'How're you feeling?' he asked the patient as his cool gloved fingers explored her upper spine.
'I'm ready.'
'Fine. I'm going to give you a high spinal block. That'll numb you from the neck down.' She could not see what he was doing from her position, but she heard the sounds of instruments and bottles clattering gently on the tray.
'Okay, Valerie.' He pressed his thumb between two verte-brae. 'I'm going to poke you right there. It's very important that you don't move. Just relax.' He dabbed something cool on the spot. 'Juuust relax.'
Her first reflex was to flinch, but she resisted the urge. The sting was not nearly as bad as she had feared, but to think about what he was doing made her want to shudder. She thought instead about the clouds rolling in over Lunada Bay in the winter. About the fog that sometimes filled the cove so that one could stand on the bluffs and not see the ocean churn-ing a scant hundred feet below the cliff. In all of L.A. nothing was more like a seaside village to her. It soothed her.
Something had gone quite wrong with her hands. They tingled.
'Very good,' the voice drawled. Something tugged out of her back. 'Let's roll her over.' Nurse Dyer pulled at her legs, though she felt nothing but a sensation of pressure and a vague tingling that diminished quickly into an eerie numbness from the neck down. Looking up, she saw Dr. Fletcher gazing at her. She hadn't heard her come in. Gowned, gloved, capped, and masked, as was Dyer, now, she nodded to Valerie and said, 'Remember what I told you. Just relax and think about pleasant things.' Valerie nodded, looking up to concentrate on the spot. It seemed to scintillate a bit. A motion at the side of her head caused her to turn. The anesthetist taped a capsule of smell-ing salts to the pillow. She was fairly certain that it was for her, but for a moment she wondered.
Nurse Dyer brought forward a cart with the aspiration de-vice. It hissed in much the same way the suction device had. Grasping a large, long needle attached to clear silicone plastic tubing, Fletcher hovered over Valerie's exposed sternum. Po-sitioning the needle squarely on the midline between her patient's breasts, she leaned on the device and gave it a hearty, firm push. Valerie felt only the pressure of something against her chest. The aspirator make a sucking noise. That was when the pain hit her. She tried to visualize the cliffs on Oahu's windward side where she and Ron had flown kites on their vacation two years back. It wasn't working.
Another shove. Again the needle pierced skin, muscle, and bone. Another gasp from the machine. Another lance of sear-ing agony. Valerie chanced to gaze downward to see a clump of thick, dark-red glop slowly moving halfway up the tube. Needle out, reposition, push hard. She felt no sting but heard the faintest of crunches underneath the sound of the pump. The pain came with aspiration. How long would this go on?
She felt a panic overwhelm her. There must be some other way to help Renata. She'd donate a thousand pints of blood just to be free of the spike that plunged into her chest every few seconds. Sweat beaded up on her face. She watched the spot overhead waver, turn grey.
A hand stroked at her hair. Looking to the side, her gaze met Nurse Dyer's. Above her mask, her eyes revealed a com-passion Valerie hadn't seen before. The nurse's gloved hand tenderly stroked her long blond hair. 'Be brave,' she whis-pered. 'This is the only way to save Renata. Your daughter's counting on you.'
Tears leaked out of Valerie's eyes. Dyer picked up a piece of gauze to dab at them, all the while stroking her head. 'You've a great deal of courage,' she said. 'The courage to do right no matter what the-'
'Gauze,' Dr. Fletcher said quietly.
Dyer stopped stroking Valerie and assisted the doctor. Fletcher continued to probe, drive home the needle, and aspi-rate the bone-marrow.
Where would it end? Valerie wondered. Not just the opera-tion. All of it. The needle punctured her, inches from her heart.
XII
Terry Johnson sat on the brushed grey fabric couch in the reception area of Women for Reproductive Freedom, reading their position paper on surrogate mothering. Before he could get more than a few paragraphs into it, the woman at the desk, who looked as if she had just stepped out of Cosmopolitan, said, 'Ms. Burke will see you now.'
Johnson followed the woman to an austere office that, though spacious, contained little more than a large mahogany desk, executive chair, two conference chairs, and a matched pair of Jackson Pollock paintings. A trio of woodgrain-painted metal filing cabinets stood to one side. There were no bookcases. Jane Burke stepped in a moment later. She was of moderate height, though she seemed taller due to her high-heeled pumps. They were purple and perfectly matched to the suit she wore. On her lapel, a gold Venus symbol, surmounted by two slender hands clasping, indicated that she was a member of the Sisters Network, a sororal order of female executives. Her brown hair was full-bodied, permed, and businesslike. Behind her aviator-style glasses, she could have been a mid- forties executive at any Fortune 500 company whose old-boy network had relinquished control to the new-woman network.
'What's up, Mr. Johnson?' She sat behind her desk, smiling courteously. Realizing that she favored brevity, he jumped immediately to the point. 'I am representing Dr. Evelyn Fletcher in the Baby Renata case. I'd like to enlist your assistance as an expert wit-ness for the defendants.' He paused to await a reply, received none, and continued. 'This case is certain to be a landmark in human rights, and I knew you would be interested in having a part in the outcome.' Burke leaned back in her chair, peaked her fingers, and watched Johnson with a cool,
