The Best Christian Short Stories

by Brett Lott

  A stretcher banged through a pair of metal doors and went wheeling along the opposite wall, the young blonde nurse pushing, and he saw by the swinging drape of hair and profile that the sheet-covered figure on it was Katherine. The nurse at the desk cried, "Sir, sir" as he took off, but the blonde one beckoned. An overweight Latin attendant in a white suit who had come through the doors behind the nurse and was forced by her pace into a tripping step that had him out of breath, while a stethoscope jogged in wild loops from one ear, gave Charles an okay sign, so he joined the entourage as it went banging through a single door.

  Into a tiny room, a cubicle really, hardly large enough for them all and the stretcher, on the other side of an elevated bed, which had bars up on both sides—the whole place also fashioned of metal, trimmed with the same chromium, like a miniature hold within the ship; or, worse, like a quadrant at the outer perimeter of a centrifuge just starting to spin. Because now Katherine rose as if in protest, white as the smock she had on, then swayed to one side, the sheet flying up. Bars on her side of the bed banged down, and he reached across as if to pull her up from drowning but missed her grasping hand. She was reaching back at the attendant, who now had her under the arms, so that his big belly pressed her head forward, forcing a cry from her cramped throat.

  "Hey!" Charles yelled. "What the hell—"

  "Please, sir," the blonde said. "Or you 11 have to leave. You may help with her feet, if you would."

  He leaped around and took Katherine's ankles while the nurse, placing a hand below his shoulder blade, passed with a taut swish across his backside, and eased away the attendant, who acted so inept he must have been new. The fellow gestured apologetically at Charles and gave a dog's overacted gape of shame. Then sudden sweat seemed to strip his face to its essence, grainy fat, and ran in streaks around his eyebrows, dripping from them and the manicured band of his mustache. They got Katherine on the bed and Charles saw indentations left by his grip on her ankles. He hurried around to the other side, to be out of the way of the attendant, and reached over the bars and took Katherine's hand, and in the light from a window above he saw her closed eyes pouring tears.

  "Where's Harner?" he asked, with a fear that collapsed his voice into breathlessness.

  "He should be here any minute." The blonde. "He was almost in from the Hamptons when he responded to his beeper. They're vacationing there." An intimacy had been touched on; her eyes widened, then she blinked this away.

  "We're paging him right now. Dr. Ramirez is our resident on duty. He'll fill in till then." She wheeled the stretcher out.

  P. Ramirez, M.D., Charles saw on the plastic clip above the stethoscope pocket of the "attendant." The man now drew the sheet down from Katherine and then pulled up her smock, jerking at it, and Charles was shocked to see the clenched bulge slide across her shining abdomen. Then he realized she was shaved clean. He draped her there with the sheet and discovered himself caught in a kind of contest with the resident, who was trying with his stethoscope to keep up with the strumming sidewise roll of the bulge. The man's eyes bugged. He pressed his hearing piece so hard it became buried and left little red hoops, and Charles, as if from a deafening distance, watched her arch against it and cry out and saw the exposed swath of her as this man must, as meat.

  The bulge revolved in reverse, and now a three-way struggle began as she pushed at the resident's hands, one of which Charles was trying to restrain while the other dug into the scoop of her hip as the man leaned close to listen. She cried and coughed to get her breath, and her lips, usually so blood-infused they didn't need makeup, blued, and then she went limp and her eyes rolled up.

  "Holy God, she's passed out!" Charles cried. "Watch it!"

  The man swung to the head of the bed and fumbled at the wall with equipment there, his hands shaking, got loose an oxygen mask and set it over her face, the strap awry and in the way, and then swung back and fiddled with some knobs. There was a hiss and he picked up the mask and listened to it, shook it, and then sniffed it. "Hole dis," he said, setting it over her face in the same way, and Charles lifted the strap free, onto her hair, and pressed the mask in place. "Say 'Breeze deep,'" Ramirez said.

  "Kath, please, breathe."

  An outside force seemed to seize her ribs and pull them up in shuddering bands, and he saw water pool over her lashes as her eyes squeezed. "Ahhhh!" she cried, so loud he had to gasp at the noise. "Hurts me!"

  "Breeze deep," the man commanded, and then, beginning to pant himself, pointed and said to Charles, "You. Tell hor." And in quick squeaking strides he was out the door. In a frantic scrambling to reconstruct the moment, in order to make sense of it, Charles realized the man had pointed not at him but at a sign before he'd left: NO SMOKING. Did the fellow think they would here? Now? With what was in the balance?

  She was awake and trying to focus on him. She shook her head and flung the water in her eye sockets free. "Oh, hurts," she said, under the mask, and her voice came to him as over the telephone, distantly metallic, with most of its overtones abstracted into a nasal, girlish version of her—a child with a cold. She took his hand that held the mask.

  "Don't leave me," she said, in the same tinny girlishness, which he heard as through a disk at his ear.

  "Don't worry, I won't."

  "What happened?"

  "You needed air."

  "Am I in delivery now?"

  "No."

  "Everything exploded in slow motion, all blue. The Battle of Borodino."

  The window above, oblong and blank, appeared to pulse, and he saw through to the moment she meant: choreographed columns of uniformed men going down to death through billowing smoke. Then Ramirez walked in with a thing like a trike horn strapped to his forehead, with the blonde nurse at his back, her face set, carrying something like ice tongs, as if to protect him. On their side of the bed they lifted the smock Charles had drawn back down, the nurse more sensitive in her attuning to abasement, and used the tongs, or calipers, to take a measurement, then covered Katherine except for the active bulge. Ramirez inserted listening tubes into his ears and bent down to force the trike horn into the now relaxing mass. Katherine pushed the thing away. "Not that," she said under the mask in her tiny voice. "Hurts!"

  The man's shoulders went up and his hands out as if to say, "What can you do?" to the nurse, whose face had turned the naked red of a blonde. She slipped on her own stethoscope and moved it over the area of the bulge with a cold agility. "Try here," she said, and placed two fingers flat. Then she gripped the horn and guided it as the resident hunched over with his eyes rolled up in the swarthy polish of his face. He listened, and when she let go, he shoved the thing so deep that Katherine began to kick and arch, the sheet flapping, and again was unconscious, in spite of the mask.

  "Stop that crap!" Charles said, grabbing the horn and lifting the man upright with it.

  All three of them stilled, frozen in confrontation, and then as Charles bent to get the mask back in place he heard in his ears what he thought was his heartbeat, but it was footsteps, and Harner came through the door. "What?" he said, and stopped, startled, studying them with birdlike concern, in a trim tan summer suit, with a blush reddening his wrinkled head, as if locked in a conflict to establish his control. "What the—" This came out half-cocked. "What's going on here? Answer me at once."

  "She's ten sahn-timeters dilated, Doctor," the nurse said, all professional, as if to obscure some complication with jargon.

  "What!" he said. "Good God, why didn't somebody give me an idea of the problem?"

  The blonde let this pass and in a swoop got the mask from Charles and over Katherine's blue-spotted face.

  Harner pointed a finger, surprisingly small and delicate, at Charles's forehead, only inches away in the cramped room, and said, "What the hell is he doing here?"

  "But you said I—"

  "And where's his sterile gown and cap, for goodness sake?" Harner asked the nurse, ignoring Charles, so that the word he stung worse.

  "
Katherine specifically asked me—"

  "This is an emergency. Get out!"

  "But my wife asked me not to—"

  "Get out! Do you understand English? Get the hell out!"

  Charles turned, nearly colliding in the doorway with the resident, who apparently felt Harner meant him. In the anteroom Charles found himself fighting an anger so fierce it seemed brighter than the fluorescent tubes flashing overhead as he walked, as in the aftermath of a stunning concussion in football, when criticism from a coach, as much as the injury, could throw his body off balance. The nurse at the desk smiled as if she'd overheard the scene, and said, "Why don't you wait in the lounge, down the hall to your left?" And then plucked at his coat sleeve as he passed, so he had to turn to her. "I could never see the sense of those gowns in the labor rooms anyway," she confided. "Since we go in in what we've been wearing all day. But that's what I was trying to tell you when you ran off. And then Dr. Harner—well, he can be so touchy."

  She wrinkled her nose at him.

  The lounge was lined with chairs upholstered in primary colors, stilled in a compression of sunlight. Windows went from ceiling to knee level along the length of one wall. It was empty. To sit, to him, was to concede to the hierarchical unreality closing around Katherine, like the structure of the hospital itself, until it seemed she would disappear. So he went to the wall of plate glass and stood like a sentinel for her on the real world. His knees, at the level of the ledge below, had been magically unlocked, he felt, and would suddenly bend in the reverse direction. He was staring down at the river they'd crossed, in a muddied surge at this point against the city's sculpted edge, cut as fine as if by a razor. A growing sound like voices at the fringe of understanding was, he realized, from the traffic building into its morning patterns over the streets below—a tentative stir that reached him like the first billow of an unexpected, unpredictable wind.

  The grayish cavern of a basement under construction—a further addition to the building—opened into the ground directly below, and he could make out reinforcing rods, like wires bent awry, rising out of the lines of future walls, until his exact place in relationship to them was brought home with such an impact everything in him blanked out except a central sexual core, growing in magnitude, so that he had to battle the perverse pull to throw himself down.

  It was this silence. The still sheen of the glass with bands of gold sun resting in its thickness—He felt a spraylike dispersion within him, which seemed to spill outside his boundaries through the window, hesitating in the air beyond, and then he was blinking back tears as he tried to remember how it was that Pierre had—

  He couldn't get his breath and felt afloat as he watched his own unfeeling hands slapping over his front for cigarettes. He finally got them out and lit one as if to anchor himself. Then he had to fight visions of the glitter and gore of an operating room where he had Harner strapped down and was hacking at him with every instrument he could get his hands on.

  He had to talk to somebody.

  He'd cut off his family, since none of them appeared to approve of Katherine to the degree he believed they ought to. What could his father or a brother say anyway if he called, not even knowing that she was pregnant? He'd talked to Katherine's father so little the man could hardly be considered an acquaintance. Maybe he could talk to Weston. Sure he could, certainly he could. He might even meet Weston in the halls; Weston taught here.

  He caught a reflection coming toward him and turned. It was Harner, who halted at his look, taking on an air of also being afloat, in a ballooning green gown and a cap like a house-painter's cap but without the bill, which gave the grin he put on a sillier aspect. Harner came up and put a hand on his shoulder, and Charles felt a response there like the sparking at a battery's terminal; he didn't like to be touched.

  "Say, I'm sorry," Harner said. "I guess I blew my top back there. Nobody likes to walk in on a situation like that."

  Charles looked into his eyes and encountered only an evasive fear—as if Harner had had glimpses of his operating-room assault—and managed to say only, "How is she?"

  "Well, it was a precipitate delivery, a classic case of it."

  "Is that bad?"

  "It's not so common that it didn't have us thrown a bit, you'll have to admit that." He tried to smile, and Charles felt that they were high-school enemies who'd met on a street corner and decided to be civil, and with that illumination Harner's smile came clear; it was the slack-lipped grin that cowards get, of having secretly eaten something tasty, just before they're socked. "It's not from anything either of you might have done, but unfortunate coming this early in her final trimester. Also, she's pretty badly edematous."

  "What's that?"

  "Gathered fluid. The swelling you see in her extremities. I wish you had told me about that."

  "I did, over the phone."

  "Oh, I guess you did, yes," he said, and looked down to recover himself, then up with a professional stare. "I want to reassure you that as far as we can tell it's doubtful that anything you or she might have done yesterday or the day before could have caused this. Certainly nothing that happened a week or more ago. Rest your mind on that. These things happen."

  He'd seen the bruises.

  That wiggly smile appeared again, and he said, "We'll want to keep a close eye on her, though, after this, and next time I might recommend some conjugal restraint over her last trimester." His eyebrows bobbed. "In certain cases, that seems to trigger the contractions."

  "Precipitate delivery?"

  "Yes, it's precipitated by God knows what and comes on like gangbusters. It takes a fraction of the time of usual labor and delivery, once it gets started, and there's no way of knowing what to expect. We'll have to watch that, too, the next time around."

  "You mean Katherine—"

  "Oh, she's great; you have a wonderful wife there! You're a lucky guy! She came through it like a pro, wide awake all the way. The sedative didn't even have time to take effect before it was over."

  "It's over?"

  "Well, yes—that is, the birth is, yes."

  And now Charles had to wait while the enemy, who seemed to have been priming for this, underwent an alteration that appeared in his eyes, like awe, before disclosing his dirty secret. "You had a boy. We have one of our best pediatricians with him right now. There's no use falsely getting your hopes up. He's very small and weak, almost two months early, and this has been a terribly severe trauma for him. His respiratory system isn't responding as it should be. He's fighting for his life right now."

  "What about an incubator, for crying out loud!"

  They both flinched at the tone.

  "We're giving him oxygen. We've done all we can, actually, medically."

  "I want to see my wife." Needlelike intrusions started stitching at the corners of his eyes.

  "She'll be in the recovery room soon. There are a few more things we'd like to check out, and then I have to tidy her up a bit."

  He put a hand on Charles again, this time over his flexed arm muscle, as if to intercept any violence, and wrinkled his nose (had the nurse talked to him?) and said, "There are some restaurants and some little"—he waved his hand at the window—"some little places across the street. Why don't you make it an hour, say."

  This seemed a command.

  "I'll wait right here."

  But a few minutes later, when Harner came back and told him their child had died, he walked out.

  The bartender was scattering violet sweeping compound over the floor of one of the little places that had recently opened. Charles took his bottle of beer to a table, to be alone, although nobody was present but the bartender. Low morning light came through the open door at an angle that didn't quite reach to his shoes. The sprinkled boards beneath gave off cold and damp. The door faced the river, with the ascending stories of the hospital between, and half of the pedestrians wore white, as if to claim their affinity with the constant newness of the business they hurried toward.

 
He was too terrified to feel remorse. He had sensed that this would happen and was sure that when it did he would be off at a distance, apart from her, the expendable party. No recourse. No help. He'd had complete freedom most of his life, he realized now, or he'd taken it, even after they were married, but this he wouldn't be free of. This was on him, and he didn't know how he'd ever get out from under it. He would take the responsibility for it upon himself. He'd tell her that.

  There was no possibility of divorce now, not for him. He couldn't live with this if he didn't have her side of it, or her portion of the experience, under him in support. She'd done all she could, given the circumstances. He was lucky to have her, as Harner said, and lucky she was alive. From this moment, their relationship would have to be as open as that door. He'd tell her that, and how the thought had come to him, like further sunlight through the door, but first he had to ask her forgiveness. The way had to be cleared with that, or they couldn't take the first step to begin anew. He'd do what he could to exist from day to day after that, for her sake. No promises. No—

  A raying silence, like the silence that invades a house in a driving rain, spread through his consciousness. He would not sit and imagine what it would have been like to have had a son.

  The door darkened, and an elderly woman with a stocking cap pulled over her ears came rocking into the place, carrying a shopping bag in each hand. She sat at the table next to his, talking to herself as she sorted through her bags and smoothed scraps of paper from them on the table as if they were dollar bills. Under a sweater, under a number of open coats, she appeared flat-chested above her pot belly, and her wide face was kept active by her licking at and worrying a single lower tooth. He thought with an impact that set him back in his chair how his mother would be this age if she were living.