"The best part was sometimes I'd go back to her in her dreams, sometimes with you next to me. You were such a lovely child. We'd show her what she was missing."
I hung up. The phone rang again immediately, but something told me it wasn't him this time. It absolutely was not him. I picked it up.
"Walker, please come over right now. I started bleeding a few minutes ago and it's not stopping. Please come now. I'm scared."
I drove down the Gьrtel at eighty miles an hour, running red lights the whole way. It was two in the morning and the streets were empty, but there were several near-misses that sent my heart into the back seat. I fishtailed left on Jцrgerstrasse and flew up that narrow winding street, hoping no one would get in my way. At Wattgasse a patrol car appeared and we raced along for several blocks before I realized they might do something professional like shoot me. I pulled over, jumped out, and ran back to tell them what was going on.
Viennese police are notoriously unpleasant and fascistic, but the look on my face and the words that came zooming out must have convinced them I wasn't bullshitting. They said to follow them.
On Dцblinger Hauptstrasse we were doing ninety, one right after the other. When we raced past a bunch of men repairing the tram tracks, one of them got so scared he ran across the street. I laughed because there was only that and praying left.
When we pulled up to the house an ambulance was already in front of the open gate. We all got out and ran, as if there was something more we could do.
Her white bed was full of blood. She was lying on her back with her eyes closed while one of the ambulance men worked between her spread legs. Her pajama bottoms were tossed to one side, red splashes over their green. She was such a modest woman, yet here were five men, four of them unknown to her, all staring at her most secret self.
I went over and touched one of her hands holding so tightly on to the headboard behind her.
"Maris, it's me. I'm here."
She kept her eyes closed. "I know. I know. Oh! Just stay here. I know you're here."
I looked at one of the ambulance men and caught his eye. He shook his head. "I don't know."
One of the policemen came up behind me and talked quietly into my ear. "I was with the UN forces in Lebanon. I saw something like this happen over there. It might not be anything. Sometimes they just start bleeding. It's dangerous, but it doesn't mean she's going to lose the baby. Just wait." He squeezed my shoulder and went back to his partner.
The man working on her spoke for the first time. "Okay. I've done all I can here. We're going to take you to the hospital now." He looked at me. "I thought she was bleeding through, but she isn't, so we can move her."
Her eyes opened wide and she looked around crazily. "Walker? Walker, where are you?"
"Right here, Maris. I'm here."
"They're going to take me to the hospital."
"Yes. I'll go with you."
"Okay. Okay. Let's go to the hospital." She looked at the man bending over her. "It hurts, but I think I can go with you. I think I can go to the hospital because I think I have to go –"
"Sssssh . . ."
It hadn't been so long since I'd been in a hospital at night, waiting for news: in Santa Barbara with Venasque, the night of his stroke.
The Rudolfinerhaus is hidden behind a row of high, thick hedges. The first time I went there to visit a friend, I'd had to ask where it was because it's so well camouflaged. Once you find it, though, it's not at all the scary, doomful place a hospital can be. It's open and airy and full of floor-to-ceiling windows that light even the saddest corners. When we pulled up to the door that night, a smiling orderly came right out and took over.
They wheeled Maris into an examination room and asked me to wait in a room nearby. A few minutes later, a doctor with a large moustache and a good smile came in. His name was Doctor Scheer, and I liked him from the very beginning.
"Mr. Easterling? I'm glad you're here. I'd like to ask you some questions to clear up a few things. If that's all right with you."
"You speak good English, Doctor, but we can also speak German if you'd like."
"No! This way, I get to practice for free. Your friend –"
"Fiancйe."
"Oh, let me note that. Your fiancйe Ms. York was quite close to shock when she came in, so we've put her on intravenous to start some fluids back into her. Then we'll wait awhile to see if that helps. If it doesn't, we'll give her a transfusion. But there's no need to worry at this point because she appears otherwise to be a strong and healthy woman. That's most important.
"Let me ask you these questions though. Is she pregnant?"
"Doctor, this will sound funny, but I think so."
He looked at me blankly, then wrote something down. "Could you be more specific? Did she tell you? Has she had tests?"
"No, but, um, a friend who's a doctor said she looked like she was pregnant. Her face, or her physical presence . . . Whatever it is, I do know she hasn't had her period for a while and normally she's regular."
"Well, we can find that out fast enough. There's a gynecologist in-house and I'll give him a call. I'm sure he'll want to run a few noninvasive procedures on her –"
"What does that mean?"
"Do you know what a sonogram is? It's like the sonar they use on ships to detect submarines or mines beneath the surface of the water. We send sound waves down through the body in a completely harmless, 'noninvasive' way, which then lets us see what's going on inside the person without having to expose them to an X-ray.
"If Ms. York is pregnant, it will show up there. I would think with everything I've seen so far, what we've got is a classical threatened abortion."
"Abortion? She didn't –"
He held up his hand to silence me. "Mr. Easterling, the word abortion in medical terms means any kind of termination of pregnancy. Laymen misuse the word all the time, so it has come to have a terrible connotation. In Ms. York's case, 'threatened abortion' only means that her body itself is threatening the abortion. She has had nothing to do with it. However, as far as I can see, although there was a large loss of blood, this has not happened yet."
"You mean she might be miscarrying?"
"A threatened miscarriage. There are two other possibilities that we are going to check out. One of them is called a 'placenta previa' and the other is called 'abruptio placentae.' Both of them mean her body may naturally be saying something is wrong with this fetus, so it refuses to carry it. Do you understand me?"
"I'm getting confused."
"The body keeps constant check on itself. When a woman gets pregnant and then suddenly, naturally aborts, it usually means the fetus was in one way or another defective. This isn't always the case and sometimes, in something like 37 percent of all miscarriages, the woman loses the child for unknown reasons."
"But what if she isn't pregnant? Why would she be bleeding like that? There was a hell of a lot of blood."
"I'm not sure yet, but I still think she is, from the brief examination I just gave her. There's a medical saying: 'Rare things occur rarely.' Unless she has some kind of serious condition that's been unknown till now, like a tumor or some other kind of cancer, from her condition I would say she has all the symptoms of what I described to you before."
"Isn't all that blood she lost before dangerous?"
"You'd be surprised how much a body can lose before it gets into real trouble. She's a strong woman. Her body could probably lose almost two liters and still she'd be all right."