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well, this is what finally happened.
    Tom got in touch with a supposed expert on this theory and, after much admittedly hazy philosophical discussion, became thoroughly convinced the “problem” began at birth, not at conception. Never mind that an embryo’s fingerprints are formed much earlier in fetal development. The “soul,” so Tom was told—and believed—didn’t actually enter the baby until the instant of birth. I know that idea doesn’t sit well with the Right-to-Lifers, but—hey, you believe what you want to believe. It’s a free country.
    Becky carried the baby well. Tom told me often enough that she was “textbook perfect.” That set a few pangs of jealousy tingling, I will admit.
    “Great! Good for her!” I’d say I don’t remember how many times, but beneath it all, I knew he was worried to his core that when Becky finally delivered, the baby— his baby—would have no fingerprints.
    No footprints.
    No soul .
    I had no idea what he was planning to do about it. If I had, I certainly would have tried to stop him. But he planned it with all the skill and finesse of a murderer, and that’s exactly what he was, except in his case, it was self -murder.
    Tom was in the ob. the night Becky went into labor and, textbook perfect or not, she—like any woman—went through some things that night that the childbirth lessons didn’t prepare her for. For more than twenty hours, the labor was intense and basically unproductive. It lasted all night, then into the next morning and on into the afternoon.
    Tom—the “textbook perfect” husband and father-to-be—stayed by her side the entire time, doing whatever he could to make her labor easier. I admired him all the more but, truth to tell, I think he might have known a wee bit too much. Certainly, he was much too involved with the situation to be effective as a doctor. Sometime around six o’clock that next evening, he suggested giving Becky a little squirt of Petosin to see if they could make the labor more productive. By this time, Becky was an exhausted, sweating, shaking wreck. There’s nothing like childbirth to strip you to the core of your humanity.
    Tom gave his wife the shot of Petosin, and it seemed to help. Nobody—at least at the time—saw what he did with the empty hypo. He must have pocketed it then. Anyway, once the drug kicked in, and Becky’s labor was finally getting productive, once she entered transition, Tom backed away from the delivery bed. He asked the intern there to take over for him. He excused himself, saying he was absolutely exhausted.
    Finally, Becky was fully dilated, and the stand-in doctor told her she could start pushing. Infused with blood, her face turned a bright beet-purple. The only sounds in the delivery room were her heavy panting and the steady beep-beep-beep of the fetal monitor.
    As I remember it now, there suddenly were two new sounds—the sudden, mewling cry of a baby and the soft thump of a body hitting the floor.
    I had been in the delivery room for the entire labor and birth. I wanted to be there, too, and not just out of some vindictive desire to see the woman Tom wouldn’t dump for me reduced to a sweating, screaming harridan.
    No. I wanted to be there if nothing else than to help Tom see it through. I still felt something for him. Maybe it was love, but—yes, I’ll admit it. I was curious to see if his and Becky’s baby was born with or without fingerprints!
    When I heard the soft thump , I turned and saw that Tom had dropped to the floor. I thought at first that maybe he had fainted, exhausted, but even with the quantity of blood involved with a delivery, I was shocked to see a thin ribbon of blood lacing down the inside of his forearm and dripping off his smock’s cuff onto the linoleum floor.
    Even before I reached him, I knew he was dead ... and I knew why he had done it.Using the empty hypodermic, he had injected a bubble of air into the artery in his arm. He knew exactly where to hit and