Obstetrix(6)

Once everyone was assembled, a bearded man rose. He looked older than Brandon or Sarah, probably around my age, and his beard was streaked with gray. When he stood, everyone got abruptly quiet. “Heavenly Father,” he said. “We thank you for this fine food, and the community to eat it with. We thank you that Brother Brandon and Sister Sarah’s quest did prosper, that you saw fit to allow this. Bless our new doctor, bless our community, we ask this in the name of Christ our Lord, amen.” He then nodded in our direction. Sarah’s face was bright and beaming. And then he sat, which turned out to be the cue for us to go get our food at the buffet. It was, in fact, lasagna, big trays of it, along with a salad of shredded iceberg lettuce and little bits of carrot. Someone was serving food: I was given a filled plate, but a lot of it was undressed iceberg lettuce. The lasagna was bland, but I had nonetheless eaten all of it even before the whole hall was done getting their food. I was hoping I’d be allowed seconds, but none were available. There was dessert: a small slice of carrot cake.

As I scraped the last of the frosting off my plate, I saw Sarah having some sort of whispered conference with some of the other women. She broke away and came over to me with a bright smile. “A baby’s coming tonight,” she told me. “Why don’t you join me and the mother at our hospital?”



* * *



THE “HOSPITAL” WAS ANOTHER separate building. Larger than my “house,” smaller than the dining hall, it had a bed for the laboring mother, two chairs, and a second bed, pushed up against the wall, that Sarah said was for me, if I wanted a nap. “Because labor can take a long time.”

I washed my hands, more out of habit than out of a plan to do anything, and sat down. “What’s your training?” I asked Sarah.

“I’m a midwife,” she said.

“Are you a CNM?” When she’d pretended to interview me, she hadn’t presented herself as a certified nurse-midwife, but the whole interview was a ruse, anyway.

There was a fraction of hesitation before she said, “I’m an RN with midwifery training, but not a CNM.” The hesitation made me think she was lying about something, or hiding something, and I wondered what. Was she not really an RN? Had she not had any midwifery training? Maybe she’d been an RN, and had her license taken away. Given that she was a cult member who’d committed a kidnapping, anything was possible.

The laboring woman said, “Sister Sarah is a good nurse and a good midwife, but she can’t do a C-section.”

“Do you expect to need a C-section?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “Sister Joy’s going to need one, though.”

I blinked at her for a moment and then said, “You do realize I was kidnapped, yes?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, serenely. “We needed a doctor really badly, you see. Because of Sister Joy. She’s not due for another month and a half. I wasn’t expecting a doctor for my birth, but I guess li’l acorn here wanted to be properly attended, since he waited.”

“What do you expect I’m going to do for you, under the circumstances?”

“Absolutely nothing, Dr. Elizabeth! I’m an old hand at this. You can just take a nap over there while I birth this baby.”

I did not nap, at least not right away. After that long drugged ride, I felt exhausted but not sleepy. I looked around the “hospital” instead, peering into cabinets and examining the equipment. “The narcotics are in that one,” Sarah said, and held up a key. “I can show you what we’ve got, if you’re curious.”

I nodded. She got up from the bed, where she’d been rubbing the laboring woman’s back, and unlocked the cabinet. Rows and rows of vials of clinical-grade morphine and fentanyl. “How much do you go through?” I asked, lightly.

She glanced at me, then away, her face reddening slightly. “We had an opportunity to stock up.”

Locked up with the narcotics were two doses of methotrexate, which can be used to end a pregnancy but is particularly recommended for ectopic pregnancies. I let out a tiny huff of dark amusement when I saw that. Ectopic pregnancies got brought up at my trial, by the prosecution, as an example of the sort of abortion they would not prosecute for. On the bottom shelf: bupivacaine, which is the standard anesthetic used for spinal anesthesia.

Over on the bed, the laboring woman let out a low groan and then said, “This is going a lot faster than the last one.”

From another cabinet, Sarah fetched an aluminum tank of nitrous oxide, assembled it with a mask, and handed it to the laboring woman. I’d heard of people using nitrous oxide for pain relief in labor, but I’d never actually seen it done. Women at the Minot hospital who wanted pain relief generally got epidurals.

I poked around through the rest of the cabinets while she rested between contractions. They had antibiotics, antiemetics, steroids, Pitocin. Bright lights that could be brought out and set up; sheets that smelled of bleach and disinfectant; Hibiclens, an autoclave, surgical instruments, an Ambu bag. Everything but the obstetrician, basically. I wondered how much of this they stole, how much they’d ordered. How much came from a legitimate medical supply house and how much from Amazon. Or Wish.

The woman groaned again, breathed in some of the nitrous, then let out a different noise, sort of a giggle, sort of a sigh. Well, they did call it laughing gas. She groaned again. I was pretty sure she was right, the labor was progressing quickly. She had the look of a woman in transition labor, the most painful part.