"He thinks he can make a big production number with fire-works to dazzle the jury into believing that Fletcher's a cham-pion of the oppressed." He turned to look at Valerie, then back at the road. "He's an amateur, raised on too many episodes of Perry Mason. Amateurs always get slaughtered in a real court."
"You're losing, aren't you?" Valerie asked softly.
Ron replied with instantaneous anger. "I am not losing! No-body knows what's going to happen. He's out there dancing about, harassing my witnesses, trying to score debating points. You want hostile cross-examination? Wait till I get his witnesses under my thumb. This isn't even half over."
"I wish it were," she said. "I wish we could just settle this quickly and be done." She gazed out the window at the blur of light and darkness, wondering about Renata. Karen and David had a room next to her ICU where they slept every night. She, the baby's true mother, had to live on TV news and the occasional terse report from Dr. Fletcher. Fletcher tried to be cor-dial, but the strain of the trial and the ethics hearings showed in her voice and demeanor.
"I set the evening news to tape," Ron said, pulling into their driveway. There were no news vans present at the moment, just a handful of reporters staking out the place. He parked and helped Valerie out of the car.
The reporters switched on recorders and videocams in a practiced, routine manner. Ron, taking a calming breath, de-cided to grant them an audience. He stepped into their circle of light. Valerie watched from the safety of the porch.
"Do you think you'll win custody?" asked an older man armed only with a hand-held recorder.
"That's up to the judge and jury, but the facts and the law are on our side. Nobody can steal a baby from an unsuspect-ing woman and seriously call it the moral equivalent of adop-tion."
"What is your opinion about the BMQA?"
"What about it?" Ron asked.
"They're meeting to decide whether to pull Dr. Fletcher's license."
"Well," he said, facing the cameras, "I can certainly under-stand why, can't you?" With that, he thanked the reporters and joined Valerie at the front door. She had already unlocked it, so he put an arm around her and crossed the threshold with her.
"Fire up the VCR," he said, closing and locking the door.
"Do we have to?"
He was already at the living-room machine, punching but-tons and rewinding. "We've got to know what the press thinks of all this. It's a good indication of public opinion." The televi-sion screen glowed with a high-speed backward view of the evening report.
Valerie stepped into the kitchen to prepare some herbal tea. She watched the screen from the warm environs of the other room.
"There!" he said. "Looks like a good one." The tape stopped rewinding, the picture dancing about as the playback attempted to locate and lock onto the control track. Suddenly, the image and sound united. Jill Knudsen, the young, brunette anchor for the station, spoke with an intense, serious expression. Behind her hung the superimposed artwork of the scales of Jus-tice balancing a fetus lying in one pan and a scalpel stabbed into the other.
"...continued today. Attorney and plaintiff Ronald Czernek produced testimony from pro-life and pro-choice groups. Both sides denounced transoption as an invasion of a woman's body." The image switched to a courtroom camera scene of Avery Decker saying, "...transoption is an unwarranted intrusion into the bodies of two separate women and a threat to the life of the preborn." An instant later, Jane Burke's testimony received its sound bite: "It is the ultimate cruelty for the ultimate in hollow victo-ries. For the maintenance of the sham of fatherhood-"
"Val-come and watch!" Ron craned his neck to look into the kitchen.
"Coming."
Silent shots of both Valerie and Mrs. Chandler in tears alter-nated as Knudsen's voice-over said,
"Emotions ran high at the trial, with tears and harsh words from both sides." The scene shifted back to the studio set. "The trial recesses until Novem-ber tenth, at which time an as yet unidentified surgical expert will testify about the medical implications of transoption."
"I hope," Ron muttered, putting the tape on hold and reach-ing for the phone. He punched the autodialer code for the surgeon's answering service and left a message about the date change, apologizing for the fickle nature of court calendars.
He hung up and punched the pause button on the VCR. Jill Knudsen continued her story without offense at the interrup-tion.
"In a related story," she said, "Dr. Evelyn Fletcher, the sur-geon who performed the unauthorized embryo transfer, faces an inquiry into her actions by the state of California Board of Medical Quality Assurance. The BMQA has the authority to strip her of her license to practice medicine in the state. More on that as it develops. Jerry?"
"That was great!" Ron said, switching off the machine. "They totally downplayed Johnson's side. We've got it in the bag from a PR standpoint."
Valerie gazed at the teapot atop the blue gas flames, think-ing of Renata's isolation tank, where she was safe from report-ers, lawyers, judges, and juries. Yet they surrounded her from afar, deciding her fate. She had done what no other child be-fore her had ever done-survived an abortion to find shelter inside another woman. Now the publicity would mean that she could never again find shelter no matter which mother won her.
The pain in Valerie's chest once again began to gnaw at her. From without and within. " Evelyn sat on the stage set, trying to collect her thoughts while a young man fiddled with her bodice in an attempt to hide a small condenser microphone. He gave up after a mo-ment and clipped it to the maroon piping of her grey lapel, trailing the wire beneath the jacket and across the floor. She sighed with relief at his departure.
Terry had arranged this interview on The Gerry Rivers Show, one of the hottest new talk shows in syndication. He had spent half the night convincing her to go. It wasn't that she doubted the need for publicity; she doubted Gerry Rivers' willingness to give her the right kind.
"You're a fine speaker," Johnson told her. "You'll captivate them all." She wasn't so sure.
Rivers was a young man, mid-twenties at most, who had made his name as a deep-digging investigative newspaper reporter. It had won him this talk show, which he had prom-ised would be just as incisive. Fletcher doubted it, having watched him for the first time the day before. He had built the entire hour around the beauty secrets of celebrity call girls.
The floor director waggled his digits for attention as the set fell silent. Dark-haired and sturdily handsome, Gerry Rivers stood in the studio audience to await the countdown. He was not as tall as Evelyn had expected, which seemed strange to her when she considered how small her TV set was. The floor director folded all but his index finger, which he pointed at Rivers. A weak, filtered version of the show's theme song came over a monitor, and Rivers switched on a winning smile.
"Gerry Rivers here with the controversial surgeon Evelyn Fletcher, woman of the hour, and the question of the hour: Transoption-kidnapping or salvation? What do you think of this whole thing?" He stuck his microphone in the face of a woman in the audience.
She looked up at him as if she had been waiting to be called. "I think it's really wrong," she said in a soft voice. "I don't think doctors should go around experimenting on babies."
"Dr. Fletcher?" Rivers looked toward her. A red light sud-denly glowed on the camera covering her portion of the set.
She frowned. Though she welcomed a format that required her to think on her feet, she objected to such obvious setups. "Doctors already perform experiments on aborted fetuses," she said. "Experiments that require the fetuses to be freshly dead. Why is that permitted to occur thousands of times a year while I am being persecuted for a single experiment that allowed one fetus to live?" Rivers laughed and held up his hand. "Whoa, Doctor. I can't interview you if you ask the questions." He looked down at a man in the audience. "How about you? Any questions?"