Stephen King - Different Seasons

'You must try,' I said. 'It isn't good for the -'

But she had drifted away from me. She was looking at the photograph again.

'Who is that?'

'Emlyn McCarron,' I said, trying to make a joke. It sounded extraordinarily feeble. 'Back before the Civil War, when he was quite young.'

'No, I recognized you, of course,' she said. "The woman. Who is the woman?'

'Her name is Harriet White,' I said, and thought: And hers will be the first face you see when you arrive to deliver your child. The chill came back - that dreadful drifting formless chill. Her stone face.

'And what does it say there at the base of the statue?' she asked, her eyes still dreamy, almost trancelike.

'I don't know,' I lied. 'My conversational Latin is not that good.'

That night I had the worst dream of my entire life - I woke up from it in utter terror, and if I had been married, I suppose I would have frightened my poor wife to death.

In the dream I opened the door to my consulting room and found Sandra Stansfield in there. She was wearing the brown pumps, the smart white linen dress with the brown edging, and the slightly out-of-date cloche hat. But the hat was between her breasts, because she was carrying her head in her arms. The white linen was stained and streaked with gore. Blood jetted from her neck and splattered the ceiling.

And then her eyes fluttered open - those wonderful hazel eyes - and they fixed on mine.

'Doomed,' the speaking head told me. 'Doomed. I'm doomed. There's no salvation without suffering. It's cheap magic, but it's all we have.'

That's when I woke up screaming:

Her due date of 10 December came and went. I examined her on 17 December and suggested that, while the baby would almost certainly be born in 1935, I no longer expected the child to put in his or her appearance until after Christmas. Miss Stansfield accepted this with good grace. She seemed to have thrown off the shadow that had hung over her that fall. Mrs Gibbs, the blind woman who had hired her to read aloud and do light housework, was impressed with her - impressed enough to tell her friends about the brave young widow who, in spite of her recent bereavement and delicate condition, was facing her own future with such determined good cheer. Several of the blind woman's friends had expressed an interest in employing her following the birth of her child.

‘I’ll take them up on it, too,' she told me. 'For the baby. But only until I'm on my feet again, and able to find something steady. Sometimes I think the worst part of this -of everything that's happened - is that it's changed the way I look at people. Sometimes I think to myself, "How can you sleep at night, knowing that you've deceived that dear old thing?" and then I think, "If she knew, she'd show you the door, just like all the others." Either way, it's a lie, and I feel the weight of it on my heart sometimes.'

Before she left that day, she took a small, gaily wrapped package from her purse and slid it shyly across the desk to me. 'Merry Christmas, Dr McCarron.'

'You shouldn't have,' I said, sliding open a drawer and taking out a package of my own. 'But since I did, too -'

She looked at me for a moment, surprised ... and then we laughed together. She had gotten me a silver tie-clasp with the medical symbol on it. I had gotten her an album in which to keep photographs of her baby. I still have the tie-clasp. What happened to the album, I cannot say.

I saw her to the door, and as we reached it, she turned to me, put her hands on my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were cool and firm. It was not a passionate kiss, gentlemen, but neither was it the sort of kiss you might expect from a sister or an aunt.

'Thank you again, Dr McCarron,' she said a little breathlessly. The colour was high in her cheeks and her hazel eyes glowed lustrously. 'Thank you for so much.'

I laughed - a little uneasily. 'You speak as if we'll never meet again, Sandra.' It was, I believe, the second and last time I ever used her Christian name.

'Oh, we'll meet again,' she said. 'I don't doubt it a bit.'

And she was right - although neither of us could have foreseen the dreadful cricumstances of that last meeting.

Sandra Stansfield's labour began on Christmas Eve, at just past six p.m. By that time, the snow which had fallen all that day had changed to sleet. And by the time Miss Stansfield entered mid-labour, not quite two hours later, the city streets were a dangerous glaze of ice.

Mrs Gibbs, the blind woman, had a large and spacious first-floor apartment, and at 6:30 p.m. Miss Stansfield worked her way carefully downstairs, knocked at her door, was admitted, and asked if she might use the telephone to call a cab.

'Is it the baby, dear?' Mrs Gibbs asked, fluttering already.

'Yes. The labour's only begun, but I can't chance the weather. It will take a cab a long time.'

She made that call and then called me. At that time, 6:40, the pains were coming at intervals of about twenty-five minutes. She repeated to me that she had begun everything early because of the foul weather. 'I'd rather not have my child in the back of a Yellow,' she said. She sounded extraordinarily calm.

The cab was late and Miss Stansfield's labour was progressing more rapidly than I would have predicted - but as I have said, no two labours are alike in their specifics. The driver, seeing that his fare was about to have a baby, helped her down the slick steps, constantly adjuring her to 'be careful, lady'. Miss Stansfield only nodded, preoccupied with her deep inhale-exhales as a fresh contraction seized her. Sleet ticked off streetlights and the roofs of cars; it melted in large, magnifying drops on the taxi's yellow dome-light. Miss Gibbs told me later that the young cab driver was more nervous than her 'poor, dear Sandra', and that was probably a contributing cause to the accident.

Another was almost certainly the Breathing Method itself.

The driver threaded his hack through the slippery streets, working his way slowly past the fender-benders and inching through the clogged intersections, slowly closing on the hospital. He was not seriously injured in the accident, and I talked to him in the hospital. He said the sound of the steady deep breathing coming from the back seat made him nervous; he kept looking in the rear view mirror to see if she was 'dine or sumpin''. He said he would have felt less nervous if she had let out a few healthy bellows, the way a woman in labour was supposed to do. He asked her once or twice if she was feeling all right and she only nodded, continuing to 'ride the waves' in deep inhales and exhales.

Two or three blocks from the hospital, she must have felt the onset of labour's final stage. An hour had passed since she had entered the cab - the traffic was that snarled - but this was still an extraordinarily fast labour for a woman having her first baby. The driver noticed the change in the way she was breathing. 'She started pantin' like a dog on a hot day, Doc,' he told me. She had begun to 'locomotive'.

At almost the same time the cabbie saw a hole open up in the crawling cross-traffic and shot through it The way to White Memorial was now open. It was less than three blocks ahead. 'I could see the statue of that broad,' he said. Eager to be rid of his panting, pregnant passenger, he stepped down on the gas again and the cab leaped forward, wheels spinning over the ice with little or no traction.

I had walked to the hospital, and my arrival coincided with the cab's arrival only because I had underestimated just how bad driving conditions had become. I believed I would find her upstairs, a legally admitted patient with all her papers signed, her prep completed, working her way steadily through her mid-labour. I was mounting the steps when I saw the sudden sharp convergence of two sets of headlights reflected from the patch of ice where the janitors hadn't yet spread cinders. I turned just in time to see it happen.