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.”
“We were shorthanded. I knew it wouldn’t be long till Corinne or Marie came back to relieve me,” I reply, and then realize I haven’t answered her question. “I wasn’t angry.”
“Yet Dr. Atkins says you made an offhand comment about sterilizing the baby,” the lawyer says.
My jaw drops. “You spoke to the pediatrician?”
“It’s my job to speak to everyone,” she says.
I look up at her. “The parents obviously think I’m contaminated,” I say. “It was just a stupid joke.” One that would have meant nothing at all, if everything else hadn’t happened. If. If. If.
“Were you keeping an eye on the baby? Were you even looking at him?”
I hesitate, and even in that breath, I can feel that this is the linchpin, the moment I will come back to and rub over in my mind until it is so smooth I can’t remember every knot and groove and detail. I can’t tell the lawyer that I disobeyed Marie’s orders, because it could cost me my job. But I can’t tell her that I tried to resuscitate the infant, either, because then those orders suddenly seem legitimate.
Since I touched that baby, and he died.
“The baby was fine,” I say carefully. “And then I heard him gasp.”
“What did you do?”
I look at her. “I followed orders. I was told not to do anything,” I tell Carla Luongo. “So I didn’t.” I hesitate. “You know, another nurse in my situation might have looked at that note in the infant’s file and found it…biased.”
She knows what I’m implying: I could sue the hospital for discrimination. Or at least I want her to think I can, when in reality doing so would cost me money I don’t have for a lawyer, as well as my friendships, and my job.
“Naturally,” Carla says smoothly, “that’s not the kind of team player we’d want on staff.” In other words: keep threatening to sue, and your career here is history. She jots something down in her little black leather notebook and then stands up. “Well,” she says. “Thanks for taking the time.”
“No problem. You know where to find me.”
“Oh yes,” she says, and the whole way back to the birthing pavilion, I try to shake the sense that those two simple words could be a threat.
When I get back to my floor, however, I don’t have time to wallow in self-doubt. Marie sees me step out of the elevator and grabs my arm with relief. “Ruth,” she says. “Meet Virginia. Virginia, this is Ruth, one of our most experienced L and D nurses.”
I look at the woman standing in front of me, wide-eyed as she watches a gurney being wheeled down the hallway for what must be a stat C-section. That’s all I need to understand what’s going on here. “Virginia,” I say smoothly, “Marie’s got a lot on her plate right now, so why don’t you shadow me?”
Marie tosses me a silent thank-you and runs after the gurney. “So,” I say to Virginia. “Nontraditional student?”
Unlike most of the baby-faced nursing candidates we get parading through here, Virginia is in her thirties. “Late start,” she explains. “Or early, depending on how you look at it. I had my kids young, and wanted them out of the house before I started my official career. You probably think I’m crazy to be going back to school this old.”
“Better late than never,” I say. “Besides, being a mom ought to count as on-the-job training for L and D, don’t you think?”
I intercept the nurse who’s coming off duty and figure out which rooms I’m taking over: a couplet with a GDM G1 now P1 at forty weeks and four days who had a vaginal delivery at 5:00 A.M.; baby is on Q3 hour blood sugars for twenty-four hours; a G2 P1 at thirty-eight weeks and two days in active labor. “It’s like alphabet soup,” Virginia says.
“It’s just shorthand,” I laugh. “You get used to it. But I’ll translate for you—we’re taking over two rooms. One is a mom with gestational diabetes who delivered this morning and whose baby needs sugars every three hours. One is a woman in labor who already has one kid,” I say, “so at least she’s done this before. Just follow my lead.”
With that, I push into her room. “Hello, Mrs. Braunstein,” I say to the patient, who is holding on to her partner’s hand in a death grip. “I hear you’re a repeat customer. My name’s Ruth, and this is Virginia. Virginia, it looks like Mr. Braunstein here could use a chair. Can you pull one closer?” I keep up a constant, calm chatter as I examine her strip and feel her belly. “Everything looks good.”
“Doesn’t feel good,” the woman grits out.
“We can take care of that,” I say smoothly.
Mrs. Braunstein turns to Virginia. “I want a water birth. That’s on my plan.”
Virginia nods tentatively. “Okay.”
“Once we monitor you for twenty minutes or so, we’ll see how the baby’s doing, and if it’s possible, we will definitely get you into the tub,” I say.
“The other thing is that we don’t want a circumcision, if it’s a boy,” Mrs. Braunstein says. “We’re having a bris.”
“Not a problem,” I tell her. “I’ll make a note in the file.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m at about six centimeters,” she says. “When I had Eli, I threw up just about then, and I’m starting to feel queasy now…”
I reach for the emesis basin and pass it to Virginia.
“Let’s see if we can examine you before that happens,” I suggest, and I slip on a pair of latex gloves, pulling up the sheet at the end of the bed.
Mrs. Braunstein turns to Virginia. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Um.” She turns to me. “Yes?”
I lower the sheet. “Mrs. Braunstein,” I say. “Virginia’s a nursing student. I’ve been in this business for twenty years. If you want, I’m sure she’d be delighted to add to her education by seeing how many centimeters you’re dilated. But if you’re in any sort of discomfort and just want to get that part of this over with, I’d be happy to accommodate you.”
“Oh!” The patient turns bright red. “I just assumed…”
That she is in charge. Because even though Virginia is ten years younger than me, she is white.
I exhale, the same way I tell my imminent mothers to exhale, and—like them—with that breath, I let the frustration go. I put a gentle hand on Mrs. Braunstein’s knee, and offer her a professional smile. “Let’s just get this baby out,” I suggest.
MY MAMA STILL works for Mina Hallowell in her Upper West Side brownstone. Ever since Mr. Sam passed, it’s Ms. Mina that my mom is supposed to be helping. Her daughter, Christina, lives nearby, but has her own life. Her son, Louis, lives in London with his husband, a director in the West End. Apparently I’m the only person who finds it ironic that Mama is three years older than the woman she’s supposed to be assisting. Every time I’ve talked to my mama about retiring, though, she shrugs me off and says the Hallowells need her. I’d venture that my mama needs the Hallowells just as much, if only to feel like she still has a purpose.
My mother only has off on Sundays, and since I usually am asleep that day after a long Saturday-night shift, when I visit her it has to be at the brownstone instead. I don’t visit very often, though. I tell myself it’s because I have work or Edison or a thousand other reasons that take precedence, but in reality, it’s because a little piece of me dies every time I walk inside and see my mama in that shapeless blue uniform, with a white apron wrapped around her hips. You’d think that after all this time, Ms. Mina would just tell Mama to dress the way she likes, but no. Maybe this is the reason why, when I do visit, I make a point of using the front entrance, with the doorman, instead of the servants’ elevator in the back of the building. There is just some perverse part of me that likes knowing I will be announced like any other guest. That the name of the maid’s daughter will be written down in a log.
Today when my mother lets me inside, she gives me a big hug. “Ruth! If this isn’t the best surprise! I just knew today was going to be a good one.”
“Really?” I say. “Why?”
“Well, I put on my heavy coat because the weather’s turning, and wouldn’t you know I found a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket left behind from last fall when I wore it. And I said to myself, Lou, this is either a good omen, or else it’s the start of Alzheimer’s.” She grins. “I chose the former.”
I love the way her wrinkles have weathered her smile. I love seeing how age will look on my face, one day.
“Is my grandbaby here too?” she asks, looking behind me in the hall. “Did you bring him for another one of those college visits?”
“No, Mama, he’s in classes now. You’re gonna have to make do with just me.”
“Just you,” she teases. “As if that was never enough.” She closes the door behind her as I unbutton my coat. She holds out her hand for it, but I reach into the closet instead for a hanger. The last thing I’m going to do is make my mama wait on me, too. I put my coat next to hers, and just for old times’ sake, run my hand down the soft underbelly of Mama’s lucky scarf before closing the closet door.
“Where’s Ms. Mina?” I ask.
“Shopping, downtown, with Christina and the baby,” she says.
“I don’t want to interrupt you if you’re busy —”
“For you, baby, I always have time. Come into the dining room. I’m just doing a little cleaning.” She starts down the hallway, and I follow, carefully noticing the way she’s favoring her right knee because of the bursitis in her left.
On the dining room table a white sheet is spread, and the strings of crystal that form the massive chandelier overhead are laying on it like trails of tears. A pungent bowl of ammonia solution sits in the center. My mother sits down and resumes her task of dipping each strand, then letting it air dry.
“How did you get those down?” I ask, eyeing the chandelier.
“Carefully,” my mama replies.
I think about her balancing on the table, or a chair. “It’s too dangerous for you to do that kind of stuff anymore—”
She waves me away. “I been doing this for fifty years,” my mama says. “I could clean crystal in a coma.”
“Well, keep climbing up to get them down from the chandelier and you might get your wish.” I frown. “Did you go to the orthopedist whose name I gave you?”
“Ruth, stop babying me.” She starts to fill in the space between us by asking about Edison’s grades. She says that Adisa is worried about her sixteen-year-old dropping out of high school (something she failed to mention to me at the nail salon). As we talk, I help lift strands of crystal and dip them into the ammonia solution, feeling the liquid burn my skin, and pride—even more bitter—burn the back of my throat.
When my sister and I were little, Mama used to bring us here on Saturdays to work. She framed this as a big deal, a privilege—not all kids are well behaved enough to shadow a parent at a job! If you’re good, you get to push the button on the dumbwaiter that brings the dishes up from the dining room to the kitchen! But what started as a treat soured quickly for me. True, sometimes we got to play with Christina and her Barbies, but when she had a friend over, Rachel and I were evicted to the kitchen or the laundry room, where Mama showed us how to iron cuffs and collars. At ten, I finally rebelled. “Maybe you’re okay with this, but I don’t want to be Ms. Mina’s slave,” I told my mother, loud enough to maybe be overheard, and she slapped me. “You do not use that word to describe an honest, paying job,” my mama corrected. “The same job that put that sweater on your back and those shoes on your feet.”
What I didn’t realize at the time was that our apprenticeship had a higher purpose. We were learning the whole time—how to make hospital corners on a bed, how to get stains out of the grout, how to make a roux. My mama had been teaching us to be self-sufficient, so that we’d never be in the position Ms. Mina was in, unable to do things for ourselves.
We finish cleaning the crystal drops, and I stand on a chair while my mama hands them to me one by one to hang from the chandelier again. They are blinding in their beauty. “So,” Mama says when we are nearly finished, “are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or do I have to pry it loose?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I was just missing you, that’s all.”
It’s true. I came to Manhattan because I wanted to see her. I wanted to go somewhere where I knew I’d be valued.
“What happened at work, Ruth?”
When I was a child my mother’s intuition was so uncanny it took me many years to realize she wasn’t psychic. She didn’t know the future; she just knew me.
“Usually you can’t stop talking about a set of triplets or a father-in-law who punched out a new daddy in the waiting room. Today, you haven’t mentioned the hospital at all.”
I step down from the chair and fold my arms. The best lies are the ones that are wrapped around a core of truth. So although I conspicuously leave out any mention of Turk Bauer or the dead baby or Carla Luongo, I tell Mama about the nursing student and the patient who so easily assumed that she was the one in charge, instead of me. The words spill like a waterfall, with more force behind them than I expect. By the time I am finished, we are both sitting in the kitchen, and my mother has set a cup of tea down in front of me.
Mama purses her lips, as if she’s weighing evidence. “Maybe you just imagined it.”
I wonder if this is why I’m the way I am, the reason I tend to make excuses for everyone but myself and try so hard to fit in seamlessly. My mother modeled that behavior for years.
But what if she is right? Could I be overreacting? I replay the interaction in my head. It’s not the same as the incident with Turk Bauer—Mrs. Braunstein didn’t even mention the color of my skin. What if my mama’s right and I’m the one who’s being overly sensitive? What if I’m making the assumption that the patient’s comments were made because Virginia’s white and I’m not? Doesn’t that make me the one who can’t see past race?
Clear as a bell, I hear Adisa’s voice in my head: That’s just what they want: for you to doubt yourself. As long as they can make you think you’re not worthy, they still got you in chains.
“I’m sure the lady didn’t mean anything by it,” Mama pronounces.
But it didn’t make me feel any less small.
I don’t say it out loud, but I think it, and it sends a shiver down my spine. This isn’t me. I don’t accuse; I don’t believe the majority of white people judge me because I’m Black or assume they are superior to me. I don’t prowl the world looking for an excuse to pick a fight. I leave that to Adisa. Me, I do my best to fly under the radar. Sure, I know that racism exists and that people like Turk Bauer are waving that banner, but I don’t judge all white folks by the historical actions of a few.
Or, rather, I never have before.
It’s as if the little Post-it note on the patient file of Davis Bauer has nicked a vital artery, and I can’t figure out how to stop the bleeding.
Suddenly we hear a jangle of keys and bluster as Ms. Mina and her daughter and grandson return to the brownstone. Mama hurries into the foyer to take their coats and their shopping bags, and I trail after her. Christina’s eyes widen when she sees me, and she throws her arms around me while Mama peels the snowsuit off her four-year-old son, Felix. “Ruth!” she cries. “This is fate. Mom, wasn’t I just talking to you about Ruth’s son?”
Ms. Mina looks up at me. “She was indeed. Ruth, dear, aren’t you just beautiful. Not a single wrinkle on that skin. I swear, you don’t age.”
Again, I hear Adisa in my head: Black don’t crack. Very forcefully, I tamp down on that voice and gently fold tiny Ms. Mina into an embrace. “Neither do you, Ms. Mina,” I say.
“Oh, go on with those lies.” She pretends to wave away my words, and then smiles slyly. “No, seriously. Go on with them. I love hearing every one.”
I try to signal to my mama. “I should probably be going—”
“Don’t you cut your visit short on our account,” Ms. Mina says, taking Felix from Mama’s arms. “You stay as long as you want.” She turns to Mama. “Lou, we’ll take our tea in the gold room.”
Christina grabs my hand. “Come with me,” she says, and she drags me up the stairs to the bedroom where we used to play.
It’s a shrine of sorts, with the same furniture she had as a child, but now there is a crib and a litter of toys on the floor. I step on something that nearly hobbles me, and Christina rolls her eyes. “Oh, God, Felix’s Playmobil men. Crazy, right, to spend hundreds of dollars on something plastic? But you know Felix. He loves his pirates.”
I crouch down, examining the intricate ship as Christina rummages through the closet. There is a captain in a red coat and a feathered black hat, and several pirates tangled in the plastic web of rigging. On the deck is a character with plastic skin that’s an orange-brown, with a little silver collar around his neck.
Good lord, is this supposed to be a slave?
Yes, it’s historically accurate. But still, it’s a toy. Why this slice of the past? What’s next—the Japanese POW internment camp play set? The Trail of Tears Lego? The Salem Witch Hunt game?
“I wanted to tell you before you read it in the paper,” Christina says. “Larry’s thinking of running for Congress.”
“Wow,” I answer. “How do you feel about that?”
She throws her arms around me. “Thank you. Do you realize you’re the first friend I’ve told who doesn’t act like this is the first step to the White House or start talking about whether we should get a place in Bethesda or Arlington? You’re the first person, period, who it occurred to that I might have a choice in the matter.”
“Well, don’t you? It seems like a pretty big disruption for the whole family.”
“Yeah,” Christina says. “I’m not sure I have the fortitude to be the wife of a politician.”
I laugh. “You have the fortitude to run the country by yourself.”
“That is exactly what I mean. Apparently I’m supposed to forget the fact that I graduated summa cum laude and instead I get to stand around holding my cute kid and smiling like the only thought I can hold in my head is what shade of lipstick matches my blouse,” Christina sighs. “Promise me something? If I ever cut my hair into a bob that kind of looks like a helmet, you’ll euthanize me?”
You see, I tell myself. Here is proof. I’ve known Christina my whole life. And yes, maybe there are differences between us—socioeconomic, political, racial—but that doesn’t mean we can’t connect, human to human, friend to friend.
“Sounds to me like you’ve already made up your mind,” I point out.
She looks at me, hopeless. “I can’t say no to him,” Christina sighs. “That’s why I fell for him in the first place.”
“I know,” I tell her. “But it could be worse.”
“How?”
“Congressmen serve for two years,” I point out. “Two years is a blink. Imagine if he’d set his heart on being a senator.”
She shudders, then grins. “If he makes it to the White House,” Christina says, “I’m hiring you as my chief of staff.”
“Maybe surgeon general,” I counter.
Christina links her arm through mine as we walk back to the gold room, where my mama is now setting out a tray of china and a teapot, a platter of homemade almond cookies. Felix sits on the floor, playing with a wooden train. “Mmm, Lou, I dream about these cookies,” Christina says. She hugs my mama before reaching for one. “We are so lucky to have you as part of our family.”
Family doesn’t get a paycheck, I think.
I smile. But like anything you wear that doesn’t fit, it pinches.
DURING ONE OF those Indentured Servant Saturdays when I was playing hide-and-seek with Christina and Rachel, I took a wrong turn and found myself in a room that was off-limits. Mr. Hallowell’s study was usually locked, but when I turned the knob, desperate to hide from the high-pitched squeal of Christina calling, “Ready or not, here I come…” I found myself stumbling inside the secret sanctum.
Rachel and I had spent a good deal of time imagining what might be behind that closed door. She thought it was a laboratory, with rows and rows of pickled body parts. I thought it was candy, because in my seven-year-old mind, that was the most valuable stash worth locking up. But when I landed on my hands and knees on the Oriental rug in Mr. Hallowell’s study, the reality was pretty disappointing: there was a leather couch. Shelves and shelves of what looked like silver wheels. A portable movie screen. And feeding the film into the chattering teeth of a projector was Sam Hallowell himself.
I always thought Mr. Hallowell looked like a movie star, and Mama used to say he practically was one. As he turned around, pinning me with his gaze, I tried to come up with an excuse for why I had breached this forbidden territory but was distracted by the grainy picture, on the screen, of Tinker Bell lighting animated fireworks over a castle.
“This is all you’ve ever known,” he said, and I realized that his speech was funny, that the words blurred into each other. He lifted a glass to his mouth and I heard the ice cubes clink. “You have no idea what it was like to see the world change in front of your eyes.”
On the screen, a man I didn’t recognize was speaking. “Color does brighten things up, doesn’t it?” he said, as a black-and-white wall of photos behind him bloomed into all the shades of the rainbow.
“Walt Disney was a genius,” Mr. Hallowell mused. He sat down on the couch and patted the seat beside him, and I scrambled over. A cartoon duck with glasses and a thick accent was sticking his hand in animated cans of paint and dumping the contents on the floor. You mix them all together and they spell muddy…and then you got black, the cartoon duck said, stirring the paint with his flippered foot so that it turned ebony. That’s exactly the way things were in the very beginning of time. Black. Man was completely in the dark about color. Why? Because he was stupid.
Mr. Hallowell was close enough now for me to smell his breath—sour, like that of my uncle Isaiah, who’d missed Christmas last year because Mama said he had gone somewhere to dry out. “Christina and Louis and you and your sister, you don’t know any different. For you it’s always looked like this.” He stood up suddenly and turned to me so that the projector shadowed his face, a dance of bright silhouettes. “The following program is brought to you in Living Color on NBC!” he boomed, spreading his arms so wide that the liquid in his glass sloshed over the side and onto the carpet. “What do you think, Ruth?” he asked.
I thought that I wanted him to move, so I could see what the duck was going to do next.
Mr. Hallowell’s voice softened. “I used to say that before every program,” he told me. “Until color TV was so common, no one needed reminding that it was a miracle. But before that—before that—I was the voice of the future. Me. Sam Hallowell. The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC!”
I didn’t tell him to move over, so that I could see the cartoon. I sat with my hands in my lap, because I knew that sometimes when people spoke, it wasn’t because they had something important to say. It was because they had a powerful need for someone to listen.
Late that night after my mama had brought us back home and tucked us into our beds, I had a nightmare. I opened my eyes and everything was cast in shades of gray, like the man on the movie screen before he pinked up and the background exploded with color. I saw myself running through the brownstone, pulling at locked doors, until Mr. Hallowell’s study opened. The film we had watched was ticking through the projector, but the picture was black and white now, too. I started screaming, and my mama rushed in and Rachel and Ms. Mina and Christina and even Mr. Hallowell, but when I told them my eyes weren’t working and that all the color in the world had vanished, they laughed at me. Ruth, they said, this is the way it always has been. Always will be.
BY THE TIME my train gets back to New Haven, Edison is already home and bent over the kitchen table doing his schoolwork. “Hey, baby,” I say, dropping a kiss on the crown of his head as I walk in, and giving him an extra squeeze. “That’s from Grandma Lou.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“I had a half hour before my shift starts, and I decided I’d rather spend it with you than in traffic.”
His eyes flicker toward me. “You’re gonna be late.”
“You’re worth it,” I tell him. I grab an apple from a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table—I always keep something healthy there, because Edison will eat whatever’s not nailed down—and take a bite, reaching for some of the papers spread out in front of my son. “Henry O. Flipper,” I read. “Sounds like a leprechaun.”
“He was the first African American graduate from West Point. Everyone in AP History has to teach a class profiling an American hero, and I’m trying to figure out what my lesson’s going to be.”
“Who else is in the running?”
Edison looks up. “Bill Pickett—a Black cowboy and rodeo star. And Christian Fleetwood, a Black Civil War soldier who won the Medal of Honor.”
I glance at the grainy photos of each man. “I don’t know any of these people.”
“Yeah, that’s the point,” Edison says. “We get Rosa Parks and Dr. King and that’s about it. You ever hear of a brotha named Lewis Latimer? He drew telephone parts for Alexander Graham Bell’s patent applications, and worked as a draftsman and patent expert for Thomas Edison. But you didn’t name me after him because you didn’t know he existed. The only time people who look like us are making history, it’s a footnote.”
He says this without bitterness, the way he would announce that we are out of ketchup or that his socks turned pink in the wash—as if it is something he’s not thrilled about, but can’t get worked up over, because it’s unlikely to change the outcome at this particular moment. I find myself thinking about Mrs. Braunstein and Virginia again. It feels like a splinter my mind keeps getting caught on, and Edison just pressed deep on it again. Have I really never noticed these things before? Or have I been very studiously keeping my eyes shut tight?
Edison glances at his watch. “Mama,” he says, “you’re gonna be really late.”
He’s right. I tell him what he can heat up for dinner, what time he should go to bed, what time my shift is over. Then I hurry to my car and drive to the hospital. I take as many shortcuts as I can, but I’m still ten minutes late. I take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, and by the time I reach the birthing pavilion I am out of breath and sweating. Marie is standing at the nurses’ desk, as if she’s waiting on me. “I’m sorry,” I say immediately. “I was in New York with my mother, and then stuck in traffic, and—”
“Ruth…I can’t let you work tonight.”
I am dumbfounded. Corinne is late more than 50 percent of the time, but I have a single transgression and I get punished for it?
“It won’t happen again,” I say.
“I can’t let you work,” Marie repeats, and I realize that she hasn’t met my gaze, not once. “I’ve been informed by HR that your license is being suspended.”
Suddenly, I am made of stone. “What?”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “Security will escort you out of the building after you clear out your locker.”
“Wait,” I say, noticing the two goons who are hovering behind the nurses’ desk. “You’re kidding me. Why is my license being suspended? And how am I supposed to work if it is?”
Marie draws in her breath and turns to the security guards. They step forward. “Ma’am?” one of them says, and he gestures toward the break room, as if after twenty years I might not know the way.
THE LITTLE CARDBOARD box I carry out to the car has a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of Advil, a cardigan sweater, and a collection of photos of Edison. That’s all I kept in my locker at work. It sits in the backseat and keeps drawing my attention in the rearview mirror, surprising me, like a passenger I wasn’t expecting.
I have not even pulled out of the parking lot before I call the union lawyer. It’s 5:00 P.M., and the chances of him being at his desk are slim, so when he answers the phone I burst into tears. I tell him about Turk Bauer and the baby and he calms me down and says he will do some digging and call me back.
I should go home. I should make sure Edison is all right. But that will spark a conversation about why I’m not at work, and I’m not sure I can cope with that right now. If the union lawyer does his job, maybe I can even be reinstated before I’m supposed to work tomorrow night.
Then my phone rings. “Ruth?” Corinne says. “What the fuck is going on?”
I lean back against the driver’s seat, closing my eyes. “I don’t know,” I admit.
“Hang on,” she says, and I hear muffled noises. “I’m in the goddamned supply closet for privacy. I called you as soon as I heard.”
“Heard what? I don’t know anything, except that my license is apparently being suspended.”
“Well, that bitchy hospital lawyer said something to Marie about professional misconduct—”
“Carla Luongo?”
“Who’s she?”
“The bitchy hospital lawyer. She threw me under the bus,” I say, bitter. Carla and I had each gotten a glimpse of the other’s cards, and I’d thought that was enough for us to implicitly agree we both had aces. I just never expected her to play her hand so quickly. “That racist father must have threatened a lawsuit, and she sacrificed me to save the hospital.”
There’s a pause. It’s so small that maybe if I wasn’t listening for it, I might not have heard it. And then Corinne—my colleague, my friend—says, “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.”
At Dalton, there was one table at lunch where all the Black kids sat, except me. Once, another scholarship student of color invited me to join them for lunch. I said thanks, but I usually spent that time tutoring a white friend who didn’t understand trig. This was not the truth. The truth was that the Black table made my white friends nervous, because even if they’d sat down there with me, they would have been tolerated but not welcomed. In a world where they always fit in, the one place they didn’t chafed hard.
The other truth was that if I sat with the other kids of color, I couldn’t pretend I was different from them. When Mr. Adamson, my history teacher, started talking about Martin Luther King and kept looking at me, my white friends shrugged it off: He didn’t mean it that way. At the Black table, if one student talked about Mr. Adamson staring at her during that same lesson, another African American student would validate the experience: That totally happened to me, too.
I so badly wanted to blend in in high school that I surrounded myself with people who could convince me that if I felt like I was being singled out because of the color of my skin, I was making things up, overthinking, being ridiculous.
There was no Black table in the cafeteria at the hospital. There were a handful of janitors of color, and one or two doctors, and me.
I want to ask Corinne when she was last Black, because then and only then would she have the right to tell me if Carla Luongo’s actions were intentional or accidental. But instead I tell her I have to go, and I hang up while she is still responding. Then I drive out of the hospital where I’ve been hiding for two decades, underneath the highway that pulses with New York–bound traffic, like an artery. I pass a small tent city of homeless vets and a drug deal going down and park outside the projects where my sister lives. She answers the door with a toddler on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand and an expression on her face that suggests she has been expecting me for years.
“WHY ARE YOU surprised?” Adisa asks. “What did you think was going to happen, moving into Whiteville?”
“East End,” I correct, and she just gives me a look.
We are sitting at her kitchen table. Given the sheer number of children she lives with, the apartment is remarkably clean. Pages from coloring books are taped to the wall, and there is a macaroni casserole in the oven. In the kitchen, Adisa’s oldest, Tyana, is feeding the baby at her high chair. Two of the boys are playing Nintendo in the living room. Her other child is MIA.
“I hate to say I told you so…”
“No, you don’t,” I mutter. “You’ve been waiting to tell me that forever.”
She shrugs, agreeing. “You’re the one who kept saying, Adisa, you don’t know what you talking about. My skin color isn’t even a factor. And go figure, you’re not just like one of them, are you?”
“You know, if I wanted to be a punching bag, I could have just stayed at the hospital.” I bury my face in my hands. “What am I supposed to tell Edison?”
“The truth?” Adisa suggests. “There’s no shame in it. It’s not like you did anything wrong. It’s better he learn earlier than his mama that he can run with the white crowd but it don’t make him any less Black.”
When Edison was younger, Adisa used to babysit him after school if I pulled an afternoon shift, until he begged to stay home alone. His cousins ribbed him for not being able to understand their slang, and when he did start to master it, his white friends in school looked at him like he had grown a second head. Even I was having trouble understanding my nephews, elbowing each other on the couch and laughing until Tyana whacked them both with a dish towel so that she could put the baby to sleep. (Oh, we out chea, I heard one of the boys say, and it took me a few minutes to realize that translated to We’re out here, and that Tabari was teasing his brother for thinking he was all that because he won a round of the game.) Edison might not have fit in with the white kids in his school, but that at least he could blame on his skin. He didn’t fit in with his cousins, either, and they looked like him.
Adisa folds her arms. “You need to find a lawyer and sue that damn hospital right back.”
“That costs money,” I groan. “I just want this all to go away.”
My heart starts to hammer. I can’t lose our home. I can’t take my savings—all of which is Edison’s college fund—and liquidate it just so that we can eat and pay the mortgage and buy gas. I can’t ruin my son’s opportunities just because mine blew up in my face.
Adisa must see that I’m on the verge of a total breakdown because she reaches for my hand. “Ruth,” she says softly. “Your friends may have turned on you. But you know what the good thing is about having a sister? It’s forever.”
She locks her eyes on mine—hers are so dark that you can barely see the edge between iris and pupil. But they’re steady, and she doesn’t let go of me, and slowly, slowly, I let myself breathe.
WHEN I RETURN to my house at seven o’clock, Edison comes running to the front door. “What are you doing home?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”
I paste a smile onto my face. “I’m fine, baby. There was just a mix-up with the shifts, so Corinne and I went out to dinner at Olive Garden.”
“Are there leftovers?”
God bless the teenage boy, who can’t see past his own hunger pangs. “No,” I tell him. “We shared an entrée.”
“Well, that seems like a missed opportunity,” he grumbles.
“Did you wind up writing about Latimer?”
He shakes his head. “No. I think I’m going to pick Anthony Johnson. First Black landowner,” he says. “Way back in 1651.”
“Wow,” I reply. “That’s impressive.”
“Yeah, but there’s kind of a hitch. See, he was a slave that came over to Virginia from England and worked on a tobacco plantation until it was attacked by Native Americans and everyone but five people there died. He and his wife, Mary, moved and claimed two hundred and fifty acres of land. The thing is, he owned slaves. And I don’t know if I feel like being the one to tell that to the rest of my class, you know? Like it’s something they can use against me someday in an argument.” He shakes his head, lost in thought. “I mean, how could you do that, if you knew what it was like to be a slave yourself once?”
I think about all the things I’ve done to feel like I belong at the top—education, marriage, this home, keeping a barrier between myself and my sister. “I don’t know,” I say slowly. “In his world, the people with power owned other people. Maybe that’s what he thought he needed to do to feel powerful too.”
“That doesn’t mean it was right,” Edison points out.
I wrap my arms around his waist and hold him tight, pressing my face against his shoulder so he cannot see the tears in my eyes.
“What’s that for?”
“Because,” I murmur, “you make this world a better place.”
Edison hugs me back. “Imagine what I could do if you’d brought me chicken parm.”
Once he goes to bed, I sift through the mail. Bills, bills, and more bills, plus one slim envelope from the Department of Public Health, revoking my nursing license. I stare at it for five whole minutes, but the words don’t materialize into anything other than what it is: the proof that this is not a nightmare I will wake up from, wondering at my own crazy imagination. Instead, I sit in the living room, my thoughts racing too fast for me to think about turning in. It’s a mistake, that’s all. I know it, and I just need to make everyone else see it, too. I’m a nurse. I heal people. I bring them comfort. I fix things. I can fix this.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I glance at the number—it’s the union lawyer calling me back. “Ruth,” he says when I answer. “I hope it’s not too late.”
I almost laugh. As if I’m going to get any sleep tonight. “Why did the Department of Public Health take away my license?”
“Because of an allegation of possible negligence,” he explains.
“But I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve worked there for twenty years. Can they still fire me?”
“You’ve got bigger problems than keeping your job. A criminal prosecution has been filed against you, Ruth. The State is holding you responsible for the death of that baby.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, the sentence sharp as knives on my tongue.
“They already convened a grand jury. My advice is for you to hire a defense attorney. This is out of my league.”
This is not real. This can’t be real. “My supervisor said not to touch the infant, and I didn’t, and now I’m being punished for it?”
“The State doesn’t care what your supervisor said,” the union lawyer replies. “The State just sees a dead baby. They’re targeting you because they think you failed as a nurse.”
“You’re wrong.” I shake my head in the darkness, and I say the words I’ve swallowed down my whole life. “They’re targeting me because I’m Black.”
IN SPITE OF all this, I fall asleep. I know this because when I first hear the jackhammer at 3:00 A.M. I think it is part of my dream—me, stuck in traffic, late for work, while a road crew creates a canyon between me and where I need to be. In my dream I honk the car horn. The jackhammer doesn’t stop.
And then just like that I am bursting through the surface of consciousness, and the jackhammer of knocking detonates as the police break the door off its hinges and swarm into my living room, their guns drawn. “What are you doing?” I cry out. “What are you doing?”
“Ruth Jefferson?” one of them yells, and I can’t find my voice, I can’t speak at all, so I just jerk my chin: Yes. Immediately he pulls my arm behind my back and pushes me facedown onto the floor, his knee in the small of my back as he zips a plastic tie around my wrists. The others are overturning furniture, dumping drawers onto the floor, sweeping books off the shelves. “A grand jury has charged you with murder and involuntary manslaughter,” the policeman says. “You’re under arrest.”
Another voice pierces through the tinny echo of these words. “Mama?” Edison asks. “What’s going on?”
All eyes turn to the doorway of the bedroom. “Don’t move!” shouts another cop, aiming his gun at my baby. “Hands in the air!”
I start to scream.
They are all over Edison, three of them wrestling him onto the ground. He is handcuffed like me. I see him straining toward me, panic lining every muscle of his neck, the whites of his eyes rolling as he tries to see if I am all right.
“Leave him be,” I sob. “He has nothing to do with this!”
But they don’t know that. All they see is a six-foot-tall black boy.
“Do what they say, Edison,” I cry. “And call your aunt.”
My joints crack as the policeman who is holding me down suddenly yanks me upright by my wrists, pulling my body in a way it doesn’t want to go. The other policemen file behind, leaving the contents of my kitchen cabinets, my bookshelves, my drawers in heaps on the floor.
I am wide awake now, being dragged in my nightgown and slippers down my porch steps so that I stumble and scrape my knee on the pavement before I am pushed headfirst into the back of a police car. I pray to God that someone will remember to cut my son’s hands loose. I pray to God that my neighbors, who have been awakened by the hullaballoo in our sleepy neighborhood at 3:00 A.M., and who stand in their doorways with their white faces reflecting the moon, will ask themselves one day why they remained dead silent, not a single one asking if there was anything they could do to help.
I HAVE BEEN to the police station before. I went when my car was sideswiped in the grocery store parking lot and the fool who did it just drove off. I held the hand of a patient who had been sexually assaulted and couldn’t get the courage to tell the authorities. But now I am brought into the station the back way, where the bright fluorescent lights make me blink. I am handed off to another officer, just a boy really, who sits me down and asks me for my name, my address, my date of birth, my Social Security number. I speak so softly that a few times he has to ask me to be louder. Then I am led to what looks like a copy machine, except it’s not. My fingers are rolled one by one across the glass surface and the prints appear on a screen. “Pretty awesome, right?” the boy says.
I wonder if my fingerprints are already in the system. When Edison was in kindergarten I had gone with him to a community safety day, to get him fingerprinted. He was scared, so I did it first. Back then, I believed that the worst thing that could ever happen was that he might be taken from me.
It never occurred to me that I might be taken from him.
I am then placed up against a cinder-block wall and photographed straight on, and in profile.
The young cop leads me to the only cell that our police department has, which is small and dark and freezing cold. There’s a toilet in the corner, and a long-necked sink. “Excuse me,” I say, clearing my throat as the door locks behind me. “How long do I stay here?”
He looks at me, not without sympathy. “As long as it takes,” he says cryptically, and then he is gone.
I sit down on the bench. It is made of metal, and the chill goes right through my nightgown. I have to pee, but I am too embarrassed to do it here, in the open, because what if that’s the moment they come for me?
I wonder if Edison has called Adisa, if even now she is trying to get me out of here. I wonder if Adisa has filled him in, told him about the baby that died. I wonder if my own boy blames me.
I have a sudden flash of myself just twelve hours ago, dipping strands of a crystal chandelier into an ammonia solution while classical music played in the Hallowells’ brownstone. The incongruity makes me choke on a laugh. Or perhaps it is a sob. I can’t tell anymore.
Maybe if Adisa can’t get me out of here, the Hallowells can. They know people who know people. But my mama would have to be told what happened first, and although she would defend me to her death, I know there would be a part of her thinking, How did it come to this? How did this girl, whose lucky life I broke my back for, wind up in a jail cell?
And I wouldn’t know the answer. On one side of the seesaw is my education. My nursing certification. My twenty years of service at the hospital. My neat little home. My spotless Toyota RAV4. My National Honor Society–inductee son. All these building blocks of my existence, and yet the only quality straddling the other side is so hulking and dense that it tips the balance every time: my brown skin.
Well.
I didn’t do all this hard work for nothing. I can still use that fancy college degree and the years I’ve spent in the company of white people to turn this around, to make the policemen understand that this is a misunderstanding. Like them, I live in this town. Like them, I pay my taxes. They have so much more in common with me than with the angry bigot who started this debacle.
I have no idea how long it is until someone returns to the cell; I don’t have a watch or a clock. But it’s enough time for me to get that spark of hope burning in my chest again. So when I hear the tumblers click, I look up with a grateful smile.
“I’m going to take you for questioning,” the young officer says. “I have to, um, you know.” He gestures to my hands.
I stand up. “You must be exhausted,” I tell him. “Staying awake all night.”
He shrugs, but he also blushes. “Someone’s gotta do it.”
“I bet your mama’s so proud of you. I know I would be. I think my son’s only a couple of years younger than you.” I hold my hands out in front of me, innocent and wide-eyed, as he glances down at my wrists.
“You know, I think we’re okay without them,” he says after a beat. He puts his hand on my arm, still firmly guiding me.
I hide my smile inside. I take this as a victory.
I am left alone in a room with a large mirror that I am sure is a window to another space on the other side of the wall. There is a tape recorder on the table, and a fan that is whirring overhead, although it is freezing here, too. I flex my hands on my lap, waiting. I don’t stare at my reflection, because I know they are watching, and because of this I can only catch a glimpse of myself. In my nightgown, I might as well be a ghost.
When the door opens, two detectives enter—a bull of a man and a tiny sprite. “I’m Detective MacDougall,” says the man. “And this is Detective Leong.”
She smiles at me. I try to read into it. You are a woman too, I think, hoping for telepathy. You are Asian American. You’ve been in my seat metaphorically, if not literally.
“Can I get you some water, Mrs. Jefferson?” asks Detective Leong.
“That would be nice,” I say.
While she goes to get me water, Detective MacDougall explains to me that I don’t have to talk to them, but if I do, what I say might be used against me in court. Then again, he points out, if I have nothing to hide, maybe I’d like to give them my side of the story.
“Yes,” I say, although I have watched enough cop shows to know that I am supposed to shut up. But that is fiction; this is real life. I didn’t do anything illegal. And if I don’t explain, how will anyone ever know that? If I don’t explain, doesn’t that just make me look like I’m guilty?
He asks if it’s all right to turn on the tape recorder.
“Of course,” I say. “And thank you. Thank you so much for being willing to hear me out. This is all a very big misunderstanding, I’m afraid.”
By now Detective Leong is back. She hands me the water and I drink it all, a full eight-ounce glass. I did not know until I started how thirsty I was.
“Be that as it may, Ms. Jefferson,” says MacDougall, “we have some pretty strong evidence to contradict what you’re saying. You don’t deny that you were present when Davis Bauer died?”
“No,” I reply. “I was there. It was awful.”
“What were you doing at the time?”
“I was part of the crash team. The baby became very ill, very fast. We did the best we could.”
“Yet I just finished looking at photos from the medical examiner that suggest the child was physically abused—”
“Well, there you are,” I blurt out. “I didn’t touch that baby.”
“You just said you were part of the crash team,” MacDougall points out.
“But I didn’t touch the baby until he started to code.”
“At which point you started hammering on the baby’s chest—”
My face flushes with heat. “What? No. I was doing CPR—”
“A bit too enthusiastically, according to eyewitnesses,” the detective adds.
Who? I think, running through my brain to list all the people who were there with me. Who would have seen what I was doing and not recognized it for what it was: emergency medical care?
“Mrs. Jefferson,” Detective Leong asks, “did you have any discussions with anyone in the hospital about your feelings for this baby and his family?”
“No. I was taken off the case, and that was that.”
MacDougall narrows his eyes. “You didn’t have a problem with Turk Bauer?”
I force myself to take a deep breath. “We didn’t see eye to eye.”
“Do you feel that way about all white people?”
“Some of my best friends are white.” I meet his gaze squarely.
MacDougall stares at me for so long I can see his pupils shrink. I know he is waiting to see if I’ll turn away first. Instead, I notch up my chin.
He pushes back from the table and stands up. “I have to make a call,” he says, and he walks out of the room.
I take this as a victory, too.
Detective Leong sits on the edge of the table. Her badge is at her hip; it’s shiny, like a new toy. “You must be so tired,” she says, and I can hear in her voice the same game I was trying to play with the young cop in the holding cell.
“Nurses get used to working on very little sleep,” I say evenly.
“And you’ve been a nurse for a while, right?”
“Twenty years.”
She laughs. “God, I’ve been on the job for nine months. I can’t imagine doing anything for that long. I guess it’s not work if you love it, right?”
I nod, still wary. But if I have any chance of making these detectives understand that I’m being railroaded, it’s going to be with her. “That’s true. And I love what I do.”
“You must have felt awful when you were told by your supervisor you couldn’t take care of that baby anymore,” she says. “Especially given your level of expertise.”
“It wasn’t the best day I’ve ever had, no.”
“My first day on the job? I totaled a police car. Drove it into a highway barrier at a construction site. Seriously. I scored highest on the detective exam, but in the field, I was a joke. The other guys in my class still call me Crash. I mean, let’s be honest, a female detective has to work twice as hard as the guys, but the only thing they remember me for is a simple mistake. I was so upset. I still am.”
I look at her, the truth balanced on my tongue like a hard candy. I wasn’t supposed to touch the baby. But I did, even though I could have gotten in trouble. And it still wasn’t enough.
“Look, Ruth,” the detective adds, “if this was an accident, now would be the time to say so. Maybe the hurt you were feeling got the best of you. It would be totally understandable, given the circumstances. Just tell me, and I’ll do what I can to make this go down easier.”
That is when I realize that she still thinks I’m at fault.
That she’s not being nice to me by sharing her own story. She’s being manipulative.
That those TV shows are right.
I swallow hard, so that honesty sits in the pit of my belly. Instead, I speak four short words in a voice I do not recognize. “I want a lawyer,” I say.