Storm Prey

babies were conjoined before birth. The option of abortion had been proposed but rejected by the parents, Lucy and Larry Raynes, for religious and emotional reasons. The children had been delivered by cesarean section at seven and a half months. Sara had been born with a congenital heart defect, which further complicated matters.
     
     
    WEATHER PUSHED INTO the OR and found three surgeons working with the baby doll—a life-sized, actual-weight dense-foam model of the Raynes twins. They had it on the table and were rolling it against the foam.
    “So ... no change,” Gabriel Maret said.
    Maret was a short man, with a head slightly too large for his body, the size emphasized by a wild thatch of curly black hair, shot through with silver. He was dark-eyed, olive-complected, with a chipped front tooth. He favored cashmere in his carefully tailored, French-cut winter suits, and the women around the hospital paid close attention to him: he was French, and the observing women agreed that his accent, in English, was perfect.
    Maret had come to dinner with Lucas and Weather every week or so over the winter, enjoying the kids and the family life. He was divorced, with four children of his own. He and his wife still shared an apartment in Paris, and, sometimes, he said, a bed. “It’s insane,” he said. “She is more stubborn than one of your mules.”
    “More stubborn than you?” Weather had asked.
    He considered the question: “Maybe not that stubborn,” he said.
    He and her husband, Lucas, who got along improbably well, once spent an hour talking about men’s fashion, nearly driving Weather crazy with the inanity of it. She’d said, “Fifteen minutes on loafers? Loafers?”
    “We were just getting started,” Lucas said. She wasn’t sure he was joking.
     
     
    “So . . . NO CHANGE,” Maret said.
    “Not as long as everything goes right,” said John Dansk, a neurosurgeon. “If we run into trouble splicing the six vein, if we lose it, we may have to take out another piece and that means rolling Sara this way and Ellen will torque back to the right.”
    The six vein was a vein shared by the twins. They’d tie it off on Ellen’s side, and attempt to splice it into the five vein on Sara’s, the better to move blood out of Sara’s brain. The vein numbers simply came from imaging charts prepared by the radiologists.
    “So what are you suggesting?” Maret asked. He glanced at Weather: “You are gorgeous this morning.”
    “I know,” she said, to make him laugh. As did the other women around him, she liked to make him laugh.
    Dansk scowled at them and said, “I’m suggesting that we slice a few wedges out of the base of the mold, so that we can use them as shims if we have to brace one of the kids.”
    “Why not have a nurse hold her?” Maret asked.
    “Because we might be talking a couple hours, if worse comes to worse.”
    “You know how much that mold cost?” Maret asked.
    “About one nine-thousandth of your annual salary,” Dansk said.
    Maret shrugged. “So, we cut a few wedges. Why not? If we need them, we have them, and if we don’t, it won’t matter.”
    “Should have thought of this before now,” said Rick Hanson, an orthopedic surgeon who would make the bone cuts through the kids’ shared skull. He seemed shaky; he’d invented a half-dozen little saws for this operation and would be the focus of a lot of attention. Because of the way the children’s skulls intersected, they formed a complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle—basically, an oval ring of bone—of which he’d be removing only a few pieces at a time. Normally the cutting would have been done by the neurosurgeon, with drills and flexible wire saws. Hanson, from Washington University in St. Louis, had developed his own set of electric saws matched to jigs—cutting templates—for complicated bone cuts. Maret had decided that Hanson’s technique would be ideal, and would make it possible to prepare perfectly fitted composite plates to cover the holes in the babies’ skulls.
    “We’re just nervous,” Maret said now. “That’s normal.” Maret was the team leader, the one with all the experience. He’d done two other craniopagus separations, one in France, one in Miami. Of the four children involved, two had survived—one from each operation. When he talked about the work, he talked mostly about the children who’d died.
     
     
    ANOTHER DOC PUSHED into the room, followed by a second one. They had all