Читать книгу Life Expectancy - Dean Koontz - Страница 10

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Trembling with relief, Dad took me from Charlene Coleman and carried me to my mother.

After the nurse raised the head of the birthing bed and provided more pillows, Mom was able to take me in her arms.

Dad swears that her first words to me were these: “You better have been worth all the pain, Little Blue Eyes,’ cause if you turn out to be an ungrateful child, I’ll make your life a living hell.”

Tearful, shaken by all that had occurred, Charlene recounted recent events and explained how she’d been able to spirit me to safety when the shooting started.

Unexpectedly required to attend two women simultaneously in urgent and difficult labor, Dr. MacDonald had been unable at that hour to locate a qualified physician to assist on a timely basis. He divided his attention between the two patients, hurrying from one delivery room to the other, relying on his nurses for backup, his work complicated by the periodically dimming lights and worry about whether the hospital generator would kick in reliably if the storm knocked out electric service.

Natalie Beezo had received no prenatal care. She unknowingly suffered from preeclampsia. During labor she developed full-blown eclampsia and experienced violent convulsions that would not respond to treatment and that threatened not only her own life but the life of her unborn child.

Meanwhile, my mother endured an excruciating labor resulting largely from the failure of her cervix to dilate. Intravenous injections of synthetic oxytocin initially did not induce sufficient contractions of the uterine muscles to allow her to squeeze me into the world.

Natalie delivered first. Dr. MacDonald tried everything to save her—an endotracheal tube to assist her breathing, injections of anticonvulsants—but soaring blood pressure and convulsions led to a massive cerebral hemorrhage that killed her.

Even as the umbilical cord was tied off and cut between the Beezo baby and his dead mother, my mother, exhausted but still struggling to expel me, suddenly and at last experienced cervical dilation.

The Jimmy Tock show had begun.

Before undertaking the depressing task of telling Konrad Beezo that he had gained a son and lost a wife, Dr. MacDonald delivered me and, according to Charlene Coleman, announced that this solid little package would surely grow up to be a football hero.

Having successfully conveyed me from womb to wider world, my mother promptly passed out. She didn’t hear the doctor’s prediction and didn’t see my broad, pink, wonder-filled face until my protector, Charlene, returned and presented me to my father.

After Dr. MacDonald had given me to Nurse Coleman to be swabbed and then wrapped in a white cotton receiving cloth, and when he had satisfied himself that my mother had merely fainted and that she would come to herself in moments, with or without smelling salts, he peeled off his latex gloves, pulled down his surgical mask, and went to the expectant-fathers’ lounge to console Konrad Beezo as best he could.

Almost at once, the shouting started: bitter, accusatory words, paranoid accusations, the vilest language delivered in the most furious voice imaginable.

Even in the usually serene, well-soundproofed delivery room, Nurse Coleman heard the uproar. She understood the tenor if not the specifics of Konrad Beezo’s reaction to the loss of his wife.

When she left the delivery room and stepped into the hallway to hear Beezo more clearly, intuition told her to carry me with her, bundled in the thin blanket.

In the hall, she encountered Lois Hanson, another nurse, who had in her arms the Beezo baby. Lois, too, had ventured forth to hear the clown’s intemperate outburst.

Lois made a fatal mistake. Against Charlene’s advice, she moved toward the closed door to the waiting room, believing that the sight of his infant son would quench Beezo’s hot anger and ameliorate the intense grief from which his rage had flared.

Herself a refugee from an abusive husband, Charlene had little faith that the grace of fatherhood would temper the fury of any man who, even in a moment of profound loss, responded first and at once with rage and with threats of violence rather than with tears or shock, or denial. Besides, she remembered his hat, worn indoors with no regard for manners. Charlene sensed trouble coming, big trouble.

She retreated with me along the maternity ward’s internal hall to the neonatal care unit. As that door was swinging shut behind us, she heard the gunshot that killed Dr. MacDonald.

This room contained rows of bassinets in which newborns were nestled, most dreaming, a few cooing, none yet crying. An enormous view window occupied the better part of one long wall, but no proud fathers or grandparents were currently standing on the other side of it.

With the infants were two crèche nurses. They had heard the shouting, then the shot, and they were more receptive to Charlene’s advice than Lois had been.

Presciently, Nurse Coleman assured them the gunman wouldn’t hurt the babies but warned he would surely kill every member of the hospital staff that he could find.

Nevertheless, before fleeing, each nurse scooped up an infant—and fretted about those they were forced to leave behind. Frightened by a second shot, they followed Charlene through a door beside the view window, out of the maternity ward into the main corridor.

The three, with their charges, took refuge in a room where an elderly man slept on unaware.

A low-wattage night-light did little to press back the gloom, and the flickering storm at the window only made the shadows jitter with insectile energy.

Quiet, hardly daring to breathe, the three nurses huddled together until Charlene heard sirens in the distance. This welcome wail drew her to the window, which provided a view of the parking lot in front of the hospital; she hoped to see police cars.

Instead, from that second-story room, she saw Beezo with his baby, crossing the rain-washed blacktop. He looked, she said, like a figure in a foul dream, scuttling and strange, like something you might see on the night that the world ended and cracks opened in the foundations of the earth to let loose the angry legions of the damned.

Charlene is a transplanted Mississippian and a Baptist whose soul is filled with the poetry of the South.

Beezo had parked at such a distance that through the screen of rain and under the yellow pall of the sodium-vapor lamps, the make, model, and true color of his car could not be discerned. Charlene watched him drive away, hoping the police would intercept him before he reached the nearby county road, but his taillights dwindled into the drizzling darkness.

With the threat removed, she returned to the delivery room just as Dad’s thoughts were flashing from the Lindbergh baby tragedy to Rumpelstiltskin to Tarzan raised by apes, in time to assure him that I had not been kidnapped by a homicidal clown.

Later my father would confirm that the minute of my birth, my length, and my weight precisely fulfilled the predictions made by my grandfather on his deathbed. His first proof, however, that the events in the intensive care unit were not just extraordinary but supernatural came when, as my mother held me, he folded back the receiving blanket, exposing my feet, and found that my toes were fused as Josef had predicted.

“Syndactyly,” Dad said.

“It can be fixed,” Charlene assured him. Then her eyes widened with surprise. “How do you know such a doctorish word?”

My father only repeated, “Syndactyly,” as he gently, lovingly, and with amazement fingered my fused toes.