Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page B

into a hellish legal situation and land on her feet every time without even breaking a sweat-found herself completely at a loss.
    She sat down and held Peter beneath his armpits. By now, he’d turned tomato-red, his skin so angry and dark that his soft fuzz of hair glowed like platinum. “Listen,” she said. “I may not be what you want right now, but I’m all you’ve got.”
    On a final hiccup, the baby quieted. He stared into Alex’s eyes, as if he was trying to place her.
    Relieved, Alex settled him into the sling of her arm and sat a little taller. She glanced down at the top of the baby’s head, at the translucent pulse beneath his fontanelle.
    When she relaxed her grip on the baby, he relaxed, too. Was it that easy?
    Alex traced her finger over the soft spot on Peter’s head. She knew the biology behind it: the plates of the skull shifted enough to make giving birth easier; they fused together by the time the baby was a toddler. It was a vulnerability we were all born with, one that literally grew into an adult’s hardheadedness.
    “Sorry,” Lacy said, breezing back to the table. “Thanks for that.”
    Alex thrust the baby out toward her as if she were being burned.
    The patient had been transferred from a thirty-hour home birth. A firm believer in natural medicine, she’d had limited prenatal care, no amnio, no sonograms, and yet newborns had a way of getting what they wanted and needed when it came time to arrive in the world. Lacy laid her hands on the woman’s trembling belly like a faith healer. Six pounds, she thought, bottom up here, head down here. A doctor poked his head through the door. “How’s it going in here?”
    “Tell the intensive-care nursery we’re at thirty-five weeks,” she said, “but everything seems to be fine.” As the doctor backed away, she settled herself between the woman’s legs. “I know this has been going on for what seems like forever,” she said. “But if you can work with me for just one more hour, you’ll have this baby.”
    As she directed the woman’s husband to get behind his wife, holding her upright as she began to push, Lacy felt her pager vibrate at the waistline of her sea-blue scrubs. Who the hell could it be? She was already on call; her secretary knew she was assisting at a birth.
    “Will you excuse me?” she said, leaving the labor nurse in the room to fill in while she walked to the nurses’ desk and borrowed a telephone. “What’s going on?” Lacy asked when her secretary picked up.
    “One of your patients, insisting to see you.”
    “I’m a little busy,” Lacy said pointedly.
    “She said she’ll wait. For however long it takes.”
    “Who is it?”
    “Alex Cormier,” the secretary replied.
    Normally, Lacy would have told her secretary to have the patient see one of the other midwives in the practice. But there was still something elusive about Alex Cormier, something she couldn’t put her finger on-something that wasn’t quite right. “All right,” Lacy said. “But tell her it might be hours.”
    She hung up the phone and hurried back into the birthing room, where she reached between the patient’s legs to check her dilation. “Apparently, all you needed was for me to leave,” she joked. “You’re ten centimeters. The next time you feel like pushing…go to town.”
    Ten minutes later, Lacy delivered a three-pound baby girl. As the parents marveled over her, Lacy turned to the labor nurse, silently communicating with her eyes. Something had gone terribly wrong.
    “She’s so tiny,” the father said. “Is there…is she okay?”
    Lacy hesitated, because she didn’t really know the answer. A fibroid? she wondered. All she knew for certain was that there was a lot more inside that woman than a three-pound infant. And that any moment now, her patient was going to start to bleed.
    But when Lacy reached up to grab the patient’s belly and press down on her uterus, she froze. “Did anyone tell you you were having