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from big city pressures prompted me to move to Maine. The simple ... or, at least, the simpler life was going to be the key to my future happiness. And it was ... for a while.
    The only opening I found was working the swing shift in the ob. at Osteo. Even some of the staff call it Osteopathetic, but it’s a nice hospital. Since I always liked babies and thought I’d never have one of my own, I didn’t mind ushering the little cuties into the world. Of course, most parents-to-be have innumerable fears, both rational and irrational, but the vast majority of cases are absolutely normal, and so are the results of anywhere from two to twenty-four or more hours of intensive labor.
    Mostly ...
    I suppose it’s time to mention Doctor Thomas Jacobs. “Tom” He was one of the residents— the resident, actually, who set most of the nurses’ hearts a’flutter whenever he was around. “A’flutter!” What a stupid phrase, but that’s the best I can come up with. The night I met him, after I’d been on duty only three nights, my heart literally skipped a couple of beats, and I was as tongue-tied as a junior high school girl with a mad crush on the high school quarterback.
    Look, I was young at the time, but I was a “city girl.” I’d been around. I knew the score. But— damn! My heart did skip a few beats. I wish I could stop resorting to these clichés, but—really—that’s how he made me feel. Look, I said I was young!
    At first Dr. Jacobs—Tom—and I would sit together now and then in the break room (the one with that cute little sign reading: “BEWARE OF STAFF INFECTIONS!”) and shoot the breeze. He told me right up front he was married, and I didn’t miss the gold band he wore. He told me how he hadn’t started med school until several years after college, with a stint as a medic during the Gulf War—the first one—in between, so he was quite a bit older, almost twelve years older than I was.
    Okay. I did the math. Twelve years, three months, and fifteen days.
    But like I said, I was a “city girl,” so I thought that more or less evened things up. What started out as just a doctor and a nurse co-workers—chatting over a cup of coffee now and then turned a bit more serious— after a while, a lot more serious. Long hours working double shifts—the usual pressures of the job, especially in those rare instances when “complications” do occur—all of that more or less brought us together. It happens. And after a while—hell, I won’t mince words here—Tom and I started sleeping together. Never at work, mind you ... although every now and then an empty bed in an unoccupied room got mighty tempting. Just a couple of times at my apartment on Montrose Ave after work ... and once out behind the hospital in the parking lot one hot summer night. Steve Blodgett, one of the janitors, came close to catching us that time. I teased Tom about that, telling him I was the “kid,” and he should have known better. And we laughed a lot … I remember that.
    Then ... well, of course, we heard about that baby in Oklahoma City like everyone else did.
    Just the idea of a baby with no fingerprints or footprints was pretty freaky, to say the least. But when we got more of the details, what was at first interesting or weird started to get downright creepy. Rumors travel fast in the medical field, and we started hearing things that didn’t get into the media right away, like about how the baby in Oklahoma City was ... different.
    I know this sounds like something out of a cheap paperback horror novel, but word got around that the baby boy supposedly “looked” … dead. His eyes, so the rumor mill informed us, looked like the eyes of a dead person. No life. Oh, he was alive, all right. Make no mistake. He ate and slept and filled his pants like any normal baby. But the way some folks described him, he looked like he had no soul ... like he was empty ... the husk of a human being, but not the contents.
    Then reports