Seal doubled her calories. At breakfast when Doc was home, he added tofu to her whole grain cereal. It floated on top and Seal gagged it down with the guilt that she had to do this for her children. She hated food, could find nothing that tasted good. She got breathless when she ate. She stopped doing morning shifts at the hospital so she could sleep later, but then she woke feeling woozy from odd dreams. She was forever drifting through the air toward some unknown destination. It wasn’t unpleasant but after a while she became frustrated that she didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

When it was Seal’s turn to sign up for night duty, she removed her name from the nursing schedule and left the hospital early without telling Doc. They always took two cars now so he wouldn’t be stranded. The general insanity of the Emergency Room had sapped her strength. She didn’t know why she had bothered to go to work. For money, she reminded herself. She and Doc could barely make the house payments and then there were all the things they would need to buy for two babies, after they overcame their fear of jinxing the future.

When Seal turned into her driveway, she saw Ronnie, their neighbor. Doc had worked on Ronnie when he’d almost cut his wrist off with a machine press. Now Ronnie walked up and down the road all day so he would stay in shape for when he returned to work. Seal didn’t like having him so close when she was so tired. She double-checked the locks, although he had done no more than wave, a normal wave, no leering or disgust involved. She wished she were back in the van in Hore’s Orchard. She had never been afraid there. Finally, she called the police to ask about Ronnie. “Harmless” was the word they used. He’d crashed two trucks, but had never hurt anyone but himself. “Do you want us to talk to him?” the officer offered.

“No,” she said. She didn’t want Ronnie to know that she was afraid of him. That would be worse. What if he got angry, or what if he came down to make friends? She wouldn’t talk to him. She wouldn’t open the door. She worried that he knew how to get into the house without a key. He had done caretaker work for the previous owner. In their Closing Agreement, she and Doc had had to sign Ronnie on to clear up the dead trees out in the forest behind their house. It had been a longstanding agreement. She and Doc would get their timber cut, split, and stacked for nothing. Ronnie would get free wood too. “It was a good deal,” Doc had said, “to help keep down the fire danger.” Their house was so far from a fire station that it would burn to the ground before a pumper truck could reach it. “They could draw from the pond,” Seal had offered. The pond was 300 feet from their bedroom. “If they knew how to do that,” Doc had replied.

Seal lay in bed worrying then that the woods would go up in flames. If she were asleep, she would die from smoke inhalation. But it was the rainy season. There was no fire danger, except maybe in their fireplace. Doc had had the chimney inspected. They were safe. Seal worried all the time now about catastrophes that rarely happened--meteors, level five hurricanes. She never focused on the difficulties with her body. Her babies were fine. They would be born healthy and she would feel better sooner. Her body was making her rest now so the babies could grow.

When she was younger she had not liked being alone at home because she could not stop herself from eating everything she could find. That’s how she had become addicted to red licorice. Maybe she would eat licorice now if she had any but she didn’t and she was too tired to drive the seven miles to the store to get some. She could call Doc and ask him to bring her some but he wouldn’t. He would tell her that she was wasting her calories on junk food that had no nutrition. She exhausted herself with that idea and fell asleep.

Doc arrived home at midnight. Seal pulled the sheets up over her head. Doc had known that she’d been by herself and that being alone made her uncomfortable, and still he hadn’t called. He had put work ahead of her and the babies. Adults were full of evil but babies were different. They were completely innocent even if they had been infected by AIDS or another virulent disease by their parents. Rotten world, she thought. What kind of place am I bringing my children into? The good had to outweigh the bad or she and Doc wouldn’t be together. Right?

Seal wished she still believed in God. She wanted to let someone else take care of her. Maybe she should join AA with Ronnie. Surrendering her life to a higher power had to be a lot easier than this.

At 6 AM, Doc got up for work. Seal moaned when he kissed her. He put a bowl of cereal and chopped strawberries by the bed. He also left a pitcher full of water. She hadn’t risen to go to the bathroom the whole time he had been home. “Drink, so you don’t become dehydrated,” he told her just before he went out the door.

Around 10 AM, when Seal’s state of grogginess seemed permanent, the phone rang and she rolled over to get it. Ronnie was selling magazines. She told him to call back when Doc was home; she felt awful. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Some time later, the phone rang again and Ronnie said he had left soup and some bread at her door. Did she need help? She thanked him and said she was feeling better.

Seal crawled out of bed and retrieved the bright orange pot and took a spoon from the kitchen. It was broccoli and onion soup and she ate all of it. The babies had been fed. She wouldn’t have to move for hours.

By late afternoon Seal felt better and went for a walk in the woods behind their house all the way up to the oldest barn. The ground was soft and the redwings were about. Seal climbed to the second floor hayloft to gaze out the cut glass window. The valley was turning green. She loved this spot. She wouldn’t mind living right here. Later, she cleaned and did laundry and drove to the store to buy food, but she had the bagger take everything out of the cart. Seal wasn’t going to strain herself by twisting up and down when she didn’t have to. She took the groceries into the house one bag at a time. She chewed on lettuce and apples to please Doc and the babies and then started eating dry roasted peanuts one at a time. She had turned into a complete slug. Why shouldn’t she? Doc’s sisters had never held jobs and no one was punishing them for doing nothing to further the advancement of the human race.

Seal’s 22cnd week exam and sonogram showed the babies were progressing normally. During her 26^th week exam, the obstetrician pronounced that since their hospital had only basic equipment, she would have to go to the regional hospital, an hour from their house, for a Level II sonogram in order to know how the babies’ brains and other vital organs were developing.

Doc missed the exit and had to reverse directions and cross in front of oncoming cars that did not slow to let them pass.

“Couldn’t you have waited?” Seal yelled.

Doc drove behind a huge liquor truck down a street lined with houses whose windows were boarded. The sidewalk was spewed with wet cardboard and newspapers. Seal didn’t see any people, only a small dog chained to a bus bench. She wanted to go home. The truck slammed its brakes and parked kitty-corner to the curb to unload. Doc sped around it then headed up hill toward the hospital. Along the sharp incline were grand old houses that had been split into multifamily dwellings. This was not an upscale neighborhood. Abandoned cars, with smashed windshields and without tires, lined the odd side of the street. A bent-over metal sign screamed out at them:

WARNING! Due to the rash of recent thefts, we advise all employees and visitors to avoid parking on the street.

“There’s a parking garage,” Doc said. “The appointment secretary said to use it.”

It said Lying In in grey cement letters over the entryway. The red brick building was an antique from the days when women were confined for pregnancy. Seal did not want anyone in there touching her stomach. But this was the designated teaching hospital for the medical school while their new unit across town was completed. “They must have been desperate,” she wanted to say, but she restrained herself. She was too tired to put up resistance and all she really needed was one room with a modern machine and a technician and a physician who knew how to use it. She wished they had driven just a little further into the City to the Antenatal Center.

It was as if she had entered a museum. In the Registration Area, there was a glass case full of surgical tools used before the days of anesthesia—saws, clamps, hammer-like objects. Seal was sick to her stomach so she looked away to the row of women with white hair. In addition to its Antenatal Unit, this hospital was known for its Gynecological Oncology Unit—from one end of the spectrum to the other. There were crosses on all the walls. The women, all nuns, were wearing black clothes and black shoes. Doc had assured Seal that they didn’t do anything differently here than in any other hospital. “Except abortions,” Seal had countered. “Or tubal ligations. I don’t ever want to be pregnant again.”

They took a metal cage elevator and exited onto a trenched wooden floor. Next they ducked into a closet-sized waiting area that had a fan hanging from its low ceiling.

Seal was supposed to be relaxing before the sonogram. She wanted to bend her head between her legs but she was bloated and she felt faint. She stood, grabbed the ceiling fan (that’s how small the room was) and pointed it on herself. “Do we have to be in the only hospital in the United States that doesn’t have central air conditioning?” she asked. “This hospital is a perfect example of what modern medicine thinks of women.”

Doc didn’t answer. His solution to everything: ignore her, don’t engage her moods. Seal began watching a doctor who was across the hall flirting with the secretaries. He was telling them something about his steeple-like summer home. His antics were probably delaying her appointment.

Half an hour later, Seal followed a red-nosed resident to an exam cubicle. It had a window air conditioner. But too quickly she was on her back with her dress up under her breasts, and she was cold.

Seal tried to separate gray images from black and white. This was her fourth sonogram and still she wasn’t certain which dots on the screen were what. She thought she visualized a leg, an arm, and then she saw two heads, one upside down, the other almost looking at her.

The machine emitted a grinding noise as the resident turned on the Doppler, the reason they’d driven all this way. “Um,” the resident said.

“What are those colors?” Doc asked.

“Please excuse me,” the resident said. She stood. “I’ll be right back. I need to get my supervisor.”

“Maybe she should have read the instructions,” Seal said. “She doesn’t even know how to run this machine.”

When the door swung back open, the resident trailed the doctor who had been gossiping with the secretaries. He didn’t look at Seal or at Doc, even when Doc offered his hand in introduction. The doctor sat at the machine where the resident had been sitting and she stood beside him in an obsequious stance. Seal stared at the now-colored screen and listened to the strange sucking noises. The picture flashed reds.

“The Doppler measures the blood flow in the umbilical cord and the fetuses,” the obstetrician pronounced as he ran the probe over Seal’s shiny stomach. The in and out sucking noise continued.

“There’s something wrong?” Seal asked.

“Not necessarily.”

“Then what are you doing? Why is this taking so long? Why do two of you have to run the scan?”

“Well,” the obstetrician said. He turned sideways to Doc. The machine’s fan was still whirring. “There’s a problem with one of the babies that is affecting both of them,” he said. “I think the best course of action is for her to stay in the hospital now. We can do ultrasounds every day and try to take the babies on time to save the big one”

“Her?” Seal said. She raised herself off the exam table to her side and pushed away the scanner. “You mean me. One of my babies is going to die?”

Still the young man looked only at Doc as if Seal weren’t there. “There’s reverse diastolic blood flow in the small one,” he said. “That’s not good. She’s losing ground.”

“And,” Seal said, standing now and pulling down her pink gingham dress over her shiny stomach and the conductor jelly that she hadn’t bothered to wipe off.

“You should lie back down,” the obstetrician said, and the resident came around the exam table to push Seal onto her behind.

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