I’m sorry, but you have to go,” one of the nurses told Bennie. They’d rushed Marshall to Memorial’s Labor and Delivery floor, and a group of nurses were hurrying to prepare her for an emergency C-section. A nurse grabbed the checked curtain that hung around Marshall’s bed and whisked it along its metal J-shaped track with a zzzipp, blocking Marshall from Bennie.
“I hate to leave her alone,” Bennie said, her throat thick with emotion. “Her husband’s not here. He’s at the wrong hospital.”
“Husbands can stay, but you can’t.” The nurse’s brown eyes softened. “We’ll take good care of her and the baby. She’s getting blood now. The baby’s on the monitor. The doctor will be right here. He’s dealing with another emergency.”
“What’s the matter with her? She’s in so much pain.”
“We think it’s placenta abruptio,” she said, and Bennie looked puzzled. “An abruption. The placenta peels away from the uterine wall. It’s terribly painful.”
Oh my God. “How did she get that? She was fine.”
“No one knows why it happens, but it does.”
“Is there a phone, so I can call her husband? I left my cell phone.”
“You couldn’t use a cell here anyway. Use our L and D phone.” The nurse pointed to the station behind them, covered with baby photos and thank-you notes, but another nurse in a puffy scrub hat was already on the phone. “There’s a pay phone, but it’s quite a ways, because the new labor wing is under construction. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but take the shortcut.”
“Where?”
The nurse pointed down the hall and to her right, at a makeshift plywood door with a handmade sign that read NO ADMITTANCE! CONTRACTION SITE. “Take that door, go through the double doors, take a right at the sign for the elevators, and you’ll see the pay phones. I think they’re still there. But tell Dad to get here quick. We go in five minutes.”
“Five minutes?” Bennie took off. She hustled down the hallway to the door, flung it open, and found herself in a construction site, with temporary drywall where corridors evidently used to be. Her house had looked like this for two years, while she’d rehabbed it. The air was warm here-the air-conditioning hadn’t been put in yet. She ran down the hall of exposed drywall and raw concrete subfloor, but it ended in another corridor of drywall, which she also ran down, then stopped.
Shit! There were no double doors. Just another makeshift corridor. A trash bag against one wall overflowed with empty Mountain Dew cans, Tastykake wrappers, and bunched-up paper bags. There were no workmen around to ask for directions. It was after five, and they would have cut out by four.
Bennie spun around. Two glass doors lay on their side, resting on a pile of two-by-fours, and next to them hung a bright blue tarp, duct-taped over a hallway entrance to keep the dust out, which everybody knew never worked. On the tarp hung another sign that read DANGER-KEEP OUT. Maybe the tarp had become the double doors, or vice versa. The phones must be on the other side of the tarp. Bennie didn’t have time to be law-abiding.
She ducked under the tarp and came out the other side, into another drywall corridor, almost finished and painted with white prime coat. The floor was bare cement, spotted with drips of paint. What had the nurse said?
Damn. Go! She ran down the corridor, which angled into another corridor, less finished than the first, partly unpainted. She ran down it, too, and it was longer, some twenty-five feet. The drywall was completely unpainted in the corridor, and the air smelled like something burning. It didn’t seem more finished, it was obviously less so, and Bennie couldn’t believe phones were anywhere near here.
Fuck! She must have gone the wrong way. It was like a maze of drywall! She didn’t have the time to run back, but this couldn’t be right. She heard a sound and spun around on her pumps.
And came face-to-face with herself.