Small Great Things(36)

Which is about as long as it would take the cops to point a finger at me if anything happened to her or her property.

Instead, I park under a railroad overpass and get out of the car. My heart’s pounding, my adrenaline is high. It’s been so long since I’ve been wilding that I’ve forgotten the high of it, unlike anything that alcohol or sports or even falling in love can produce.

The first person that gets in my way is unconscious. Homeless, he’s drunk or drugged or asleep on a cardboard pallet under a mountain of plastic bags. He’s not even black. He’s just…easy.

I grab him by the throat, and he startles from one nightmare into another. “What are you looking at?” I scream into his face, even though I have him pinned by the neck, so that he couldn’t be looking at anything but me. “What the f*ck is your problem?”

Then I head-butt him in the mouth, so that I knock his teeth loose. I throw him back on the pavement, hearing a satisfying crack as his skull meets the ground.

With every blow, I can breathe a little easier. It has been years since I did this, but it feels like yesterday—my fists have a muscle memory. I pound this stranger into someone who will never be recognized, since it’s the only way to remember who I am.





WHEN YOU ARE A NURSE, you know better than most anyone else that life goes on. There are good days and there are bad days. There are patients who stay with you, and those you can’t wait to forget. But there is always another mother in labor, or delivering, who drives you forward. There is always a new crop of tiny humans who haven’t even written the first sentence in the story of their lives. The process of birth is such an assembly line, in fact, that it always surprises me when I am forced to stop and look twice—like when a baby I helped deliver seemingly yesterday is suddenly my patient, about to have her own child. Or when the phone rings, and the hospital lawyer asks if I could just come in to talk.

I am not sure that I have ever conversed with Carla Luongo. In fact I’m not sure that I knew the hospital lawyer—pardon me, risk management liaison—was named Carla Luongo. But then I’ve never been in trouble before. I’ve never been a risk that needs to be managed.

It’s been two weeks since Davis Bauer’s death—fourteen days of me going in to work and doing my business hanging IVs and telling women to push and teaching them how to get a newborn to latch on. But more important, it’s been fourteen nights when I’ve awakened with a start, reliving not that infant’s death but the moments before. Playing them in slow motion and reversing them and erasing the edges of the narrative in my head so that I start to believe what I’ve told myself. What I’ve told others.

What I tell Carla Luongo, on the phone, when she calls.

“I’d be happy to meet with you,” I say, when what I really mean is: Am I in trouble?

“Terrific,” she replies. “How does ten o’clock sound?”

Today my shift begins at eleven, so I tell her that’s fine. I scribble down the floor number where her office is just as Edison walks into the kitchen. He crosses, opens the fridge, and takes the orange juice from inside. He looks like he’s about to drink right from the bottle, but I raise one eyebrow and he thinks otherwise.

“Ruth?” Carla Luongo says into my ear. “Are you still there?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“See you soon, then?”

“Looking forward to it,” I say brightly and hang up.

Edison sits down and piles a heap of cereal into a bowl. “Were you talking to someone white?”

“What kind of question is that?”

He shrugs and pours the milk into the bowl, curling his answer around the spoon he tucks into his mouth. “Your voice changes.”

—

CARLA LUONGO HAS a run in her hose. I should be thinking of many other things, including why this interview is even necessary, but I find myself focusing on the tear in her panty hose and thinking that if she were anyone else—anyone I considered a friend—I would quietly tell her to spare her any embarrassment.

The thing is, even though Carla keeps telling me she is on my side (there are sides?) and that this is a formality, I am finding it hard to believe her.

I have spent the past twenty minutes recounting in explicit detail how I wound up in the nursery alone with the Bauer baby. “So you were told not to touch the infant,” the lawyer repeats.

“Yes,” I say, for the twentieth time.

“And you didn’t touch him until…How did you phrase it?” She clicks the cap of her pen.

“Until I was directed to by Marie, the charge nurse.”

“And what did she say?”

“She asked me to start compressions.” I sigh. “Look, you’ve written all this down. I can’t tell you anything else I haven’t already told you. And my shift’s about to start. So are we about done here?”

The lawyer leans forward, her elbows balanced on her knees. “Did you have any interactions with the parents?”

“Briefly. Before I was removed from the baby’s care.”

“Were you angry?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Were you angry? I mean, you were left to care for this infant, by yourself, when you’d already been given the directive to leave him alone.”