“No. But I’ve found out she’s pregnant.”
Jeff’s hand froze mid-squeeze. He stared at me, and then his eyes darted some more, and then he stared again. “She’s pregnant?”
I nodded miserably.
“Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”
I nodded again.
My son removed his hand from mine. He pushed his half-eaten salad away, slid from the booth, and walked out.
THAT NIGHT I HAD Adream, and in my dream I was helping Eddie Garcia autopsy a woman’s body. But this was a young woman’s body, and when I made the long incision that opened the chest and abdomen, her belly opened to reveal a full-term fetus inside: a baby boy whose face I recognized. It was the face I’d seen three decades before, when Jeff was born. Then I looked closer, and I realized the face was my own.
CHAPTER 17
“YOU DON’T LOOK SO HOT,” SAID MIRANDA WHEN Iwalked into the bone lab the next morning.
“And yet I look better than I feel.”
“Oh, my. So I guess I’d better start looking for a new Ph.D. adviser, huh?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But first let’s watch this DVD that Eddie got from the surgeon in Crossville.” I slid the disc—a video of Clarissa Lowe’s surgery—out of the envelope that had arrived the day before, while we were doing the autopsy, and Miranda loaded it into the computer’s optical drive. Watching the video was like opening a letter or hearing a voice mail after the sender has died: There was Lowe, anesthetized but still alive—and still healthy, except for a bum neck—just ten days earlier. “This is creepy,” said Miranda, “butso cool. How’d they get this great camera angle?” If Lowe’s eyes had been open, they’d have been staring almost directly into the camera lens. Besides her face, which was obscured by an oxygen mask, the image showed her neck and chest as well.
“Eddie said it’s a prototype OR video system, designed by the surgeon’s brother or cousin or something. The camera lens is built into the handle of the surgical light. So adjusting the angle of the light automatically adjusts the aim of the camera.”
“Cool,” she repeated. “Wish I’d invented that. Right after inventing the transporter beam and the perpetual-motion machine.”
Early in the video—before the incision—a gloved hand reached up, filling the screen, and the image on the screen lurched wildly as the light was adjusted. Eventually the lurching ceased and the image stabilized; once it did, the angles of the light and the camera were—as best I could tell—exactly the same as they’d been before all the jostling and adjusting. A few seconds elapsed, and then the hand loomed into view again; again the image careened wildly, and again it returned to exactly the same angle. “Whee, that was fun,” said Miranda. “Let’s do it again. Dramamine, anyone?”
“Now, now,” I chided. “Don’t be snarky. If I were about to operate on your neck, wouldn’t you want the light to be aimed just right?”
“If you were about to operate on my neck, I’d want someone to stop you.” She moved the computer’s cursor to an arrow labeled FF and clicked on the mouse. As the video scrolled forward, the camera zoomed in to a tighter shot of the neck, and the image lurched a third time—far more dramatically this time—and then, after it steadied, hands darted into the frame, a scalpel flicked swiftly, and the front of the woman’s neck gaped open.
“Slow down, slow down,” I said. “We actually want to watch the surgery, remember?”
“But the surgery lasted more than two hours, Dr. B. Do you really want to watch it all in real time? Can’t we fast-forward till we see something interesting?”
“How will we know what’s interesting if it zooms past in a nanosecond?”
“Tell you what,” she offered. “If we get to the end and we haven’t seen anything interesting, I’ll back it up and we can watch it in slo-mo. Deal?”
“Deal.” On the screen, two pairs of hands converged on the neck, steel instruments glistening in the light, and then withdrew. Once they were out of the frame, I saw that the incision in the neck had been spread apart with clamps; the opening was now as wide as it was long. “Slow down; this is getting interesting.”