No, it’d smash her teeth. More pillows!

The thud of her feet, the slam as she ransacked the cupboard.

I stayed helplessly on my knees, trying to keep Ita Noonan from breaking any bones as she convulsed under me. Rose-streaked foam leaked out the side of her mouth. I needed to get her lying on her side so she wouldn’t choke, but it was impossible, wedged as she was in this gap. Her feet were still up on the cot, knotted in the blankets.

The childhood prayer threaded through my head: Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour—

Bridie dropped three pillows into my arms.

But Ita Noonan was limp now. No writhing; no rise and fall of her chest.

I wiped her mouth with my apron, bent, and put my cheek to her lips.

What are you doing?

Shh!

I waited. No breath against my face, nothing at all. Help me turn her over, facedown.

Here on the floor? But even as she asked this, Bridie was wrenching the bed linen loose so Ita Noonan’s lower legs came unstuck and slid and dropped down, the huge white one and then the skinny one.

We got her prone, one cheek to the floorboards. I should have been sitting at her head but there wasn’t room. I pressed on her back as hard as I could, trying to pump the lungs. I straddled her and folded her arms with her yellowed fingers under her face, hauled her elbows back towards me to open the chest, as I’d been trained. I pushed on the back of her ribs, pulled up her elbows. Push, pull, push, pull. Kneading a vast lump of dough that was so dry, it would never make bread.

When at last I stopped, the room hung very still. I checked my watch: 5:31.

Is she…

I couldn’t answer Bridie. This day was too much for me. I closed my eyes.

My hand was seized. I tried to jerk away.

But Bridie wouldn’t let go; she only squeezed tighter.

So I gripped her hand. I held on to her fingers, hard enough to hurt.

Then I took my hand back so I could wipe my face. Just sweat; I couldn’t afford to cry.

I was busy counting in my head. Sister Finnigan had measured the height of the uterus above the pubic bone and estimated that Ita Noonan was twenty-nine weeks on. In which case, all I should do right now was have a doctor certify her death. Theoretically, a foetus was viable from twenty-eight weeks on, but in practice, babies delivered before thirty weeks’ gestation rarely survived, so if they were unresponsive, hospital policy was not to revive them.

Then again, because the uterus dropped in the final days of pregnancy, nine months could look more like eight, perhaps even seven. So there was a slim but awful chance that Sister Finnigan’s estimate was wrong and that Ita Noonan—her belly sagging particularly low under its twelfth load—was actually at full term.

Bridie, fetch the doctor at once.

Will I not help you get her into bed first?

I roared: Go!

I couldn’t put words to the terrible calculations I was making.

Right away, she said. Dr. Lynn?

I flapped my hand. Any surgeon.

For a posthumous caesarean section, an obstetrician wasn’t absolutely necessary, since there was no mother to save, only her dead flesh to slice, a living baby to seize. The window of opportunity was twenty minutes, but the faster the better—less risk of damage to the brain.

Bridie’s feet thudded off down the corridor.

I found I was as weak as water.

Delia Garrett sat bolt upright and stared at me accusingly as if this room were an antechamber of hell and I the attendant. Mrs. Noonan—is she gone now?

I nodded. I’m so sorry you—

Then why are you shouting, Nurse—what’s so bloody urgent?

I couldn’t tell her that sometimes a surgeon would harvest a woman’s fruit while she was still warm.

I got my arms under Ita Noonan and heaved her onto the bed. My back spasmed. I laid her out flat. I closed her startled eyes and clasped her hands together. One of them slipped down and off the cot, so I retrieved it and tucked it back into the blanket. For lack of a priest, I murmured, Eternal rest grant unto her, and let perpetual light shine upon her.

I resisted the temptation to check my watch; the minutes were ticking by and I could do nothing to slow them. Maybe it would take Bridie more than twenty minutes to find a doctor, in which case we’d all be spared this awful decision.

I rolled up my apron and threw it in the laundry basket, tied on another to be ready for whatever came next. What more could I do than keep putting one foot in front of the other?

Dr. Lynn glided in, Bridie on her heels. She checked for a pulse in Ita Noonan’s neck while she listened to my rapid-fire report.

In the back of my mind, I was thinking, What have I done? Why did I have to send Bridie so bloody fast? If my qualms persuaded the doctor to haul out a stunted, suffering infant at twenty-nine weeks, or twenty-eight, or even twenty-seven, for all we knew…

I saw the moment Dr. Lynn decided not to cut. A slight shake of her braided head; no layperson would have understood what she was communicating.

I felt groggy with relief.

Death from febrile convulsions consequent on influenza, she scrawled at the bottom of Ita Noonan’s chart, then signed K. Lynn.

I wondered what the K. stood for.

I’ll inform the office myself, Nurse Power.

I wondered if this was the first patient Dr. Lynn had lost today.

I tried back pressure on Mrs. Noonan, I told her, and arm lifts.

Resuscitation’s always worth attempting, she confirmed flatly. It sets one’s mind at rest to have done all one can.

(But my mind was not at rest.)

If I’d realised how fast she was slipping away, I asked, should I have tried a stimulant—smelling salts or a hypo of strychnine?

Dr. Lynn shook her head. That might have bought her a few more minutes of pain but wouldn’t have saved her. No, some flu patients are dropping like flies while others sail through, and we can’t solve the puzzle or do a blasted thing about it.

Mary O’Rahilly coughed in her drugged sleep.

Dr. Lynn went over and put the back of her hand to the girl’s pink cheek to check for fever. Then she turned on the spot and looked at the grieving woman.

How’s your cough, Mrs. Garrett?

A shrug as if to say, What does it matter.

The doctor asked me, No signs of puerperal infection?

I shook my head.

Once Dr. Lynn had gone, Bridie sidled up to me at the counter where I was counting packets of swabs. What was all that about twenty-nine weeks?

I hesitated, then said very quietly, If the foetus had been farther on—more ready—the doctor would’ve taken it out.

How on earth—

By opening up the belly.

I gestured, using my finger as the scalpel.

Her light blue eyes widened. That’s disgusting.

I managed a small shrug. To save one life out of the two…

And send it home with no mammy?

I know.

It was now 5:53 by my watch. I wondered when exactly the scampering heartbeat of the last Noonan child had stilled. What did it mean to die before ever being born?

Bridie, could you go for a couple of orderlies to collect Mrs. Noonan?

Certainly.

In her absence I cleaned the dead woman, working gently, as if Ita Noonan could still feel everything. I had time on my hands, and somehow I couldn’t bear to leave the preparation to the mortuary attendants.

Delia Garrett had turned towards the wall as if to give her fallen comrade a bit of privacy.