite
her expertise, despite her absolute dedication to her patients. She only ever had to do them when what was supposed to be predictable and routine became a cascading flow of everything opposite.

She backed into the suite, keeping her hands sterile, and stood still while a tech assisted her with gown and gloves. Her right arm, the one that was giving her trouble, felt a little stiff, sluggish as she held it out for the glove. As soon as the tech stepped away, Meg lifted both arms above her head and stretched.

“Need a nap?” asked Clay Williams, the new surgeon who would be assisting. “Susan said you all have been at it all night with this one.”

“We have,” Meg agreed as she approached the table, where he stood facing her from the far side. “But I think I’ll wait on the nap until after we finish.”

“Well, I s’pose that
is
the better protocol,” Clay joked, his mouth hidden behind the light green mask but his smile apparent in his eyes—as was a kind of interested regard that surprised her. Was he flirting? He added, “You pros know best.”

He had to be several years her junior, and they’d worked together only a few times, socialized at a couple conferences, chatted before or after staff meetings now and then; even so, she had the distinct feeling he was attracted to her. Her response was friendly but circumspect: “I tried that napping-during-surgery approach and, well, somehow the results weren’t up to AMA standards.”

“Bah, rules are made to be broken,” Clay said—alluding to marital rules, perhaps? Or was she just imagining that sparkle of interest, that suggestive tone?

The anesthetist, a serious, middle-aged man named Leo, spoke up then, bringing Meg’s attention back to the job at hand. “She’s all set.”

Meg looked closely at her now-unconscious patient, at the draping around Cristina’s iodine-orange belly, at the tray of instruments nearby, checking that everything was in place. “What was the last fetal bpm?” she asked, referring to the baby’s heart rate.

“Eighty-one, right before we unhooked her.”

Very low, but not absolutely critical. Meg nodded at the assembled team of nurses, technicians, and a pair of neonatologists, and said, “Okay then, let’s make a birthday.”

At first, everything seemed to be fine. She reached for the scalpel, grasped it with no trouble, aligned the blade with Cristina’s skin just above the pubic bone. Then it was as if all the strength simply leached out of her arm. The scalpel dropped from her fingers, tumbled onto the edge of the operating table and down to the floor, landing with a clatter. Meg looked up, embarrassed and concerned. There was a baby in distress here; her arm could
not
refuse to cooperate.

“Butterfingers,” she joked, sweat breaking out on her forehead, dampening her armpits and her palms, inside her gloves.

“Mmm, a candy bar does sound good, but I think another scalpel’s the better choice,” Clay said.

“Right, a
scalpel
,” Meg nodded, trying to play along. She looked down at her hand. It rested, yet, on Cristina’s belly, on the mound of a baby who was almost certainly fading fast. It took all her concentration to lift her arm and pull it in, close to her chest.

“Here you go,” the tech said, holding out a second scalpel. Meg looked at it, its steel blade glinting under the lights, taunting her. The moment stretched out in long, agonizing delay as Meg willed her arm to extend normally. It felt leaden.

Clutching her wrist with her left hand, she stepped back abruptly.

“Dr. Williams, would you proceed?” she said, feeling the eyes of everyone there watching her with concern. “I have a…a cramp. In my hand.”

“I—sure,” Clay said. He hurried around to her side and reached for the scalpel. “Thanks for the opportunity,” he added, making it seem like she was staging this as a favor to him.

Marshalling her focus away from her arm and onto the crucial matter of delivering Cristina’s baby, she guided Clay through the relatively unfamiliar-to-him procedure. He worked quickly and with steady assurance, but when he pulled the baby out, it was clear that something had gone very wrong. The tiny boy was well formed but gray, motionless as Clay put him in the hands of the neonatal specialist. Clay glanced at her, his eyes full of dread.

Her own heart had plummeted, but she tried to reassure him. “You did everything right.” Behind them, the specialist and his team worked to revive the baby. “Let’s finish up here,” she nodded toward her patient, who, as difficult as it was for any obstetrician to remember when there was trouble with the baby, remained her priority.

“Right,” Clay said. “Do you want
me
to—”

“Yes,” she said, her voice low. “My arm…” She frowned behind her mask.

“No problem.”

“Thank you.”

She stood by, feeling helpless in every sense. What had gone wrong? She reviewed Cristina’s labor in her mind, recalled the events and procedures of the surgery, thought again about the baby’s heart rate troubles—but as soon as Clay delivered the rest of the umbilical cord and the placenta, the culprit became obvious: a knot in the cord.

“Shit,” she said, reaching for it with her left hand. “It must’ve gotten looped early in her pregnancy.” Rarely, but once in a while, a very active fetus with a longer-than-usual cord could manage to loop through it. Rarely, but once in a while, an ultrasound would fail to show it. Then, at some point in the labor, the knot, which had been loose enough not to be a problem, tightened up or got compressed, cutting off the baby’s blood and oxygen supply. In the minutes—literally
minutes
—between when the monitor had been removed and Clay had reached in to pull the baby out, the baby had crashed. Silently, fading away without a struggle. There was no way for them to know, or to do anything differently even if they
had
known. Except…except for those forty-five or so seconds after she’d dropped the scalpel: it was possible that those seconds made the difference. Clay nudged her with his elbow, and when she looked at him, he shook his head as if he were reading her thoughts, as if to say,
Don’t go there.

She looked behind them, at the slumped shoulders of the group surrounding the warming table, and swallowed hard.

A
LONE IN AN ELEVATOR TWO HOURS LATER
, C
LAY AND
M
EG RODE IN
silence until he reached forward and pushed the Stop button.

Startled, she said, “What are you doing?”

Clay touched her chin, to get her to look up at him. “It’s not your fault.”

She looked away. “You don’t know that. If I hadn’t screwed up my arm—”

“You didn’t know it was going to cramp up just then.”

“I knew it
could.
It happened once last week.”

“Once. Last
week.
”

She appreciated his support, but the truth was that she’d had a hint while getting suited up, and she’d ignored it. And now a baby was dead.

Clay continued, “Look, suppose we could have that minute back. The baby
might
have survived—I double-emphasize ‘might’—in which case he almost certainly would’ve been severely brain-damaged from what had already occurred, and dependent on his poor parents for the rest of their lives. A vegetable, if you’ll forgive the crassness of the term.”

“Maybe,” she acknowledged, imagining Cristina and Mark trying to manage the needs of such a child along with their chubby, charming two-year-old daughter Chloe, whom she had also delivered by emergency C-section, without a hitch. She saw their baby boy with vacant eyes, a permanent feeding tube, a ventilator, no future—and couldn’t wish such a life on anyone.

Clay took her right hand with both of his, massaging it gently, and looked into her eyes. “We can’t save them all, you know. Hell, we can hardly save ourselves.”

She knew without asking that he was referring to his attraction to her, a married woman. Saying they had no control, not over death and not over whatever strange forces brought people together, not over love. She let his eyes hold her that way for a long moment, a moment when the comfort and support and affection of someone who truly understood was exactly the salve she needed.

Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. “I have to get going,” she said, the rest of the day’s obligations intruding, reminding her that her world existed outside this tender gesture, that she was wrong to welcome it.

Clay said, “Me too.” But still he held her hand, and she didn’t pull it away. “Meg…”

“Clay.”

He sighed quietly, then let go and leaned over to start the elevator again. It gave a small lurch and began the rest of its journey to the main floor.

He said, “You’re a damn fine doctor. Everyone says so.”

“You did a good job today,” she told him.

The chime sounded and the doors slid open. She stepped out first, into a crowd of lunchtime visitors. “Try to enjoy the rest of your weekend,” she said.

He nodded, his eyes unreadable. “You too.”

She walked away from him then, and away from the hospital, the paperwork, away from the grieving parents who had so graciously already absolved her of wrongdoing—for now anyway. Her other responsibilities were calling: she needed to phone her father and cancel their dinner date, Savannah needed to be picked up from the game Meg had missed, Brian text-messaged her from the golf course, asking her to buy a bottle of Moët for a friend of his who’d just gotten engaged. Self-indulgence, especially with Clay Williams, was a luxury she could not afford.