Life Expectancy Read Online Free PDF Page A

memory regurgitated the suddenly nauseating image of Beezo in the hallway, the pistol in his right hand, the baby cradled in his left arm. Bitter acid burned in my father’s throat, and his already harried heart raced faster.
    Perhaps Beezo’s wife
and
child had died at birth. Perhaps the infant in his arms hadn’t been his own but had been instead little James—or Jennifer—Tock.
    I thought “kidnapped,”
Dad says when he recalls the moment.
I thought about the Lindbergh baby and Frank Sinatra Junior being held for ransom and Rumpelstiltskin and Tarzan being raised by apes, and though none of that makes sense, I thought it all in an instant. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t, and I felt just like that red-faced baby with its mouth open but silent, and when I thought of the baby, oh, then I just knew it had been you, not his at all, but you, my Jimmy.
    Desperate now to find Beezo and stop him, Dad dropped the phone, bolted toward the open door to the hallway—and nearly collided with Charlene Coleman, a nurse who came bearing a baby in her arms.
    This infant had a broader face than the one Beezo had spirited into the stormy night. Its complexion was a healthy pink instead of mottled red. According to Dad, its eyes shone clear and blue, and its face glowed with wonder.
    “I hid with your baby,” Charlene Coleman said. “I hid from that awful man. I knew he would be trouble when he first showed up with his wife, him wearing that ugly hat indoors and making no apology for it.”
    I wish I could verify from personal experience that, indeed, what alarmed Charlene from the get-go was not Beezo’s clown makeup, not his poisonous ranting about his aerialist in-laws, not his eyes so crazy that they almost spun like pinwheels, but simply his
hat.
Unfortunately, less than one hour old, I had not yet learned English and had not even sorted out who all these people were.

3
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    T rembling with relief, Dad took me from Charlene Coleman and carried me to my mother.
    After the nurse raised the head of the birthing bed and provided more pillows, Mom was able to take me in her arms.
    Dad swears that her first words to me were these: “You better have been worth all the pain, Little Blue Eyes, ’cause if you turn out to be an ungrateful child, I’ll make your life a living hell.”
    Tearful, shaken by all that had occurred, Charlene recounted recent events and explained how she’d been able to spirit me to safety when the shooting started.
    Unexpectedly required to attend two women simultaneously in urgent and difficult labor, Dr. MacDonald had been unable at that hour to locate a qualified physician to assist on a timely basis. He divided his attention between the two patients, hurrying from one delivery room to the other, relying on his nurses for backup, his work complicated by the periodically dimming lights and worry about whether the hospital generator would kick in reliably if the storm knocked out electric service.
    Natalie Beezo had received no prenatal care. She unknowingly suffered from preeclampsia. During labor she developed full-blown eclampsia and experienced violent convulsions that would not respond to treatment and that threatened not only her own life but the life of her unborn child.
    Meanwhile, my mother endured an excruciating labor resulting largely from the failure of her cervix to dilate. Intravenous injections of synthetic oxytocin initially did not induce sufficient contractions of the uterine muscles to allow her to squeeze me into the world.
    Natalie delivered first. Dr. MacDonald tried everything to save her—an endotracheal tube to assist her breathing, injections of anticonvulsants—but soaring blood pressure and convulsions led to a massive cerebral hemorrhage that killed her.
    Even as the umbilical cord was tied off and cut between the Beezo baby and his dead mother,
my
mother, exhausted but still struggling to expel me, suddenly and at last experienced cervical dilation.
    The Jimmy Tock