stuck on the doctor’s ass inspired a minute compassion for the fish-eyed and weary young man with his burden of alopecia, and this, in turn, sent her over the edge.
“Gwen!” Aviva said, but it was too late, and anyway, the hell with her.
An hour ago, when they had blown in on a gust of urgency from the ambulance bay, EMT yelling instructions, calling for a stretcher, Garth looking modestly wild-eyed, dancing like a man who had to pee, holding the baby who needed to be fed, Aviva breaking out a bottle of Enfamil from her backpack and cracking it with a sigh and that formula smell of vitamins and cheese, the wonderful avid baby needing every ounce of it—Gwen had failed to remark just how busy it was tonight at the emergency room of Chimes General Hospital.
Every room seemed to be occupied. Her pursuit of Dr. Lazar was haunted at its edges by glimpses of a pale hairy shin slashed with red. A forlorn teenager in a volleyball uniform clutching her arm at a surrealist angle. A young man with baby dreadlocks gripping either side of a sink as if about to vomit. The whole scene scored with a discordant soundtrack of televisions and woe, the nattering of SpongeBob, an old man’s ursine expectorations, a pretty Asian woman cursing like a sailor as something nasty was extracted from the meat of her hand, the horrific shrieking of a toddler being held down by its father while a phlebotomist probed its arm for a vein. Outside the last examination room before the waiting area, a young Hispanic man lolled in a chair, holding a bloody ice pack to his face, while from inside the room, a doctor yelled cheerfully in English at his bleeding companion as if the man were deaf and retarded.
“I am a nurse,” Gwen said, managing to sound calmer than she felt, catching up with Lazar. “Please tell me that I did not just hear you employ the term ‘voodoo’ in reference to my licensed and certified practice of midwifery.”
Lazar stopped at the threshold of the waiting area, where he planned, she assumed, to tell Garth and Arcadia that Lydia would be okay, business that was definitely more important, as Gwen knew perfectly well in some cool, quiet corner of her being, than whatever point she was attempting to make. The doctor turned to confront her with an air of resigned willingness to go along, an obedient soldier saddling up for the ride into the valley of death.
“I know you were burning something,” he said. “I could smell it on her.”
“It was ylang-ylang,” Aviva said, hurrying up behind them, taking a step toward Gwen as if to interpose her body between Gwen and the doctor. “Her husband was burning it during the first part of her labor. She likes the smell.”
“That woman,” Gwen said, “Lydia. The placenta was retained. There was stage zero hemorrhage, borderline stage one. Uterine atonicity. And she went into a hypovolemic shock.”
“Correct,” the doctor said, impatient.
“Even though we had her on a course of supplements and immediately began to administer oxytocin and do uterine massage. Exactly like you or any doctor would have done. Is that not correct?”
He blinked, not wanting to give up anything to her.
“So tell me this, Doctor, how many accretas, how many postpartum hemorrhages, have you guys had here this month? Like, what, I’m going to say six?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Ten?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, Ms. Shanks, but see, the thing is, when those things happen here, okay? When they happen here? When there’s some hemorrhaging? Which does occur, of course. Then the patient’s already in the damn hospital. Where she ought to be.”
Gwen looked over at the young man with the ice pack, his visible eye dull and maddened, his knuckles swollen like berries on the point of rot.
“You know what?” Aviva said, and out came the pointing finger so feared by all who loved her, Gwen among them, as the Berkeley faded and the Brooklyn broke through, and all at once Aviva’s proximity no longer buffered but menaced the doctor. “In fifteen years, my practice has never lost a single mother. And not one single baby. Can this place make that claim? No, I happen to know very well it can’t, and so do you.”
“Who would ever want to have a baby here?” Gwen observed, half to herself, a hand settling on her belly like an amulet or shield.
“It’s a birth,” the doctor said. “You know, call me crazy, but maybe in the end that’s one of those things you just don’t want to try at home. It’s not like conking your hair.”
Somebody gasped out in the waiting room. An arch, eager female voice went Awwwwww shit.
“You racist,” Gwen began, “misogynist—”
“Oh, come on, don’t start that crap.”
Lazar turned his back on her and went into the waiting room. Throwing up his hands, shaking his head: all the bad acting people tended to engage in when they were most sincere. Gwen stayed right with him. Everyone in the waiting room raised their head, face blank and attentive, prepared if not hoping for further entertainment.
“Don’t you bait me,” Gwen said, feeling an internal string, years in the winding, snap with a delicious and terrible twang. “Don’t you ever try to bait me, you baldheaded, Pee-wee Herman–looking, C-sectioning, PPO hatchet man.”
Ho! Uh-uh! Go, Mommy!
Gwen was right up against him, her body, her belly, the pert cupola of her protruding navel flirting through the fabric of her blouse with actual physical contact. He backed off, betraying the faintest hint of fear.
Garth stood up, holding the baby stiffly, forlornly, as if it were a rare musical instrument, some kind of obscure assemblage of reeds and bladders that he would now be called upon to play. His blue eyes looked frightened, bewildered, and when she saw him, Gwen felt ashamed. Arcadia, curled in on herself in a plastic armchair, woke up and started to cry.
“Mr. Frankenthaler?” the doctor said.
“Garth, she’s fine,” Aviva said. She hurried over to Garth, rubbed his shoulder. “She’s fine, she’s going to be fine.”
“Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Frankenthaler? I’ll take you to see your wife,” Lazar said.
“She isn’t my wife,” Garth said, dazed. “My last name is Newgrange.”
Lazar crouched down in front of Arcadia and spoke, in a tender voice, words that only she could hear. She nodded and sniffled, and he moved a thick coil of her dark hair, damp at the end with tears, out of her eyes, painting a shining trail across her cheek. Suddenly, the man was the kindest doctor in the universe. He stood up, and Arcadia took hold of the hem of her father’s windbreaker, and they followed Lazar back into the ER. Two seconds later, Lazar reappeared and pointed his finger at Gwen in a parody, perhaps unconscious, of Aviva’s recent performance.
“I’m writing this up,” he told Gwen, who stood there, shoulders heaving, all the righteousness emptied out of her, the last bright tankful burned off in that final heavenward blast. “Count on that.”
“Did you hear the way he spoke to me?” she said to Aviva, to the room, a note of uncertainty in the question as if seeking confirmation that she had not in fact imagined it. “‘Voodoo.’ ‘It’s not like having your hair conked.’ Did you hear? I know everybody in this room heard the man.”
Aviva was back to the hushed voice, gently taking hold of Gwen’s elbow. “I heard,” she said, “I know.”
“You know? I don’t think you do.”
“Oh, come on,” Aviva said with an unfortunate echo of Lazar in her tone. “For God’s sake, Gwen. I’m on your side.”
“No, Aviva, I’m on my side. I didn’t hear him say one damn word to you.”
Gwen pulled her arm free of Aviva’s grasp and trudged out of the waiting room, through the covered entranceway to the ER, and out to the driveway, where Hekate the Volvo still sat, her hazard lights faithfully blinking.