Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

I just couldn’t find it in myself to hand this woman an ice-cold baby, so I wrapped him up again and went to the emergency room for some heated blankets. In the morgue, I swaddled the baby in them, one after another, trying to take the chill from his skin. I took one of the knit caps we usually put on newborns to cover the peak of his head, mottled purple with settled blood.

We have a policy, if a newborn dies: we never take him away from the mother. If that grieving woman wants to hold her baby for twenty-four hours, to sleep with him tucked against her heart, to brush his hair and bathe him and have all the moments with her child she will never get to have, we make it happen. We wait until the mother is ready to let go.

That grandmother, she held her great-grandson for the entire afternoon. Then she put the infant back into my arms. I put a towel over my shoulder, as if I were nursing him, and got into the elevator, taking him down to the basement level of the hospital, where our morgue is located.

You’d think that the hardest part of an experience like this is the moment the mother gives you her child, but it’s not. Because at that moment, it’s still a child, to her. The hardest part is taking off the little knit hat, the swaddling blanket, the diaper. Zipping him into the body bag. Closing the refrigerator door.

–

AN HOUR LATER I am in the staff room, taking my coat from the locker, when Marie pokes her head inside. “You’re still here? Good. Got a minute?”

I nod, sitting down across from her at the table. Someone has tossed a handful of hard candy on it. I take a piece and unwrap it, let the butterscotch bleed onto my tongue. I hope it will keep me from saying what I shouldn’t say.

“What a morning,” Marie sighs.

“What a night,” I answer.

“That’s right, you pulled a double.” She shakes her head. “That poor family.”

“It’s horrible.” I may not agree with their beliefs, but that doesn’t mean I think they deserve to lose a baby.

“We had to sedate the mom,” Marie tells me. “The baby’s gone downstairs.”

Wisely, she does not mention the father to me.

Marie flattens a form on the table. “This is obviously just protocol. I need to write up what officially happened when Davis Bauer went into respiratory arrest. You were in the nursery?”

“I was covering for Corinne,” I reply. My voice is steady, soft, even though every syllable feels as dangerous as a blade at my throat. “She got called to the OR unexpectedly. The Bauer baby had his circ at nine, and couldn’t be left unattended. Since you were at the stat C, too, I was the only body even available to stand in for observation.”

Marie’s pen scratches across the form; none of this is anything she doesn’t know or expect. “When did you notice that the infant had stopped breathing?”

I curl my tongue around the candy. Tuck it high in my cheek. “A moment before you arrived,” I say.

Marie starts to speak, and then bites her lip. She taps the pen twice, then puts it down with a definitive click. “A moment,” she repeats, as if she is weighing the scope and size of that word. “Ruth…when I came in, you were just standing there.”

“I was doing what I was supposed to do,” I correct. “I wasn’t touching that baby.” I get up from the table, buttoning my coat, hoping she cannot see that my hands are shaking. “Is there anything else?”

“It’s been a tough day,” Marie says. “Get some rest.”

I nod and leave the break room. Instead of taking the elevator to street level, though, I plunge to the bowels of the hospital. In the overexposed fluorescent fixtures of the morgue, I blink, letting my eyes adjust. I wonder why clarity is always so damn white.

He’s the only dead baby there. His limbs are still pliable, his skin hasn’t taken on a chill. There’s mottling in his cheeks and feet, but that is the only clue that he is anything other than what he seems to be at first glance: someone’s beloved.

I lean against a steel gurney, cradling him in my arms. I hold him the way I would have, if I’d been allowed to. I whisper his name and pray for his soul. I welcome him into this broken world and, in the same breath, say goodbye.

IT’S BEEN QUITE THE MORNING.

First, we all overslept because I thought Micah had set his alarm and he thought I had set my alarm. Then our four-year-old, Violet, refused to eat a bowl of Cheerios and sobbed until Micah agreed to fry an egg for her, at which point she was so far gone down the path of nuclear meltdown that she burst into tears again when the plate was set down. “I want a fuckin’ knife!” she screamed, and it was quite possibly the only thing that could have stopped both Micah and me in our frenetic tracks.

“Did she say what I think she said?” Micah asked.

Violet wailed again-this time more clearly. “I want a fork and knife!”

I burst out laughing, which made Micah give me a withering look. “How many times have I told you to stop swearing?” he says. “You think it’s funny that our four-year-old sounds like a sailor?”

“Technically she wasn’t. Technically, you misheard it.”

“Don’t lawyer me,” Micah muttered.

“Don’t lecture me,” I said.

So by the time we left-Micah taking Violet to preschool before he went to perform six back-to-back surgeries; me, driving in the opposite direction to my office-the only family member in a good mood was Violet, who had breakfast with all her utensils and was wearing her fancy sequined Mary Janes because neither of her parents had the energy to fight her about that, too.

–

AN HOUR LATER, my day has gone from bad to worse. Because although I went to law school at Columbia, graduated in the top 5 percent of my class, spent three years clerking for a federal judge, today my boss-the head of the New Haven Judicial District of the Division of Public Defender Services in the state of Connecticut-has sent me to negotiate about bras.

Warden Al Wojecwicz, the director of corrections at the New Haven facility, is sitting in a stuffy conference room with me, his deputy director, and a lawyer from the private sector, Arthur Wang. I’m the only woman in the room, mind you. This convening of what I’ve come to call the Itty Bitty Titty Committee has been precipitated by the fact that two months ago, female lawyers were barred from entering the prison if we were wearing underwire bras. We kept setting off the metal detectors.

The prison wouldn’t settle for a pat-down, insisting on a strip search, which was illegal and time-consuming. Ever resourceful, we started going into the ladies’ room and leaving our underwear there, so that we could go in and visit our clients. But then the prison said we couldn’t go inside braless.

Al rubs his temples. “Ms. McQuarrie, you have to understand, this is just about minimizing risk.”

“Warden,” I reply, “they let you go inside with keys . What do you think I’m going to do? Bust someone out of jail with a foundation garment?”

The deputy warden cannot meet my gaze. He clears his throat. “I went to Target and looked at the bras they have for sale there-”

My eyebrows shoot up to my hairline, and I turn to Al. “You sent him to do field research?”

Before he can answer, Arthur leans back in his chair. “You know, it does beg the question of whether the entire clothing policy should be under review,” he muses. “Last year I was trying to see a client last-minute, before I headed out for vacation. I was wearing sandals, and was told I couldn’t enter the prison with them. But the only other shoes I had were golf cleats, which were perfectly acceptable.”

“Cleats,” I repeat. “The shoes with actual spikes on the bottom? Why would you send someone in with cleats but not flip-flops?”