Free Souvenir by Therese Fowler

procedures of the surgery, thought again about the baby’s heart rate troubles—but as soon as Clay delivered the rest of the umbilical cord and the placenta, the culprit became obvious: a knot in the cord.
    “Shit,” she said, reaching for it with her left hand. “It must’ve gotten looped early in her pregnancy.” Rarely, but once in a while, a very active fetus with a longer-than-usual cord could manage to loop through it. Rarely, but once in a while, an ultrasound would fail to show it. Then, at some point in the labor, the knot, which had been loose enough not to be a problem, tightened up or got compressed, cutting off the baby’s blood and oxygen supply. In the minutes—literally
minutes
—between when the monitor had been removed and Clay had reached in to pull the baby out, the baby had crashed. Silently, fading away without a struggle. There was no way for them to know, or to do anything differently even if they
had
known. Except…except for those forty-five or so seconds after she’d dropped the scalpel: it was possible that those seconds made the difference. Clay nudged her with his elbow, and when she looked at him, he shook his head as if he were reading her thoughts, as if to say,
Don’t go there.
    She looked behind them, at the slumped shoulders of the group surrounding the warming table, and swallowed hard.
             
    A LONE IN AN ELEVATOR TWO HOURS LATER , C LAY AND M EG RODE IN silence until he reached forward and pushed the Stop button.
    Startled, she said, “What are you doing?”
    Clay touched her chin, to get her to look up at him. “It’s not your fault.”
    She looked away. “You don’t know that. If I hadn’t screwed up my arm—”
    “You didn’t know it was going to cramp up just then.”
    “I knew it
could.
It happened once last week.”
    “Once. Last
week.
”
    She appreciated his support, but the truth was that she’d had a hint while getting suited up, and she’d ignored it. And now a baby was dead.
    Clay continued, “Look, suppose we could have that minute back. The baby
might
have survived—I double-emphasize ‘might’—in which case he almost certainly would’ve been severely brain-damaged from what had already occurred, and dependent on his poor parents for the rest of their lives. A vegetable, if you’ll forgive the crassness of the term.”
    “Maybe,” she acknowledged, imagining Cristina and Mark trying to manage the needs of such a child along with their chubby, charming two-year-old daughter Chloe, whom she had also delivered by emergency C-section, without a hitch. She saw their baby boy with vacant eyes, a permanent feeding tube, a ventilator, no future—and couldn’t wish such a life on anyone.
    Clay took her right hand with both of his, massaging it gently, and looked into her eyes. “We can’t save them all, you know. Hell, we can hardly save ourselves.”
    She knew without asking that he was referring to his attraction to her, a married woman. Saying they had no control, not over death and not over whatever strange forces brought people together, not over love. She let his eyes hold her that way for a long moment, a moment when the comfort and support and affection of someone who truly understood was exactly the salve she needed.
    Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. “I have to get going,” she said, the rest of the day’s obligations intruding, reminding her that her world existed outside this tender gesture, that she was wrong to welcome it.
    Clay said, “Me too.” But still he held her hand, and she didn’t pull it away. “Meg…”
    “Clay.”
    He sighed quietly, then let go and leaned over to start the elevator again. It gave a small lurch and began the rest of its journey to the main floor.
    He said, “You’re a damn fine doctor. Everyone says so.”
    “You did a good job today,” she told him.
    The chime sounded and the doors slid open. She stepped out first, into a crowd of lunchtime visitors. “Try to enjoy the