by JA Schneider
Jill smiled thinly, pushed a pill out from under its aluminum foil cover. It was an effort.
Under his bluster, Sam was a sweetheart. Sandy-haired and as tall as David, he was actually attractive unless one minded his occasional temper, his white jacket that always looked slept in, and the eating manners of a timber wolf. Now he was flipping Advil packs like playing cards to everyone around the table.
Woody said, “Aw, let’s steal the good stuff, Percocet’ll keep you happy till March, pass the Ketchup please?” His curly brown hair bobbed as he banged on the near empty bottle. He’d probably be wiry all his life. Even on no sleep he was usually amped and stumbling over his words.
Tricia, watching his Ketchup smother his half-eaten burger, said, “I know I’m going to have nightmares about that snake. Just hearing about it…”
MacIntyre grimaced. “Just as well you didn’t see it.”
Jill and David traded glances.
David looked gravely at Sam and Woody. “You haven’t heard the whole story.”
Jill listened as he filled them in. The SPAWN OF THE DEVIL sign, maybe connected to the seven-headed rubber garter snake found in the anatomy lab. The Bible passage Carl Hutchins read them about a seven-headed serpent representing evil. Jenna Walsh’s real garter snake.
“Impaled on her crucifix,” David said. “Subtle, huh? Think it’s the same guy?”
Tricia saw the whole picture. “My God,” she breathed.
Sam was very still, except for one hand making a fist on the tabletop. “So now we have a religious zealot to deal with?”
Woody pushed his plate away, wordless.
“And is this guy done?” David asked, leaning forward. “He went to a lot of work sewing that rubber seven-headed snake. His attack on Jenna was planned. He brought his real snake and pin.”
“And probably knew she was headed here.” Jill put her Coke down. “Had a four o’clock appointment in the clinic. The two snakes and the attack - think they had anything to do with Jenna being a surrogate mother?”
She got stares that understood.
“Surrogacy’s a huge no-no for Catholics,” Tricia said.
“Not for Protestants,” from Sam.
“Hutch says Baptists are against it,” David said.
“Oh, right, and fundamentalists,” Sam said grimly. “They don’t like Harry Potter either. Witchcraft, y’know.”
David was unhappily stacking Advil packs like a house of cards. “I don’t think Jews are against surrogacy,” he said. “What was that story In the Bible? Sarah was infertile so she asked her maid to bear Abraham’s child? So…that was the first surrogate baby.”
“Recorded baby,” Woody said. “It must have been done throughout history.”
Jill listened as the others started talking at once. Do you realize most wars have been fought in the name of religion? Yeah, each side claiming they and they alone could interpret the Bible and God’s will. The Reformation! Catholics and Protestants killing each other for centuries! Queen Mary I executing Protestants, burning them at the stake? The Inquisition, oh, don’t go there. Pulled apart on the rack, then getting burned alive! Wasn’t Galileo tortured during the Inquisition?
“I read Galileo’s biography,” Woody said, watching David piling Advil cards. “He was declared a heretic, forced to recant his outrageous idea that the earth revolved around the sun…instead of the Church’s position that the sun revolved around the earth. He was old and sick and forced to spend the rest of his life under house arrest.”
Jill knew Galileo’s story. Abruptly the others switched back to an emotional discussion of the SPAWN OF THE DEVIL sign, and she felt a new tightness in her chest. A sense of fear and loss at once, knowing that David was right about Jesse because she and David were magnets for every weirdo. Her eyes stung and she wanted to cry.
Do stalkers ever quit?
He’d be safer adopted anonymously.
A zealot now to deal with?
Tricia took another Advil. Woody somberly started collecting their plates, stacking them onto a plastic tray. And David’s house of cards fell.
His eyes were grave. “Two snakes in one day,” he said. “This creep’s got a ritual that excites him. What’s he planning next?”
12
Like planes landing at JFK, three women in labor had been brought in. David sent Sam, Charlie Ortega, and Ramu Chitkara to one with more time; to another he sent Gary Phipps and woke grumpy George Mackey, and to the one in hard labor, he brought Woody, Jill and Tricia.
The patient had been brought in only thirty minutes before, “ready to pop,” a nurse said. In the labor room Jill and Trish had to rush the history and physical, assess the labor and check the degree of cervical dilatation.
Then the nurse helped them push the bed from the labor room into delivery, where a circulating nurse was helping David and Woody, already scrubbed, into their surgical gowns. Jill and Tricia got into surgical gowns too, and helped hoist the moaning woman onto the table.
Dilatation was already a full ten centimeters. The head was visible. The mother was pushing and moaning loudly.
“Almost there!” Woody said.
“Um, not so sure.” David frowned over his mask. “The head isn’t coming. The kid’s stuck.”
He slid one gloved hand in alongside and past the baby’s face. “Great,” he grimaced. “The cord’s around the neck.”
Jill and Tricia both darted looks to the fetal monitor. “What now?” asked Tricia.
“Come see.”
“I’ve only done this once,” Woody said.
The three watched David slide in his second hand, and manually rotate the baby a quarter turn, from face down to a position where the shoulders were vertical. Then, very gently, he pulled the shoulders first downwards, and then upwards, until the baby and the umbilical cord were partway out.
“This isn’t rare,” he told the others. “You need to do it fast, or the cord will be compressed by the mother’s pelvic bone, which will cut off the baby’s oxygen supply. The cord can also act like a noose and strangle the baby.”
Woody quickly clamped the cord, still pulsating, in two places close to each other. David nodded, and Jill used sterile scissors to cut between the clamps.
“That’s it,” he said. And more brightly, looking up: “Momma, you’re doing great.”
Momma smiled at him, gasping.
The rest of the baby, slippery with amniotic fluid, slid right down into his hands, one hand at the junction of the neck and shoulder, the other under and supporting the lower back. It was a girl. “Oh, beautiful!” he said, holding the child up by her ankles while Tricia unwound what remained of the cord, wiped the tiny face with a sterile cloth, and used a rubber bulb syringe to suction her mouth and nostrils.
The newcomer began to breathe on her own, and let out a lusty wail. Woody hooted and the others beamed as they put her, howling, on her joyous mother’s chest. Jill tied the cord, and Tricia removed the clamps.
The rest - checking the placenta, administering Ergotrate to contract the uterus - took just a minute. The whole birth had taken fourteen minutes.
A welcome respite for Jill from her brooding. She even smiled for David as they left the delivery area.
“Let’s see how Jenna’s doing,” he said, scrubbing out.
When they left he had his arm around her. Had seen her gloom in the cafeteria, and in the elevator kissed her, lovingly and fully.
On the surgery floor, they made their way to neurosurgery and Jenna Walsh’s ICU room - and a surprise.
She lay, eyes closed, on pillows with her bed slanted up and her head swathed in bandages. A blue sheet and blanket covered her up to her chin. Wires protruded from under her blanket to a beeping monitor. Her IV pole by the monitor hung its tubing down to a vein on the back of her hand.
And seated sprawled across the bottom of the bed was a woman with her face in her arms. She was crying softly. A man was seated next to her, his head down, his arm across the
woman’s back.
The man looked up as they entered. Blinked at their scrubs, and blinked again as they approached. His bloodshot eyes saw their OB/GYN nametags.
David and Jill introduced themselves.
“Oh,” said the man. “We’re Paul and Susan Sutter. The…baby’s parents. Jenna was our surrogate.”
Susan Sutter was frail-looking with short, pale blond hair. Her eyes were raw and her face was strained, but she struggled for composure. Apologized, even, for crying, and thanked them for their efforts. Her hand gripped her soggy tissue.
“Jenna’s not doing well,” Paul Sutter said, glancing back at the pretty, comatose face on the pillows. “The surgeon was in a while ago. He said there’d been damage to her brain. Hopefully only temporary.”
“Hopefully,” David said softly, peering at Jenna. “No ventilator, she’s breathing on her own...”
“Is that a good sign?” Susan Sutter asked.
David hesitated. “It’s favorable,” he said carefully. “There’s still been brain damage. Something like this, you just have to wait and see.”
They’d both just lost a child, and they were still here, deeply concerned about their surrogate. Jill knew David was thinking the same.
“You were close with Jenna?” she asked, putting her hand on the bed rail. David was studying the nurses’ chart hanging at the bottom of the bed: pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate and temperature. He inhaled, let it drop.
Susan Sutter wiped an eye again and nodded. “She was a friend,” she said. “The sweetest person you can imagine. Big-hearted, giving…” Her voice cracked.
Her husband gulped, “Whoever did this…I don’t understand such evil.” He shook his head incredulously. “A few times Jenna had morning sickness bad, and worried more about Susan. My wife’s an unstable type 1 diabetic. Adoption became impossible because if one parent is deemed ill…”
He made a futile gesture, handed his wife another tissue, and swallowed. “Jenna cared so much about others. She used to fret about Susan losing consciousness during her sugar lows. ‘Eat a cracker, have a donut!’ she’d say. They’d go for walks together and Jenna always brought raisins, fruit drinks in those little box lunch packs because she was afraid Susan would faint.”
David’s cell phone rang. He excused himself and stepped out to the hall.
Jill’s breath caught. David might have said Don’t bother them, but she surprised herself by leaping at his absence; looking feelingly from Paul to Susan Sutter.
“Any idea who could have done this?” she asked gently. “Did Jenna have enemies?” Her heart pounded. She and David hadn’t heard what the Sutters told the cops.
“Her brother Brian,” Susan said bitterly; and Paul Sutter said. “We found out belatedly that he’s obsessed with the Church, harangued her that surrogacy was a sin and she was going to burn in hell. He wasn’t gentle about it, he really hurt her. She finally told him to get lost, and told us not to worry.”
He really hurt her. Jill gritted her teeth, managed to restrain her anger. If someone profoundly believes something, there are kinder ways to persuade. Jenna was brave, giving, and had suffered.
On the bed rail, Jill’s knuckles went white. “Did he ever threaten her? Or, like, stalk her?”
The Sutters’ eyes met. “Not that we know of,” Susan said slowly, looking back at Jill. “He called her one last time during the summer. Spent the whole call screaming at her. She hung up on him.”
“Did she have friends? Any kind of support group?”
Paul looked uncertain. “One good friend named, uh, Mary?”
“Mari,” Susan said. “Mari…something on Bleecker Street. Jenna also belonged to an online group called SurroMomsForum. She found a lot of comfort there. Talked to other people dealing with the same…issue.”
It occurred to Jill that it was doing the Sutters good just to talk. Susan’s face had actually brightened a little when she described Jenna finding comfort.
“Jill.”
David was back, excusing himself again. “We’ve been called,” he said. Delicately, Jill noticed. Nothing about delivering babies.
Paul Sutter stood and gave Jill and David each the Sutters’ card. Jill glanced at it. They owned an interior design company.
“We’re limited to visiting hours here,” Paul said. “But if we miss you, please call us if…anything. We want to help. This shouldn’t happen to good people.”
They thanked him and made for the door, David saying they’d be checking regularly on Jenna.
“Hope to see you again,” Jill said with a little wave.
The Sutters smiled bravely back.
13
Just outside, Jill let her anger out. Whispering fiercely, she filled David in on Jenna’s hostile brother, the whole story.
“Brian Walsh,” she said. “The cops interviewed him while I was with that breech and you were doing Jenna’s surgery.” She stopped for a second. “What was that call?”
David was frowning back toward Jenna’s room. “Something Holloway’s gonna take,” he said low. “I don’t like the sound of brother Brian. They should have a police guard-”
He stopped as they saw a figure rushing toward them. A young nun in modern habit, looking bereft. Feet away, she stopped to check the patient’s I.D. plaque and room number.
“Ah, Sister?” David said.
She turned with tearful eyes to them. They explained who they were.
“You know Jenna?” Jill asked.
The young nun said yes, she was an old friend of Jenna’s, and asked worriedly about her condition.
David gently told her.
She put her hands to her face, half-turned away, and burst into muffled tears. “I’m Cathy Riley,” she managed, turning back, pulling tissues from her pocket and scrubbing her face. “Now Sister Catherine, please call me Cathy. I’m…oh, I just can’t believe this,” she said in a high, tremulous whisper. Her words rushed. She needed to talk. “Jenna’s been my lifelong friend. I’m four years older. I used to babysit for her, then she grew up and…we volunteered at charities, chopped veggies for soup kitchens, laughed and giggled a lot...”
David said, “Sister-”
“Cathy, Cathy.”
“Okay, Cathy. Maybe have a seat before you go in?”
On a bench just down from Jenna’s room, they sat her between them and told her about the attack - including Brian’s reported hostility but leaving out the snake. Listening, she went from sitting slack-jawed and frozen to rocking forward with her face in her hands.
“Brian…do that? Kicking and punching her belly?” she said in a muffled voice. “I can’t believe it. I know he’s a pain and…” She floundered.
“Obsessed with the Church?” Jill said as delicately as she could.
Cathy raised her chin. “In the past few years, yes. But he’s mean about it. Drives people away, actually.”
“But you don’t think he could have done this?” David asked quietly.
Sister Cathy straightened, her strained face slack. Finally she said, “I can’t think that. I mean, Brian yells, he’s got a temper…but this?”
She mopped more tears. “He’s mean but not crazy. Anyone who uses his religion as a pretext to harm is just plain nuts. Psycho. No priest would condone harming anyone. It can’t be Brian...”
Her voice trailed as if she were re-thinking it, troubled. She shook her head helplessly.
Jill asked, “Did you know Brian as well as you did Jenna?”
A swallow. “Not since childhood.” A frown. “Actually, even then he was a hard kid to know. Always in his room studying, or just avoiding people if you ask me. He got good marks, but Jenna used to say he studied by memorizing, not understanding.”
“Do you know his wife?” David asked.
“Barely. Saw her at the wedding four years ago and maybe twice since. She isn’t gregarious either. Jenna said they’d been fighting lately, and she apparently finds her only comfort in the Church. Brags and br
ags how she’s never missed a Mass. Even I’d want to say, Enough already.”
Cathy’s eyes turned suddenly alarmed. “Not Brian…I can’t believe... There must be some maniac out there.”
They told her the police were on it.
“Working as we speak,” Jill said; and David said, “The surrogate couple is in there now with Jenna. Grieving for their lost child, but also worried about her. Staying with her.”
“That’s so kind,” Cathy murmured.
“You must have known about Jenna’s surrogacy?” Jill asked - again, delicately.
“Yes.” Sister Cathy pulled in a shaky breath. “I wasn’t in favor of it, but her mind was made up. I’ve never met the Sutters but she said she loved them, felt so bad about the type 1 diabetes. Truthfully, I didn’t know how I felt. I mean, God loves all children, and this baby was to be raised by his or her loving parents and God loves families.” She shrugged and gestured. “I often feel torn.”
They nodded, smiled a little.
Cathy was quiet for a moment, then searched David’s eyes. “Is there any chance Jenna might recover? Partially at least?”
“There’s significant brain damage,” he said quietly. “But there’s always hope.”
“And prayer. I’m going to pray my heart out.”
Sister Cathy rose, wiping a tear. “Thank you for telling me, preparing me.” She glanced feelingly toward Jenna’s room. “The Sutters must be in so much pain. Maybe I can comfort them.”
Jill said, “It does help them to talk, have company. They’re feeling very alone.”
“I’ll go to them now.”
The figure was stooped. Wore a dark, cheap coat, leather gloves, and a kerchief over her blond hair.
It should have looked odd: stiff, bleached-looking hair on a tall figure who walked bent over - but at one in the morning, who’d notice in a hospital chapel? It’s nearly deserted anyway, the figure thought. Just one man in a pew near the front, weeping.
