Seal and Doc rode in the realtor’s BMW to see a perfectly restored Cape. It had two barns for Seal because she had always wanted horses, two acres of grass for their baby-to-be to play in, and an unobstructed view of Thump Hill. They were making the final negotiations with the owner when Seal felt wet in her underwear. She tried to continue with the conversation, but she became faint and wanted to sit outside on the wooden porch and breathe in the cold, sunny air, maybe even stick her hands in the new snow.
Then people were talking to her and she was filling out papers and she was in a green gown and up on an exam table. “Shit,” she screamed. Doc was holding her hand so tightly that he was cutting off the blood supply to her fingers.
Seal was to have an ultrasound and Doc was to take a seat in the Waiting Room. Seal’s coping mechanism was to stay completely calm, so calm that she was almost in a coma. She’d do anything now to keep her mind off the spot of blood from her baby. Oh, God, maybe she’d need a D&C if she were far enough along. Twelve weeks was definitely far enough along. She would have to have general anesthesia and it’d be hours before she could return to the van to sleep.
But thirty minutes later Seal was up, in her own cotton clothes, and walking back toward the Waiting Room. She bent over and leaned into Doc. “They’re fine,” she said. “They think there are two of them. We have twins.”
Doc laughed. When he stood he was still laughing and while he was striding with Seal against his chest down the hospital corridor, he was laughing.
“You’ll get the hiccoughs,” she said.
But Doc couldn’t stop. He laughed through the entire drive back to their van in Hore’s Peach Orchard. He was still laughing when he fell asleep on the mattress between the side bench cupboards. Seal wished for silence. “High-risk pregnancy” was blasting out of a bullhorn in her head. She had absolutely no control over what was about to happen to her. Twin pregnancies were trickier than singletons. But even with singletons, you didn’t have a healthy baby until it was born healthy and then you still had to worry about infants getting high fevers that would send them into seizures. Seal had seen too many babies succumb to bacterial infections that their bodies were not prepared to fight off. What if Seal got sick now when she was already bleeding from some odd development in this double pregnancy? She wondered if her hesitancy to be pregnant had instigated some kind of bodily response? Why were there two of them? Double of what she had feared. Twice as many as she could have hoped for. Identical twins were an anomaly, beginning mysteriously on day 8, 9, or 10. Genetics had determined their fates but Seal would have to wait another 28 weeks to find out if her babies were healthy.
She lay beside Doc. She didn’t know what they would do if anything else unexpected happened. They didn’t have a phone. They would have to wake up Henry Hore. They had not planned well. They should have bought a house before she had gotten pregnant and they should have mapped out emergency routes and written down directions to their van and they should have two cellular phones. “Please God, let us make it through the night and I will figure out a better plan.” They didn’t have running water and it was below freezing and there was only one down quilt and Seal wrapped herself in it and she was chilly and she had to get up to put on Doc’s jacket and wrap her own jacket around her legs. Doc’s fault. He was a doctor and he lived in a van that was older than his oldest pair of shoes. But it had a loudspeaker on top. If worse came to worse she could turn on the radio and broadcast a help message to all the rotting peaches in the surrounding fields and any of the deer that were out there stealing them before they composted. The CB didn’t work. It never had. The guy Doc had bought the van from had smashed it when no one would answer his request for a radio check. He’d been about as brilliant as Doc was acting now, and Doc had made fun of him. That guy would have a good laugh if he could see Doc living out here with Seal and his children-to-be.
Seal was shaking Doc and shouting, “Get up.” It was 6:15 AM already. “We have to go or I’ll be late for my shift.”
“No,” he said. “You have to get back in bed.”
She threw his scrubs at him. “Now,” she said. “I have Pediatrics. I have to take report so I’ll know what I’m doing.”
She drank canned soymilk as he put on his pants. She pulled him out the rear door.
“Slow down,” Doc said.
“There’s no time and you didn’t get up.”
“You can be late. Nurses are always late.”
“This is my job, not yours. I won’t be late just because you think it’s okay.”
“What about the babies?”
“Shut up,” she said. There was no one else on the road and she had a safe car and they were not in danger. Seal did not like Pediatrics. Children were never able to tell her where they hurt. She had to look at a child and decide what the child’s problem was. Parents rarely remembered the onset or duration of symptoms. If both parents were present, it was worse. They would argue about the details. Meanwhile the child was screaming in pain or vomiting all over the floor or had collapsed from the fever or pain. Other nurses were wizards with children and Seal was resentful when she had to try to do something she was bad at. The Nursing Supervisor would not allow Seal to switch. She insisted that all her nurses be able to handle all types of patients in case of a mass disaster. Seal would never be a supervisor. After she left the ER, she wanted to roller blade or go to a movie. For at least part of each day, she would do what she wanted to do. If she were an administrator, she would be a robot. Even the doctors hated the Nursing Supervisor. She knew how to wield power and fortunately for the nurses, she got them more rights than they deserved in the hospital hierarchy. Seal could not do that.
As soon as Seal reached the Triage Desk, an ambulance crew called in to say they were transporting a kid they had resuscitated from a near drowning in a bathtub. He was three, the report continued, and his mother was hysterical and she had another kid with her, the twin of the one they were working on, and could they please have a nurse ready to take this woman somewhere else while they worked on the kid? They were trying to notify the father but he was not at work where he was supposed to be. “Get assistance,” the driver ended.
The EMTS were coming through the door and Doc was on the child already and Seal was running to get a neurologist and the student nurse following Seal was crying. “Grab the healthy brother,” Seal yelled at her. Seal tried to locate intubation equipment small enough for this much smaller than normal, miniature three-year-old. How could a child that fully developed be that small? Maybe he was a dwarf or a little person. Seal didn’t know the correct term. She couldn’t let anything weird come out of her now-obsessed head. She found the equipment, and the neurologist intubated the child. His color returned but the mother wouldn’t stop sobbing. Doc pointed to Seal to take over with the mother.
Up until now, Seal had been sure that children should not be treated better than adults, that it was wasteful to feed them expensive food, that it was ridiculous to spend large amounts of money on toys they outgrew in a month. Now she was looking at this mother with her head bent down to her lap and felt sick to her own stomach because of this woman’s anguish. Seal’s babies weren’t even born but she knew she did not want them to die.
The woman was out in the corridor in a borrowed waiting room chair, twenty feet from the curtained exam room where her son Herb was. Seal pulled up another chair then put her hand on the woman’s back and the woman looked up. Seal had seen her in the Emergency Room once before when the woman had glued her eyelid shut with instant glue, thinking she was using her eye drops. “Dumb shit,” Seal had described her then to the other nurses. The woman had driven to the hospital with only one eye open, her children in tow. She couldn’t even talk now she had been crying so much. Seal’s job was to get her to fill out forms for insurance and to sign a paper that said the hospital had permission to treat her child. There was also a space for the mother to describe how the accident had happened. How had the boy almost drowned?
“Coffee,” the woman gasped now.
“I’ll get you some,” Seal said.
“No!” the woman moaned.
“What?”
“I went to the kitchen to make coffee.”
She had left two three-year-olds in a bathtub because she needed caffeine. It seemed unreal.
“I did it,” she said. “I killed Herb.”
“He’s not dead,” Seal said. “He’s breathing and his color is back.”
“He’s dead,” the woman repeated. “I did CPR for 46 minutes before the ambulance came.”
“They’ve got him responding. His arm and leg reflexes are fine. He’ll wake up soon.”
“His brain is dead,” the mother said.
“Come in here and see. His eyes are blinking with the light.”
Doc gave a thumbs-up. He was just about to pull the throat tube out when Herb did it himself. Herb was going to be his normal self again, whatever that was.
“See,” Seal said.
The woman started wailing so loud that Doc called Security to have her put outdoors for some air. An orderly wheeled the boy up to the Pediatric Ward for further observation.
I won’t be that selfish, Seal told herself. I’ll never kill my children by being careless.
“Go eat,” Doc said to Seal. “You need calories for you know who.”
“I can’t leave Pediatrics. There’s no one but the student to cover,” she said. She could have left but she didn’t want to. She would be nice to the next parent who came in, test her new ability to empathize. If she started with parents she might be more sympathetic to everyone, even her old roommate Anna. No. Gossiping and making fun were diversions from the yuck of her life. She liked to tell stories. People listened when she poked fun of others’ minor flaws. She knew it drove Doc crazy when she smiled to a person’s face and then turned and talked daggers about her. Seal had never caught Doc doing that. He was so uninvolved in others’ lives that he rarely got upset about them or what they did. When the other doctors failed to stand up to the Administration, he didn’t confront them because he didn’t want people angry with him. “Not everyone is going to like you even if you suck up to them,” Seal had told him. She had been crude in order to get her point across. Doc was never crude. “I’ll cover, you eat,” he told her now.
Seal
walked away angry that Doc was interfering with her job. Did he
think she was less capable now because she was pregnant? The babies
wouldn’t starve. They would get all the nutrition before she
did. Pregnant women in Amsterdam during World War II had eaten
almost nothing and their children were born small but healthy.
The fetuses had depleted their mothers’ fat supplies and had spent
those few calories on brain development because no organism can survive
unless the brain lets it know what to do.
In late March, in the middle of mud season, when Seal was 17 weeks pregnant, she and Doc moved into the one-hundred-year-old Cape with the two barns. Seal didn’t lift heavy objects. She ran and biked less. She was tired. All she could think about was lying down. The obstetrician said this was normal and pointed out that she should cut back to part time so she’d get more rest and have more opportunities to eat. The babies were growing, but she seemed awfully skinny, although she was still within the normal range.