“Very well,” Mrs. Hargrave said.
“I’ll suggest it to her. But as a physician, she might be resistant to such an idea.”
With the matter decided, Dr. Wingate moved to the door and opened it for Mrs. Hargrave.
“Speaking of Rebecca Ziegler,” said Mrs. Hargrave, “I trust she’s being well taken care of?”
“She’s reading her records as we speak,” Dr. Wingate said, following Mrs. Hargrave into the hallway.
“Unfortunately, it will be upsetting for her.”
“I can well imagine,” Mrs. Hargrave said.
March 19,1990
11:37 A.M.
Dorothy Finklestein hurried under the overhead walkway and entered the brick courtyard of the Women’s Clinic. As usual, she was late. She was always late. Her appointment for her annual exam had been scheduled for eleven-fifteen.
A sudden gust of wind caught the edge of her hat and lifted the brim. She reached up just in time to prevent the hat from sailing off her head. At the same time, something above caught her eye.
A high-heeled shoe was plummeting toward her. It landed near her, falling into a planter filled with rhododendrons..
Despite her haste, Dorothy stopped as her eye traveled upward, tracing the shoe’s trajectory. At the very top story of the Women’s Clinic, six floors up, her gaze became transfixed by what looked like a woman sitting on a window ledge, her legs dangling over, her head tilted down as if she were studying the pavement below. Dorothy blinked, hoping her eyes were deceiving her, but the image remained: it wasn’t her imagination, it was a woman on the ledge-a young woman!
Dorothy’s blood ran cold as she watched as the woman seemed to inch forward, then pitch headfirst in a slow somersault. The woman fell like a life-sized doll, picking up speed as she passed each successive floor. She landed in the same planter as her shoe, hitting with a dull thump like a heavy book dropped flat on a thick rug.
Dorothy winced em pathetically as if her own body had suffered the fall. Then she screamed as the reality sank in. Pulling herself together, she ran toward the planter without any idea of what she would do. As a buyer for a large Boston department store, she had scant training in emergency first aid, although she had attended a CPR course in college.
A few passersby responded to Dorothy’s scream. After recovering from their initial shock, several followed her to the planter.
Someone else ducked back into the clinic to sound an alarm.
Arriving at the edge of the planter, Dorothy stared down in horror. The woman was on her back. Her eyes were open and they stared skyward, focused on nothing. Not knowing what else to do, Dorothy bent down in the bushes and started to give mouth-to mouth resuscitation. It was apparent to her that the woman was not breathing. She blew into the woman’s mouth several times, but she had to stop. Turning her head, she vomited her coffee break blueberry muffin. By then, a doctor in a crisp white jacket had arrived.
“Of course I remember you,” Dr. Arthur said.
“You were the woman who was so sensitive to ketamine. How could I forget?”
“I just wanted to be sure you wouldn’t use it again,” Marissa said. She hadn’t recognized Dr. Arthur at first since he’d not treated her since the biopsy. But after he’d started her IV, something jogged her memory.
“All we need today is a little Valium,” Dr. Arthur reassured her.
“And I’m going to give you a little right now. This should make you pretty sleepy.”
Marissa watched him inject the drug into the side port of her IV. Then she rolled her head straight. Now that the egg retrieval was about to begin, her attitude about the procedure had changed from fifteen minutes earlier. She was no longer ambivalent.
As the Valium hit her system, Marissa’s mind calmed, but she didn’t sleep. She dwelt on the thought of her blocked tubes and what might have caused the blockage. Then she began to consider the different procedures she had undergone. She, remembered how she felt waking up from the general anesthesia after her laparoscopy.
As soon as she was lucid, Dr. Carpenter had told her that her tubes appeared so scarred that microsurgery was totally out of the question. He said that all he’d been able to do was take a biopsy. He let her know then that her only chance for a baby was in-vitro fertilization.