his mask. His voice sounded high pitched. He sounded startled to find them there, startled to be talking.
“For what?” her father said.
“He doesn’t know, Ben,” her mother said. “Do you, Bruce? You’ve been in there with her, darling, haven’t you?”
Nothing is following, thought Knox. Words are not connecting here.
A nurse pushed out through the door.
“I’m here for you, Mr. Tavert,” she said to Bruce. “There’s another area we can wait in. Follow me.”
“But what about us? Can’t we go with you?” Knox’s mother asked, her voice rising.
“The doctor will be with you,” the nurse said. “Just hold tight where you are, okay?”
She led Bruce through another door next to the OR entrance. Knox and her parents stood, waiting, silent again, for what seemed like a long time. Knox stared at a frayed place in the canvas that covered the door Bruce had moved through, drawing herself more fixed with every breath and contracting her mind until it was temporarily fixed, too, fixed like the frayed place on the door, fixed into a kind of starry point: cold, still, immovable.
Breathe in, breathe out.
When Dr. Boyd emerged, his white coat was clean, and he wasn’t wearing a mask or gloves. That’s good, Knox thought. He’s clean.
“Hi,” he said. “Let’s sit down.” He spoke to her father. Knox felt a burning in her chest that was instant. All the organs in her caught fire at once. She wanted to close her eyes, but instead opened them wider, until she could feel the air of the hallway touching them, drying them out. Freeze, she thought: we are this family, this attentive family, waiting at the mercy of Dr. Boyd. Anybody walking by would be able to see the kind of family we are. If I could only be walking by, instead of here in this family.
“There were complications,” Dr. Boyd said, and Knox hated that she’d known he would say that, use that word. “Charlotte’s uterus failed to contract, which needs to happen in order for her postpartum bleeding to stop. We gave her medication—” The words were rushing from him. Knox had only met him on this night. She didn’t know what his face meant, how to read it.
“You were giving her something when we were in the room,” her mother said. Her face was hard; the lines around her mouth seemed to deepen as she spoke.
“Yes. When it became clear that the medication wasn’t slowing the bleeding down, that Charlotte was experiencing what’s called uterine atony, we brought her to the OR in order to arrest the bleeding.”
“How—,” her father said.
Dr. Boyd looked at him. “We gave her a blood transfusion. Your daughter continued to bleed.”
Knox could see the tiny points of black inside the stretched pores on his nose. She wondered if, at any point, her mother, or her father, or herself for that matter, would smash the nose. That seemed possible. To smash his shiny nose, kick his chest, gnaw at the fleshy parts of his ears, push him, push him away. “Your daughter developed a very rare complication, something I’ve only seen a couple of times in my practice. It’s called DIC, which means that her blood refused to clot. The blood thins, to the point of, almost … a watery consistency. It thinned and at that point couldn’t respond to medications, or to any of the blood products we could provide, and I’m afraid that your daughter has ultimately lost so much blood that her organs cannot sustain function.”
Knox wondered if Dr. Boyd would begin to pant from speaking so quickly, from packing so many words into one breath. He stood fingering the pockets of his lab coat.
“This is what you’re telling us,” her father said. “How is there time for anyone to have a complication, we were gone for twenty minutes.”
“Unfortunately it only takes a matter of minutes for the patient to become incapacitated. We have even—in an emergency, a hysterectomy is performed, and I did perform that as a final resort. I know this is extremely difficult to take in, I understand that. What is important to know is that the clotting factors in your daughter’s blood were used up, and she began to convulse. This happened extremely quickly. She was under anesthetic at the time, and wouldn’t have suffered.”
Dr. Boyd looked down at the floor. Then he looked up, and Knox thought she saw a kind of aggression in his face. “Your daughter has died,” he said. “At eleven forty-seven, a few minutes ago. I