Raney & Levine (2 page)

2


D
o stalkers ever quit?

Jill Raney saw the frightening sign too. From where she
stood, holding Jesse in his blue blanket by the neonatal window, she peered
down at the jumping placard.
SPAWN OF THE DEVIL
, it screamed in angry,
painted letters dripping red.

Today was the day of Madison Memorial’s big announcement.
That Jesse was
here
, born, and oh, such frenzy down there by the
entrance. A photo of Jesse with a smiling nurse holding him was all over
cyberspace and the world’s papers.

Jill had dreaded this day.

He weighed barely eight pounds. Hard to believe he was the
cause of the chaos five floors below. He slept happily, his tiny fist curled to
his cheek as the reporters, gawkers, thrilled advocates, and hollering
protesters surged behind the cop line holding them back.

“Déjà vu, huh?” David came to whisper over Jill’s shoulder.
He sounded tired. Tense too.

Jill didn’t answer. She was feeling bad, almost crying bad.
Her eyes welled and the corners of her mouth turned down as she thought,
I
love this baby
. She had named him Jesse, and for now that’s what they were
calling him.

For now
… The words came back to her, and she felt a
worse downpress of pain. Guilt too, and a trembly feeling of being terribly
alone.

Last night she and David had their first argument.

It was four o’clock on the second Monday in October. Sixteen
days after they’d lifted Jesse, wet with amniotic-like fluid, from the silicone
cylinder a crazy genius had created for him to serve as a man-made uterus. The
media was going nuts because today, after two plus weeks of monitoring him in
the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, world-famous Madison Memorial Hospital was
showing him to the world. This miracle child who wasn’t just any IVF baby,
started in a Petri dish and transferred to a woman’s body.

No, Jesse was the astonishing fetus Jill had discovered last
July in a hidden lab, in what at first blink had looked like a rounded fish
tank. ARTIFICIAL WOMB, blared headlines as the news hit; DESIGNER BABY, EMBRYO
FARM and BRAVE NEW WORLD. Creepy blurry pictures of him, floating in his
cylinder at six months gestation, were snapped by staff rushing in to the
nearly dark attic where Jill had found him.

And almost died. David too. They were both almost killed.

She blinked; for an instant saw herself again bloodied and
screaming and David hauling her back to safety. Trauma had bonded them, fast.
Had it happened too fast?

She still felt tense with him, but the awful sign below made
her speak.

“See that one?” she said faintly, tipping her chin down to
the crowd, to the
SPAWN OF THE DEVIL
sign.

The guy holding the sign had his megaphone turned up;
through the glass they could hear him screaming “…the arrogance of taking the
place of the Creator!
That child up there is evil!
”

David let out a breath. “Yep,” he said softly. “Nice, huh?
Just one religious nut.”

She turned her head toward him. “About last night…”

“It’s okay. We’ll talk later.”

He stepped closer, nuzzled the back of her neck. She had her
long, dark hair up in a ponytail. His white-jacketed chest warmed her back in
its thin scrub top. She closed her eyes for a second.

Then looked out again, hugging Jesse.

“The cops are taping?”

“You know it. And hospital security.”

It didn’t comfort her. Last July an army of cops and
security hadn’t kept a killer from Jesse. After
that
crisis came three
months of relative quiet…and now, suddenly, the scene down there was back…like
last July’s sweltering crowds when Jesse’s discovery lit its first firestorm.
Had people saved their same signs? THANK YOU MADISON MEMORIAL FOR OUR FAMILY
jostled next to IVF IMMORAL, and ADOPT AN EMBRYO. The only difference now was,
the leaves were turning. It was autumn and the days were shorter. Jill raised
her gaze. Beyond the surging mess of disagreeing humanity glowed the first
bright dabs of gold and orange, tinted even brighter by the setting sun…

“Doctor Levine?”

“Damn,” David whispered. “How many more?”

“Never ending,” she groaned back.

He touched her arm and went back to today’s bunch of
researchers, white-coated and intense, grouped scribbling and conferring around
Jesse’s empty isolette. Three days ago the hospital had started allowing
excited researchers in in small groups. Jill and David were obstetricians, not
pediatricians, but the hospital had assigned them to speak with researchers
because they’d seen and
interacted
with this child since three months
before his birth.

Just two hours each afternoon, but it was getting old. The
same astonished questions asked and answered, over and over. Couldn’t they just
all wait for the hospital’s Chief of Pediatrics et al to write their damn paper
and get it online?

No. They begged and besieged, just had to see the babe. Poke
him and prod him and study his normal chart notes for themselves. Miraculous!
Lungs…heart…every organ and neurological response normal!
Gestated nine
months outside a woman’s body!

Jill glanced briefly back at them. Today, three
neonatologists from Texas, a pediatric neurologist from Boston, and a pediatric
hematologist from London.

Drone…drone…
Jill tuned them out. Tuned out David
too, answering the same bleeping questions as yesterday and the day before. She
was back to looking out the window, thinking not for the first time that he was
a much nicer person. She was rash and impatient. He was an explainer, a patient
teacher who rarely had to show his tough side…which was why he was OB’s third
year resident charged with teaching younger residents and Jill’s fellow
interns.

He was her boss, they slept together, and she loved him…
say
it
…but it led to some interesting minor wrangling.

Not that last night was minor.

“I want to adopt him!” trilled the blond pediatric
neurologist (“Corinne! Call me Reenie!”), who wore too much perfume. Jill made
a face that no one saw, then heard an annoyed,
“Git in line
.”

Tricia!

Chubby-cheeked, bespectacled Tricia Donovan, fellow intern
and Jill’s best friend since med school, had just entered the NICU from the
connecting regular nursery; was heading for Jill and waving to David.

His handsome face split into a grin. “Hey Trish! How’d the
delivery go? The twins throw you?”

“Nah. Sam caught one and I caught the other. Slid right down
da chute.”

David grinned again and went back to the white coats.
Tricia, reaching Jill, whispered, “Admiring the mad cow herd down there?”

“There’s a sign-”

“Saw it. Came to check your fever chart. What’s Jesse doing
out of bed?”

“Blondie back there used a cold stethoscope on him. He
started screaming. I scooped him out and calmed him down.”

“Lemme guess. She researches and writes papers more than she
handles babies.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She has donkey teeth.”

David’s voice was starting to sound hoarse, so Tricia turned
to answer the next question for him.

“Yaaas, Jesse grinned and
waved
at us at twenty-four
weeks gestation. Or flopped his hands, I guess you’d call it.” She stepped
closer to them, flopping her hands to show how hands flopped. “Did
something
like a wave.”

“You saw him too?” asked one of the Texas neonatologists, a
thin, older man behind thick glasses.

“Several of us visited him regularly.” Tricia glanced at
Jill, approaching too with Jesse. “When he wasn’t asleep, we’d hug his cylinder
and goof around and play music for him. He likes Beethoven.”

“Beethoven,” Texas repeated solemnly.

Jill said, “We tried the Stones, Clapton, ‘Twist and Shout.’
They made him agitated. But Beethoven - he’d do swimmy, dancing little motions
to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, um-”

“Third Movement,” Tricia said. “We just stumbled onto it.
It’s really happy music.” She switched tacks. “What’s really amazing is, till
now we – all of us – have only been able to see fetuses in ultrasounds. This
little guy we really
watched develop.
Other staff members did too.”

“You took pictures?” a Texas white coat asked.

“Yes,” Jill said. “They’re in that folder we gave you.
They’re not being released to the media, but they’ll be in a paper the OB and
Pediatrics Departments are preparing together.” She started to put
still-sleeping Jesse into his isolette.

David said, “Aw, lemme hold him.” She handed the
blue-blanketed bundle to him and he cradled the infant, used his free right
hand to pat the baby’s wisps of light brown hair.

Jill watched, feeling bereft, feeling Jesse’s warmth leave
her arms. It was always a wrench, separating from him.

A second Texas neonatologist said, “But he isn’t waving and
responding
now
. He’s mostly sleeping like any newborn.”

“His hemoglobin’s adjusting,” David said, and the London
pediatric hematologist nodded eagerly. He wore a flowered tie, Nike running
shoes, and was younger than the Texas trio.

“Before birth,” he said in his elegant British tones, “fetal
blood absorbs oxygen more readily than ours because there’s less oxygen in the
womb, and this tyke’s cylinder apparently duplicated the womb environment
perfectly. Now he has to convert to adult-type hemoglobin like any newborn. It
takes three months for a complete fetal hemoglobin turnover.”

“Plus,
everything’s
growing,” said blond Corinne
emotionally. “Every cell and organ in his little body. That takes energy.
Another reason why newborns sleep so much.” A hesitation. “Will you keep us
updated on his development?
The first month especially?”

Jill and Tricia traded looks. Saw Blondie gazing dewy-eyed
at David. No surprise. He was gorgeous. Tall, rugged-looking, penetrating dark
blue eyes, dark hair that kept falling over his brow.

And like everyone else, Blondie had seen him in news chopper
footage shoot a killer dead on a roof. Now he was cuddling an infant, stroking
the little cheek with his index finger. What woman wouldn’t get all
dreamy-eyed?

“He’s going to be
absolutely
amazing,” Blondie
crooned.

David shrugged. “Or maybe he’ll just be a regular kid.”

Tricia rolled her eyes, and Jill gave the woman a sour look.
Gestured
enough of this
, and they went back to the window.

The scary sign was still down there, its owner still
hollering into his megaphone.

“He’s gonna lose his voice,” Tricia whispered. “Be hoarse
for a year.”

“Is insulin findable at autopsy?” Jill asked.

“Yes!” Tricia hissed low. “And you’re not going to sneak up
and jab him dead.”

“What about morphine?”

“You know it is.” Tricia glanced up at her tall, slender
friend, now frowning. “Something I gotta ask. At breakfast and rounds you were
all tight-lipped and barely spoke to David. Wassup?”

“We had words last night.”

“A whole three months before your first ‘words?’
I
should
have such a relationship. I should have
any
relationship.” Tricia had
been trying to lose weight lately. It made her cranky.

Jill blew air out her cheeks.

“I’m also just so damned tired of being afraid,” she
breathed. “Of jumping at every shadow or threatening creep.” She hesitated,
then her face crumpled as she looked at Tricia. “It’s suddenly like last July
again. The nut jobs are back.”

Tricia glanced over at the bored security guard the hospital
had belatedly put
inside
the NICU, then looked back as if to say, See?

No sale. “And when Jesse leaves the hospital?” Jill’s voice
was despondent. “Grows up or tries to?”

Tricia got it, fell silent, and Jill seemed to sink into a
fit of abstraction. Behind them, the voices now droned about Clifford Arnett,
M.D., PhD, former second-in-command of the hospital’s Genetic Counseling
Committee, and world famous in reproductive endocrinology and infertility
research.

Also surprise crazy genius who had built Jesse’s cylinder
and put him in it, done other research both stunning and shocking.

Dead now. Fallen from the same roof on which David had
fought him and shot to death his murdering assistant.

A Texas voice: “Immeasurable tragedy. Brains and talent like
that...”

London: “But he started out nobly?”

David: “So it seems. He wanted to increase immunity, delete
inherited disease, and prolong life. His notes say he could snip cystic
fibrosis and multiple sclerosis right out of the embryonic DNA. He didn’t say
how.”

“He
must
have kept further lab notes.” Corinne’s
voice.

“Somewhere. We’re still looking. He worked in an attic with
a million nooks and crannies. Workmen have pulled it apart, and his regular
lab-”

“Excuse me?” Jill had stepped back to them. “If you don’t
need me,” she told David, “I’ll be moving along.”

“Where to?” His brow raised. He was still holding Jesse.

Tricia sidled up and said, “I’ll bet she wants to go assault
that religious nut with the sign-“ and got a quick look from Jill:
Don’t.

Too late. David handed Jesse to Tricia, explaining the SPAWN
OF THE DEVIL sign. The others shook their heads, looked dismayed.

“Whackos,” said one of the Texas Three. “We’ve got lots of
‘em.”

“Catholics don’t even like IVF,” Corinne said. “But I’m
Protestant. My pastor says God gave doctors the wisdom and ability to help
people.”

The researchers thanked Jill as she headed out. To her
annoyance David was at her heels, with Tricia back holding Jesse and explaining
to London in his flowered tie why Jesse didn’t seem to like Clapton or the
Stones.