Chapter 2 - The Audit of Flesh
The emergency bay at Northwestern Memorial Hospital was illuminated by thirty-two fluorescent tubes that had no yellow in their spectrum. It was a space designed to eliminate shadows, ambiguity, and sentimentality.
Dr. Aris Thorne did not look like a suburban obstetrician. He was fifty-four, with the short-cropped iron hair of a naval surgeon and forearms that were hairless from thirty years of surgical scrubbing. He had delivered eight hundred high-risk infants in Cook County, and he smelled of chlorhexidine and stale espresso.
He cut my dress off with heavy, blunt-tipped trauma shears.
The powder-blue chiffon—the dress I had spent six weeks hunting for on Michigan Avenue because Renata had told me that dark colors at an engagement party were "an aggressive social choice"—parted with a rhythmic, wet snip-snip-snip. It fell into a red biohazard bin at the foot of the bed with a dull, sodden slap.
"Placental abruption," Thorne said, not looking at me. His eyes were pinned to the gray-scale monitor of the portable ultrasound unit, where a flickering pixelated smudge represented the interior of my uterus. "Partial. Grade two. There’s a four-centimeter retroplacental hematoma forming along the posterior wall."
Theo was standing at the head of the bed. He had removed his tuxedo jacket, his cufflinks, and his watch. His white shirt was rolled to the elbows, the starched cuffs creased into neat, sharp bands against his forearms. He held my left hand between both of his, his thumbs pressing firmly into the acupressure points on the back of my wrist—a technique he had read about in an obscure German obstetrical journal at four in the morning three months earlier.
"How long on the margin, Aris?" Theo asked.
The two men had known each other for a decade. Theo had audited the billing records for Thorne’s surgical group during a contentious hospital acquisition five years ago; they spoke to each other in the dry, uninflected language of professionals who trusted data over hope.
"We have twelve minutes before the fetal distress crosses the hypoxia threshold," Thorne said. He didn't look up from the probe. "Her blood pressure is eighty-five over forty. She’s dropping three hundred milliliters every twenty minutes into the cavity. We don't have the runway for an epidural."
"General," Theo said.
"General," Thorne agreed. He turned his head forty-five degrees toward the scrub nurse hovering by the suction line. "Call the floor. Clear OR Four. Tell the neonatal team we have a thirty-four-week female, estimated weight four pounds six ounces, traumatic separation. I want three units of O-neg cross-matched and on the rapid-infuser before my gloves are wet."
"Theo," I whispered. My teeth were chattering with a violent, uncontrollable frequency that made my jaw ache. The ceiling tiles were beginning to tilt, their little black perforations sliding into long, geometric lines like an ledger spreadsheet being cleared with an eraser. "Don't let them... don't let her leave."
Theo leaned down until his forehead touched the side of my temple. His skin was cold, but his breath was steady, smelling of the single black coffee he had consumed seven hours ago in our kitchen.
"No one is leaving, Naomi," he murmured. "Claire is coming out right now. And your mother is going to account for every cent of the red ink."
"The will," I choked out, the cold from the IV saline hitting my subclavian vein like an ice pick. "She said Dad’s will... she said there wasn't anything left after the nursing home."
Theo’s hand tightened on my fingers until the gold band of my wedding ring bit into the bone.
"Your father never spent a night in a nursing home, Naomi," he said.
The scrub nurse pressed a translucent plastic mask over my nose and mouth. It smelled of sweet, industrial fruit and rubber tubing.
"Breathe the air, Mrs. Castellin," an anesthesiologist with purple hair said from somewhere above my eyebrows. "Count backward from ten."
"Ten," I said into the rubber.
The ceiling tiles dissolved into a flat, gray sea.
"Nine," I tried to say, but my tongue had become a heavy, leaden bolt sliding into the groove of an iron door.
May you like
Behind the mask, the last sound I heard was not the beep of the fetal monitor or the rattle of the surgical instruments on the stainless-steel tray.
It was the dry, flat click of Theo’s fountain pen being unscrewed from its cap.
