He was in court when she went into labor. Turning the case over to his assistant, he drove to St. Vincent’s.
“You can go into the labor room but not the delivery room,” a harassed nurse told him. Keith hadn’t wanted to go into either, but he donned the paper garments and followed her meekly.
Barbara lay on a gurney, her hair plastered wetly to her head and her face sweaty. To his relief, she wasn’t screaming. At least not at the moment.
“Keith.”
“I’m here, honey.” Why didn’t she have a girlfriend do this? He tried to look reassuring instead of resentful.
“Talk to me.”
“Okay. What about?”
“The trial. What is it about?” All at once her face grew very intent. She gripped the sides of the gurney hard enough to turn her entire hands white. Her features contorted so much that Keith hardly recognized her, but still she made no sound. He began talking very fast, hardly aware of what he was saying, sure she was hearing none of it anyway.
“It’s a corporate liability case. I represent the corporation. A worker was cleaning the inside of a mixing machine, which was turned off, of course—”
Barbara gave a long, low sound, less like pain than a weird kind of off-key singing.
“— and he fell asleep. Actually, he was drunk, we’ve proved that conclusively.”
Her face relaxed, became her face again. “Go on, go on, go on.” She closed her eyes.
“The allotted time for the cleaning was over,” Keith said desperately. He would give anything, anything at all, to be back in court. “And the supervisor, my client, called out loudly that all machinery was going to be turned on again, and—”
Her face contorted and she sounded the long, weird, sliding note.
“Go on, Keith!”
“And so they turned the mixer on.” Was this a suitable story to tell a woman in labor? It was not. “The worker was killed. The family is suing.”
“Go on!”
“I’ll give the summation tomorrow morning. The main point is that for liability you must have negligence on the part of the employer, the standard is that of reasonable care—”
“How are we doing?” the nurse said, rescuing him. She did something to Barbara that Keith didn’t watch and, to his intense relief, ordered him back to the crowded waiting room. He sank down gratefully into an orange plastic chair with rips in both arms. People around him jabbered in at least three languages.
It seemed only a few minutes before a doctor appeared, beaming broadly. “Mr. Anderson? You have a daughter!”
Keith felt too wrung out to correct her. He merely nodded and smiled, shuffling his feet like an idiot.
“Your wife is doing fine, she’s in Recovery. But if you go to Maternity, you can see the baby. Through this door, down the corridor, take your first left.”
“Thank you.”
The babies lay behind a big glass window. There were only two of them. Keith pointed to the crib labeled ANDERSON and a masked nurse held up a bundle wrapped in pink. Again Keith pantomimed smiling and nodding until the nurse seemed satisfied.
The baby looked like a baby: reddish, bald, wrinkled, wormlike. All babies looked alike. Keith tried to think what he should do next, and hit on the idea of buying Barbara some flowers. He escaped to the gift shop, breathing deeply with relief.
With any luck, he’d make it back to court before the judge adjourned for the day. With any luck at all.
The aide had just left. Lillie lay on her bed in New York-Presbyterian Hospital as she had lain for three weeks now, unmoving. Unseeing, unhearing. Although Keith wasn’t sure he believed that last, and so he talked to her whenever he could make himself do it.
“How are you feeling today, Lillie? You look good. Mrs. Kessler put a red ribbon in your hair. I told her red was your favorite color.”
He sat down at the little table beside her bedside and pulled out a pack of cards. It helped if his hands were occupied. Helped him, that is. There was no help for her.
Nof a conventional coma, the doctor had said. If a nipple was inserted into Lillie’s mouth, she sucked. At least that eliminated any need for an IV. She jumped at sounds, closed her eyes at light. But nothing woke her. She didn’t use the toilet, didn’t respond to anything said to her, didn’t move voluntarily. No one had ever seen anything like it. Interns trooped through the room daily. Machines scanned every corner of Lillie. Conferences were held. Lillie harbored no viruses, no bacteria, no parasites, no cancers, no blood anomalies, no nerve or muscular degeneration, no concussion, no endocrine malfunctions. No one could explain anything.
Keith shuffled the cards and began to lay them out. “I used to play solitaire on the computer,” he told her companionably. “In law school, when I couldn’t stand to study a second longer. I liked seeing those little red and black cards snap into their rows when I clicked on the mouse. Very satisfying.”
Lillie lay inert, a physically healthy thirteen-year-old dressed in a blue hospital gown and red hair ribbon.
“Funny, though. Once during a boring weekend at somebody’s beach house, a weekend it did nothing but rain, I tried to play with an old deck of cards I found in a dresser drawer. And the game wasn’t any fun. It wasn’t the solitaire itself I liked, it was the neatness and quickness of the computer moving the cards. Click click.”
There was no computer here. Keith could have brought his handheld, but if he did, he’d probably work. He didn’t want to work when he visited Lillie, didn’t want to get so absorbed in the law that he forgot about her. If that were possible.
“Red nine on the black ten, Lil.”
Someone came into the room. Keith clicked a black eight onto the growing column and looked up. At the expression on Dr. Shoba Asrani’s face, Keith got to his feet. Dr. Asrani held a printout in her hand.
“Mr. Anderson, this is a new article from a Net list serve. It describes a patient case, brain scan and PLI and DNA chart. All the same anomalies.”
No one had done a brain scan or PLI or DNA chart on Lillie when she was born. No reason: she was a normal healthy infant. And anyway, PLI and DNA charts hadn’t been invented yet. The human genome was still being sequenced. Things were different now.
Asrani took a deep breath. “Things are different now. There’s another one like Lillie.”
Keith had the biggest trial case of his career. He’d been working on it with a team of assistants for months, which meant that gradually he’d seen less and less of Barbara.
BioHope Inc. had developed a genetically engineered soya bean with strong pest resistance, good adaptability to soil variety, and dramatically high bean yield. The plant had the potential to thrive in Third World countries. The United Nations had expressed strong interest, the World Health Organization had given the bean its imprimatur, and several governments were interested. Mechanisms were being put in place to distribute seeds free, courtesy of three international charitable trusts, in Africa and Asia. Agriexperts estimated that hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved from starvation.
Then a volunteer in the American clinical trial of the soya bean went into convulsions and died.
The investigation showed that the woman had neglected to tell BioHope that she was allergic to Brazil nuts. A gene from the Brazil nut genome had been spliced into the new soya bean to make methionine, an essential amino acid which soya beans lacked. The dead woman’s family sued BioHope.