“A good job,” Anna said.
With a sigh that could have been heard in the back row from the stage at Madison Square Garden, Chrissie trudged over. “Kneel here and rub her feet, try and warm them up with your hands.”
“Her
feet
?” Chrissie complained.
“Jesus did feet. Doing feet was very fashionable then,” Steve volunteered.
“You’re Jewish, what do you know about Christ,” Chrissie grumbled, but she knelt in the space Anna had vacated and took the feet into her lap.
“He was a Jew,” Steve said.
“Don’t be stupid.” Chrissie set her lips in a thin line and began rubbing the woman’s feet with a gentleness that, given the source, startled Anna. Perhaps the old saw was right; perhaps there was some good in everyone.
Anna put Lori at the woman’s head to serve as pillow. If there was any spinal injury the poor thing had been bashed around and manhandled so much, elevating her head a few inches wasn’t going to make matters any worse. It might make breathing a bit easier and a lap would be warmer than the ground, but mostly Anna did it for Lori. She was uninjured, but too quiet and docile; shock could be induced by fear as well as cold and pain. Giving her something constructive and distracting to do would help.
From upstream a shout of victory melted through the river sounds. Moments later Carmen came back at a jog, waving a cell phone over her head. “Dry and charged,” she said triumphantly.
“What are the odds?” Anna asked, and let relief wash over her. “Dial nine-one-one. I never thought it would feel so good to say that.”
“Does this mean the human hot-water bottles may get up?” Cyril asked. “Easter might be ready to eat a little.”
“Not yet,” Anna said. “Unless Easter wants to take your place. Ever read Steinbeck’s
The Red Pony
?” Cyril hadn’t and, feeling magnanimous because of the satellite phone miracle, Anna didn’t describe the cutting open of the horse and crawling inside to keep from freezing.
“Damn. I’ve got a signal but no connection. Sat phones are amazing but not infallible. There are places they can’t get out, and deep in narrow canyons are them. I think if I climb up a ways I’ll be able to get a call out.”
“What do those things cost?” Steve asked, his head held up at an awkward angle so he could look at Carmen without peeling any part of his physical and warm self from his patient.
“Twelve bucks a month,” Carmen said, and not without a touch of smugness.
“No!” Steve yelped. “Nooooo.” In a day of shocking happenings, clearly this was the most disturbing to the Princeton student.
“The federal government picks up the tab,” Carmen said. “The poor folks in Terlingua were designated among the lucky few who required sat phones for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Every rusting trailer and tumbledown shack has a satellite phone.”
Steve groaned and let his head fall back to the ground.
The clouds had gone, at least from the narrow strip visible above the canyon rims but, even with the blue, there was little light left in the day. “Can you get up and back before dark?” Anna asked. Boulder hopping without good light was a dangerous proposition.
“Maybe,” Carmen said. “I’ll stop before the point of no return.”
She left, again at a jog. Anna loved her strength and energy. Carmen lived below the poverty level—the subsidized sat phone proved that. From what she’d heard, she lived without running water in an abandoned miner’s shack. A goal of Carmen’s was to get entirely “off the grid,” whatever that meant. Her work was hard physical labor overlaid with the skills needed to keep rich tourists happy and safe. Still, there was a lot to be said for a life lived outdoors and close to the bone. At forty Carmen was vital and strong. She wasn’t worried about how much she weighed; a slice of cake wasn’t an evil adversary. She smoked when she wanted to and drank bourbon when her day was done and slept on the ground without nightmares.
A flicker of the wildness that had drawn her to the wilderness, the parks and law enforcement sparked in Anna. It died when she turned back to the five people on the ground under the lowering brow of the cliff face.
“Her eyes are open,” Lori said in a wisp of a voice.
Anna squatted at the woman’s head. “Hey,” she said. “Nice to have you back among the living.”
Paul returned, dragging a dry-bag. Things were looking up.
“My baby, take my baby,” the woman whispered. Her eyes didn’t close but the life went from them. Anna had seen life wink out before. There was no great exhalation of air, there were no celestial choirs, her head did not flop dramatically to one side. Just in one instant there was a person behind the eyes. Then there wasn’t.
She laid two fingers on the woman’s carotid. No pulse beat there. She tried the wrist, listened at the nostrils and watched the chest.
“She’s dead,” Anna said. “You guys can get up if you want.” Chrissie dropped the feet and crabbed backward as if the meat left behind when the soul had fled was contaminated. Cyril and Steve climbed slowly and stiffly to their feet. Only Lori stayed, cradling the woman’s head in her lap with something akin to compassion.
“Is the baby dead too?” she asked softly.
“Not yet,” Anna said. “But it will be.”
Lori began to cry silently.
“Shit,” Steve said.
“Do something,” Cyril begged.
“Paul, did I give you back your pocketknife?” Anna asked.
TEN
P
aul handed Anna the jackknife. She knelt beside the drowned woman and began cutting away her clothing.
“What are you doing?” Chrissie gasped. She hadn’t bothered to stand from her crabbing position and sat in the sand where her rump had first touched down.
“C-section,” Anna said. She had never done anything of this sort before. The closest she’d come was watching an old Jane Fonda movie where the heroine saves a victim by giving him an emergency tracheotomy with a pair of scissors or a Bic pen or something.
“You’ll kill her!” Chrissie almost screamed.
“She’s already dead. His mother isn’t breathing for him anymore,” Paul explained gently. “Anna’s going to try and save the baby. If she doesn’t get it out of the womb quickly, the little guy will suffocate.”
“Jiminy Cricket,” Steve said, sounding all of six years old.
Anna peeled back the wet rayon to reveal the woman’s belly, smooth and brown and swollen. She laid her hand on it and the skin was warm. The woman’s arms and legs and face were cold but nature had sent what heat there was to the fetus. Life must go on. Nothing moved beneath her palm. The baby was still and Anna wondered if a fetus could die of shock.
“Here goes,” she said, sounding as unprofessional as she felt at the moment.
“Shouldn’t you sterilize yourself or something?” Cyril asked.
Anna had been acutely aware of how germ-laden she and her surgical instrument must be, but there was nothing for it; no soap, alcohol or fire.
Resisting the compulsion to wipe the blade on her shorts, she said nothing. Cyril didn’t ask again.
Anna ran her hands down the woman’s abdomen, trying to feel where the little person inside began and ended, visions of thrusting the blade of Paul’s jackknife into a tiny eye or through a soft skull dancing like poison plums in her head. A handspan above the pubic bone the uterus softened. If any bit of the baby inhabited that part of the womb it was a hand or a foot. Nothing too vital. Except that a filthy knife amputating a miniature finger couldn’t but give a kid a rotten start on life. If it were still alive.
Anna walked her fingers down till they were on solid bone. “Paul, could you rifle through the dry-bag you rescued and see if there is anything to wrap this baby in?” She didn’t add, “if I don’t kill it first,” but she was thinking it.
“Right,” Paul said. Like the others, he’d been standing transfixed by the prospect of horror, gore, salvation, death and rebirth. That, and the prospect of a pocketknife slicing into the turgid belly of a dead person. He sounded relieved to have been released from the trance.
“You might not want to watch this,” Anna said to Lori, who still had the woman’s head in her lap.
“I’m okay,” Lori said softly and lifted a wet strand of hair from the woman’s face as if it could still bother her.
“Suit yourself,” Anna said.
Cyril, Steve and Chrissie had pressed close, none of them making a sound. “Back off,” Anna said. “You’re in my light.”
They circled around so they were on the cliff side of the overhang. Anna could feel them hovering above her shoulders like sentient storm clouds.
“If anybody passes out or throws up on me, they are next to go under the knife,” she warned.
Then she forgot about them, her attention narrowed to the tip of the knife. Pressing firmly, she pushed the blade through the cooling flesh till it hit bone. Though the mother was dead, Anna winced as if the cut could still cause her pain. Sawing a little to work the small blade through flesh and muscle, Anna made a cut about four inches long up from the pubic bone toward the sternum. Blood oozed around the knife but, without a heart to push it, it was minimal. Gifts from the dead.
When the incision was long enough, she put her left hand into it, her fingers feeling their way carefully. The blood was still warm. Her fingers traced the bone then slipped off into the uncharted territory of the abdomen.
From behind her she heard the thump of something hitting the sand and turned her head briefly. Paul had fainted. He lay in a heap beside the opened dry-bag, his arms full of sleeping bag.
Anna turned back to her work. Turning her hand palm up, she made a tent of the skin and began to cut with her right hand, her left between the knife’s tip and the fetus. As the blade dragged its trail of dark blood upward, Anna felt a nudge against the back of her left hand. The fetus was protesting this unceremonious rescue.
“The baby’s alive,” Anna said, and was surprised to hear the exultation in her voice.
“Hurrah,” was whispered by one of the twins. It passed like a zephyr near Anna’s ear and she knew they had pushed closer than before. She didn’t tell them to back off again. She needed the company.
Rustling and grumbling let her know Paul had regained consciousness. Anna risked a glance at Lori to make sure the girl wasn’t sliding into a shocky oblivion. Lori looked more focused than she had since the raft had overturned; there was nothing in her face but compassion.
Resisting the urge to hurry, Anna continued the incision till the knife scraped against the sternum. In the wake of the blade the belly spread the cut open. Paul’s voice penetrated Anna’s concentration.
“Oh Lord. Look at that.” It was a prayer, given in wonder and awe.
Anna pulled her hand free of the drowned woman’s viscera and looked back where she’d made the opening. A tiny hand, fat as a starfish and scarcely bigger than a half-dollar, was reaching out of the incision. “Holy smoke,” she said.
“It’s
alive
!” Steve said in the voice of horror movie starlets and Cyril laughed.
“It’s covered in blood,” Chrissie complained.
Paul knelt on the other side of the corpse.
“Are you going to pass out again?” Anna asked. She sounded harsh but she didn’t want a hundred and sixty pounds of sainted sheriff crashing down on her baby.
“No.”
Anna handed Paul the bloody knife, then slowly insinuated both hands into the abdominal cavity. She cradled the baby’s head in one hand and its buttocks in the other and lifted it delicately from its mother’s womb.
Cyril had brought over the sleeping bag. “The dry-bag didn’t keep things all that dry,” she apologized, “but I found a bit that the river missed.”
She knelt beside Paul and made a cradle of her arms, the sleeping bag a hammock between them.
The fetus—a person now with rights and privileges, an American citizen—lay quietly in Anna’s hands. The face was perfect, smooth and relaxed, all the tiny fingers and toes in place. Anna had not sliced off a single one.
“It’s a girl,” Anna said.
“Wish we had some cigars,” Steve murmured from behind her.
“You’re supposed to hold it by its feet and whack it,” Chrissie said knowledgeably.
The girl wasn’t breathing. Anna bent over the child, put her mouth over its mouth and nose and sucked gently. Warm salty liquid came into her mouth. She spat it to one side. The baby looked at her, made a wet gurgling sound and, breathing, closed its eyes again without having uttered a single cry.
“What a trouper,” Paul said.
Anna laid the little girl in the down nest Cyril had made for it. Cyril folded a bit of the bag over the baby, the rest trailing sodden and enormous from her to the dry-bag it had been liberated from.
“You have to wash it and cut its cord off,” Chrissie said.
“Do you think it could get any milk from its mom?” Anna was asking Paul. The issue of whether dead women lactate for a moment after death wasn’t one she’d ever had the need to consider.
“I don’t think so. The milk isn’t there right away. It has to come in. I think the baby’s nursing is what triggers it.”
“Too bad. I need a couple strips of cloth to tie the cord.” Anna turned back to what she could do rather than what she could not.
Paul cut and tore two strips of fabric from the sleeping bag piled between him and Cyril and handed them to Anna. She tied them on the cord a couple of inches apart then cut between the ties. As she severed the umbilical cord it occurred to her that the second tie wasn’t necessary. The mother was beyond any danger of bleeding to death.
For what seemed like a very long time, none of them moved or spoke. They simply watched the baby, held cuddled now in Cyril’s arms, nothing but her face showing from the nest of down.
“She needs a name,” Steve said at last.
“Maybe she has one. Her father may still be living.”