Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

“Objection!” the other lawyer says.

The judge purses his lips. “I’ll allow it.”

“How did you react, Mr. Bauer?”

“I didn’t say anything. Brit and I, we were both shocked. I mean, they told us this procedure was nothing . We were supposed to go home that afternoon. It was like my brain couldn’t process what was right before my eyes.”

“Then what happened?”

The jury, I realize, is on the edge of their seats. Every face is turned toward me. “The doctors and the nurses, they were moving so fast I couldn’t tell whose hands were whose. Then the pediatrician came in-Dr. Atkins. She worked for a little bit on my son, and then she…then she said there was nothing else to do.” The words become three-dimensional, a movie I can’t turn away from. The pediatrician looking at the clock. The way the others all stepped back, their hands in the air, like someone was pointing a gun at them. My son, too still.

A sob belches out of me. I hold tight to the chair. If I let go, my fists will take over. I will find someone to punish. I look up, and for just one second, I let them all see how empty I am inside. “She said my son was dead.”

Odette Lawton walks toward me with a box of Kleenex. She puts it on the railing between us, but I don’t make a move to take a tissue. I am glad, right now, that Brit doesn’t have to go through this. I don’t want her to have to relive that moment.

“What did you do next?”

“I couldn’t let them stop.” The words feel like glass on my tongue. “If they weren’t going to save him, I was. So I went to the trash and I pulled out the bag they were using to help Davis breathe. I tried to figure out how to attach it again. I wasn’t going to quit on my own kid.”

I hear a sound, a high-pitched keen, one that I recognize from the weeks that Brit did not get out of bed, but shook our home with the force of her grieving. She is hunched over in her seat in the gallery, a human question mark, as if her whole body is asking why this happened to us.

“Mr. Bauer,” the prosecutor says gently, drawing my attention back. “Some people here would call you a White Supremacist, and would say that you were the one who started this ball rolling by requesting that an African American nurse be removed from the care of your child. They might even blame you for your own misfortune. How would you respond?”

I take a deep breath. “All I was trying to do was give my baby the best chance in life he could possibly have. Does that make me a White Supremacist?” I ask. “Or does that just make me a father?”

–

DURING THE RECESS, Odette coaches me in the conference room. “ Her job is to do whatever she can to make the jury hate you. A little bit of that is okay, because it shows the jury the nurse’s motive. But just a little. Your job is to do whatever you can to make them see what they have in common with you, not what sets you apart. This is supposed to be a case about how much you loved your son. Don’t screw it up by focusing on who you hate.”

She leaves Brit and me alone for a few minutes, before we are called back to the courtroom. “Her,” Brit says, as soon as the door closes behind her. “I hate her .”

I turn to my wife. “Do you think she’s right? Do you think we brought this down on ourselves?”

I have been thinking about what Odette Lawton said: if I hadn’t spoken out against the black nurse, would this have ended differently? Would she have tried to save Davis the minute she realized he wasn’t breathing? Would she have treated him like any other critical patient, instead of wanting to hurt me like I’d hurt her?

My son would be five months old now. Would he be sitting up on his own? Would he smile when he saw me?

I believe in God. I believe in a God who recognizes the work we are doing for Him on this earth. But then why would He punish His warriors?

Brit stands up, a look of disgust rippling her features. “When did you become such a pussy?” she asks, and she turns away from me.

–

IN THE LAST few weeks of Brit’s pregnancy, our neighbors-a pair of beaners from Guatemala who’d probably jumped a barbed-wire fence to get into this country-got a new puppy. It was one of those little fluffy things that looks like an evil cotton ball with teeth, and never stopped barking. Frida, that was the dog’s name, and it used to come into our yard and shit on our lawn, and when it wasn’t doing that, it was yipping. Every time Brit lay down to take a nap, that stupid mop head would start up again and wake her. She’d get pissed, and then I’d get pissed, and I’d stomp over and bang on the door and tell them if they didn’t muzzle their goddamned animal I would get rid of it.

Then one day, I came home from a drywall job to find the beaner digging a hole under an azalea bush, and his hysterical wife holding a shoe box in her arms. When I came into the house, Brit was sitting on the couch. “Guess their dog died,” she announced.

“So I see.”

She reached behind her and held up a bottle of antifreeze. “Tastes sweet, you know. Daddy told me to keep it away from our puppy, when I was little.”

I stared at her for a second. “You poisoned Frida?”

Brit met my gaze with so much nerve that for a second, I could only see Francis in her. “I couldn’t get any sleep,” she said. “It was either our baby, or that fucking dog.”

–

KENNEDY MCQUARRIE PROBABLY drinks pumpkin spice lattes. I bet she voted for Obama and donates after watching those commercials about sad dogs and believes the world would be a bright shiny place if we all could just get along .

She’s exactly the kind of bleeding-heart liberal I can’t stand.

I keep this front and center in my head as she walks toward me. “You heard Dr. Atkins testify that your son had a condition called MCADD, didn’t you?”

“Well,” I say. “I heard her say that he screened positive for it.”

The prosecutor’s coached me on that one.

“Do you understand, Mr. Bauer, that a baby with undiagnosed MCADD whose blood sugar drops might go into respiratory failure?”

“Yes.”

“And do you understand that a baby who goes into respiratory failure might go into cardiac failure?”

“Yes.”

“And that same baby might die?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Do you also understand, Mr. Bauer, that in none of those events would it make a difference whether or not a nurse attempted every medical intervention possible to save that baby’s life? That the baby could still possibly die?”

“Possibly,” I repeat.

“Do you realize that in that scenario, if your son was that baby, Mother Teresa herself could not have saved him?”

I fold my arms. “But that wasn’t my son.”

She cocks her head. “You heard the medical testimony from Dr. Atkins, which was corroborated by Dr. Binnie. Your baby did indeed have MCADD, Mr. Bauer, isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know.” I jerk my head toward Ruth Jefferson. “She killed him before he could get tested for sure.”

“You really, truly believe that?” she asks. “In the face of scientific evidence?”

“I do,” I grit out.

Her eyes spark. “You do,” she repeats, “or you have to?”

“What?”

“You believe in God, Mr. Bauer, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe things happen for a reason?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Bauer, do you use the Twitter handle @WhiteMight?”

“Yeah,” I say, but I have no idea what that has to do with her questions. They feel like a blast of wind that comes from a different direction every time.

She enters a computer printout into evidence. “Is this a post from your Twitter account, made last July?” I nod. “Can you read it out loud?”