He could see the vein and artery stringing in front of the ringed trachea like two pink straws. One of them had little red things attached to it. The other looked slick. He couldn’t get the tremble out of his fingers as he used the pen to gently press the vein and artery out of the way.
“Hold still.” Sara held the plastic barrel of the pen between her thumb and fingers. Her elbow was tight to her body. She moved downward, pushing the silver tip of the barrel into the trachea until the bottom third of the pen was inside.
“Move.”
He carefully lifted away his hand. The vein and artery slid back over.
Sara took a breath. She sealed her lips around the pen barrel and exhaled a stream of air directly into the trachea.
Nothing happened.
Sara took another breath. She exhaled through the pen.
They both strained forward to listen, hearing birds chirping and leaves rustling and then finally, after what felt like an eternity, the whistle of air pushing out of the barrel.
The girl’s chest shuddered as it rose to take in a breath. The resulting fall was slow, almost imperceptible. Jeffrey held his own breath, counting off the seconds until the chest rose again and she filled her own lungs with air.
He breathed with the girl, in and out, as the blue drained from her face and life came back into her body.
Sara peeled off the bloody exam gloves. She stroked back the girl’s hair, whispering, “You’re okay now, sweetheart. Just keep breathing. You’re okay.”
Jeffrey didn’t know if Sara was talking to the victim or to herself. Her hands had started to tremble. Tears welled into her eyes.
Jeffrey reached out to steady her.
Sara recoiled, and he had never felt so monstrous, so worthless, in his entire life.
His let his hands fall uselessly back to the ground.
All he could do was wait with her in silence until the ambulance arrived.
Atlanta
4
“Tessa,” Sara practically yelled into the phone. “Tessie, would you just—”
Her little sister wasn’t going to listen. She kept rambling, her voice taking on the cadence of the adults in Peanuts cartoons.
Wah-wah-wah-wah, wah-wah-wah-wah.
Sara tapped the phone on speaker and rested it on the shelf above the sink. She washed her face with the pink soap from the dispenser. The cheap paper towels disintegrated in her hands. If Sara did not get out of this prison soon, they were going to have to put her in a cell.
Tessa picked up on the noise. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m taking a whore’s bath in the visitor’s restroom at Phillips State Prison.” Sara peeled a piece of wet paper towel off her cheek. “I’ve been up to my eyeballs in blood, piss and shit for the last five hours.”
“It’s like college all over again.”
Sara laughed, but not so Tessa could hear. “Tessie, do what you want to do. If you want to train to be a midwife, train to be a midwife. You don’t need my approval.”
“Bull. Shit.”
Sara couldn’t say it again because, in truth, they always needed each other’s approval. Sara couldn’t sleep if Tessa was mad at her. Tessa couldn’t function if Sara was displeased. Fortunately, the older they got, the less it happened, but this time was different.
Tessa was spinning out of control. She was supposed to fly home a month ago, but she’d delayed the trip. She had texted her husband for a divorce. She had FaceTimed her five-year-old daughter to tell her that she would be home by Thanksgiving. She had apparently moved back into their parents’ garage apartment. One day, she wanted to go to graduate school. The next day, she wanted to be a midwife. What she really needed to do was find a good therapist who could help her understand that all of this change wasn’t going to change a damn thing.
As the old saying went, wherever you go, there you are.
“Sissy, you should know this,” Tessa said. “Georgia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country. It’s even worse for black women. They’re six times more likely to die from giving birth than white women.”
Sara did not point out that she did know this, because as one of the state’s medical examiners, she was in charge of compiling all of the depressing statistics her sister was tossing back at her. “You’re making an argument for more doctors, not more midwives.”
“Don’t try to change the subject. It’s a proven fact that home births are just as safe as hospital births.”
“Tess.” Shut up, Sara. Just shut up. “The study you’re taking that from was done in the UK. Pregnant women in rural areas have to drive more than an hour for—”
“In South Africa—”
Wah-wah-wah-wah, wah-wah-wah-wah.
Sara could not bear to hear another heart-warming story about how being a missionary in South Africa had Made Tessa a Better Human Being. As if everyone was supposed to forget about the six years Tessa had spent partying her way to a four-year degree in modern English poetry, then the next five years she’d spent working in their father’s plumbing business while managing to fuck every good-looking man in the tri-county area.
Not that Sara was against fucking good-looking men—she had fucked one several times over the weekend—but there was an actual point to her intransigence that she could never, ever say out loud.
Sara did not think that midwives were an inherently bad idea. She thought Tessa, her sister, working as a midwife was a recipe for disaster. She loved her baby sister, but Tessa had once thrown her shoe through a window when the lace broke. She couldn’t solve a Rubik’s Cube if you put the math in front of her face. Tessa’s idea of a balanced diet was using a piece of celery to scoop out macaroni and cheese. This was the woman who was supposed to remain calm and composed,
