Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

I realize that the whispering behind me has stopped. But instead of feeling more comfortable, it feels ominous. What do they think I’m doing wrong?

By the time I flip him back over, Davis’s eyes are starting to drift shut. Babies usually get sleepy a couple of hours after delivery, which is one reason to do the bath now-it will wake him up long enough to try to feed again. There is a stack of wipes on the warmer; with practiced, sure strokes I dip one into the warm water and wipe the baby down from head to toe. Then I diaper him, swiftly wrap him up in a blanket like a burrito, and rinse his hair under the sink with some Johnson’s baby shampoo. The last thing I do is put an ID band on him that will match the ones his parents have, and fasten a tiny electronic security bracelet on his ankle, which will set off an alarm if the baby gets too close to any of the exits.

I can feel the parents’ eyes, hot on my back. I turn, a smile fastened on my face. “There,” I say, handing the infant to Brittany again. “Clean as a whistle. Now, let’s see if we can get him to nurse.”

I reach down to help position the baby, but Brittany flinches.

“Get away from her,” Turk Bauer says. “I want to talk to your boss.”

They are the first words he has spoken to me in the twenty minutes I’ve been in this room with him and his family, and they carry an undercurrent of discontent. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to tell Marie what a stellar job I’ve done. But I nod tightly and step out of the room, replaying every word and gesture I have made since introducing myself to Brittany Bauer. I walk to the nurses’ desk and find Marie filling out a chart. “We’ve got a problem in Five,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “The father wants to see you.”

“What happened?” Marie asks.

“Absolutely nothing,” I reply, and I know it’s true. I’m a good nurse. Sometimes a great one. I took care of that infant the way I would have taken care of any newborn on this pavilion. “I told them I heard what sounded like a murmur, and that I’d contact the pediatrician. And I bathed the baby and did his exam.”

I must be doing a pretty awful job of hiding my feelings, though, because Marie looks at me sympathetically. “Maybe they’re worried about the baby’s heart,” she says.

I am just a step behind her as we walk inside, so I can clearly see the relief on the faces of the parents when they see Marie. “I understand that you wanted to talk to me, Mr. Bauer?” she says.

“That nurse,” Turk says. “I don’t want her touching my son again.”

I can feel heat spreading from the collar of my scrubs up into my scalp. No one likes to be called out in front of her supervisor.

Marie draws herself upright, her spine stiffening. “I can assure you that Ruth is one of the best nurses we have, Mr. Bauer. If there’s a formal complaint-”

“I don’t want her or anyone who looks like her touching my son,” the father interrupts, and he folds his arms across his chest. He’s pushed up his sleeves while I was out of the room. Running from wrist to elbow on one arm is the tattoo of a Confederate flag.

Marie stops talking.

For a moment, I honestly don’t understand. And then it hits me with the force of a blow: they don’t have a problem with what I’ve done.

Just with who I am.

THE FIRST NIGGER I EVER met killed my older brother. I sat between my parents in a Vermont courtroom, wearing a stiff-collared shirt choking me, while men in suits argued and pointed at diagrams of cars and tire skids. I was eleven and Tanner sixteen. He’d just got his driver’s license two months before. To celebrate, my mother baked him a cake decorated with a Fruit Roll-Up highway and one of my old Matchbox cars. The guy who killed him was from Massachusetts and was older than my father. His skin was darker than the wood of the witness box, and his teeth were nearly electric by contrast. I couldn’t stop staring.

The jury couldn’t reach a verdict-hung, they called it-and so this man was free to go. My mother completely lost it, shrieking, babbling about her baby and justice. The murderer shook hands with his lawyer and then turned around, walking toward us, so that we were only separated by a railing. “Mrs. Bauer,” he said. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

As if he had nothing to do with it.

My mother stopped sobbing, pursed her lips, and spit.

–

BRIT AND ME, we’ve been waiting forever for this moment.

I’m driving with one hand on the steering wheel of the pickup and the other one on the bench seat between us; she clenches it every time a contraction hits her. I can tell it hurts like a bitch, but Brit just narrows her eyes and sets her jaw. It’s not a surprise-I mean, I’ve seen her knock out the teeth of a beaner who dented her car at the Stop & Shop with a runaway cart-but I don’t think she’s ever been quite so beautiful to me as she is right now, strong and silent.

I steal glimpses at her profile when we idle at a red light. We have been married for two years, but I still can’t believe that Brit is mine. She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen, for one, and in the Movement, she’s about as close to royalty as you can get. Her dark hair snakes in a curly rope down her back; her cheeks are flushed. She’s puffing, little breaths, like she’s running a marathon. Suddenly she turns, her eyes bright and blue, like the middle of a flame. “No one said it would be this hard,” she pants.

I squeeze her hand, which is something, because she’s already squeezing mine to the point of pain. “This warrior,” I tell her, “is going to be just as strong as its mom.” For years, I was taught that God needs soldiers. That we are the angels of this race war, and without us, the world would become Sodom and Gomorrah all over again. Francis-Brit’s legendary dad-would stand up and preach to all the fresh cuts the need to increase our numbers, so that we could fight back. But now that Brit and I are here, in this moment, about to bring a baby into the world, I’m filled with equal parts triumph and terror. Because as hard as I’ve tried, this place is still a cesspool. Right now, my baby is perfect. But from the moment it arrives, it’s bound to be tainted.

“Turk!” Brittany cries.

Wildly, I take a left-hand turn, having nearly missed the hospital entrance. “What do you think of Thor?” I ask, turning the conversation to baby names, desperate to distract Brit from the pain. One of the guys I know from Twitter just had a kid and named him Loki. Some of the older crews were big into Norse mythology, and even though they’ve broken up into smaller cells by now, old habits die hard.

“Or Batman or Green Lantern?” Brittany snaps. “I’m not naming my kid after a comic book character.” She winces through another contraction. “And what if it’s a girl?”

“Wonder Woman,” I suggest. “After her mother.”

–

AFTER MY BROTHER died, everything fell apart. It was like that trial had ripped off the outside layer of skin, and what was left of my family was just a lot of blood and guts with nothing to hold it together anymore. My father split and went to live in a condo where everything was green-the walls, the carpet, the toilet, the stove-and every time I visited, I couldn’t help but feel queasy. My mother started drinking-a glass of wine with lunch and then the whole bottle. She lost her job as a paraprofessional at the elementary school when she passed out on the playground and her charge-a kid with Down syndrome-fell off the monkey bars and broke her wrist. A week later we put everything we owned into a U-Haul and moved in with my grandfather.

Gramps was a vet who had never stopped fighting a war. I didn’t know him all that well, because he’d never liked my dad, but now that that obstacle was out of the way, he took it upon himself to raise me the way he thought I should have been raised all along. My parents, he said, had been too soft on me, and I was a sissy. He was going to toughen me up. He’d wake me up at dawn on weekends and drag me into the woods for what he called Basic Training. I learned how to tell poisonous berries apart from the ones you could eat. I was able to identify scat so I could track animals. I could tell time by the position of the sun. It was sort of like Boy Scouts, except that my grandfather’s lessons were punctuated by stories of the gooks he fought in Vietnam, of jungles that would swallow you if you let them, of the smell of a man being burned alive.