The End of Vandalism (22 page)

“Shh,” said Dr. Pickett. She fastened the belt of the monitor around Louise’s stomach and stared into the green and black pattern of the monitor screen. Then she said, “There is no heartbeat.”

“Sometimes it takes a while to find,” said Dan.

“The baby… is not alive.”

“No,” cried Louise.

“I am sorry.”

“Bring her back,” said Louise, her voice full and breaking, like the peal of a bell.

“Louise …”

“Ah, Jesus,” said Dan. “What happened?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Dr. Pickett. “There are things that go wrong. We will find out before this is over.”

Louise sat up, pulled the black dress over her head, and threw it fiercely across the room. “You’re not even trying!”

“I’m going to try very hard,” said Dr. Pickett. “Please settle yourself now.”

“How can this be,” said Dan. “What will happen?”

“Louise will go into labor and deliver the baby,” said Dr. Pickett.

“I can’t go through labor,” said Louise. “I can’t go through labor with a dead baby.”

“And I’m not going to operate for a dead baby,” said Dr. Pickett. “I’m not going to endanger you more than you already are.”

Louise pressed her hands against her eyes. “It hurts,” she said. “Oh, how it hurts me.”

“We’re going upstairs, Louise,” said Dr. Pickett. “We’ll make it hurt less.”

The sturdy, reticent nurse put an IV needle in Louise’s arm. Then both nurses, Dr. Pickett, and Dan hurried Louise to the elevator. Dan rolled the IV stand along as they ran down the hall.

A big stainless-steel elevator took them to the fourth floor. Louise’s room was the last one in a long, wide corridor with rooms on the left and tall windows on the right. Louise was placed in the bed.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“We can’t for a while,” said Dan.

They gave her a drug to induce labor, and when labor came it was more than she could take. The pains tore at her lower back and she called out for relief. Dan had read of something called back labor, and he supposed this was back labor. How strange, how misguided, that the body would go ahead trying to give birth when the baby was dead. An anesthesiologist gave her morphine, which did nothing. Later he came back to give her a shot in the spine called an epidural.

“Don’t knock her out,” said Dan. “She doesn’t want to be knocked out.”

“She may sleep because the pain has stopped,” said the anesthesiologist. “But she won’t be knocked out. Now please go while I give the shot. Please go.”

“She wants me here,” said Dan.

“Dan, get out, it’s all right,” said Dr. Pickett.

Dan left the room, and the door clicked behind him. He stood in the corridor looking down at the parking lot. Trees moved darkly and rain spattered the glass. A car turned slowly on the asphalt. There was a row of lights on the grass
beside the street, and as the car went by, the lights went out one by one by one.

The epidural did its job, and Louise drifted into sleep. Now they had to wait just as anyone who is in labor must wait. A yellow chair stood in the corner, and Dan pulled it over by the bed. It was heavy and cumbersome as if a reclining chair were a wonder of heavy-gauge mechanics. Dan put his feet on the rail of the bed and tried to sink into a dream but the medical people kept coming and going in their soft shoes and whispering clothes. They used a door on the opposite side of the room from the corridor in which he had watched the lights going out. Dan dreamed that he was carrying the yellow chair along an empty highway. He went into a gas station, where a man with white hair said, “I make sculptures of pipe, which everyone likes.” But Dan knew this was a dream and knew that the hospital was not a dream, so he awoke more tired than if he had really been carrying the chair, and the lights of the room seemed to drain his heart.

Louise was asleep, but he knew if he spoke her name she would answer. At four-thirty they gave her something to bring her blood pressure down. Dr. Pickett came in and taped one plastic bag to the wall and another to the frame of the bed. She said the bags contained antiseizure medicine. She told Dan that Louise was suffering from preeclampsia; the placenta had evidently separated from the wall of the uterus, and the baby must have died immediately.

“She is very sick,” said Dr. Pickett. Her face glowed and her eyes were light blue. “The only cure is to deliver the baby.”

It took two more hours for Louise’s cervix to dilate sufficiently. Dan went into the corridor from time to time.
The light was coming up over Stone City. The delivery room filled with doctors, nurses, carts of gleaming instruments.

“All right, Louise,” said Dr. Pickett. She said it loud. “I know this is not easy, not what we had planned. Is it, Louise? Is it?”

“No it isn’t.”

“That’s for sure,” said the doctor. “But we have a job to do, and for that to happen you must help. We have talked about breathing and pushing and resting. I want you to do what you can. We need you to push, not now but soon. Do you think you can?”

“Yes.”

“You do.”

“Yes I do.”

“All right. Then here we go.”

Dan held her hand so tightly he could not feel where his hand stopped and hers began. She bore down when told to, her lips and eyes pressed shut, and then gulped air as if rising from a dive. Her green eyes were alive, her brown hair matted on her temples. “Stay with me,” said Dan. He washed her face with a cloth. After a while she could not push anymore. Dr. Pickett used suction to help bring the baby out. Dan was afraid she would come out in pieces but she didn’t. She fell into the doctor’s wiry arms, and only after she had been carried away and some minutes had passed did Dan stop hoping that somehow the heart had been beating and they had missed it all along.

“Is it a girl?” said Louise.

“Yes,” said Dr. Pickett. “A beautiful girl.”

Thinking back, Dan was never sure how soon it was after this that Beth Pickett presented him with a form to sign allowing
the transfusion of blood. “She has lost too much,” said the doctor. “You see, she was hemorrhaging and it was dammed up behind the placenta. That’s why her tummy was so hard, because of this bleeding.”

“You said delivery would end it,” said Dan.

“She lost a lot in the course of delivery, and what she has left is not clotting,” said Dr. Pickett.

“What are you saying? Is she bleeding to death?”

“It is a serious situation. I think she will be all right if we do what we must. But, as I say, it’s quite serious.”

“Well, Christ,” said Dan.

“Don’t despair,” said Dr. Pickett. “I’ve dealt with preeclampsia before, and I know we can bring Louise around. But right now she needs good blood and plasma, so please, Dan, let’s go.”

He signed the transfusion form and turned to the bed. There was dark blood all over the floor. People had tracked it around the room. He could see their footprints, the zigzag serrations of hospital shoes. Louise was pale and still. He went over and whispered about the transfusions.

“All right, Dan,” she said. Her eyes were badly swollen. He kissed her, and she smiled sadly, and he sat down in the yellow chair.

She kept bleeding. The first transfusion was followed by more. Envelopes of blood hung from the IV hook and drained into Louise’s arm. They had rigged a catheter to collect her urine, but the collection bag remained empty, and different doctors came in to observe the strange emptiness of the catheter bag. Dan saw Dr. Pickett leaning against the wall, saying something no one could hear.

Louise knew they were pumping blood through her. There didn’t seem to be any secret about that. Her heart raced to keep up but it could not. And her vision was failing. There was a big gray spot in front of her eyes. The spot was dense and uneven, like the nest of a paper wasp, and she could not see around it. She pulled Dan to her.

“I love you,” she said. “But my eyes hurt and I am closing them.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m right here.”

She touched his face, which was very hot. Closing her eyes, she imagined or saw a red light glowing under her pale gown. She knew this light so well that she could have laughed. It was the safe light from Kleeborg’s, which enabled her to see what she was doing without damaging the prints. Now the light rose from her chest and it was as if she were inside it. Being in this light was as natural as going to a window to learn the weather. She could see the doctors, the nurses, and Dan from a place slightly above them. Dan gripped the rail of the bed and stared blankly at a bloodpressure monitor. He looked like hell, bathed in the warm red light but not knowing it. Louise drifted up. The ceiling would not hold her. She felt powerful and free from pain. She could go or she could stay, and the decision was hers. It did not scare her to go. It made her curious. She had lost the baby, and nothing would hurt. She saw a house on a road. It was dark, guarded by trees. She knew the house, had dreamed of it the night before she and Dan were married. The lane went up from the road, cushioned with pine needles. There was a plank porch and a brass knocker shaped like a deer. Whatever was in the house hummed. She could go in or not, her choice, but once through the door she could not return. She looked away from
the house. The lights of the doctors cast a ragged glow in the darkness. Dan was holding her hand. The house hummed louder and the boards trembled beneath her feet. But she didn’t want to go without him, without knowing him.

So she would always believe that it had been her choice to come back. And her body did regain its balance slowly over the next three or four hours. Her kidneys began to work, her blood to clot. The shift changed, and a woman in fresh green clothes mopped the floor. Louise had received twelve units of blood and plasma in all. Dr. Pickett smoked a cigarette in the cafeteria. Dan stared at the dust that floated in the corridor. Louise’s voice was low and hoarse, her eyelids swollen. In the late morning nurses brought the baby into the room. They had washed her, wrapped her in a blanket, placed a white cap on her head. Dan held her. Her features were delicate, her eyes closed. She did not seem to have been in pain. Her hands would have been strong. Dan cradled the baby on the bed beside Louise, but with the tubes in her arms and with the blood-pressure cuff Louise could not hold her. Dan sat with the baby in the yellow chair for a long time. “Tell her what’s happening,” said Louise. Dan held her some more. He did not know what to do. He gave her back to the nurses.

Mary Montrose and Cheryl Jewell came to see Louise. They pushed her hair gently from her face and held her hands, but were not allowed to stay long. They wandered from the room, lost in disbelief and wonder.

Louise would not leave the delivery room for days, because Dr. Pickett felt the equipment and staff there were better able to deal with her. Her blood pressure remained high. Around the hospital she was a curiosity. Eye doctors and kidney
doctors and blood doctors came to examine and question her. One day Dr. Pickett asked the extra doctors to leave because she needed to speak to Dan and Louise alone. Dan thought he knew what this was about, and his heart pounded. Undoubtedly it was among Pickett’s duties to find out why they had not got to the hospital sooner on the night the baby died—to find out who was at fault. But all she said was that they should get counseling.

On the third day Dan was sitting in the sun of the corridor when Joan Gower came around the corner with flowers.

“I’m awfully sorry,” she said.

“Hello, Joan,” said Dan.

“Did you name the baby?” she said.

Dan looked out at a blue sky with small clouds. “Why do you ask?”

Joan was pulling her hair into a ponytail these days, with a few strands left to curl forward. “They have to be named to go to heaven. Otherwise they become a spirit, called a taran, in the woods.”

“Just be quiet,” said Dan.

“It can be a private name, known only to you.”

“Please go.”

“I was so sorry when I heard.”

“Thank you.”

“You couldn’t stop it.”

“Thank you.”

“You couldn’t.”

“We’ll never know.”

“I know you think you could, but it’s not true,” said Joan. “I brought you these flowers. They’re from me and Charles.”

“Get them out of here.”

“Don’t take it all on yourself.”

“Please, will you take them out of here.”

“I will leave them at the desk in case you should change your mind.”

He watched her go. They had named the baby. They had named her Iris Lane Norman.

When Dan went home, he found the beer bottle still in the bathroom where he had left it. He took it out to the kitchen and threw it against the wall as hard as he could. The bottle did not break but put a hole in the plaster that is still there today. Dan went outside and sat on the steps. The white dog ran from him.

Ed Aiken picked him up and they went to see Emil Darnier in Morrisville. Darnier Funeral Home was the biggest house in town, with white columns and red bricks, and when Darnier handled a funeral it was a little like the Holiday Inn handling a funeral. Emil’s daughter met them at the front door and led them down to the basement, where Emil’s son took over, escorting the two men through a long cinder-block hall with metallic purple caskets. Eventually they were face to face with Emil, who had a clipboard in his hand and a hearing aid. The three men sat around a low table. Emil smoked a little cigar.

“I want a simple wooden box,” said Dan.

“For infants there is only one,” said Emil. He puffed, and spoke around the cigar. “It is white and like so.” He showed with his hands.

“What’s it made of?” said Dan.

“Oh, I don’t know. It isn’t plywood. I want to say particle board, but that isn’t right, either. Let me see if I can find one. Tony! Tony! Where is that kid? Usually I have to order them, but sometimes we have them around. Let me go see.”

While Emil was gone, Ed explained how he, Earl, and Paul Francis were keeping the sheriff’s office going.

“That sounds good,” said Dan.

Emil came back with a case that seemed hardly bigger than a shoebox. Dan lifted the lid and closed it.