We order slices and sit down, waiting to be called. In the booth, Edison hunches over his Coca-Cola, sucking hard on the straw until he reaches the bottom of the glass and slurps. I, too, am lost in my thoughts and my memories.
I guess I didn’t realize that a trial is not just a sanctioned character assassination. It is a mind game, so that the defendant’s armor is chipped away one scale at a time, until you can’t help but wonder if maybe what the prosecution is saying is true.
What if Ihaddone it on purpose?
What if I’d hesitated not because of Marie’s Post-it note but because, deep down, Iwantedto?
I am distracted by Edison’s voice. Blinking, I come back to center. “Did they call our name?”
He shakes his head. “Not yet. Mama, can I…can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
He mulls for a moment, as if he is sifting through words. “Was it…was it really like that?”
There is a bell at the front counter. Our food is ready.
I make no move to retrieve it. Instead I meet my son’s gaze. “It was worse,” I say.
—
THE ANESTHESIOLOGIST WHOis called that afternoon as a witness for the State is someone I do not know very well. Isaac Hager doesn’t work on my floor unless a code is called. Then, he arrives with the rest of the team. When he came to minister to Davis Bauer I did not even know his name.
“Prior to responding to the code,” Odette asks, “had you ever met this patient?”
“No,” Dr. Hager says.
“Had you ever met his parents?”
“No.”
“Can you tell us what you did when you reached the nursery?”
“I intubated the patient,” Dr. Hager replies. “And when my colleagues couldn’t get an IV in, I tried to help.”
“Did you make any comments to Ruth during this process?” Odette asks.
“Yes. She was doing compressions, and I instructed her at several times to stop so that we could see if the patient was responding. At one point, when I felt she was a little aggressive with her chest compressions, I told her so.”
“Can you describe what she was doing?”
“Chest compressions on an infant involve pressing the sternum down a half inch, about two hundred times a minute. The complexes on the monitor were too high; I thought Ruth was pushing down too hard.”
“Can you explain what that means to a layperson?”
Dr. Hager looks at the jury. “Chest compressions are the way we manually make a heart beat, if it’s not doing it by itself. The point is to physically push the cardiac output…but then let up on your thrust long enough to let blood fill the heart. It’s not unlike plunging a toilet. You have to push down, but if you keep doing that and don’t pull up, creating suction, the bowl won’t fill with water. Likewise, if you do compressions too fast or too hard, you’re pumping, pumping, pumping, but there’s no blood circulating in the body.”
“Do you remember what you said to Ruth, exactly?”
He clears his throat. “I told her to lighten up.”
“Is it unusual for an anesthesiologist to suggest a modification to the person who is doing compressions?”
“Not at all,” Dr. Hager says. “It’s a system of checks and balances. We’re all watching each other during a code. I might just as well have been watching to see if both sides of the chest were rising, and if they weren’t, I would have told Marie Malone to bag harder.”
“How long was Ruth overly aggressive?”
“Objection!” Kennedy says. “She’s putting words in the witness’s mouth.”
