Mistress of the Game

Chapter Two

IN THE MATERNITY UNIT AT NEW YORK'S MOUNT SINAI Medical Center, Nurse Gaynor Matthews watched the handsome, middle-aged father take his newborn child in his arms for the first time.

He was gazing at the baby girl, oblivious to everything around him. Nurse Matthews thought: He's thinking how beautiful she is.

Nurse Matthews was pleasantly plump, with a round, open face and a ready smile that accentuated the twin fans of lines around her eyes. A midwife for more than a decade, she'd seen this moment played out thousands of times - hundreds of them in this very room - but she never tired of it. Besotted dads, their eyes lighting up with love, the purest love they would ever know. Moments like these made midwifery worthwhile. Worth the grinding hours. Worth the crappy pay. Worth the patronizing male obstetricians who thought of themselves as gods just because they had a medical degree and a penis.

Worth the rare moments of tragedy.

The father gently caressed his baby's cheek. He was a beautiful man, Nurse Matthews decided. Tall, dark, broad-shouldered, a classic jock. Just the way she liked them.

She blushed. What on earth was she doing? She had no right to think such things. Not at a time like this.

The father thought: Jesus Christ. She's so like her mother.

It was true. The little girl's skin was the same delicate, translucent peach as the girl he'd fallen in love with all those years ago. Her big, inquisitive eyes were the same pale gray, like dawn mist rolling off the ocean. Even her dimpled chin was her mother in miniature. For a split second, the father's heart leaped at the sight of her, an involuntary smile playing around his lips.

His daughter. Their daughter. So tiny. So perfect.

Then he looked down at the blood on his hands.

And screamed.

Alex had been so excited that morning when Peter drove her to the hospital.

"Can you believe that in a few short hours she'll be here?"

She was still in her pajamas, her long blond hair tangled after a fitful night's sleep, but he didn't think she'd ever looked more luminous. She wore a grin wider than the Lincoln Tunnel, and if she was nervous, she didn't show it.

"We're finally going to meet her!"

"Or him." He reached over to the passenger seat and squeezed his wife's hand.

"Uh-uh. No way. It's a girl. I know it."

She'd woken up around six with fairly mild contractions and insisted on waiting another two hours before she would let him drive her to Mount Sinai. Two hours in which Peter Templeton had walked up and down the stairs of their West Village brownstone sixteen times, made four unwanted cups of coffee, burned three slices of toast and yelled at his son, Robert, for not being ready for school on time, before being reminded by the housekeeper that it was in fact mid-July, and school had been out for the last five weeks.

Even at the hospital Peter flapped around uselessly like a mother hen.

"Can I get you anything? A hot towel?"

"I'm fine."

"Water?"

"No thanks."

"Crushed ice cubes?"

"Peter..."

"What about that meditation music you're always playing? That's calming, right? I could run to the car and get the tape?"

Alex laughed. She was astonishingly calm.

"I think you need it more than I do. Honestly, darling, you must try to relax. I'm having a baby. Women do this every day. I'll be fine."

I'll be fine.

The first problems began about an hour later. The midwife frowned at one of the monitors. Its green line had begun rising in sudden, jagged leaps.

"Stand back please, Dr. Templeton."

Peter searched the woman's face for clues, like a nervous airline passenger watching the flight attendant during turbulence...if she was still smiling and handing out gin-and-tonics, no one was gonna die, right? But Nurse Matthews would have made a first-class poker player. As she moved surely and confidently around the room, a professional smile of reassurance for Alex, a brusque nod of command to an orderly - fetch Dr. Farrar immediately - her doughlike features gave nothing away.

"What is it? What's the problem?"

Peter struggled to keep the panic out of his voice, for Alex's sake. Her own mother had died giving birth to her and Eve, a snippet of Blackwell family history that had always terrified Peter. He loved Alexandra so much. If anything should happen to her...

"Your wife's blood pressure is somewhat elevated, Dr. Templeton. There's no need for alarm at this stage. I've asked Dr. Farrar to come and assess the situation."

For the first time, Alexandra's face clouded with anxiety.

"What about the baby? Is she all right? Is she in distress?"

It was typical Alex. Never a thought for herself, only for the child. She'd been exactly the same with Robert. Since the day their son was born, ten years ago now, he'd been the center of his mother's universe. Had Peter Templeton been a different sort of man, a lesser man, he might have felt jealous. As it was, the bond between mother and son filled him with joy, a delight so intense that at times he could barely contain it.

It was impossible to imagine a more devoted, selfless, adoring mother than Alexandra. Peter would never forget the time Robert came down with chicken pox, a particularly nasty case. He was five years old, and Alex had sat by his bedside for forty-eight hours straight, so engrossed in her son's needs that she had forgotten to take so much as a sip of water for herself. When Peter came home from work, he'd found her passed out cold on the floor. She was so dehydrated she'd had to be hospitalized and placed on a drip.

The midwife's voice brought him back to the present with a jolt.

"The baby's fine, Mrs. Templeton. Worst-case scenario, we'll speed things up and do a cesarean."

Alex went white.

"A cesarean?"

"Try not to worry. It probably won't come to that. Right now the heartbeat looks terrific. Your baby's as strong as an ox."

Nurse Matthews had even risked a smile.

Peter would remember that smile as long as he lived. It was to be the last image of his old, happy life.

After the smile, reality and nightmare began to blur. Time lost all meaning. The obstetrician was there, Dr. Farrar, a tall, forbidding man in his sixties with a pinched face and glasses that seemed in permanent, imminent danger of toppling off the end of his long, shrewlike nose. The green line on the monitor took on a life of its own, some unseen hand pulling it higher, higher until it looked like a fluorescent etching of the north face of the Eiger. Peter had never seen anything quite so ugly. Then came the beeping. First one machine, then two, then three, louder, louder, screeching and screaming at him, and the screams turned into Alex's voice, Peter! Peter! and he reached out his hand for hers, and it was their wedding day, and his hands were trembling.

Do you take this woman?

I do.

I do! I'm here, Alex! I'm here, my darling.

The doctor's voice: "For Christ's sake, someone get him out of here."

Peter was being pushed, and he pushed back, and something fell to the floor with a crash. Then suddenly the sounds were gone, and everything was color. First white: white coats, white lights, so strong Peter was almost blinded. Then red, the red of Alex's blood, blood everywhere, rivers and rivers of blood so livid and ketchup-bright it looked fake, like a prop from a movie set. And finally black, as the movie screen faded, and Peter was falling into a well, down, down, deep into the darkness, pictures of his darling Alex flickering briefly in front of him like ghosts as he fell:

Flash!

The day they first met, in Peter's psychiatrist's office, back when Alexandra was still married to that psychopath George Mellis.

Flash!

Her smile, lit from within as she walked up the aisle to marry him, an angel in white.

Flash!

Robert's first birthday. Alex beaming, with chocolate cake smeared all over her face.

Flash!

This morning in the car.

We're finally going to meet her!

Dr. Templeton? Dr. Templeton, can you hear me?

We're losing him. He's blacking out.

Quick! Someone catch him!

No more flashes. Only silence and darkness.

The ghosts had gone.

Reality did not return until he heard his baby cry.

He'd been awake for almost half an hour, listening to the doctor and the hospital staff, even signing forms. But none of that was real.

"You must understand, the level of hemorrhaging, Dr. Templeton..."

"The speed of the blood loss..."