Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

I hand him the lab results. “The lab says there was an abnormality in this patient’s newborn screening.”

He flips through the first few pages. “Bingo-this kid has MCADD. You can tell by the spikes on the mass spectrometry graph here at C-six and C-eight-that’s the acylcarnitine profile.” Ivan looks up at us. “Oh, okay, yeah. English. Well, the acronym is short for medium-chain acyl-coenzyme A dehydrogenase deficiency. It’s an autosomal recessive disorder of fatty acid oxidation. Your body needs energy to do stuff-move, function, digest, even breathe. We get our fuel from food, and store it in our tissues as fatty acids until we need it. At that point, we oxidize those fatty acids to create energy for bodily functions. But a baby with a fatty acid oxidation disorder can’t do that, because he’s missing a key enzyme-in this case, MCADD. That means once his energy stores are depleted, he’s in trouble.”

“Meaning…?”

He hands me back the packet. “His blood sugar will tank, and he’ll be tired, sluggish.”

Those words trigger a flag in my mind. Davis Bauer’s low blood sugar was blamed on his mother’s gestational diabetes. But what if that wasn’t the case? “Could it cause death?”

“If it’s not diagnosed early. A lot of these kids are asymptomatic until something acts like a trigger-an infection, or an immunization, or fasting. Then, you get a rapid decline that looks an awful lot like sudden infant death syndrome-basically the baby goes into arrest.”

“Could a baby who arrests still be saved, if he has MCADD?”

“It really depends on the situation. Maybe. Maybe not.”

Maybe, I think, is an excellent word for a jury.

Ivan looks at me. “I’m guessing, if there’s a lawsuit involved, that the patient didn’t make it?”

I shake my head. “He died when he was three days old.”

“What day was the kid born?”

“Thursday. The heel stick was done on a Friday.”

“What time was it sent off to the state lab?” Ivan asks.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “Does that make a difference?”

“Yeah.” He leans back in his chair, eyeing Violet, who is now trying to ride the dog. “The lab in Connecticut is closed on Saturday and Sunday. If the screening sample was sent out from the hospital after, say, midday on Friday, it didn’t reach the lab till after the weekend.” Ivan looks at me. “Which means if this kid had been born on a Monday instead, he would have had a fighting chance.”

WE ALL DO IT, YOU know. Distract ourselves from noticing how time’s passing. We throw ourselves into our jobs. We focus on keeping the blight off our tomato plants. We fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping so that the weeks look the same on the surface. And then one day, you turn around, and your baby is a man. One day, you look in the mirror, and see gray hair. One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you’ve already lived. And you think, How did this happen so fast? It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink, when I was diapering him, when I was young .

When this realization hits, you start doing the math. How much time do I have left? How much can I fit into that small space?

Some of us let this realization guide us, I guess. We book trips to Tibet, we learn how to sculpt, we skydive. We try to pretend it’s not almost over.

But some of us just fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping, because if you only see the path that’s right ahead of you, you don’t obsess over when the cliff might drop off.

Some of us never learn.

And some of us learn earlier than others.

–

ON THE MORNING of the trial, I knock softly on Edison’s door. “You almost ready?” I ask, and when he doesn’t answer, I turn the knob and step inside. Edison is buried under a pile of quilts, his arm flung over his eyes. “Edison,” I say more loudly. “Come on! We can’t be late!”

He’s not asleep, I can tell by the depth of his breathing. “I’m not going,” he mutters.

Kennedy had requested that Edison miss school and attend the trial. I didn’t tell her that these days, going to school has been less of a priority for him, as evidenced by the number of times I’ve been called about him skipping class. I’ve pleaded, I’ve argued, but getting him to listen to me has become a Herculean task. My scholar, my serious, sweet boy, is now a rebel-holed up in his room listening to music so loud it makes the walls shake or texting friends I did not know he had; coming home past curfew smelling of hard liquor and weed. I have fought, I have cried, and now, I am not sure what else to do. The whole train of our lives is in the process of derailing; this is only one of the cars skidding off the tracks.

“We talked about this,” I tell him.

“No we didn’t.” He squints at me. “You talked at me.”

“Kennedy says that someone who’s seen as maternal is harder to picture as a murderer. She says that the picture you present to the jury is sometimes more important than the evidence.”

“Kennedy says. Kennedy says. You talk like she’s Jesus-”

“She is,” I interrupt. “At least, she is right now. All my prayers are going to her, because she is the only thing that stands between me and a conviction, Edison, which is why I’m asking-no, begging you to do this one thing for me.”

“I got stuff to do.”

I arch a brow. “Like what? Skip school?”

Edison rolls away from me. “Why don’t you just leave?”

“In about a week,” I snap, “your wish might just come true.”

The truth has teeth. I hold my hand over my mouth, like I could will back the words. Edison fights to blink back tears. “I didn’t mean that,” he mumbles.

“I know.”

“I don’t want to go to the trial because I don’t think I can listen to what they say about you,” he confesses.

I put my hands on either side of his face. “Edison, you know me. They don’t . No matter what you hear in that courtroom, no matter what lies they try to tell-you remember that everything I have ever done has been for you.” I cup his cheek, follow the track of a tear with the pad of my thumb. “You’re going to make something of yourself. People are going to know your name.”

I can hear the echo of my mama telling me the same thing. Be careful what you wish for, I think. After today, people will know my name. But not for the reasons she had hoped.

“What happens to you matters,” I tell Edison. “What happens to me doesn’t.”

His hand comes up, encircling my wrist. “It matters to me .”

Oh, there you are, I think as I look into Edison’s eyes. This is the boy I know. The boy I hooked my star on.

“It seems,” I say lightly, “that I am in need of a date to my own trial.”

Edison lets go of my wrist. He holds out his arm, crooked at the elbow, old-fashioned and courtly, even though he is still wearing his pajamas, even though I have a scarf wrapped around my hair, even though this is not a ball we are attending, but more of a gauntlet to run. “It would be my pleasure,” he says.

–

LAST NIGHT, KENNEDY had showed up at my house unexpected. Her husband and daughter were with her; she had come straight from some town about two hours away and was bursting to share her news with me: MCADD had shown up in Davis Bauer’s newborn screening.