Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [6]
“Those cloths you tore, dammit. We’re nowhere near done here yet.”
“You hung them on the door handle,” someone in the crowd said.
“Oh, yes,” said the doctor.
He took one cloth, leaned in, and tied it around the baby’s cord. For all the blunt, clumsy look of his fingers, he did seem to know what he was doing. “After the ball is over,” he sang in his beard-blurred voice. While he was knotting the second cloth, a faraway cry started up. It sounded like an extension of the baby’s cry—equally thin, watery-sounding in the wind. Then it separated and grew more piercing. “The ambulance!” Leon said. “I hear the ambulance, Emily.”
“Send it back,” Emily said.
“They’re going to take you to the hospital, honey. You’re going to be all right now.”
“But it’s over! Do I have to go?” she asked the doctor.
“Certainly,” he said. He stepped back to admire his knots, which looked something like the little cloth bows on a kite tail. “Actually,” he said, “they’re coming in the nick of time. I have nothing to cut the cord with.”
“You could use my Swiss Army officer’s knife,” she told him. “It’s in my purse. It’s the Woodsman style, with a scissors blade.”
“Remarkable,” said the doctor, and he rocked on his heels, beaming down at her. His teeth seemed very large and yellow behind the tangled beard.
The siren drew closer. A spinning red light wove through the traffic, and the ambulance screeched to a halt beside the doctor’s car. Two men in white leaped out. “Where is she?” one asked.
“Here we are,” the doctor called.
The men flung open the back doors of the ambulance and brought a stretcher crashing to the street—a wheeled bed, too long and narrow, like a coffin, with too much chrome. Emily struggled to a sitting position. The baby stopped in mid-cry, as if shocked. “Do I have to do this?” Emily asked the doctor. And while the attendants were helping her out of the car (chairing her onto the stretcher, newspapers and all), she kept her face turned toward the doctor and waited to be rescued. “Doctor? I can’t stand hospitals! Do I have to go?”
“Of course,” the doctor told her. He stooped for her purse and laid it on the stretcher.
“Is Leon coming too?”
“Certainly he’s coming.”
“Are you?”
“Me? Oh.”
“Best if you would, Doc,” the driver told him, unfolding a sheet over Emily.
“Well, if you like,” the doctor said.
He closed his car door and followed the stretcher into the ambulance. There was another stretcher, empty, next to Emily’s. He and Leon sat on it—both of them gingerly, just on the edge, with their knees jutting out. “Pretty fancy,” the doctor said to Leon. He meant, presumably, the interior of the ambulance: the deeply carpeted floor, the gleaming tanks and gauges. When the men slammed the doors shut, there was a sudden, luxurious silence. The street noises faded, and through the tinted windows the people on the sidewalk seemed as soundless and slow-moving as creatures on the ocean floor. They slid away. A café and a pawnshop glided past. Even the siren was muffled, like something on an old-fashioned radio.
“How’re you feeling?” the doctor asked Emily.
“Fine,” she said. She lay still, in a tangle of loosened braids. The baby stared severely at the ceiling.
“We really appreciate all you’ve done,” Leon told the doctor.
“It was nothing,” said the doctor, turning down the corners of his mouth. He seemed displeased.
“If Emily didn’t have this thing about hospitals, we’d have made our arrangements sooner, I guess. But the baby wasn’t due for another couple of weeks. We just kept putting it off.”
“And I suppose you were on the move so much,” the doctor said.
“No, no—”
“But the style of your lives: I don’t imagine you can plan very far ahead.”
“You have the wrong idea about us,” Emily said.
Flattened on the stretcher, with the crisp sheet covering the newspapers and her sodden skirt, Emily seemed untouched, somehow—pristine and remote, with her gaze turned inward. “You think we’re some