It was terrible now and she was so afraid and not just for the baby. This wasn’t the hospital she’d been promised, and Sergeant Walker was no midwife. She wasn’t even sure what kind of doctor Dr. Turner was. They were in trouble with her and were just guessing and there was blood, so much blood, and she was getting real tired, and here it came again, another contraction, and despite her ample hips, this baby was big, he was too big, and she screamed and pushed as best she could, but she was so tired.

Then it ended.

“Is it out?” she gasped. But she knew it wasn’t, not nearly, and she cried then, because she thought this was the last day she would ever see and she was scared.

She’d needed the money. Dr. Turner had promised her the finest care. He’d had the face of a liar, that was for sure, with those eyes that always looked away. It was as if there were something in her face he feared to see. Furtive. His hands were long and white, like a woman’s. She didn’t like his touching her.

She’d answered an ad in SF Weekly. She’d been hungry and she didn’t want to party, and there were no damn jobs for a GED from Arkansas. She’d come out here because Mom had always regretted leaving, and maybe there were boys with some money or some kind of a good job, not like home. They couldn’t all be gay and she was pretty, she knew that. She’d assumed that she could waitress, but it had just not happened. Nothing had happened for her, and she was about out of the cash Mom had left her.

“Go to San Francisco,” she’d said in her dying days. “I never shoulda left, girl, it was my mistake.”

They had relatives here, supposedly, but she hadn’t found them. Nobody wanted a damn waitress who sounded the way she did, a drawling, red-state cracker. So she was living in a four-flight walk-up she couldn’t afford, eating less and less often, looking and feeling more tired every passing day.

So the ad: Big money to participate in an accredited medical experiment. Safety guaranteed. Major hospital.

More of a major nondescript old building with only one open office, this one. She’d sat in the waiting room with a dozen other girls. Sergeant Walker had interviewed her. Not in uniform. He was a warm, twinkling man who listened well. He’d asked about her friends and associations—none. About her family—none. Relatives—none she could find. Making some gentle joke, he had measured her hips.

He’d asked her, “Are you willing to carry a baby?”

That was the medical experiment? She’d visualized tubes and things.