Small Great Things(130)

“Objection!” Kennedy roars.

“I’ll withdraw,” Odette says, but the damage is done. Because the last words that jury has heard may as well be bullets, shooting my optimism out of the sky.

—

THAT NIGHT EDISON is silent on the way home. He tells me he has a headache, and almost as soon as we have walked in the door and I’m starting supper, he comes back through the living room with his coat on and tells me he is going out to clear his head. I don’t stop him. How can I? How can I say anything that will erase whatever he’s been through, sitting behind me every day so far like a shadow, listening to someone try to make me into someone he never believed I could be?

I eat by myself, but really, I just pick at the food. I cover the rest with tinfoil and sit at the kitchen table waiting for Edison. I tell myself I will eat when he returns.

But an hour passes. Two. When it is after midnight and he does not come back and will not answer my texts, I put my head down on the pillow of my arms.

I find myself thinking about the Kangaroo Suite, at the hospital. It’s a room with an unofficial name that has a mural of the marsupial on the inside. It’s where we put the mothers who have lost their babies.

I have always hated that term—lost—to be honest. Those mothers, they know just where their infants are. They would in fact do anything, give anything, even their own lives, to get them back.

In the Kangaroo Suite, we let the parents spend time with an infant who has died for as long as they’d like. I’m sure Turk and Brittany Bauer were put in there with Davis. It’s a corner room, next to the charge nurse’s office, intentionally set aside from other labor and delivery rooms, as if grief is a communicable disease.

This isolation means that the parents don’t have to walk past all the other rooms with healthy babies and mothers in them. They don’t have to hear the cries of newborns coming into the world, when their own child has left it.

In the Kangaroo Suite, we put the birthing mothers who knew, thanks to ultrasounds, that their babies would be born in a way that was incompatible with life. Or the mothers who had to terminate late, because of some gross anomaly. Or the ones who delivered normally, and who—to their great shock—lived both the greatest moment of their lives and the worst within hours of each other.

If I was a nurse who was assigned to a patient whose baby died, I’d do handprints of the baby in plaster. Or hair samples. I had professional photographers I could call, who knew how to take a picture of the deceased and touch it up so that it looked beautiful and vibrant and alive. I’d put together a memory box, so that when the parents left the hospital, it was not empty-handed.

The last patient I had who had used the Kangaroo Suite was a woman named Jiao. Her husband was getting a master’s degree at Yale and she was an architect. For her entire pregnancy, she had too much amniotic fluid, and would come in weekly to have an amniocentesis to check the baby, and to siphon off fluid. One night I took four liters of fluid off her, to give you a sense. And obviously that’s not normal; that’s not healthy. I asked her doctor what she thought it was—was the baby missing an esophagus possibly? A baby in utero normally ingests amniotic fluid, yet clearly if that much was accumulating, the baby wasn’t swallowing it. But the ultrasounds were normal, and no one could convince Jiao that this was a problem. She was certain the baby was going to be fine.

One day she came in and the baby had hydrops—fluid collection under his skin. She stayed with us for a week, and then her doctor tried to induce, but the baby couldn’t tolerate it. Jiao had a C-section. The baby had pulmonary hypoplasia—the lungs just didn’t function. He died in her arms quickly after birth, puffy, swollen, as if he were jointed of marshmallows.

Jiao was put in the Kangaroo Suite, and like many mothers who had to come to terms with the fact that their babies had not survived, she was robotic, numb. But unlike other mothers, she did not cry, and she refused to see the baby. It was as if she had this image in her mind for a perfect little boy, and she could not reconcile anything less than that. Her husband tried to get her to hold the baby; her mother tried to get her to hold the baby; her doctor tried to get her to hold the baby. Finally, when she was on her eighth hour of catatonia, I wrapped the baby in warm blankets and put a tiny hat on his head. I carried him back into Jiao’s room. “Jiao,” I said, “would you like to help me give him a bath?”

Jiao didn’t respond. I looked at her husband, her poor husband, who nodded, encouraging.

I filled a basin with warm water and took a stack of wipes. Gently, at the foot of Jiao’s bed, I unwrapped her baby. I dipped a cloth in warm water and ran it over her baby’s sausage legs, his blue arms. I wiped his swollen face, his stiff fingers.

Then I handed Jiao a damp cloth. I pressed it into her palm.

I don’t know if the water shocked her into awareness, or if it was the baby. But with my hand guiding her she washed every fold and curve of her baby. She wrapped him in the blanket. She held him to her breast. Finally, with a sob that sounded like she was tearing a piece of herself away, she offered the body of her child back to me.

I managed to hold it together while I carried her infant out of the Kangaroo Suite. And then, as she collapsed in her husband’s arms, I lost it. I just lost it. I sobbed over that baby the whole way to the morgue, and when I got there, I couldn’t let him go any easier than his mother had.