Miracle (45 page)

“Fuck the counseling. When you’re ready to live with me again, then we’ll talk about the rest.”

“Too bad. Bye.” She pivoted and headed for the door.

“Wait!” He kicked the soft-drink machine again. His anger crumpled. “All right. You’re hired.”

“Good. One more thing. I don’t mind working overtime at all, but I won’t work nights.”

“Why?”

“I have other fish to fry.” She had decided to keep her stand-up routine a secret. He wasn’t capable of dealing with more of the new Amy yet. She planned to work at the little clubs outside L.A., where people who knew her would be less likely to go. She had a lot to learn, and she wanted
the relative anonymity of the smaller clubs in which to do it.

Elliot thrust his hands into his hair. “You’ve got a boyfriend!”

“No, I just want to have my nights free.”

“All right, all right! Anything else? You know, of course, that you really crave my body and it’s just a matter of time before we do an Ozzie and Harriet again?”

She smiled, putting sunshine on steel. “Don’t hold your breath.”

M
arie entered her seventh month—longer than she’d ever carried a baby before—and the waiting became torture. Sebastien went to her room every night and sat for a minute with his hand on her stomach, hardly believing the movement he felt inside her. They discussed the change of luck in cautious terms, always more polite than intimate, but Sebastien allowed himself a surge of hope.

Throughout the pregnancy Marie had forbidden her doctors to perform any but the most routine medical examinations; she had decided that all the testing on past pregnancies had contributed to her miscarriages. “I no longer violate the purity of my womb,” she explained to Sebastien. He humored her beliefs, caring only that this pregnancy had survived.

After the child was born they would finally have a mutual interest; something worth sharing in their lives. His work had begun to seem like a treadmill on which he performed with automatic efficiency, losing track of his emotions to the point where he would sometimes resort to cafés to observe people laughing and talking in casual conversations. He rarely saw such things at the hospital or at home, and a hunger for them was growing inside him.

Marie’s eighth month came, without complications. Late one night Sebastien returned home to find that she had unlocked the door to the nursery. Now she sat in a lotus position in the middle of the floor, eyes shut, lips moving
in a silent chant, radiating her earnest vibrations to the empty, stale-smelling suite that had not been entered in years.

Sebastien couldn’t resist imagining the suite filled with toys and baby furniture, with the tall, stern windows open to let sunlight into a pleasant world filled with his child’s laughter. It all seemed amazingly possible.

The ninth month was as charmed as the rest. Sebastien’s one firm request was that Marie not have the baby at home, which was what she wanted to do. In her peaceful, confident mood she agreed without protest. Nothing could go wrong now.

And nothing did. Sebastien was performing his rounds one evening when the call came from the hospital’s maternity ward. Marie’s water had broken during her Thursday-evening yoga class, and she’d gone straight to the hospital. Sebastien ignored the hospital’s lazy elevators and ran down several flights of stairs to see her. She was sitting up in the bed of her private room, placidly stroking a crystal.

He raised both the crystal and her hands and kissed them. “I’ll rearrange some duties upstairs so that I can be with you during delivery.”

“No, please. You’re a dear for offering, but you’d distract me. I have to focus all my thoughts.” She gave him a pleading look. “Try to understand. I only agreed to come to the hospital to make you happy. Now please, let me manage the birth as nearly to my liking as possible.”

“As you wish.” His excitement over the impending birth drove away any frustration. After the baby was born he would no longer tolerate her aloof and possessive attitude. Before he left the room he placed his hand on her belly. Her hospital gown made a soft cover for the turgid muscle underneath. “Welcome to the world,” he said gruffly.

It was near dawn when Marie’s doctor came into the waiting room. Sebastien pivoted from a window and stiffened the moment he saw the woman’s shuttered expression. A thousand shards of fear cut through him, and his only salvation was to feign anger. “If something is wrong,
Doctor, I want to know why you’ve waited until now to inform me.”

If there had been sympathy under the obstetrician’s severely plucked brows, it vanished. “It was impossible to inform you of something I didn’t know until ten minutes ago. Your wife delivered the baby without extraordinary problems. Your wife is doing well, physically. She’s heavily sedated.”

“The point, Doctor, the point.”

The woman’s chin snapped up. “You have a baby daughter,” she retorted. “But she’s having breathing difficulties. We’ve already put her on a respirator. Her condition is marginal—low pulse, poor reflexes, poor skin color. I’ve scheduled an EEG. I hate to say this, but I suspect that she’s anencephalic.”

He died inside. The horror was almost palpable. After all the years of waiting.…
She suffers. Dear God, I brought my daughter into a world filled with nothing but the most terrible misery
.

The perfect machine, trained from childhood to turn grief inward, asked brusquely, “If the baby is anencephalic, how much time does it have?”

“
It
? Your child?” the doctor asked in an acid voice. “No more than a week, at most. Maybe a day or two. These babies … it’s tragic—”

“Yes, well, it’s doubtful that it knows much of what’s happening.” He strode from the room, snapping his fingers for the pediatrician to follow. “I want every detail. Extensive blood work—”

“Just a moment!” She grabbed the sleeve of the hospital scrubs he still wore from his own work, upstairs. “We’re discussing your daughter! Your own flesh and blood! What do you think you’re going to do?”

He halted and very calmly pried her fingers from their grip. Her furious, disbelieving gaze clung to him. She loathed him, not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered except rescuing his daughter from this nightmare. He held the doctor’s attention without blinking. He hardly knew that she was there. “I’m going to check with other
hospitals,” he told her, “to see if they have any babies waiting for heart transplants.”

The nursery for intensive-care infants was home to only one tiny patient, a dark-haired thing with an undersized head and a small mask of a face, his daughter. He looked down at her in her prison of electrodes and tubes, watching her breathe with the aid of a machine. She was blind. There was nothing behind her eyes. She was one of the cruelest contortions of nature, born with only a brain stem, the most primitive neurological center, and it was already failing its task.

He slipped his hand down into the jungle of technology and touched her gently, amazed at how beautiful she was. Her delicate hands curled and she blinked long, dark lashes, but he knew that both reactions were meaningless. She was no more aware of him than she was of herself. His legs failed him, and he sat down quickly on a stool he pulled close to the incubator.

Shaking, he leaned over her and whispered, “
Je t’aime, ma petite, je t’aime.
” It was no sentimental lie. He loved her so fiercely that he wanted to be absorbed in the hopeless body and die with her.

But he couldn’t indulge self-centered grief, not when she was in such torment. He cupped her head in his hand as she had a mild seizure, crooning soft sounds to her while he stroked the silky forehead with the pad of his thumb.
It won’t be much longer, little one. I promise. Your father promises
.

“Doctor de Savin? I came as soon as I got your message.” The transplant coordinator waited a few feet away, his clothes rumpled, his owlish eyes revealing the early hour and the tension of this unusual situation. “I’ve finished checking. We have a match with a baby at Jenane Saint Alz.”

“The baby? Tell me—”

“Two weeks old. A congenital heart defect. Very critical at this point. We may be too late for him.”

“Why?”

“He may not last until, uhmmm—” the coordinator shifted awkwardly, “until we can provide the donor.”

Sebastien straightened. His daughter lay quiet again, her head still resting in his hand. There would be more seizures, much worse than this one. He wouldn’t let her be tormented. There was no alternative, no guilt, nothing but the sacrifice they would make for each other.

“We won’t wait,” he told the coordinator. “She is no more alive than a brain-dead accident victim. I’m going to take her off the respirator. I don’t think she can breathe on her own.”

“But if there are impulses from the brain stem—”

“A CAT scan of an empty skull is fascinating in its perversity. I suggest that you refresh your memory.”

“I know it’s terrible, Doctor, but—”

“The impulses from the brain stem are meaningless.”

“But what if she continues to breathe when you remove life support? That would be considered …” His voice faded and he shifted from foot to foot.

Alive, that’s considered alive
, Sebastien finished for him silently.
But only in the most pitiful way
. He fixed a hard gaze on the man, daring him to finish the statement. “I’m willing to take that chance.”

The coordinator coughed and looked away. “Hmmm, Doctor de Savin,
shouldn’t
we contact Dr. d’Albret? He’s scheduled to return tomorrow from the administrator’s conference in Nice, but I’m sure, considering the birth of his grandchild—”

“I’ll call him myself.”

“
Before
you proceed?”

Sebastien rose to his feet furiously, ready to fight anyone who tried to delay him. “I will make all the decisions concerning my child. As head of the transplant unit I make
this
decision. If you have a problem with that, you no longer belong on my staff.”

“But hospital protocol—”

“Does not apply to my daughter. I take full responsibility. I’ll perform both the removal and the transplant.”

“Mother of God! To do this to your own child … how can you?”

How can I not
? Sebastian thought. “We have work to do,” he said crisply. “And no time to waste on ethical debates.” He gathered his strength and sent the coordinator a look so full of warning that the man nodded jerkily and hurried away.

Power. Privilege. He would use them to full advantage today, knowing that this would probably be the end of them.