Final Option

plate—roast chicken, baked potatoes, peas, and salad. I had thirds. The Hexters’ two little boys, Peter—the two-year-old I met at the front door—-and his three-and-a-half-year-old brother, James, turned the meal into a small scale riot. Milk spilled, food flew through the air, a burping contest was begun and quickly put to a stop. When Jane was in the kitchen and Barton was engaged in mopping up yet another spill. Peter succeeded in stuffing a pea up his nose before I could stop him and had to be taken from the table for its extraction.
    “So are you ready to take a vow of childlessness?” inquired Jane after we had abandoned the table. Barton had taken the boys upstairs for their bath. I was helping Jane with the dishes.
    “Not at all,” I replied truthfully. “By comparison my life seems unexciting.”
    “I’m not sure that exciting is a great way to describe it. When I walk out onto the stage and the orchestra stands up and all the faces in the audience are turned toward me—that’s exciting. This is just chaos.”
    “But I bet you wouldn’t trade places with me for all the money in the world,” I replied.
    “I’d do it for the weekend,” answered Jane with a smile. “Especially if we could swap bodies. Mine seems to be getting rather full of somebody else right now.“
    “Do you know what you’re having?”
    “No. I’m hopelessly low-tech about everything. Even though everyone says they’re safe, I’d rather not have an ultrasound if I don’t have to. Besides, it’s nice to be surprised.”
    “Are you hoping for a girl?”
    “A girl would be nice.” Jane sighed. “Otherwise, can you imagine what it will be like? I’ll be living the rest of my life in a locker room. Still, as long as the baby is healthy, I’ll be thrilled whether it’s a boy or a girl. The more experience I have at parenthood, the more I appreciate what a miracle a normal child is.”
    “No matter what you’re in for a busy time,” I said, with the wildness at dinner still ringing in my ears. “You better believe it,” answered Jane with a laugh. “With three children three and under, my martyrdom is practically assured.”
     
    “I don’t think my dad believed that he was ever going to die,” said Barton Jr. as Jane poured the coffee. The boys were upstairs in their pajamas watching their daily quota of television. “You know Dad had a massive heart attack two years ago. He was clinically dead when they brought him into the emergency room. Even after that, I still don’t think he believed his life would ever be over. He just figured if he wanted it enough, if he was stubborn enough about it, he’d get what he wanted and live forever.”
    “Talk about stubborn,” said Jane. “Remember what we went through last year with the defibrillator? After the heart attack Bart developed a condition called ventricular tachycardia,” Jane explained to me. “It’s an intermittent, grossly irregular heart rhythm that originates in the ventricle of the heart. His doctors insisted that he have a defibrillator implanted in his chest, but he wouldn’t have it.”
    “What’s a defibrillator?” I asked. “Is it like a pacemaker?”
    “No,” replied Bart. “It’s bigger than a pacemaker and you have to have a fair-sized battery, about five inches square, implanted in your abdomen to power it. It’s sort of an automatic jumpstarter for your heart. It monitors the heart rhythm so that whenever you have an episode of ventricular tachycardia—they call it VT—the defibrillator sends electricity through your heart and jolts it back into normal rhythm.”
    “Doesn’t sound very pleasant.”
    “It’s not,” said Jane. “But the family thought that it was a preferable alternative to death. Bart said he wasn’t going to have them cut him open and put some machine into his chest. He said he was a gambler and he’d take his chances. Pamela was sick about it. The doctors told us that if he went into VT again it would almost certainly be fatal.”
    “Thankfully, then, last year a new drug came on the market for regulating VT,” interjected Barton Jr. “But until he started taking it we were all nervous wrecks.“
    “I don’t think your father lost a single night’s sleep over it,” said Jane. “I think Barton is right. His father thought he was immortal.”
    “I was talking to a friend of mine who’s in law enforcement,” I said. “He claims that the1 police are hinting that they’re close to