Obstetrix(19)

“Oh, he finds ways. Sometimes porn, sometimes impure thoughts.”

I wondered if the adults here were so sheltered that none of them had the same thought I did, that possibly Toby’s “impure thoughts” involved a sexual fetish for the sort of punishment he was volunteering for. But if he had “found ways” to look at porn, did that mean he had a hidden phone? Maybe they all had phones tucked away. Maybe I could find one.



* * *



THE WORD OBSTETRICS COMES from the Latin word obstetrix, which means midwife. Literally it means “stands opposite to,” and references the person who stands opposite to the woman giving birth. (Although, hilariously, the same root word turned into obstacle, and I once had a grumpy patient who pointed this out. She was not having a good time that day, although we managed to avoid a C-section and she went home with a healthy baby.)

When I did my residency, back in the mists of time (by which I mean the late 1990s), one of the attending physicians who trained me was a white-haired older doctor who’d seen a whole range of birthing practices come and go. He liked to tell residents that obstetrics was the science of waiting. Most of the time, if you just wait for the cervix and uterus to do their jobs, things go better than they would if you put your oar in. You need to pay attention, because sometimes your skills are needed very suddenly, but he believed that the most critical skill for a good obstetrician was patience. The ability to just stand opposite to, no more and no less.

I was actually pretty good at waiting when a patient was in labor. But there was a difference between saying things to patients like “I’m not really the one in charge here, the baby is” and really, truly not being the one in charge here. Waiting for a chance to escape was a completely different sort of patience, and not something I felt particularly skilled at.

In The Onyx Dagger, the escape was assisted by a telepathic cat, but still required patience because he was not initially a friendly cat. You could usually recognize a telepathic cat in the world of the book because they had heterochromatic eyes; the cat Deirdre spotted was missing an eye, so she couldn’t be sure, and he was feral and wouldn’t come within touching distance. She’d saved morsels of food to tempt him, and he had come closer, finally rubbing against her offered hand. The physical contact let her confirm her guess.

The cat had to fully trust her before she could look out through the cat’s eyes and know when the guards were distracted, asleep, or gone, though, and that took days; they were being marched toward the mines, so there was a deadline, and she couldn’t let herself push things with the cat too quickly or the cat would run away. The chance had come at nearly the last possible moment; the cat had not only allowed Deirdre to look through his eyes but had taken suggestions for things that would create a distraction, which was good because logically the guards would only get more vigilant as they got closer to the mines and their prisoners would be more desperate to escape.

The cat had a name, in the book, but it was one of those names with lots of consonants and no vowels—Rrrtrxrl or something like that—and I couldn’t remember it. Back in the pre-audiobook era, you could have a name that was just fully unpronounceable. Reading the book, I’d called him Retrixeral in my head, but that was definitely not correct.

I dropped off that night thinking about Retrixeral and had another nightmare, but at least this time it was your garden-variety obstetrician’s nightmare: I was in a casino and someone had gotten a jackpot with a slot machine, and now babies were shooting out and I was trying to catch them and dropping them. I woke up filled with anxiety and then thought about the dream and laughed with relief. A slot machine full of newborn babies, ridiculous. I rolled over and thought about cats again until I’d dropped back off.





CHAPTER 4




SATURDAY WAS A CLINIC day, but a different sort of clinic day: instead of examining pregnant women, we mostly examined children.

I am not a pediatrician. Obstetricians obviously get to see a lot of babies, and a certain number of older children, but we are not the ones responsible for babies once they’re separated from their mothers. If you have me look into a toddler’s ear with an otoscope, I can tell you if it’s infected, of course, but I have no skill in getting wiggly little kids to hold still long enough that I can have a look. Nor do I know much about the normal development of children. But I didn’t want to imply that I thought they ought to go kidnap themselves a pediatrician, so I examined the children and did the best I could at identifying problems that needed some sort of intervention.

It was not surprising that a cult that beat adults also routinely physically punished children. One of the boys, a little freckled guy with a spiky blond buzz cut, had multiple welts, some half healed and some fresh. I couldn’t tell what he’d been hit with. He was otherwise healthy, and his sister, a toddler, didn’t have any contusions that didn’t look like the result of normal tumbles. His mother looked exhausted in a way that parenting young children didn’t explain.

I thought about my pediatrician friend Lori, and whether she’d ever given me advice that fit this particular situation. Pediatricians were trained to screen mothers for postnatal depression; surely they also at least referred mothers who were clearly unhealthy in other ways. “I’m worried about you,” I said, bluntly. “Are you getting enough sleep?”