Preeclampsia

Dess

The cuff squeezed her arm like a python with a grudge, held, and let go with a long sigh.

"Hm," said Dr. Pratt.

It was not a good hm. Dess had been collecting Dr. Pratt's hms for seven months, and she had learned to sort them the way she sorted claims. There was the hm of mild interest (a heartbeat, a kick). There was the hm of professional amusement (the time Dess had asked whether the baby could hear her complaining about Gerald the lemon tree). There was the long, soft, falling hm of a woman who has seen a number she does not want to see, and is deciding how to say it to a patient who reads the ends of contracts first.

This was the third kind.

"Say it," said Dess.

"Let's do it again." Pratt unwound the cuff, shook it out, and wrapped it on the other arm. She was a brisk woman of fifty with gray braids and half-moon reading glasses on a beaded chain and a mug on the counter that said I DELIVER. "Left this time. Feet flat. Don't talk."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were. You had your mouth open to say something clever." The cuff began to swell. "Breathe. Look at the poster."

The poster was a cross-section of a uterus with a cheerful, cartoonish baby curled inside it, thumb in mouth, wearing the expression of a creature who has not yet been told about taxes. Dess looked at it. She breathed. The cuff hissed. The Monday-morning sun came through the blinds in bars and lay across her knees, across the paper sheet, across the white sneakers she'd put on because her ankles had decided, sometime over the weekend, to become somebody else's ankles.

One-sixty-two over one-oh-eight, said her brain, helpfully, reading the number off the screen before the nurse could. It was a thing she did. She'd been an adjuster for eight years; she read upside down.

"Dess," said Pratt.

"I know."

"You don't know yet. I haven't said it."

"One sixty-two over a hundred and eight. That's the first one. That's—" She swallowed. "That's not stress."

"No. It isn't." Pratt took off her glasses, let them fall on their chain, and sat down on the rolling stool so that her face was level with Dess's. "I want you to hear the next part calmly, because I'm going to say it calmly. You've got a blood pressure that's been creeping for ten days. You've got protein in your urine this morning, two-plus, which wasn't there at the last visit. You've got swelling in your hands, which I can see from here, and your face is puffy. And you told Joelle you had a headache this morning that wouldn't go away."

"Joelle has a big mouth."

"Joelle has a large and wonderful mouth and she's sitting in my waiting room holding your purse like a hostage. Did you have a headache?"

"A small one."

"Any spots? Flashing lights? Pain here?" Two fingers pressed lightly under Dess's right rib.

"Last night," said Dess, "I saw some sparkles. Just for a minute. I thought it was the lamp."

Pratt closed her eyes briefly.

"Okay," she said. "That's what I was afraid of. I'm sending you across the street. Now. Not after lunch, not after you've told your boss. Now."

"Across—to the hospital?"

"To Labor and Delivery triage. They're expecting you; I called while you were in the bathroom." She stood. "They're going to run bloods, put you on a monitor, and probably admit you. I think this is preeclampsia, Dess. I think it's early. And I think you and I are going to be seeing a great deal of each other for the next eleven weeks."

Eleven weeks.

Dess looked at the cartoon baby on the poster.

The baby did not look back. It was a drawing. But she put her hand on her stomach, flat, over the swell that had been hers and no one's since September, and under her palm something rolled, large and slow and sleepy, like a boat turning in a harbor, and she thought with total clarity: twenty-seven weeks and three days.

She'd read the chart. Everyone had read the chart. Twenty-seven weeks was viable. It was a word she'd looked up at three in the morning on the bathroom floor on the night of the petition, and then wished she hadn't.

"Is it—" She had to start again. "Is the baby okay? Right now?"

"The baby has a lovely heartbeat. I listened to it ten minutes ago, remember? A hundred and forty-two." Pratt's voice softened and did not lose any of its steel. "He's fine. He's not the one in trouble. You're the one in trouble, and the best thing I can do for him is get you somewhere that can fix that. All right?"

"All right."

"Good." Pratt rolled the stool back and took the beaded glasses in her hand like a pointer. "One more thing. Who's your emergency contact?"

The question landed in the room like a dropped plate.

Dess looked at her.

"It's in the chart," Pratt said, a trifle apologetically. "From Christmas. It says Wexcombe, Theron. I'd normally just ask the hospital to pull it. But I know the last ten days have been—" She stopped, tactfully. "I've got a feeling. If you'd rather change it, now's the time. I'll write it myself."

Don't touch me. Don't call. Don't write. Through Ansel, by letter, for the rest of the pregnancy.

She'd said all of that. She'd said it on a Saturday, in a kitchen, to a man on his knees. She'd meant every word.

But I don't have a husband, she thought. I don't have a father. I have Joelle, who has a toddler, and a job, and a husband who works nights. I have Colleen, who sat on the end of my bed on Saturday and cried until she hiccuped. I have a woman downstairs who's seventy-eight and keeps a baseball bat behind her kitchen door.

And I have one person in the world whose name I wrote on a form because he was the only one I could stand to have walk in when the doctors said the words.

"Leave it," she said.

"You're sure."

"I'm not sure of anything." Dess pressed her hand to her stomach. "Leave it. It's a form. It doesn't mean—it's a form."

"Of course," said Pratt, in the voice of a woman who had delivered three thousand babies and read three thousand faces. "It's only a form."

…

"I have to tell you," said Joelle, "I've been a very good friend."

"You've been fine."

"I've been magnificent." She was driving; she drove the way she did everything, with elbows out and zero apology, in a blue Subaru with a Cheerio permanently fused to the dashboard. They were doing forty-five in a twenty-five, and had been since the light on Elmwood. "I held your purse. I did not make a single joke in the waiting room. I let an old man with a cane take my seat. And I have not, in the entire last ten minutes, said what I want to say, which is: I told you it wasn't stress."

"You said it was stress, too."

"I said I thought it was stress. I'm allowed to have thought both. I contain multitudes." Joelle swung into the hospital drive, took the speed bump at a speed that sent Dess's stomach into her mouth, and slammed into a spot marked PHYSICIANS ONLY. "Okay. We're here. You're going to walk in, you're going to be brave, and I'm going to carry the bag."

"I don't have a bag."

"I stuffed one under the back seat on Friday. It's got your toothbrush and the green socks and two protein bars and a copy of Wind in the Willows. I didn't tell you because I knew you'd say I was being dramatic." She cut the engine. "Am I being dramatic?"

"A little," said Dess.

"Good. I like to be a little."

They sat in the car for a moment.

It was a bright, hard, windy day, the kind of late-March day that cannot decide between winter and spring and tries both. A flag snapped on a pole. A delivery van sat idling in the fire lane. And across the lot a woman in a hospital gown and a coat went by with an IV pole, moving at the stately pace of a ship, smoking a cigarette with an expression of great peace.

"Dess," said Joelle.

"Mm."

"I'm going to text him."

"No."

"I'm going to—"

"No." It came out harsher than she'd meant. She heard it and softened it. "Please. Not yet. I want to hear what they say first. I don't want—I don't want him in the room while they decide whether I'm—"

She did not finish.

Joelle looked at her. She had her hands on the wheel and a small, fierce, careful line between her brows, and beneath the bravado, in the hard bright morning light, her face looked all at once very young.

"Okay," she said gently. "Not yet."

They got out.

…

It took forty minutes for the nurse to take her blood, and it took less than four for the word emergency to appear on her chart.

Her name was Bernadette. She was forty, large, calm, with freckled forearms and a laugh like a hinge, and she wore a lanyard so thick with pins that it clinked. She had taken Dess's pressure herself, and then made a small, quiet, fatal face, and said "Okay, sweetheart, we're going to get you lying on your left side," in the voice a pilot uses to say we're experiencing a little turbulence.

They put her in a bed. They put a monitor on her belly (two bands, one for the baby, one for the contractions she was not having) and a clip on her finger and a cuff on her arm that inflated every fifteen minutes with a soft electronic groan. They put in an IV, which took the second try, and which went into the back of her left hand with a sting like a bee. They took tubes of blood, a brimming rack of them, red and amber and a dark lavender. A resident named Dr. Varga came in, twenty-nine, with the exhausted glitter of a person on hour twenty-two, and asked her to recite her last six meals.

"Eggs. Oatmeal. Soup. More soup. A cracker. A, um, strawberry."

"A strawberry?"

"The baby wanted one at three a.m."

"Great. Great." He wrote it down with enormous gravity. "And your headache. On a scale of one to ten?"

"Four."

"It's an eight," said Joelle, from the corner. "She says four. She says four about everything. She said four when she broke her wrist."

"I did not break my wrist."

"You fractured your wrist. In a car accident. And drove yourself to work."

"It was a hairline."

Varga looked from one of them to the other with the faint expression of a man being forced to ref a sport he doesn't know. "I'm going to put it at six," he said diplomatically. "Okay? Splitting the difference." He turned to Dess. "The numbers are coming back in about an hour. Meanwhile, we're going to start you on medicine for your pressure, and we'll give you steroid shots, two of them, twenty-four hours apart. Those help the baby's lungs, just in case. Standard stuff. If your labs are what I think they'll be, we'll also start a magnesium drip tonight to prevent seizures."

The room dipped.

Seizures.

"Seizures," said Dess.

"It's a precaution," said the resident hastily. "It's—look, I'm not trying to scare you. Eclampsia, the thing it's meant to prevent, is very rare. Most women with your numbers never have it. It's like a seat belt. You wear it so you don't need it."

"Is the baby going to be okay?"

"The baby's heart rate is perfect. His growth on last week's scan was perfect. He's, uh—" He glanced at the screen. "He's got a very active left foot."

"That's his father's," said Dess.

It slipped out.

She heard it fall into the room and lie there, unnoticed by the resident, noticed by the nurse (a flicker in the freckled face, instantly ironed flat), and noticed to the bone by Joelle, who had gone completely, tactfully still.

His father's.

She'd meant Kit.

She had meant the man whose number was 4417; the man who had never walked, never kicked, never done anything at all but fill a tube in a cold room in a cold city on a Tuesday in August. The man with the WORLD'S OKAYEST UNCLE mug and a brother who loved him.

Hadn't she?

She closed her eyes.

Not now.

…

At 12:41 a nurse she hadn't met came in with a clipboard and a polite smile and said, "Ms. Rourke, I'm just verifying the contact on your file. We have a Mr. Theron Wexcombe, listed as emergency contact. Is that current? And do you give us permission to call him?"

"Why would you call him?"

"Policy. For a patient admitted with severe-range pressures, we notify the listed contact." She looked at the clipboard. "It's just, once you go on magnesium, you'll be quite sleepy, and some of the paperwork has to be signed by a—"

"I can sign things."

"Of course you can. But for the consent to proceed in the event of a cesarean—"

"A what?"

The nurse stopped.

"Oh," she said. "I'm sorry. I thought Dr. Varga had talked to you about the possibility. It's only if the baby's in distress, or if your labs get worse. It's very unlikely this week. It's probably a precaution." She had gone slightly pink. "I'll let him explain."

A cesarean.

At twenty-seven weeks.

The monitor on her belly went on drumming softly, a hundred and forty-four, a hundred and forty, a hundred and forty-six, like a small steady horse galloping in the dark.

"Dess," said Joelle, very low.

"Don't."

"I know you said not yet. I know. But Dess—" Joelle had come to the bedside. She'd taken Dess's free hand, the one without the IV, and wrapped both of hers around it. Her voice was shaking. "I'm sitting here in a room with a woman who might be having surgery tonight, and the only person in the world who's going to be in this building in twenty minutes with his entire heart in his throat is a guy I'm furious at. So I'm furious. And I'm also going to text him. And you can hate me."

"I could never hate you."

"You could, a little."

"A little," said Dess, and a tear slid off the side of her nose and into her ear, which was disgusting. "Okay. Text him."

Joelle already had her phone out.

She typed with both thumbs, fast, a rattle like hail. Dess didn't read it. She lay with her eyes on the ceiling tile (it had a water stain shaped like Ohio) and listened to the horse in the dark, and in the tight pocket of her chest, where all week she had kept a locked door, something turned over and was very quiet.

"Done," said Joelle.

"What did you say?"

"I said: She's in Labor and Delivery at Women & Infants. BP 162/108. They're monitoring. Baby's fine. She doesn't know I'm texting you. She'll be mad. Come anyway." Joelle put the phone face down on the blanket. "That's a lot of full stops. I counted."

…

He came in twenty-six minutes.

She'd known it would be quick. She had not known it would be that quick. It was Bristol; it was twenty-nine miles; it was a Monday at one in the afternoon on Route 114 with a bridge to cross. She would have bet fifty minutes on a good day. She heard it, instead, first in the hall: a voice, low and clear and stripped of its usual courtesy, saying to the desk, "Rourke. I'm told she's in triage. I'm her emergency contact. Which way?" and then Bernadette's hinge-laugh, shortened, and a rubber squeak of shoes.

Then silence.

She turned her head on the pillow.

He was standing in the doorway.

She had not seen him up close in nine days. She had seen him across a yard, once, that morning, in the street, with his hand lifted. She had seen him as a shape, a figure, a tall dark symbol of a man. She had not seen the face. And the face, in the hard light of the hospital corridor, was one she had not met before.

It was not the Theron of the dock. It was not the Theron of the dish towel, or the cradle, or the kitchen floor. It was the face of a man who had not slept in a week. The hollows under his eyes had gone from blue to bruise. A day's stubble darkened his jaw. His coat was open and his tie was crooked, and his hair, which was never anything but exact, had been pushed back by a hand that had clearly shoved it through ten or fifteen times in the car. He was breathing hard. He'd run from the garage.

And he did not come in.

He stood on the threshold with one hand flat on the frame, and his eyes went over her once, the bed, the monitor, the IV, the cuff, the band across her belly, the line on the screen, in a single fast, hungry, terrible sweep, and then came back to her face and stopped.

"May I," said Theron.

It was barely a voice.

Dess looked at him.

I'll ask first.

Twice.

She could feel Joelle holding her breath in the corner. She could feel the machine counting her blood. She could feel, under her ribs, a pressure that was neither the headache nor the baby but something older, and she thought, very clearly, this is the worst possible moment to make a decision about this man, and then, a half-second later, with a sort of dismay, and it is also the only one I will ever get.

"Not yet," she said.

He didn't move.

"Stay there." Her voice cracked. She forced it level. "Tell me what the doctor said. Not what you think. What the doctor said."

"I haven't spoken to a doctor. I spoke to the girl at the desk. She said, 'Preeclampsia, she's stable, the baby is fine.'" He swallowed. "That's all. I've been in the car for twenty-six minutes assuming everything else."

"Well, assume less."

"I'm trying."

"Try harder."

"I am trying," said Theron, "with every part of me."

His voice went on the last word, like a plank giving way. He turned his head aside, sharply, and stared at the wall for a moment, his jaw working. Then he turned back. His eyes were wet. He did not wipe them. He just stood there in the doorway with them wet, and his hand white on the frame, and said, in a different voice, a small, ordinary, broken one, "May I come in, Dess?"

Twice.

She let the silence stand. She wanted to. She wanted to make him wait the way she had waited, at the window, in the dark, with the lamp off, for nine days. She wanted to put him through every minute of it.

But the horse in the dark was galloping.

And she was so tired.

"Yes," she said.

He came in.

He came in like a man crossing ice. He took four steps, and stopped at the foot of the bed, and his eyes went to her hand (the one with the IV, taped, a bruise already flowering) and she saw him make a small convulsive movement toward it, and stop himself.

"Don't touch me," said Dess.

"I won't."

"Don't. I mean it. Don't touch me, don't hold my hand, don't put your hand on my head. I can't—" She drew a breath that shook. "If you touch me I'll fall apart. And I can't fall apart. My blood pressure can't take it. I've got a monitor on it."

"I understand."

"Do you?"

"No," he said honestly. "But I'll do it anyway."

There was a single chair in the room. It was a hard plastic hospital chair, pale orange, bolted to a metal frame, designed by someone who believed in the discomfort of the visitor as a moral good. It stood by the window. He looked at it. He looked at her.

"May I sit?"

"It's a chair, Theron. You don't need my permission to sit in a chair."

"I should like it, all the same."

She almost smiled. It was the worst possible time for it and she felt it arrive and clamped down on it, and he saw it anyway. She watched it land in his face. Something in his shoulders let go by a quarter inch.

"Sit," she said.

He sat.

He sat as he had once sat on a kitchen chair in Newport: straight-backed, feet together, hands on his knees. He folded himself into it like a man folding a flag. And the chair, being what it was, creaked.

"Forgive me," he said. "I haven't the smallest idea what I'm meant to do with my face."

"Same."

"May I at least ask the questions?"

"You may ask one."

"Is it—" He stopped. "Is it as bad as it sounds?"

She looked at him. She thought about lying. She was good at it; it was her stock-in-trade, the soft it's fine with which women have spared men for ten thousand years. She opened her mouth to use it.

"I don't know," said Dess.

It came out raw. It surprised her. She lay in the bed with the cuff on her arm and the lines in her hand and the water-stain on the ceiling, and said, to the man in the orange chair, in a small clear voice, the thing she hadn't said to Joelle or Pratt or herself: "They said the word seizure, Theron. They said they might have to take him out tonight. He's twenty-seven weeks. He'd weigh about two pounds. He'd fit in my hand."

His face did something terrible.

It was not a break. It was more like a slow, careful draining, as though every particle of color and expression were being withdrawn through a very small hole, and what was left was not a face at all but a mask of exquisite attention, steady, white, absolutely still.

"Then we shall make certain," he said, "that he doesn't."

"You can't make certain."

"No. But I can sit here. And I can ask whoever comes through that door every question you don't have the strength to ask. And I can read the numbers, which is a thing I am quite good at." His voice had gone very low and very level. It was the voice from the dock, the voice that had once said, I don't know how to do this, and then done it. "You needn't speak to me. You needn't look at me. You may tell me to go at any moment and I shall go. But I shall be in the corridor, if you do. In the orange chair, if they have a second one. On the floor, if they don't."

"There are rules about visitors."

"I have already bought the hospital a new wing."

Dess stared at him.

"I'm joking," said Theron. "Please don't have a stroke."

And a sound came out of her, half laugh, half hiccup, wet and unlovely and entirely involuntary, and she clapped her free hand over her mouth, and in the corner Joelle said, in a strangled voice, "Oh my God, he made a joke," and Bernadette, who had come to the doorway to see what the noise was, put her fist against her sternum and said, "Lord, I love my job."

The cuff began to inflate.

…

It was a long afternoon.

It was the kind of afternoon with no center, a slab of time, bright and blank, in which minutes did not pass but accrued. The cuff squeezed every fifteen minutes. The monitor drummed. The clock above the door (a white institutional disc with a sweep hand) ticked in a way that seemed personally directed at her. Dr. Varga returned at three with a printout, and a senior physician at his shoulder, a tall gray woman named Dr. Adeyemi, who sat on the edge of the bed and explained, in full, quietly, in plain English, what the numbers meant.

"Your liver enzymes are elevated," said Adeyemi. "Not dramatically. Your platelets are on the low side of normal. Your urine protein is two grams over twenty-four hours, which is what we'd call preeclampsia with severe features, mostly on the strength of your pressures and that headache." She looked at Dess over the top of her glasses. "I'm going to be honest. At twenty-seven weeks and three days, this is not where any of us want to be."

"No."

"But it's also not an emergency tonight. Your lab values are stable. The baby's doppler is reassuring. The strategy, in a case like this, is to buy time. To get you, if we can, to thirty-four weeks, or beyond; the longer he stays in, the better he'll do. Magnesium tonight, as a precaution. Steroids for the lungs. Pressure medication, every four hours, by mouth. Strict bed rest. You will stay in this hospital until we're comfortable, which may be days, may be weeks. And you'll be monitored like a head of state."

"Weeks."

"Possibly."

"I have a hearing next Tuesday."

Adeyemi's brows rose a fraction. "A hearing?"

"A custody—a guardianship matter. In Probate Court."

"Ah." The doctor's face did not change. But something in the set of her mouth indicated that she was a woman who had seen a great many families, and had developed a fine instinct for which of them had lawyers. "I'd say," she said dryly, "you're not going to make it. And I'd say any judge who'd ask you to is a judge I'd be happy to write a letter to."

"Her lawyer will file for a continuance," said Theron.

It was the first thing he'd said in an hour.

Adeyemi turned. She took him in, the tall man in the orange chair, the rumpled coat, the ruined face. "And you are?"

"I am the emergency contact."

"That's not what I asked."

"I know," said Theron. "It's the only answer I've been given leave to give."

There was a pause.

Adeyemi looked at him a moment longer, and then at Dess, and then, very slightly, a degree or two, at the corner of the room where Joelle sat with her arms folded and her eyes glittering. Something passed across the long gray face that was almost a smile and wholly unprofessional.

"Well," she said. "Emergency contact. If you're going to be in this room, I need you to follow two rules. One: no upsetting her. Her pressure goes up when she's upset, and I'd like it to go down. Two: no lying to her. Ever. In my experience, the second is the cause of the first."

"I have learned," said Theron, "the second."

"Recently?"

"Very."

"Good." She stood. "Then you'll do."

…

They started the magnesium at nine.

It came in a bag the size of a pillow, clear and cold, and went into a pump at her bedside that clicked as it dripped. Bernadette hung it with ceremony. "You're going to feel hot," she said. "Like somebody lit a stove inside you. And you'll be sleepy and dopey and your mouth'll go dry. That's normal. It means it's working."

"What if I want to die?"

"Everyone says that. You won't."

It was, Dess thought, rather like being slow-cooked from the inside. The heat began in her chest and fanned outward, a rolling, treacly flush that left her limbs heavy and her tongue thick and her eyelids, which had been propped open with matchsticks all day, drooping like wet paper. The room softened. The sound of the monitor, that tireless horse, receded, and somewhere in the back of the haze she thought she heard Joelle's voice, and Colleen's, who had come at six with a casserole nobody was allowed to eat and had cried at the door and been sent home to sleep. She heard Mrs. Ferreira's voice, over the phone, on speaker, shouting in Portuguese, then in English, tell her I have lit a candle to every saint in Fall River. She heard the nurse. She heard the pump. She heard the long soft wind of the ventilation system in the ceiling.

And in the orange chair, she heard nothing.

She turned her head.

He was sitting where he had been for eight hours. He had not left. He had not eaten, though Bernadette had put a tray in front of him and said "Mister, you're no use to anyone passed out." He had drunk a cup of water. He'd taken off his coat and folded it with precision over the back of the chair, and loosened his tie, and rolled his sleeves to the elbow. His forearms lay on his knees. And in the dim blue light of the room, with the shade half drawn, she could see that his left hand was trembling.

It was a fine, steady, rapid tremor, the same one she'd felt in the dark of the kitchen at No. 14, the same one that had stopped when she took it in her own.

He was staring at it.

He looked at it as if it belonged to someone else. As if it were a thing that was happening in the room that he could do nothing about. He was holding his breath. Slowly, with an effort that she could see in the cords of his neck, he closed the fingers into a fist.

It went on shaking.

"Theron," she said.

His head came up.

"Yes?" He was on his feet before the word was out. "What is it? Shall I call the nurse? Are you in pain? Is it the—"

"Sit down."

He sat.

"I'm not in pain. I'm just—" The words were thick. They came out like molasses. "I'm just looking."

"At what?"

"At you."

He looked at her.

"You've been in that chair for eight hours," said Dess.

"Yes."

"Don't you want to go home?"

"I haven't got one," said Theron, very simply. "I have a loft with a stove. And the nearest thing to a home I've had since November is a flat with a cot in it that I'm no longer permitted to look out of." A faint, tired smile. "I find that I should rather be here."

"That's a terrible answer."

"I thought it rather good."

"It's the answer of a man who's been told for a week that he's in the doghouse and is trying to lean into it."

"Is it working?"

"No," said Dess. "It's absolutely not working. I want it noted." She shut her eyes. The drip clicked. In the dark behind her lids the heat unrolled, slow and golden. "Theron."

"Yes."

"I'm still angry."

"I know."

"I'm so angry I can't see straight."

"I'd be disappointed if you weren't."

"I'm angry about the cameras. And the building. And Article Four. And I'm going to be angry about it tomorrow, and the day after, and in June." Her mouth was slow. "And I'm angry that you ran from the garage."

A silence.

"How did you know I ran?"

"You're still out of breath."

He laughed. It was a very small, cracked, startled laugh, hardly audible, the laugh of a man who has been handed something he has not earned and doesn't know where to put it down. "Dess."

"Don't," she said. "Don't say it. Not yet."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were."

"I was going to say thank you."

"For what?"

"For letting me be in the room." He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, his hands loosely clasped. He did not touch the bed. He did not reach for her. He sat, in the hard orange chair, in the blue dusk, and watched her with an expression she couldn't name, only knew from somewhere, like a song she'd heard once in another language. "You didn't have to. You've every right to put me in the corridor. I'll sit in whichever place you assign."

"The corridor's cold."

"I have a very good coat."

"It's on the chair."

"Then I shall sit in it."

She would have laughed. She tried. It turned, halfway, into something else, a long, shuddering exhalation, and she turned her face into the pillow, because the tears were coming now and there was nothing in the world she could do about it. They slid sideways. They ran into her ears. The monitor over her head spiked (a hundred and fifty, a hundred and fifty-four) and she heard him draw breath, and heard him not speak, and heard, instead, in the soft electronic dark, a tiny creak: the chair, shifting, as he gripped its edges with both hands and held on.

He's not getting up, she thought. He wants to. He is dying to. He is holding on to the chair.

I said don't touch me.

And he's not.

It was a very small thing. In the larger inventory of her grievances it did not even register. But it was the thing that she kept returning to, in the long hot dream of the magnesium, as the room dissolved: the sight of his hands, white-knuckled, on a piece of molded plastic, gripping it as if the whole world were tilting, and he alone were being asked to keep it level.

Net: unclassified, she thought dreamily.

Sleep took her under, like a warm tide.

The last thing she heard was his voice. It was very low, and very careful, and he wasn't speaking to her. He was speaking to the curve beneath the blanket, to the child who had a left foot of his own and a heart like a drum.

"Stay where you are, little fellow," said Theron. "Stay exactly where you are. There's a great deal of nonsense going on out here, and I should not like you to miss any of it. But not yet. Not yet."

He said it, she thought, from a great way down. He said "little fellow" again.

I know.

She had meant to say it aloud. She had meant to tell him that she knew, that she'd always known, that she'd stood in the hall on the night of the twelfth of March with her hand on the doorframe and listened to every word.

She didn't. She was asleep.

But on the monitor, in the dark, where he could see it, the line went down. A hundred and forty-eight. A hundred and forty-four. A hundred and forty-two. The old steady horse, trotting home across a sleeping field.

And in the orange chair, a man sat with his hands in his lap and watched it all night long, and did not once look away.