Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

“This isn’t a good time,” Alex said.

Lacy laughed. “I don’t know if it’s ever a good time to have a baby. Your life certainly gets turned upside down.”

Alex stared at her. “I like my life right side up.”

Lacy fussed with her baby’s shirt for a moment. “In a way, what you and I do isn’t really all that different.”

“The recidivism rate is probably about the same,” Alex said.

“No…I meant that we both see people when they’re at their most raw. That’s what I love about midwifery. You see how strong someone is, in the face of a really painful situation.” She glanced up at Alex. “Isn’t it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?”

Alex thought of the defendants that had paraded through her professional life. They all blurred together in her mind. But was that because, as Lacy said, we were all similar? Or was it because Alex had become an expert at not looking too closely?

She watched Lacy settle the baby on her knee. His hands smacked the table, and he made little gurgling noises. Suddenly Lacy stood up, thrusting the baby toward Alex so that she had to hold him or risk having him tumble onto the floor. “Here, hang on to Peter. I just have to run into the bathroom.”

Alex panicked. Wait, she thought. I don’t know what I’m doing. The baby’s legs kicked, like a cartoon character who’d run off a cliff.

Awkwardly, Alex sat him down on her lap. He was heavier than she would have imagined, and his skin felt like damp velvet. “Peter,” she said formally. “I’m Alex.”

The baby reached for her coffee cup, and she lurched forward to push it out of reach. Peter’s face pinched tight as a lime, and he started to cry.

The screams were shattering, decibel-rich, cataclysmic. “Stop,” Alex begged, as people around her started to stare. She stood up, patting Peter’s back the way Lacy had, wishing he would run out of steam or contract laryngitis or just simply have mercy on her utter inexperience. Alex-who always had the perfect witty comeback, who could be thrown into a hellish legal situation and land on her feet every time without even breaking a sweat-found herself completely at a loss.

She sat down and held Peter beneath his armpits. By now, he’d turned tomato-red, his skin so angry and dark that his soft fuzz of hair glowed like platinum. “Listen,” she said. “I may not be what you want right now, but I’m all you’ve got.”

On a final hiccup, the baby quieted. He stared into Alex’s eyes, as if he was trying to place her.

Relieved, Alex settled him into the sling of her arm and sat a little taller. She glanced down at the top of the baby’s head, at the translucent pulse beneath his fontanelle.

When she relaxed her grip on the baby, he relaxed, too. Was it that easy?

Alex traced her finger over the soft spot on Peter’s head. She knew the biology behind it: the plates of the skull shifted enough to make giving birth easier; they fused together by the time the baby was a toddler. It was a vulnerability we were all born with, one that literally grew into an adult’s hardheadedness.

“Sorry,” Lacy said, breezing back to the table. “Thanks for that.”

Alex thrust the baby out toward her as if she were being burned.

The patient had been transferred from a thirty-hour home birth. A firm believer in natural medicine, she’d had limited prenatal care, no amnio, no sonograms, and yet newborns had a way of getting what they wanted and needed when it came time to arrive in the world. Lacy laid her hands on the woman’s trembling belly like a faith healer. Six pounds, she thought, bottom up here, head down here. A doctor poked his head through the door. “How’s it going in here?”

“Tell the intensive-care nursery we’re at thirty-five weeks,” she said, “but everything seems to be fine.” As the doctor backed away, she settled herself between the woman’s legs. “I know this has been going on for what seems like forever,” she said. “But if you can work with me for just one more hour, you’ll have this baby.”

As she directed the woman’s husband to get behind his wife, holding her upright as she began to push, Lacy felt her pager vibrate at the waistline of her sea-blue scrubs. Who the hell could it be? She was already on call; her secretary knew she was assisting at a birth.

“Will you excuse me?” she said, leaving the labor nurse in the room to fill in while she walked to the nurses’ desk and borrowed a telephone. “What’s going on?” Lacy asked when her secretary picked up.

“One of your patients, insisting to see you.”

“I’m a little busy,” Lacy said pointedly.

“She said she’ll wait. For however long it takes.”

“Who is it?”

“Alex Cormier,” the secretary replied.

Normally, Lacy would have told her secretary to have the patient see one of the other midwives in the practice. But there was still something elusive about Alex Cormier, something she couldn’t put her finger on-something that wasn’t quite right. “All right,” Lacy said. “But tell her it might be hours.”

She hung up the phone and hurried back into the birthing room, where she reached between the patient’s legs to check her dilation. “Apparently, all you needed was for me to leave,” she joked. “You’re ten centimeters. The next time you feel like pushing…go to town.”

Ten minutes later, Lacy delivered a three-pound baby girl. As the parents marveled over her, Lacy turned to the labor nurse, silently communicating with her eyes. Something had gone terribly wrong.

“She’s so tiny,” the father said. “Is there…is she okay?”

Lacy hesitated, because she didn’t really know the answer. A fibroid? she wondered. All she knew for certain was that there was a lot more inside that woman than a three-pound infant. And that any moment now, her patient was going to start to bleed.

But when Lacy reached up to grab the patient’s belly and press down on her uterus, she froze. “Did anyone tell you you were having twins?”

The father went ashen. “There’s two in there?”

Lacy grinned. Twins, she could handle. Twins-well, that was a bonus, not some horrible medical disaster. “Well. Only one now.”

The man crouched down beside his wife and kissed her forehead, delighted. “Did you hear that, Terri? Twins.”

His wife did not take her eyes off her tiny newborn daughter. “That’s nice,” she said calmly. “But I’m not pushing a second one out.”

Lacy laughed. “Oh, I think I might be able to get you to change your mind.”

Forty minutes later, Lacy left the happy family-with their twin daughters-and headed down the hallway to the staff restroom, where she splashed water on her face and changed into a fresh pair of scrubs. She took the stairs up to the midwifery office and glanced at the collection of women, sitting with their arms balanced on bellies of all sizes, like moons in different stages. One rose, red-eyed and unsteady, as if she’d been pulled upright magnetically by Lacy’s arrival. “Alex,” she said, remembering only in that instant that she had another patient waiting. “Why don’t you come with me.”

She led Alex into an empty examination room and sat down across from her in a chair. At that moment Lacy noticed that Alex’s sweater was on backward. It was a pale blue crewneck-you could barely even tell, except that the tag had flapped out along the curve of her neck. And it was certainly something that might happen to anyone in a rush, anyone upset…but probably not Alex Cormier.

“There’s been bleeding,” Alex said, her voice even. “Not a lot, but. Um. Some.”

Taking a cue from Alex herself, Lacy kept her own response calm. “Why don’t we check anyway?”