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appreciate your help. I know you all did the best you could.” No one wants to meet my eyes. Several people touch my shoulder or brush my arm as they leave, some attempt at support that might leave me intact.
    I have to look over at her, this child, still plugged with IVs and monitors, the breathing tube still taped so securely to her lips, arms stretched out with her palms up so we could access her veins, lying there in the shape of a supplicant. I have witnessed the deaths of any number of people since I began medical school, almost all appropriately at the end of full lives of mating and parenting, loving and arguing, worshipping God and wondering whether God recognizes them. I have stood at bedsides while life support was discontinued, and held warm and supple hands as they entered death, wondering if I discerned that imprecise moment when a soul and body separate. But I have never seen a dead child. It feels wrenchingly incongruous to see her pallid, inanimate death mask without wrinkles or gray hair.
    Don must have led me to a stool, because I’m sitting down and he’s kneeling in front of me holding my clasped hands inside his own.
    “We’ll need to tell her soon, Marie. She’ll be asking why it’s been so long.”
    “Right.” I barely hear my own words over my breath. I have to think of what to say. I have to think of how to tell her. I don’t know how to do this. I can’t tell her she’s lost her little girl. I rock back and forth on the small stool, grip Don’s hands as if they could anchor me to this spot in time.
    He stands and guides me up to him, holds me wrapped in his arms and whispers, “Don’t think. Don’t be Marie yet. Be her doctor. Be the highly competent and skilled physician you are, helping a woman understand the most probable medical causes of this death. Just one more hour, then you can let go.”
    He leads me to the door and opens it. Jolene is behind me. It is such an adamant, ingrained principle of anesthesia never to leave a patient alone in the operating room, even for a moment, that I hesitate before walking out, still unable to comprehend there isn’t something more I can do to help her. I must leave Jolene to care for her mother in a crisis of my own creation.
     
    The surgery waiting room is lodged in an afterthought of space created over the parking garage, down two linoleum-tiled hallways. They retain the sterile, tunnel-like quality of institutional America, the floors and walls marred with pocked tiles and black streaks left by gurneys and wheelchairs. Our paired footsteps are magnified in the awkward silence. I will be the one who tells her—the death is clearly not a surgical complication, even if I cannot yet answer the blaring question of why Jolene died.
    Bobbie Jansen is sitting in the back corner of the room, flipping through the pages of a magazine. When she looks up at the clock she sees us, and I watch the knowledge overtake her. I watch her search my face for the composed and reassuring anesthesiologist who interviewed her three hours ago. I see her realize that I am no longer the same woman, and that because of what I will say to her, she also will never be the same.
    I kneel beside her chair so my face is level with her eyes. It feels like the whole world has dissolved into those two black holes. My words come out in a raspy whisper. “Ms. Jansen, Dr. Stevenson and I would like to talk with you in a more private place. Could you follow us, please?” She allows us each to take an elbow, one on either side, and walk through the waiting room filled with expectant, cautious faces. All watch as we turn down a short walkway into a small, dimly lit room with a couch and two straight-backed chairs. All recognize that this one woman will hear the words they have imagined but suppressed. Just below their tension I sense the guilty relief believing that surely two tragedies would never happen together, and this woman must have absorbed the horror that otherwise