over for speed-ing, she found that she lost more time identifying herself to police than she gained by breaking the limits. At that hour, forty miles per would get her to the hospital in a matter of minutes. And at 2:00 A.M. the lights were all with her. She slammed the Saab to a halt in one of the reserved park-ing slots right next to the emergency room doors. The bars were just closing; it looked fairly busy. Two paramedic vans were in the bays, both unloading simultaneously. One man with a minor gunshot wound walked out drunkenly. An old, disoriented woman on a gurney displayed the classic symp-toms of myocardial infarction. She rushed past the receptionist. 'PACE' was all she needed to hear as she went by. The patient assessment center was a large room compris-ing several beds divided by curtains. Women occupied two of the beds. One, a girl in her teens, looked frightened. Her par-ents and a boy who didn't look old enough to shave clustered around her, murmuring assurances. Two beds down lay Karen Chandler, her husband standing at her side. A fetal monitor strapped across her swollen abdo-men sent signals to equipment at bedside. She had obviously taken the time to brush out her deep brown hair before arriv-ing. She looked lovely.
Nurse Dyer wore her lab coat over a pink-and-black mini-skirt that occasionally peeked through the button front when-ever she shifted around. Evelyn had seen the outfit-and oth-ers-before on late-night calls. She hoped the pager hadn't interrupted anything too sizzling.
'Dilation four centimeters. Contractions every ten minutes.' Dyer's voice had the distinct buzz of someone fighting fatigue and a couple of drinks. Fletcher knew it would not harm the woman's performance but made a mental note to take the fact into account. She was certain that the Chandlers were too oc-cupied to notice.
'Hello, Karen,' she said. 'Hello, David.' Karen wore the all-purpose hospital robe, hiked up over her belly. David wore beige slacks and a rumpled royal-blue cotton shirt.
She looked at Karen's husband. 'Remembering your part-ner exercises?' He nodded and tried to sound steady. 'Ready when you are.'
Dr. Fletcher smiled. 'I think it's a matter of our being ready when the baby is.' She bent over Karen to check her pupils with a penlight. 'What time did your water break?'
'Around one,' she answered, looking up at the doctor with concerned eyes. 'I was asleep, and I woke up and felt this wetness, but it didn't feel like my bladder cutting loose. There weren't any labor pains, so I figured we'd call Patient Assess-ment and they'd tell us to come in whenever the contractions started. I thought I could just go back to sleep.'
Evelyn smiled again, shaking her head. 'Whenever the wa-ter breaks, we bring you in. If labor hadn't started soon, we'd have had to induce it. If we wait too long, infections can hap-pen.' She slipped on two right-hand gloves and gently inserted a finger to touch Karen's cervix. 'Lucky for you that things seem to be progressing.' She turned to Dyer. 'Fetal heartbeat?'
'One fifty and strong.'
'That's good.' She grasped Karen's free hand and smiled reassuringly. 'Everything's fine. I'll be back when you're a bit more dilated.' With that, she turned to leave.
'
It was dawn when the contractions finally came five min-utes apart and Karen was fully dilated. They had moved her to the homey environ of their Natural Delivery Unit, where she lay on an old-fashioned brass bed amidst soothing Victorian furniture, wallpaper, and curtains. The music they had cho-sen-one of the Brandenberg concerti, though she couldn't remember which one now-played softly from hidden speak-ers. At the moment, she had no idea whom they were trying to soothe. The pain overwhelmed her, at times slamming her onto an ocean of agony that crested every few minutes in waves of incomprehensible torment. She tried to describe the wrench-ing feeling to her husband through red-faced, sweating puffs of breath. Several times she had asked for something to numb the pain, but Dr. Fletcher had reminded her that they could not take chances with the baby.
In his own hell of pain, David watched his wife suffer while he could do nothing but coach her breathing.
'I don't want to do this,' she moaned, her face straining crim-son and wet. Her fingernails dug into David's hand as a con-traction drove pain straight through her.
He did not know what to say. Nothing could stop what was happening. She must know that. How to console someone suf-fering the inevitable who pleads for the impossible?
At last, Dr. Fletcher relented and told Nurse Dyer to admin-ister a mild hypnotic. It did nothing to reduce the pain, but Karen seemed to notice it less.
'It takes the edge off,' she murmured to David a few min-utes later.
'That does it,' Nurse Dyer said, looking up from between Karen's legs. 'I see the head.' Dr. Fletcher took over, positioning herself at the end of the bed, instructing Karen to scoot toward the edge, ordering David to concentrate on getting her to breathe with him.
'Okay. Push now.'
'I can't,' Karen screamed. 'It's too much.'
'Don't worry. You'll make it.' She cut a minuscule episiotomy with surgical scissors. Blood flowed on the sheets.
