Chapter Thirty-Eight
By the time Suella positioned the cam and reached Dr. Allende, Natalie had regained some color. “How are you feeling, hon?”
“Better than this morning,” she replied. “My mother was really worried though. I hope we’re not taking you away from anything.”
“Don’t you worry about that.”
Suella noted that onscreen, the doctor looked scrubbed down and her hair had flattened. They’d probably taken her away from a procedure, but the doctor’s expression looked professional and concerned.
“I’m just anxious fro it to all be over,” Natalie added.
Dr. Allende smiled warmly and looked as though she wanted to reach through the line somehow and comfort Natalie with a soothing touch. “I know. And it very soon will be. Everything will be fine.”
But it was not fine.
With every passing day, Natalie’s condition worsened. Suella had stretched the patience of her clients by spending nearly all of her waking hours by her daughter’s side. She would get up in the morning, get herself ready and then walk over to Natalie and David’s apartment, where she would stay until the evening, before returning home to sleep. “Mrs. Worthy, you know you can just sleep on the daybed. It would probably make things easier.”
She decided not to invite him to call her “Suella,” at least for that day. “Someone has to look after the house,” she said. “Besides, you two need some private time.”
While at first Natalie had been just been pale and clammy, she was losing weight rapidly. Dark hollows formed beneath her eyes and cheekbones. Most days she could not get out of bed without wavering and wobbling, saying she was too dizzy, and collapsing back down. When she spoke her words came in raspy bursts, every syllable seemingly straining her lungs.
Strangely, all her vitals checks came back near normal, with her temperature either slightly high or low or her blood pressure around 100 over 60. The baby turned, moved and kicked often. Sometimes she could see rustles and tugs beneath Natalie’s pajama top.
By the fourth day of this, Suella had had enough. She called Dr. Allende’s office ad sat on hold for nearly a half hour before the doctor could come to the line. When she heard the doctor’s voice, Suella blurted “We have to get Natalie to the hospital!” She spoke in that fierce whisper that people sometimes fall into when they are trying to speak emphatically yet keep quiet at the same time.
Dr. Allende said “Can I get a visual?”
It was still early and Suella normally would not have even gotten on cam without fixing her hair and putting on makeup. But that morning she didn’t care. She flashed the lens on and trained it on her sleeping daughter.
Dr. Allende’s face paled and her lips dropped open. Her eyes widened, the irises darkening. “I’ll arrange a transport and alert the team.”
When she disconnected the line, Suella wept with relief. She surprised herself at how much she had been holding in. Tears flowed splashed down her cheeks and wet her blouse as she rushed to the bed to hold Natalie. “They’re coming to help, honey. Hold on! Hold on!”
After that everything happened in a blur of static images, disconnecting her from her own life as if she was watching a movie filmed with a faltering, hand-held camera. The medical transport team blazed in less than five minutes later, when Suella buzzed them in from the atrium. Two blue uniformed mean and women streamed down the hallway holding wand scans and a collapsible gurney.
When they attacked the bedroom, the women soothed Natalie and positioned her while the men deployed the collapsible gurney with a round of clicks and clacks. Modular IVs and readouts hung from it, keeping Natalie in place while Suella ran along beside her. She turned to one of the women, a tall African-American with smooth, cocoa skin and warm eyes. “Can I ride along? Please, please, please?”
The woman blinked. “You can, but you’d have to authorize a waiver.”
“I’ll do or sign anything! I just want to be with my little girl!”
The medical teches called out numbers to each other along with what Suella recognized were code patches. A voice squawked on a speaker, responding to them. To Suella it all sounded clinical, sterile and scary. Out in the hallway and the atrium, a small crowd of onlookers watched the six of them scramble out the front door, past the opened gate and into the ambulance parked in the lot.
They’d sent a Hover 9. If floated eerily above the pavement with a constant hum while the men lifted Natalie’s gurney inside. The other woman, who was short and slight with a plain face but glittering blond hair, spirited Suella around to the front of the vehicle. There was a bench seat up there that reminded her of an old pickup truck. The driver, a tech, and Suella all sat in front and immediately after she heard the doors slam behind them, the machine lifted slightly and cruised toward the parking lot exit.
Though it was still early, rush hour had passed. The Hover 9 could blend in with the wheeled traffic and negotiate the turns and streets toward the hospital. The eyes of the crew darted around to all the other vehicles beside them, watching for gridlock before it could even happen. If need be, the hovercraft could thrust upward and surge above the snarled traffic.
The ambulance banked slightly into the turns like an aircraft and darted through openings between cars. They arrived at the hospital in such a short time Suella was convinced they’d all somehow been beamed there. Another crew awaited them at a loading bay. When the Hover 9 eased down onto the asphalt all of the crew hopped out of it and ran around to the back, just in time to see three of the men hustle Natalie’s gurney toward the interior of the hospital emergency ward.
She wanted to jump up on the dock and run after them but the tall, black woman blocked her. “We can’t let you in there!” Instead, she took her arm and guided her around to the registration table behind the sliding glass doors. Moments later, Suella found herself alone, vulnerable and helpless, standing beside a glass booth with a heavyset, kind-faced woman on the other side.
“My daughter’s just been taken back there!” Suella shouted, oblivious to the gaggle of ill or broken patients sitting in the lobby chairs and the nurses passing by. “Why can’t I see her?”
“They’ve got a code,” the clerk said. “I can’t let anyone back there until they’ve cleared it.”
“Well how long does that take?” By then, Suella was practically screaming.
The clerk took in a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment and replied “About five to ten minutes, usually.”
She passed the time by calling everyone she could think of and she power-texted David, who was probably in the middle of a class. Nathan was probably on the baseball field, watching a group of young men try to hit a tabletop with a curving baseball. Still, she left him a breathy and screeching message. She even called Claudette, who’d said she wanted to be told the minute anything happened.
When the ten minutes were up, the black woman returned for Suella, and said the most joyful and hopeful words she’d heard in years: “I’m taking you back to Natalie now.”
They walked through a maze of curtains and shutters, where Suella heard babies cry and people moan until they both rounded a corner and she came upon Natalie, propped up on a bed with an oxygen line trailing from her nostril. Her eyes had opened wide, which she immediately took as a good sign. When she spoke, her voice came out through a speaker phone near the foot of the bed. “What’s wrong with me?”
Suella felt helpless, the way she did when Natalie was nine and she caught a bad case of the flue and languished in bed for days, wailing in pain. Back then, all she could do was hold her the same way she did when she was an infant and rock her back and forth, soothing her. But she could not even do that right now because of all the tubes and sensors running over and through her.
Still, she could take Natalie’s hand. “The doctors will be here any time. They’re going to find out and help you feel a whole lot bet
ter.”
The answer seemed to satisfy Natalie, because she leaned back, closed her eyes, her shoulders and arms relaxed. Two nurses arrived with Dr. Allende and a man with a shiny bald head that Suella recognized as one of the obstetrics doctors. In what was a complete departure from anything Suella had ever known, Dr. Allende quickly hugged her, reassuringly patting her on the small of her back. “We’re here.” The nurses went to work attending to Natalie, adjusting the sensors and tubes, barking medical codes at each other.
The obstetrics doctor shouted “We need this room!” and stepped toward her, guiding her toward the door.
“But she needs me,” Suella said, barely above a whisper. As if punctuating the fact, Natalie started to groan and stir, trying to lift herself from the bed to reach out to her mother. She instinctively rushed toward Natalie, but one of the nurses held her back. Suella tugged away, and Dr. Allende called the nurse off Suella.
She put her arms around Natalie one last time. “Sweetheart, I’m here…but these doctors have to help you. They’re shoving me out of the way.”
Natalie whispered “I love you, mom,” before her pain caused her to squeeze her eyes shut and sink down into the bed.
Suella collapsed downward to her, sobbing. With her back twitching in spasms wrought by her delirium, she could still feel a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Mrs. Worthy, it’s time,” Dr. Allende said. “We’ll call you if anything changes.”
One of the nurses took her arm and gently escorted her toward the exit.
When she emerged through the doorway and into the other side, she saw David standing there with his parents, Claudette and Alan. They all stood still for a moment, gazing at her with wide-open eyes. Claudette rushed forward to embrace Suella, and the two women held each other, rocking each other. Claudette murmured soothing phrases in her island brogue while Suella continued to sob and cry.
As they released each other, she felt touched to see tears welling in David’s eyes. Even David’s father Alan showed a mist and glaze over his eyes as he shook his head and said “I’m taking that it doesn’t look good.”
Suella managed to squeeze out the words “They’re doing the best they can…Dr. Allende said she’d tell me.”
For the next half hour, the four of them sat in the brightly colored, plasticky though comfortable waiting room chairs. People sitting around them wore splints on their limbs or blankets over their shivering bodies, all of them gazing toward the group in a state of bewilderment. Suella and Claudette held hands as they kept silent vigil.
Dr. Allende soon emerged from the doors, with the obstetrics doctor following her. Both of them had changed into sterile, hospital green scrubs outfits, their shoes covered. Claudette, Alan, Suella and David all rose together in unison to greet them. David’s parents looked as if they’d just come from church on Sunday, with Alan wearing a crisp, gray pinstriped suit and his wife a colorful chartreuse blazer and a tasteful pleated skirt. Claudette said “So what is it? How is she?”
Dr. Allende inhaled sharply before delivering her news. “We’re going to have to take the baby. It’s the best chance for both of them. I’ve called on Dr. Pollidore and when he arrives, we’ll begin.”
“Can I see her?” Suella asked.
Dr. Allende’s eyes softened while she addressed her with empathy. “I know this is difficult, but your daughter is in surgery prep right now. It’s a sterile environment. We can’t allow any family in there.”
She felt a hard lump rising in her throat as she croaked “I understand.”
The doctors drifted away like ghosts to continue on methodically with their preparations and attend to Natalie. All they could do was wait. Alan offered “She’s a strong girl. I think she’ll be fine.” He looked at David and smiled. “We’re going to have a beautiful grandchild.”
After they all sat silently for a while, Suella received Nathan’s incoming call. He’d put himself on cam, and in order to receive his images, Suella reached into her purse to retrieve her specs. As his image blazed onto the screen in front of her pupils, she felt an outpouring of warmth for him: he appeared to have been crying, too. “Hello love,:” Suella said.
Nathan nodded. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
She told him about the doctor’s plans.
He winced, shaking his head slowly. “That’s going to be really tough on her.”
“I want to be there so badly.”
Nathan looked into her eyes, nodding. “The plane leaves tomorrow morning. I’ll be on it.”
“Okay.”
They just looked at each other for several moments. She felt as if thee was nothing more she could say, or was there so much swirling around in her maelstrom of thought, that it was difficult to focus on any one specific thing? Mercifully, Nathan cut his phone call short: “I love you.”
For the next hour she sat numb and stoic, surrounded by the co-grandparents and a young man she’d come to love as a son (she only realized it just then). A bright aura surrounded them while in the busy waiting room, doctors and nurses rushed past, and patients walked back and forth between the chairs and the registration window.
For the most part Suella had basked in a wash of calm and warmth, somehow knowing that everything was going to turn out all right.
Suddenly, everything changed. A blinding light flashed in her eyes and washed out the details of Alan, David and Claudette. When she re-focused, she was looking up at another bright light, with masked doctors looming over her. The doctors spoke to each other in medical terms she couldn’t understand and the words came out distorted and garbled anyway.
Suella sat still in horror, realizing what was going on. She could feel bloating and tugging at her abdomen, while over it all, Natalie’s voice called out to her beseechingly, ghostlike: “I’m leaving…I’m leaving.” Another, brighter light shone, this light washing out all the details of the sterile room and the doctor’s safety glasses and masks.
She leaped out of her chair, staggering to regain her composure. Alan reflexively shot upward, reaching out with his arm to steady her. “Easy now…easy.”
“My daughter is dying! I have to get in there!” She rushed forward and hurled herself through the emergency room double doors.
Confused doctors and nurses looked on as she blazed past them, running down a maze of narrow corridors, shouting out “Natalie! Natalie!”
There was a bright light shining from around a corridor and she instinctively knew that this was the operating suite where they were working on Natalie. It was the one she’d just visited by inhabiting her daughter’s body for a brief glimpse.
Hands reached out to her, fingers clawing at her as she ran, like zombies in a horror movie. A woman’s voice shouted “Ma’am! You can’t go in there!”
When Suella had rounded the corner completely she could see the glow around her daughter as the obstetrician, Dr. Allende, and Dr. Pollidore all bent down toward her, with solemn surgery techs standing behind them. There was blood, lots of blood. The obstetrician swerved around to the end of the table, while all of them moved faster, with more urgency.
The light surrounding Natalie shone brighter, and Suella thought she could sense an evanescent, illuminating spirit rise from her. Two strong pairs of hands restrained her at each side. Though she wanted to run forward to her daughter, she could not.
A moment later, she heard a baby cry.