Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

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…”