Chapter 7 - Sinking Into the Gurney
The ceiling of the fourth floor became a dizzying, streaking blur of white acoustic tiles, recessed light panels, and emergency exit signs as the gurney took off down the hallway.
“Call OR Six! Tell them to prep for an emergency crash section!” Dr. Wallace shouted, running alongside the right flank of the bed, her fingers pressed deep into the lower quadrant of Hannah’s abdomen, monitoring the fatal, continuous rigidity of the uterine muscle. “Stat general anesthesia! I want two units of O-negative uncrossed on the pump before we hit the double doors! Get NICU on the line—we’re going to have a premature infant in severe respiratory depression!”
The gurney was moving at a dead sprint. Sarah, the young nurse, was running on the left, holding an inverted bag of lactated Ringer’s solution high above her head with both hands, the clear plastic line trailing down into the eighteen-gauge needle she had just slammed into the vein on the back of Hannah’s wrist. Blood had backed up into the tubing, a bright crimson ribbon against the clear saline, but Sarah didn't care; she was crying openly, her tears dripping onto the white vinyl sheets as she ran.
“You stay with us, Hannah!” Sarah sobbed into the rush of the wheels. “You hear me? You stay with Gracie! David is watching you, Hannah! Keep breathing!”
Beneath the oxygen mask, Hannah’s lips were turning a faint, terrifying shade of lavender.
The physical pain was overwhelming—a blinding, white-hot fire that had spread from her hips to the base of her neck, crushing her chest like an iron bandsaw. But the spiritual agony was worse. In the dark corners of her fading consciousness, she could feel the tiny, frantic flutter of her daughter’s life slipping away, like a bird exhausted from beating its wings against a cage.
Not again, her mind screamed into the gathering darkness. God, please, not again. I gave you David. I stood by the grave and I let you take him. You cannot take his child. You cannot leave me in this world alone.
She tried to reach for Sarah’s hand, but her fingers felt impossibly heavy, weighted down with lead. The monitor mounted to the foot of the gurney was emitting a continuous, low-pitched warning tone—the fetal heart rate had decelerated from a healthy one-forty down to sixty beats per minute. A terminal bradycardia. The child was suffocating inside her.
As the gurney crossed the threshold of the central hallway, Hannah’s rolling head turned slightly to the right.
Through the fog of her oxygen mask, through the narrow tunnel of her fading sight, she caught a glimpse of Grant Wexler.
He was still standing against the wall, frozen, his tall frame suddenly looking hollow and grotesque in his dark, expensive suit. He was staring directly at her. His face was twisted into an expression of sheer, unadulterated horror, his mouth half-open, his eyes locked onto the smear of her blood and fluid that dragged along the floor behind the wheels of her bed.
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For one fleeting second, their eyes met across the screaming chaos of the corridor.
Hannah did not look at him with hatred. She had no energy left for rage. She looked at him with the pure, shattering devastation of a mother whose child was being torn from her arms, and then her eyelids surrendered, dropping shut as the cold darkness swallowed her whole.
