Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

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?