Читать книгу Demon in My Blood - Elizabeth Rains - Страница 6

PROLOGUE

DECEMBER 1971

A FLUFF OF CLOUD parted and sun danced through the windows as I entered the downtown Montreal apartment with my beautiful tiny baby. The four-room suite took up the whole second floor of the landlord’s house. Peter, Della, and I had just moved in. The floors creaked and white paint was peeling from the wainscoting, but there was ample space for a soapstone-carving corner and for four-year-old Della to run around. Unlike Peter, I had wanted a second girl. My new child was unexpectedly fair, with pink cheeks and fine, wispy hair that was almost white. She gurgled in my arms. We would name her Jessica. I was reading Dune, and Jessica was the wise woman in the story.

Because I was young, healthy, and strong, I didn’t let the doctor’s order to get some rest stop me from playing with my four-year-old. I believed she needed assurance that I’d love her the same as always, even though I couldn’t help grinning at the cute little honey bunny I had just brought home. I sat on the floor with Della, rolled out huge sheets of parchment, and opened a dozen jars of poster paint. Together we painted sheet after sheet of grassy fields that burst with flowers. We painted happy faces on suns that shone above the fields. When Della grew tired and curled into a nap, I made a mobile of ribbons, which I hung over Jessica’s crib. I woke Jessica to feed and diaper her—she was, at first, a sleepy baby—and then fatigue dusted over me.

I awoke an hour or so later when I heard a knock. Peter answered the door and greeted Norman, a friend who was an intern at the Jewish General Hospital, where Jessica had been born. He had come to congratulate the new parents and to see the baby. As I was about to get up to say hello, I noticed that a blizzard was blowing outside and the mattress on the floor that served as my bed was soaked red with blood.

Norman saw what was happening and rolled his palms over my belly, trying to push out pieces of placenta so that the hemorrhage would stop. We used up all of my Kotex pads to sop up the flow, and then all of the baby diapers. But the red, sticky stream didn’t abate. Norman carried me down the stairs to the snow-covered sidewalk and into his car. I remember the little beater Datsun swerving and screeching through icy streets. I remember snow blowing against the windscreen faster than the wipers could wipe. After that I passed out.

I awoke for a minute or two in the hospital emergency room. A nurse said I had lost so much blood that she couldn’t find my pulse. Needles attached to tubes stuck out of my arms, and one was flowing crimson. I passed out again, unaware that the demon that would threaten my life forty years later had most likely just sloshed into my veins.