which to keep photographs of her baby. I still have the tie-clasp. What happened to the
album, I cannot say.
I saw her to the door, and as we reached it, she turned to me, put her hands on my
shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were cool and firm. It
was not a passionate kiss, gentlemen, but neither was it the sort of kiss you might expect
from a sister or an aunt.
‘Thank you again, Dr McCarron,’ she said a little breathlessly. The colour was high in
her cheeks and her hazel eyes glowed lustrously. ‘Thank you for so much.’
I laughed – a little uneasily. ‘You speak as if we’ll never meet again, Sandra.’ It was, I
believe, the second and last time I ever used her Christian name.
‘Oh, we’ll meet again,’ she said. ‘I don’t doubt it a bit.’
And she was right – although neither of us could have foreseen the dreadful
cricumstances of that last meeting.
Sandra Stansfield’s labour began on Christmas Eve, at just past six p.m. By that time,
the snow which had fallen all that day had changed to sleet. And by the time Miss
Stansfield entered mid-labour, not quite two hours later, the city streets were a dangerous
glaze of ice.
Mrs Gibbs, the blind woman, had a large and spacious first-floor apartment, and at
6.30 p.m. Miss Stansfield worked her way carefully downstairs, knocked at her door, was
admitted, and asked if she might use the telephone to call a cab.
‘Is it the baby, dear?’ Mrs Gibbs asked, fluttering already.
‘Yes. The labour’s only begun, but I can’t chance the weather. It will take a cab a long
time.’
She made that call and then called me. At that time, 6.40, the pains were coming at
intervals of about twenty-five minutes. She repeated to me that she had begun everything
early because of the foul weather. ‘I’d rather not have my child in the back of a Yellow,’
she said. She sounded extraordinarily calm.
The cab was late and Miss Stansfield’s labour was progressing more rapidly than I
would have predicted – but as I have said, no two labours are alike in their specifics. The
driver, seeing that his fare was about to have a baby, helped her down the slick steps,
constantly adjuring her to ‘be careful, lady’. Miss Stansfield only nodded, preoccupied
with her deep inhale-exhales as a fresh contraction seized her. Sleet ticked off streetlights
and the roofs of cars; it melted in large, magnifying drops on the taxi’s yellow dome-light.
Miss Gibbs told me later that the young cab driver was more nervous than her ‘poor, dear
Sandra’, and that was probably a contributing cause to the accident.
Another was almost certainly the Breathing Method itself.
The driver threaded his hack through the slippery streets, working his way slowly past the fender-benders and inching through the clogged intersections, slowly closing on the
hospital. He was not seriously injured in the accident, and I talked to him in the hospital.
He said the sound of the steady deep breathing coming from the back seat made him
nervous; he kept looking in the rear view mirror to see if she was ‘dine or sumpin’ . He
said he would have felt less nervous if she had let out a few healthy bellows, the way a
woman in labour was supposed to do. He asked her once or twice if she was feeling all
right and she only nodded, continuing to ‘ride the waves’ in deep inhales and exhales.
Two or three blocks from the hospital, she must have felt the onset of labour’s final
stage. An hour had passed since she had entered the cab – the traffic was that snarled – but
this was still an extraordinarily fast labour for a woman having her first baby. The driver
noticed the change in the way she was breathing. ‘She started pantin’ like a dog on a hot
day, Doc,’ he told me. She had begun to ‘locomotive’.
At almost the same time the cabbie saw a hole open up in the crawling cross-traffic
and shot through it The way to White Memorial was now open. It was less than three
blocks ahead. ‘I could see the statue of that broad,’ he said. Eager to be rid of his panting,
pregnant passenger, he stepped down on the gas again and the cab leaped forward, wheels
spinning over the ice with little or no traction.
I had walked to the hospital, and my arrival coincided with the cab’s arrival only
because I had underestimated just how bad driving conditions had become. I believed I
would find her upstairs, a legally admitted patient with all her papers signed, her prep
completed, working her way steadily through her mid-labour. I was mounting the steps
when I saw the sudden sharp convergence of two sets of headlights reflected from the
patch of ice where the janitors hadn’t yet spread cinders. I turned just in time to see it
happen.
An ambulance was nosing its way out of the Emergency Wing rampway as Miss
Stansfield’s cab came across the Square and towards the hospital. The cab was simply
going too fast to stop. The cabbie panicked and stamped down on the brake-pedal rather
than pumping it. The cab slid, then began to turn broadside. The pulsing dome-light of the
ambulance threw moving stripes and blotches of blood-coloured light over the scene, and,
freakishly, one of these illuminated the face of Sandra Stansfield. For that one moment it
was the face in my dream, the same bloody, open-eyed face that I had seen on her severed
head.
I cried out her name, took two steps down, slipped, and fell sprawling. I cracked my
elbow a paralyzing blow but somehow managed to hold on to my black bag. I saw the rest
of what happened from where I lay, head ringing, elbow smarting.
The ambulance braked, and it also began to fishtail. Its rear end struck the base of the
statue. The loading doors flew open. A stretcher, mercifully empty, shot out like a tongue
and then crashed upside down in the street with its wheels spinning. A young woman on
the sidewalk screamed as the two vehicles approached each other and tried to run. Her
feet went out from under her after two strides and she fell on her stomach. Her purse flew
out of her hand and shot down the icy sidewalk like a weight in a pinball bowling game.
The cab swung all the way around, now travelling backwards, and I could see the
cabbie clearly. He was spinning his wheel madly, like a kid in a Dodgem Car. The
ambulance rebounded from Mrs White’s statue at an angle … and smashed broadside into
the cab. The taxi spun around once in a tight circle and was slammed against the base of
the statue with fearful force. Its yellow light, the letters ON RADIO CALL still flashing,
exploded like a bomb. The left side of the cab crumpled like tissue-paper. A moment later
I saw that it was not just the left side; the cab had struck an angle of the pedestal hard
enough to tear it in two. Glass sprayed onto the slick ice like diamonds. And my patient
was thrown through the rear right-side window of the dismembered cab like a rag-doll.
I was on my feet again without even knowing it. I raced down the icy steps, slipped
again, caught at the railing, and kept on. I was only aware of Miss Stansfield lying in the
uncertain shadow cast by that hideous statue of Harriet White, some twenty feet from
where the ambulance had come to rest on its side, flasher still strobing the night with red.
There was something terribly wrong with that figure, but I honestly don’t believe I knew
what it was until my foot struck something with a heavy enough thud to almost send me
sprawling again. The thing I’d kicked skittered away – like the young woman’s purse, it
slid rather than rolled. It skittered away and it was only the fall of hair – bloodstreaked but
still recognizably blonde, speckled with bits of glass – that made me realize what it was.
She had been decapitated in the accident. What I had kicked into the frozen gutter was her
head.
Moving in total numb shock, now I reached her body and turned it over. I think I tried
to scream as soon as I had done it, as soon as I saw. If I did, no sound came out; I could
not make a sound. The woman was still breathing, you see, gentlemen. Her chest was
heaving up and down in quick, light, shallow breaths. Ice pattered down on her open coat
and her blood-drenched dress. And I could hear a high, thin whistling noise. It waxed and
waned like a teakettle which can’t quite reach the boil. It was air being pulled into her