Life Expectancy

injections of anticonvulsants-but soaring blood pressure and convulsions led to a massive cerebral hemorrhage that killed her.
        Even as the umbilical cord was tied off and cut between the Beezo baby and his dead mother, my mother, exhausted but still struggling to expel me, suddenly and at last experienced cervical dilation.
        The Jimmy Tock show had begun.
        Before undertaking the depressing task of telling Konrad Beezo that he had gained a son and lost a wife, Dr. MacDonald delivered me and, according to Charlene Coleman, announced that this solid little package would surely grow up to be a football hero.
        Having successfully conveyed me from womb to wider world, my mother promptly passed out. She didn't hear the doctor's prediction and didn't see my broad, pink, wonder-filled face until my protector, Charlene, returned and presented me to my father.
        After Dr. MacDonald had given me to Nurse Coleman to be swabbed and then wrapped in a white cotton receiving cloth, and when he had satisfied himself that my mother had merely fainted and that she would come to herself in moments, with or without smelling salts, he peeled off his latex gloves, pulled down his surgical mask, and went to the expectant-fathers' lounge to console Konrad Beezo as best he could.
        Almost at once, the shouting started: bitter, accusatory words, paranoid accusations, the vilest language delivered in the most furious voice imaginable.
        Even in the usually serene, well-soundproofed delivery room, Nurse Coleman heard the uproar. She understood the tenor if not the specifics of Konrad Beezo's reaction to the loss of his wife.
        When she left the delivery room and stepped into the hallway to hear Beezo more clearly, intuition told her to carry me with her, bundled in the thin blanket.
        In the hall, she encountered Lois Hanson, another nurse, who had in her arms the Beezo baby. Lois, too, had ventured forth to hear the clown's intemperate outburst.
        Lois made a fatal mistake. Against Charlene's advice, she moved toward the closed door to the waiting room, believing that the sight of his infant son would quench Beezo's hot anger and ameliorate the intense grief from which his rage had flared.
        Herself a refugee from an abusive husband, Charlene had little faith that the grace of fatherhood would temper the fury of any man who, even in a moment of profound loss, responded first and at once with rage and with threats of violence rather than with tears or shock, or denial.
        Besides, she remembered his hat, worn indoors with no regard for manners. Charlene sensed trouble coming, big trouble.
        She retreated with me along the maternity ward's internal hall to the neonatal care unit. As that door was swinging shut behind us, she heard the gunshot that killed Dr. MacDonald.
        This room contained rows of bassinets in which newborns were nestled, most dreaming, a few cooing, none yet crying. An enormous view window occupied the better part of one long wall, but no proud fathers or grandparents were currently standing on the other side of it.
        With the infants were two creche nurses. They had heard the shouting, then the shot, and they were more receptive to Charlene's advice than Lois had been.
        Presciently, Nurse Coleman assured them the gunman wouldn't hurt the babies but warned he would surely kill every member of the hospital staff that he could find.
        Nevertheless, before fleeing, each nurse scooped up an infant-and fretted about those they were forced to leave behind. Frightened by a second shot, they followed Charlene through a door beside the view window, out of the maternity ward into the main corridor.
        The three, with their charges, took refuge in a room where an elderly man slept on unaware.
        A low-wattage night-light did little to press back the gloom, and the flickering storm at the window only made the shadows jitter with in sectile energy.
        Quiet, hardly daring to breathe, the three nurses huddled together until Charlene heard sirens in the distance. This welcome wail drew her to the window, which provided a view of the parking lot in front of the hospital; she hoped to see police cars.
        Instead, from that second-story room, she saw Beezo with his baby, crossing the rain-washed blacktop. He looked, she said, like a figure in a foul dream, scuttling and strange, like something you