See How They Run Read Free

monitor read 101—about nineteen counts slower than it should have been.
    David Strauss hurried into a loose-fitting scrub suit. He tugged his sewing-thimble cap over his thick black curls. Tied on the mask. Booties. And as he always did right about then, David Strauss suddenly felt a great wave of very adult responsibleness. For the next fifteen minutes or so, he was a doctor. He was an
adult
.
    One of the nurses, who was busy listening to the O’Neill baby with a fetuscope, suddenly called out across the room.
    “The heartbeat has stopped, David!”
    David Strauss, the anesthetist, and the attending resident ran to the delivery table.
    Katherine O’Neill was undergoing the most severe contractions.
    The girl was sobbing, calling out a boy’s name. The small breasts under her hospital tunic were hard fists with sharp tiny points.
    A pair of forceps appeared in Dr. David Strauss’s hand.
    Glinting in the overhead kettledrum lights, the forceps descended between Katherine O’Neill’s trembling legs.
    Then David was hoisting a baby girl up into the lime-light, letting its blood rush back for nourishment.
    The umbilical cord was carefully snipped. David whacked the baby’s bottom extra hard.
    “Prolapsed cord.” The young doctor tried to sound calm and usual. A “prolapsed cord” meant that the umbilical cord had been compressed between the baby’s head and the mother’s pelvic bone. Oxygen had totally been cut off.
    The baby girl still wasn’t breathing.
    Strauss’s six-foot one-inch frame was bent in half over the blue, suffering infant. He gently blew into a tracheal catheter, trying to force oxygen into the baby’s lungs.
    “More heat!” He wanted the Infant Table Warmer.
    “Adrenalin,” the resident tersely instructed at Strauss’s side.
    In the terrible machine-quiet of the Mount Sinai delivery room, David Strauss underwent nearly fifteen minutes of the tensest, most draining exercise and strain he could imagine.
    Finally, his dark thick head of curls flew back. David Strauss moaned. He looked down on the O’Neill baby. She looked like a sleeping little doll.
    “Oh screw me,” David said. “Just screw everything.”
    He walked over to the delivery table and leaned down toward the seventeen-year-old. David Strauss then hugged Katherine O’Neill—something that was so absolutely forbidden by hospital rules, it wasn’t even covered in the regulations.
    “Oh Doctor, Doctor, Doctor,” the little girl sobbed into his hair. “I just want to die, too.”
    It was 3:09 A.M . on April 25.
    For David Strauss, the death of the O’Neill baby wasn’t the worst thing that would happen to him that day.
    It wasn’t even in the top ten.

CHAPTER 3
    Scarsdale, April 25.
    Winding along the pretty duck pond and tree-infested Bronx River Parkway that night, feeling familiar, pleasant vibrations rising up from their ’64 Mercedes 190 (their New York City shitkicker—“the Gray Ghost”), David Strauss couldn’t help thinking that he and his wife, Heather, basically had most of the things they wanted in life.
    Sometimes—after the death of young Katherine O’Neill’s baby, for example, David wondered if he and Heather didn’t have too much of a good thing.
    Less than two months earlier, David was thinking as he maneuvered the too-skinny Parkway lanes, he and Heather had bluffed their way past the stuffed-shirt, bluestocking Coop board of the Beresford Building on Central Park West. They were now the comparatively young landlords of a high-ceilinged, eight-room park-and-river-view penthouse in one of New York’s landmark, snobbier apartment buildings.
    Right in the lobby of the forty-seven-year-old building, David also owned a neat, oak-paneled office, where he wore a white shirt and Brooks Brothers striped tie every day; where he practiced efficient, sometimes inspired medicine for women ranging from a world-renowned fifty-one-year-old playwright quietly having an illegitimate (“I like to think of her