Life Expectancy Read Online Free PDF Page B

none yet crying. An enormous view window occupied the better part of one long wall, but no proud fathers or grandparents were currently standing on the other side of it.
        With the infants were two creche nurses. They had heard the shouting, then the shot, and they were more receptive to Charlene's advice than Lois had been.
        Presciently, Nurse Coleman assured them the gunman wouldn't hurt the babies but warned he would surely kill every member of the hospital staff that he could find.
        Nevertheless, before fleeing, each nurse scooped up an infant-and fretted about those they were forced to leave behind. Frightened by a second shot, they followed Charlene through a door beside the view window, out of the maternity ward into the main corridor.
        The three, with their charges, took refuge in a room where an elderly man slept on unaware.
        A low-wattage night-light did little to press back the gloom, and the flickering storm at the window only made the shadows jitter with in sectile energy.
        Quiet, hardly daring to breathe, the three nurses huddled together until Charlene heard sirens in the distance. This welcome wail drew her to the window, which provided a view of the parking lot in front of the hospital; she hoped to see police cars.
        Instead, from that second-story room, she saw Beezo with his baby, crossing the rain-washed blacktop. He looked, she said, like a figure in a foul dream, scuttling and strange, like something you might see on the night that the world ended and cracks opened in the foundations of the earth to let loose the angry legions of the damned.
        Charlene is a transplanted Mississippian and a Baptist whose soul is filled with the poetry of the South.
        Beezo had parked at such a distance that through the screen of rain and under the yellow pall of the sodium-vapor lamps, the make, model, and true color of his car could not be discerned. Charlene watched him drive away, hoping the police would intercept him before he reached the nearby county road, but his taillights dwindled into the drizzling darkness.
        With the threat removed, she returned to the delivery room just as Dad's thoughts were flashing from the Lindbergh baby tragedy to Rum-pelstiltskin to Tarzan raised by apes, in time to assure him that I had not been kidnapped by a homicidal clown.
        Later my father would confirm that the minute of my birth, my length, and my weight precisely fulfilled the predictions made by my grandfather on his deathbed. His first proof, however, that the events in the intensive care unit were not just extraordinary but supernatural came when, as my mother held me, he folded back the receiving blanket, exposing my feet, and found that my toes were fused as Josef had predicted.
        "Syndactyly," Dad said.
        "It can be fixed," Charlene assured him. Then her eyes widened with surprise. "How do you know such a doctorish word?"
        My father only repeated, "Syndactyly," as he gently, lovingly, and with amazement fingered my fused toes.
        Syndactyly is not merely the name of the affliction with which I was born but also the theme of my life for thirty years now. Things often prove to be fused in unanticipated ways. Moments separated by many years are unexpectedly joined, as if the space-time continuum has been folded by some power with either a peculiar sense of humor or an agenda arguably worthwhile but so complex as to be mystifying. People unknown to one another discover that they are bonded by fate as completely as two toes sharing a single sheath of skin.
        Surgeons repaired my feet so long ago that I have no slightest memory of the procedures. I walk, I run when I must, I dance but not well.
        With all due respect for the memory of Dr. Ferris MacDonald, I never became a football hero and never wished to be one. My family has never had an interest in sports.
        We are fans, instead, of puffs,