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By Root 755 0

said, “but I don’t remember it being this hard.” Then she laughed a little and said, “That’s the whole point, right? You don’t remember, because if you did remember no one would ever have kids again and then what would happen? That would be the end of everything.” It was one thirty. It was two. It was three. No calls were returned. Marina delivered two other babies while the woman waited and both of the births were so easy they hadn’t needed a doctor at all. Women for the most part knew how to push out an infant. Even when they didn’t know there was no stopping them. Marina went back to check on the woman again. The doctor was terrified, the patient was patient. Back in the days when Marina played this film in her head every hour, waking and sleeping, this was the part she watched most carefully. She slowed down the tape to a crawl. She looked at every frame separately. She was not terrified that the patient would die or that she would lose the baby, she was terrified that she was doing something wrong in the eyes of Dr. Swenson. She was thinking that if she had followed instructions and waited another fifteen minutes to call the first time then none of this would be happening. Surely she had learned her lesson now. Surely Dr. Swenson was almost there. The nurses understood all of this. Even as they were prepping the patient for surgery and calling the anesthesiologist to wake him up they were saying, We’re just getting things ready for Dr. Swenson so she can walk right in. Marina should have called another doctor but she never even thought of it. She had stretched the time out too far trying to cover herself. If she hadn’t waited so long, if she hadn’t waited until everything was crashing and there was no other choice but to go ahead, she would have taken more time.

The plane dropped sharply and then righted itself. It was an air pocket, a blip, but for a split second every person on the plane heard the same voice in their head, This is it. The man in the suit grabbed her wrist, but by the time his hand was on her arm it was over, forgotten, everything was fine. “Did you feel that?” he said.

She hadn’t started in the right place. The deeper truth of the story was someplace years before this, at the beginning of her residency, or in medical school that first day of class when she saw Dr. Swenson down in the pit of the lecture hall. There were no words for how much she admired her, her intelligence, her abilities as a doctor. All of the students did. In every moment Dr. Swenson’s students were eager and anxious. She didn’t bother to learn their names and yet they lived their lives to the letter of her law. She was harder on the women in the group. She would tell them stories of her own days in medical school and how when she came along the men knit their arms together to keep her out. They made a human barricade against her, they kicked at her when she climbed over them, and now all the women were just walking through, no understanding or appreciation for the work that had been done for them. It wasn’t that Marina had ever wanted to be like her, it wasn’t in her. She had just wanted to see if she was capable of spending five years of her life living up to Dr. Swenson’s standards, and she wasn’t. All of a sudden she felt drunk. Somewhere very far away she could feel the presence of a man beside her. He had let her go. She could never have told this story to Anders, even if it would have put him on his guard, even if that might have been the thing to save his life. He had three sons of his own, after all. The skin of the patient’s belly was stretched to the point of startling thinness, like a balloon that had been blown up too far. Marina remembered there was a sheen to it. She cut the skin, dug through the fat for the fascia. She had thought there was no time left. Her hands were working at triple speed, and there was the uterus. She thought that she was saving the baby’s life because she was so fast, but the instant she realized he was occiput posterior, looking straight up, the blade had caught his head right of center