The Pull Of The Moon

Because on a night like this—when the moon was full—Danni couldn’t help thinking of Lisa.

On a night like this, Lisa and her baby had died.

But tonight’s baby was lifted out, free of the strangling cord, squirming under the Ohio warmer a mere ninety seconds after Danni’s first swift, sure cut.

Danni hadn’t even broken a sweat, but the rest of the team released a collectively held breath when they heard the first weak cries from the corner where a pediatric team labored over the tiny patient. Danni tried to ignore the palpable relief all around her. She never allowed herself to get emotional during a delivery, but tonight she was feeling the tiniest twinge of—something—as the infant’s crying picked up steam.

Then the bang of the operating-room door startled them all.

A perky young ward clerk, breathless from her sprint down the hall, held a paper mask to her face, her eyes huge above it. “Dr. Danni!” she huffed. “Dr. Stone’s having a fit down in the E.R. He said to close this case fast and get down there stat. A ton of OB’s have flooded in.”

“The moon,” a nurse behind Danni moaned.

The girl spread a palm over her chest as if to calm herself, then noticed the baby. “That baby made it?”

One of the pediatric nurses called out, “He’s perfect!” above the infant’s wailing.

“You know,” the transfixed young woman said, nodding at the unconscious mother, “that fireman that got injured saving her?”

The team, busy with their tasks, didn’t acknowledge the question.

“Well,” she announced with an air of importance, “Cooper said he looks just like Tom Selleck.”

Danni gave the girl a cutting glance over her mask, then said, “Go tell Stone to cool his jets. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

ONCE SHE GOT DOWN to the E.R., Danni took a second to look in the exam room where two toddler-size bodies lay side by side on two gurneys. The bustling E.R. teams obstructed her view, but she knew it was bad. The teams were too controlled, too quiet. It was the deafening silence of hopelessness. What would she tell the mother?

A commotion behind her caused her to turn.

Some nurses and an orderly had stopped the gurney they’d been pushing and struggled with the huge man on it. He was wearing a bloodstained T-shirt, and a fresh dressing and ice packs swaddled one arm. His turnout pants and fire boots told Danni he must be the fireman the ward clerk had been talking about upstairs. He was fighting to sit up and pushed the burly orderly back with one hand while he jerked the oxygen mask off his face with the other.

That ward clerk was wrong, Danni thought as she rushed forward to help. This guy doesn’t look anything like Tom Selleck, And right now his face was so contorted with anger, his eyes were so wild with delirium, you couldn’t even call him handsome.

“Let me see them!” he yelled as he shoved the nurses’ hands away. “Dammit! I have to see if they’re okay!”

One of his fireman buddies, a black man in full regalia except for the helmet, ran up alongside the gurney and got into the act. “Matt, you need that oxygen,” he said as he forced the mask over the patient’s face and fought to get his mighty shoulders back down on the gurney.

“What’s he had?” Danni yelled across to a nurse, and as soon as she heard the answer added, “Get me some Ativan.” The other nurse had gone off, anticipating the order, and a full syringe was instantly in Danni’s hand.

“You hold him,” Danni ordered the black fireman.

The patient fought like a bull, still ranting about the toddlers, while Danni shot the sedative into a vein.

When the patient finally moaned into semiconsciousness, the black man released his hold and turned to Danni. “It’s not Matt’s fault. This is old stuff—” The big man suddenly seemed choked up. “He worked the bombing. Saving these babies tonight kind of brought it all back.”

The bombing. In Oklahoma they simply called it that—the bombing.

Danni nodded and felt her eyes mist when she turned to look at the man on the gurney as the nurses rolled him away, and saw the top of his dark head as he tossed it miserably from side to side.

The bombing—after all this time, so many still suffered from its aftershocks. Like that poor man.

“Matt’s usually a really nice guy,” the black man said from behind her. “Are you gonna take care of his arm?” he added anxiously.

Danni turned and looked up at him. This one was a handsome man, even though he looked thoroughly exhausted. “No. I’m an obstetrician, but one of the E.R. docs—”

Before she could finish, a harried-looking nurse rushed up and said, “Dr. Goodlove, please,” while she hauled Danni by the sleeve of her lab coat into an open area where the sight of five mounded tummies on five beds made Danni groan.

“All in active labor.” The nurse held out a stack of intake charts. “Stone says they’re all yours.”

“Gee. Could the Old Man be testing me again?” Danni took the charts.

“Again? When did he stop?” The nurse plunked a Doppler device and a bottle of blue gel on top of the charts. “Don’t worry, we finally located Dr. Bryant. Claimed his pager wasn’t working.”

Danni made a sarcastic face. “Oh, goody. Bryant.” Bryant, if anything, was a bigger pain than Stone. As the chief of staff, Kenneth Stone, at least, was supremely confident and above petty one-upsmanship. Bryant was not. Only a hair older than Danni, he was fiercely competitive.

Moments later, when Roger Bryant came blasting through the E.R. doors like a Viking god to the rescue, Danni studiously ignored him and let the triage nurse give him report.

Another hour flew by while Bryant and Danni got the OB patients examined and admitted.

“I’ll go up and cover Labor and Delivery now,” Bryant said and ran a hand through his fine, sandy-blond hair, then pointed at Danni as he backed toward the elevator, beating an obvious retreat from the E.R. chaos. “You’d better take a break, sister. You look terrible.”

“Oh, my gosh!” Danni framed her cheeks with her palms. “Imagine that! I look terrible!” She addressed this remark to Carol Hollis, her best friend and a top-notch scrub nurse, who’d appeared on her left.

“Gee,” Carol deadpanned, then raised her voice as the elevator doors slid closed over Bryant’s sour expression. “Could four deliveries and two C-sections have anything to do with it?”

Carol straightened, tossed her salt-and-pepper curls toward the elevator and muttered, “Prick.” She turned to Danni. “But unfortunately, the prick can’t handle what’s developing upstairs.”

“What’s that?”

“Another C-section.”

“When?”

“Maybe an hour. That’s why I came down to find you.”

Danni held up a palm. “Okay. But first I gotta eat something or I’ll pass out.”

But just as Danni and Carol plopped down in the break area, a nurse poked her head in the door and pleaded, “Dr. Goodlove, before you go back to OB could you possibly see the fireman?”

Danni gulped milk from a carton, then rubbed the back of her neck, not comprehending something this nurse obviously thought she should. “The fireman?”

“Yeah. The guy who pulled the twins out of the trailer. He’s been waiting for over an hour. Somebody needs to check his lungs again and he has a nasty wound that needs stitches.” The nurse shrugged apologetically while she held out a disposable suture tray. “We’re swamped. In fact, we’re so crowded we had to put the poor man in the supply room. Could you?”

“I’ll help,” Carol offered. “Bryant can survive a little while without you.”

Danni sighed. Would this night never end? “Okay.” She stood, tilted the milk carton up and drained it. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER TWO