The Girls From Corona Del Mar (15 page)

“I was excited to be induced,” she said. “I was huge. I was like a house. It was the middle of winter, but I was sweating all the time. I was just like: Get this baby out of me.”

“Sure,” he said, squeezing her arm again.

“So we go in, and they start the induction drugs, and I go into labor pretty quickly. A couple of hours, really. And right away I ask for the epidural because it hurts. I had thought I could handle it because I normally have a really high pain threshold, but—no.”

“Right.”

“Jim was there, and he was cute, he was like, ‘Get the drugs! This is why we live in America, baby!’ ”

“I’ve always been curious—is the epidural just a nerve block or is there anything awesome in there?”

“Oh, there was definitely something awesome in there. Either that or they were giving it to me intravenously. I’m guessing fentanyl. Something like that.”

“So you got the good shit!”

“Yep,” Lorrie Ann said into the darkness. “I had the good shit.”

For a moment she just lay there, Arman’s arms around her. She wondered if Jim were looking down on her from heaven and if he would mind this man touching her, holding her in the dark of night as she told this story. Her instincts told her that Jim would hate it, that Jim would come back from the dead and charge into the room to stop it. But Jim wasn’t watching. Jim was gone.

“For about the first two hours, I was like: This is great. And then I started feeling really weird. I felt panicky, like my heart was racing, just this overwhelming feeling of wrongness. And then, even through
the epidural, pain started coming—pain like a knife. It felt like someone was sitting on my chest. I kept telling Jim: It hurts, it hurts. The next parts I don’t remember very well, but they turned up my epidural because I wouldn’t stop screaming. I remember the nurse rolling her eyes because she thought I was just being a baby. I kept saying: Something’s wrong, it hurts. Everyone kept saying: Yeah, it hurts—you’re having a baby. My labor had completely stalled and they were frustrated with me, I remember. I couldn’t breathe because that heavy feeling on my chest was getting worse and worse, like an elephant sitting down on me. And then … I passed out.”

“What happened?”

“Emergency C-section.”

“But why did you pass out?”

“My uterus just tore. And all the amniotic fluid started to leak out into my stomach cavity, and I guess I had a seizure.”

“But why did your uterus tear?”

“We don’t know.”

“Uteruses can just tear?”

“I guess so.”

There was silence, and then suddenly Lorrie Ann heard Arman sniffle. When she turned to look at him, she could see by the light on in the hall that he was crying. She was surprised. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No,” he said, wiping the few tears away with the back of his hand. “It just kills me: that nurse rolling her eyes at you while your uterus was splitting open.”

“She didn’t know,” Lorrie Ann said.

“She should have.”

“How could she have known?”

“They should have listened to you. They ignored you.”

“Everyone ignores a woman in labor,” she said.

There was silence again. Lorrie Ann was surprised at how defensive she felt. She couldn’t afford, emotionally, for Arman to take her side in this way. She couldn’t afford it because Jim hadn’t done it. It had never
occurred to Jim that everyone had ignored Lorrie Ann. That she had tried to tell them something was wrong, that an elephant was sitting on her chest, that her heart was racing. Jim had only been kind and never tried to make her feel bad for having a defective uterus that tore. But he had never, not even for a moment, suggested to her that she had been worth listening to, that she had been mistreated.

“What did the doctor say?” Arman asked.

“He said I was lucky,” Lorrie Ann said, hoping like hell Arman wouldn’t hear the quaver in her voice.

Then again, if he really wanted to cry, Arman could have just started doing a little bit of Internet research. The drug they gave Lorrie Ann to induce her labor was called Misoprostol. If Arman had Googled it, he would have seen that it was an oral medication for stomach ulcers that doctors had discovered also had a weird side effect of inducing labor if you stuck it up a woman’s vagina. Misoprostol was only eight dollars a dose; the next cheapest induction drug was almost two hundred dollars a dose. It wasn’t illegal to use Misoprostol; the FDA had approved it. For stomach ulcers. Taken orally. No one had studied exactly what it would do if you put it up a woman’s vagina, but it seemed to work great.

Arman wouldn’t have really found much online back when all this happened to Lorrie Ann. Doctors had just started experimenting with Misoprostol, and, anecdotally, it was a miracle drug. The best thing about Misoprostol was that it would bring on labor so hard and so fast that a woman could be induced at eight in the morning and the doctor could be home by three in the afternoon. “Let’s just get this over with,” doctors would say to women, and the women agreed: they wanted to get it over with too. They were scared. All they knew of labor was women screaming and almost dying in movies and on TV. All they wanted was to be safe, and safety was doing what the doctor said.

If he had looked into it later, when Zach was six, and when he first started banging Lorrie Ann, Arman would have found troubling indications
that Misoprostol had been linked to uterine rupture, especially in cases where the mother had had a previous cesarean. The uterus would contract so violently from the drug that it would literally be ripped apart inside the woman’s body. The babies often drowned to death inside their mother’s abdominal cavities.

But Lorrie Ann hadn’t had a previous C-section. What had happened?

It was the kind of puzzle that would have bothered Arman. He would have wanted to figure it out. God knows, I did.

Was it that Lorrie Ann’s doctor had given her four doses of 100 milligrams, when the standard dose was 25 milligrams? Or did she perhaps have a placental abruption or weakness that some careless ultrasound tech had missed? How big had the tears in her uterus even been? Had the complete hysterectomy the doctor performed during her C-section truly been necessary? Would things have turned out differently if anyone had actually listened to Lorrie Ann when she told them something was wrong, that there was a new pain? If the nurse with the My Little Pony eye shadow had been a bit better with those fetal monitors? If they had rushed her to surgery the moment she alerted them, would Zach have been born blue?

Lorrie Ann would say that no one could know the answer to that question and that it wasn’t worth asking anyway. But I say that it was fifty-seven minutes between the time she first told them something was wrong and the time the C-section was performed, that was what the log in her records said: fifty-seven minutes. And those fifty-seven minutes were what cost Zach his brain. Fifty-seven minutes of drowning in Lorrie Ann’s stomach. Fifty-seven minutes, during thirty-five of which Lorrie Ann was conscious and begging. Thirty-five minutes of rolling their eyes at her. Of telling her to calm down. Of counting off Lamaze breathing techniques for her. Of telling her to focus. Just focus. Calm down. Stop screaming. Stop screaming. Thirty-five minutes.

I would have suggested that Lorrie Ann sue, and would have offered to pay for the lawyers, if my preliminary research hadn’t already shown
me how fruitless Misoprostol lawsuits were. I did all this research in the years after I saw Lorrie Ann and Arman in the subsidized Costa Mesa apartment and she told me she’d had a complete hysterectomy. I hadn’t known before that her uterus had torn. Was it standard to remove a woman’s uterus in an emergency C-section? I started to look into it. I asked Lorrie Ann for her hospital records. I told her I was looking into getting some kind of compensation for Zach to help pay for his physical therapy. And in a way, I was.

But you couldn’t prove it was the Misoprostol that had caused the uterus to rupture. There wasn’t any science to establish a connection; no studies had been done; it was an ulcer medication. The doctors couldn’t be blamed for using an FDA-approved medication, even if its FDA approval was for the drug as used orally to treat stomach ulcers. There wasn’t any protocol in place since the drug was being used off-label, so you couldn’t even get doctors for using an inappropriate dosage.

And it’s true: everyone ignores a woman in labor.

This was just the way babies got born.

This was just the way women were hung, like meat, from hooks upon the wall.

When Lorrie Ann came back into the room, I slammed shut the drawer that hid the pregnancy test. I didn’t want to tell her I might be pregnant. I didn’t want to take the test in front of her, to find out yes or no, and then to have her ask, to have to tell her, what I was thinking, whether I thought: yes or no.

“So did I tell you about the Indians?” Lorrie Ann said.

“Indians?”

She swept past me to the table and resumed her place before her teacup. She looked phenomenally better. She had redone her braid and splashed water on her face. Her eyes were bright and sparkling.

“That’s the first part of the story,” Lorrie Ann said, “of how I lost Zach. By the way, I love the plants in your bathroom.”

“Thank you,” I said, coming to sit at the table with her, as the understanding of what she had said settled inside me like a heavy stone. So this was the Story of How I Lost Zach. I found that my lungs would not inflate fully.

“So when my mother came out of her coma, she claimed she had had a vision.”

“A vision?”

“A vision about the genocide of the Native Americans.”

“Like a dream? Is there a difference between a vision and a dream?”

Lorrie Ann sighed. “I don’t know,” she said, “but my mother got all fired up about the injustice of what we did to the Native Americans. She told me parts of it, the dream. She had some kind of guide, an Indian that, like, I don’t know, showed her all of history? She claims to have been adopted by the Blackfoot tribe in her dream. It’s—none of this matters, it’s just something that happens with traumatic brain injury. The pressure from the swelling—it made her brain fire in all sorts of weird ways.”

“But after she came out of the coma? Was she okay?”

“Well. Yes and no. I mean, she wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there or anything, but she became convinced that the reason Zach was born blue was because our ancestors had participated in the genocide. Cause and effect. Karma. Whatever you want to call it, like history is some big Rube Goldberg machine. So now we had to go around doing good works in order to lift the curse off our family.”

“This is just so weird,” I said.

“Actually, apparently lots and lots of people have visions about the Native American genocide. They have a Web forum. She goes on there all the time. She’s obsessed.”

“Holy fuck,” I said, setting down my empty teacup.

“I know,” Lorrie Ann said, letting a trill of laughter escape. The drugs were making her feel good, I could tell. She was enjoying talking, leaning toward me. Her pupils were tiny. “She can’t work anymore. Her old work wouldn’t hire her back after the accident.”

“Just because of the Indians?” Lor’s happiness was eerie, as though she were actually enjoying her mother’s misfortune.

“They say she can’t be trusted around children,” Lorrie Ann said, waving her hand dismissively. “That part’s bunk. I think she’d be fine around kids. The worst she would do is tell them about Indians being slaughtered. But because of stuff at the hospital, she had to see a shrink and then Social Security and on and on, and now she’s in the system as being mentally disabled. She bit a nurse.”

“She bit a nurse?!”

“Yeah, when she first woke up. She claims not to remember biting the nurse.”

“It’s totally impossible for me to imagine your mother biting a nurse,” I said. Underneath my almost overdone exclamations of surprise was a strange, furtive seed of doubt: What if Lorrie Ann were making all of this up?

“Honestly, I suspect the nurse provoked her in some way.”

“And there are Web forums for these people—for people who have visions about Native Americans?”

“Oh yeah,” Lor said. “Can I have some water? Or juice? Do you have juice? There’s a ton of them.”

“I have seltzer.” I got up to pour her some from the fridge. All the hairs on the backs of my arms were standing up.

“Not a ton of Native Americans, obviously. But a ton of people who become obsessed with them, or haunted by them. I mean, not any kind of large-scale movement or anything. But more than you’d think. At least hundreds of them.”

“And so do you know why she bit the nurse?”

“It’s unclear,” Lorrie Ann said, using both hands to accept the glass of seltzer, like a child. “My mom was in a lot of distress, and she was shouting things about there being blood on the nurse’s hands, and the nurse was trying to hold her down, so she could be strapped to the bed because she was thrashing, and I guess my mom bit her.”

This didn’t seem terribly unreasonable to me. No disoriented person
likes to be held down so they can be strapped to a bed. “Still,” I said, “you’d think they would have experience with things like that. I hope the nurse didn’t take it personally.”

“Actually, the nurse was black, and for some reason she got really upset with the whole thing. She yelled at me about it, and what she was most upset about was being accused of killing the Native Americans. My mom was raving, and I guess she kept calling the nurse a white devil, which really freaked the nurse the fuck out. ‘My people didn’t have anything to do with that,’ she kept saying. And she felt it was unfair that my mother’s anger was centered on the genocide instead of on slavery or any of the other awful things white people did.”

“So then Dana came to live with you.”

“Exactly.”

“And how was that?”

Lor paused, and her eyebrows flared as she considered her teacup. “It was bizarre,” she said finally. “The whole last year has been fucking bizarre.”

CHAPTER TEN