Now it was too late for an abortion. In his report, Dr. Waterston said that such a procedure would almost certainly be fatal for the mother as well as the fetus at this stage of the pregnancy. Mrs. Perry's age and precarious physical health made it not only more dangerous but genuinely lethal.
Phil walked into the kitchen, got a Styrofoam cup from the half unwrapped bag on the counter and poured himself some coffee. The room was dark, and he did not bother to turn on a light. A diffused refracted light entered the kitchen through the open hallway door, and the edges of the room were bathed in shadow. He shuddered as he looked into the darkness and thought of what the poor baby would probably look like.
Years ago, as a medic in the army, he had assisted with the birth of an infant to a similarlyove raged woman in a small town in Italy. It had not been a pretty sight. The baby had emerged horribly disfigured, almost indistinguishable from the bloody afterbirth, and had died almost instantly. He had had nightmares about it for years afterward.
He downed half a cup of the lukewarm black coffee and poured himself some more. He looked up at the broken wall clock above the refrigerator, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight coming through the partially open kitchen curtains. The clock said two thirty. He mentally subtracted an hour, then added ten minutes. One-forty.
Another four hours and twenty minutes until Mrs. Stowe needed her medication. He could catch a little sleep.
He finished off the coffee then passed through the back of the kitchen to his bedroom. He set the small alarm on the nightstand for six a.m.
and sat down on the edge of the bed. He started to take off his shoes.
The scream rent the air of the rest home like a harsh and high pitched siren.
He jumped up, startled, scared. The scream came again; a hideously inhuman shriek of pure physical pain. He ran into the hallway. The instinctive fear left his body as quickly as it had come and was replaced by a trained sense of professional duty. The scream had come from Mrs. Perry's room, and he rushed over to her door, flinging it open.
The old woman sat straight up in her bed, her face contorted with agony. Unchecked tears ran down her wrinkled cheeks, and her mouth was wide open, screaming continuously without stopping for breath.
"What's wrong?" Phil called. "What is it?" But he knew she could not answer him, and he ran up to her, pulling the covers from her body.
He stared in shock.
The white sheet of the old woman's bed was covered with blood, which was seeping outward from the space between her legs in a rapidly spreading semicircle.
She was going to have the baby.
Phil pushed her back onto the stack of piled pillows, trying not to panic, telling her all the while to relax, things were going to be all right. Other people had gathered in the doorway by this time, and he yelled for someone to call Dr. Waterston. John Jacobs, a retired air force pilot and the most physically fit of the nursing home's residents, ran off to follow the order.
"It's going to be okay," Phil said, turning back to the old woman on the bed. "Don't worry." But he was not at all sure. It looked like she had lost a lot of blood, and that did not seem natural. More blood was still flowing from between her legs. Taking a deep breath, he held her bony chest down with one hand while he attempted to part her thighs with the other.
The baby was already halfway out.
Phil gasped. The baby's head was already protruding from the opening, flopping deadly back and forth on a too-small neck. It looked as though the neck had been broken by Mrs. Perry's panicked movements.
Holding his breath, looking away, trying to keep down his own feelings of panic and terror, he reached between her legs and gently grabbed the baby's head. It was soft, slimy, slippery--like a piece of pulsating raw liver. He felt a rush of horrified disgust in the pit of his stomach, but he held on. He started to pull.
The baby squirted out in one sickening pop.
"Towel!" he yelled. "Somebody get me a towel!"
A woman handed him a blanket, and he wrapped the baby up in the material, wiping off the blood. He bent down and pressed his ear to the newborn's tiny chest, but he could hear no breathing, no heartbeat.
The infant was not moving. Instinctively, he flopped the baby over onto its back and started pressing down on its midsection, trying to get its heart started, trying to get it to breathe. When that didn't work he covered the baby's mouth with his own and attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He could taste the sickeningly acrid blood on his tongue, and the taste, combined with the strongly rancid smell, almost made him retch. But he fought down his gag reflexes and kept on.
A few minutes later, tired and out of breath, he pulled his mouth away from the baby's and once again pressed his ear to the infant's chest.
Nothing.
He pounded hard on the infant's skeletal ribcage, trying to jar the heart into action, and again started the mouth-to-mouth.
It was no use, though. And he knew it was no use.
The infant was dead.
After a few more seemingly endless moments of frantically trying to revive the dead baby, Phil gave up. He pulled back, wiping the sweat from his eyes, and looked at the small child. It was a girl. Or would have been a girl. Her face, as he had feared, as he had known, was monstrously malformed. There was only one eye-open and staring--and no nose. The mouth spread almost vertically up the side of the right cheek. Her arms and legs were twisted almost beyond recognition.
He covered the infant with the blanket and stood up. Jill had come in while he'd been trying to revive the baby. She was standing at the foot of the bed, half-dressed but fully awake, a concerned-social-worker expression on her face. He told her to stay with Mrs. Perry until Dr. Waterston came. "The rest of you," he said, gesturing toward the gathered patients, "go back to bed. We'll get everything sorted out by morning, and we'll have a group meeting at ten in the dayroom and talk. I'll answer all of your questions then."
The patients reluctantly shuffled off to their individual bedrooms, talking in low shocked tones amongst themselves, while Phil carried the dead infant to the infirmary. He placed the blanketed baby on the steel counter that ran along the south wall of the room, making sure she was completely covered, and went back down the hall to help Jill with Mrs. Perry.
The doctor arrived fifteen minutes later.
"What the hell happened?" he asked, stepping quickly through the open doorway.
"Mrs. Perry had her baby," Phil said.
Dr. Waterston strode down the hall toward Mrs. Perry's bedroom. "She wasn't supposed to have that baby for another month!"
Phil shrugged, not sure of what to say.
"Why didn't you call me earlier?" the doctor demanded. "When she was in labor?"
"She wasn't," Phil said. "I mean, I looked in on her, checking to make sure she was okay, and she was sleeping soundly. Five minutes later, she started screaming, and when I rushed in there she was covered with blood."
"What did you do?"
"She was sitting up. I made her lie back down, then I spread her legs and looked. The baby's head was already halfway out."
"That's impossible."
"That's what happened. It looked like the baby's neck was broken."
They walked into Mrs. Perry's room, and the doctor took a needle and syringe from the white bag he was carrying. He rubbed a swab of alcohol on the old lady's arm and injected her. The drug took effect almost immediately, and Mrs. Perry's sweaty, agonized, tear-stained face relaxed into unconsciousness.
Dr. Waterston examined the mother, checked her heart, her breathing, looked at her pupils, thoroughly studied her dilated vagina, then turned to Phil. "Let's look at the infant."