Edison sits down and piles a heap of cereal into a bowl. “Were you talking to someone white?”
“What kind of question is that?”
He shrugs and pours the milk into the bowl, curling his answer around the spoon he tucks into his mouth. “Your voice changes.”
—
CARLALUONGO HASa run in her hose. I should be thinking of many other things, including why this interview is even necessary, but I find myself focusing on the tear in her panty hose and thinking that if she were anyone else—anyone I considered afriend—I would quietly tell her to spare her any embarrassment.
The thing is, even though Carla keeps telling me she is on my side (there are sides?) and that this is a formality, I am finding it hard to believe her.
I have spent the past twenty minutes recounting in explicit detail how I wound up in the nursery alone with the Bauer baby. “So you were told not to touch the infant,” the lawyer repeats.
“Yes,” I say, for the twentieth time.
“And you didn’t touch him until…How did you phrase it?” She clicks the cap of her pen.
“Until I was directed to by Marie, the charge nurse.”
“And what did she say?”
“She asked me to start compressions.” I sigh. “Look, you’ve written all this down. I can’t tell you anything else I haven’t already told you. And my shift’s about to start. So are we about done here?”
The lawyer leans forward, her elbows balanced on her knees. “Did you have any interactions with the parents?”
“Briefly. Before I was removed from the baby’s care.”
“Were you angry?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Were you angry? I mean, you were left to care for this infant, by yourself, when you’d already been given the directive to leave him alone.”
“We were shorthanded. I knew it wouldn’t be long till Corinne or Marie came back to relieve me,” I reply, and then realize I haven’t answered her question. “I wasn’t angry.”
“Yet Dr. Atkins says you made an offhand comment about sterilizing the baby,” the lawyer says.
My jaw drops. “You spoke to the pediatrician?”
“It’s my job to speak to everyone,” she says.
I look up at her. “The parents obviously think I’m contaminated,” I say. “It was just a stupid joke.” One that would have meant nothing at all, if everything else hadn’t happened.If. If. If.
“Were you keeping an eye on the baby? Were you even looking at him?”
I hesitate, and even in that breath, I can feel that this is the linchpin, the moment I will come back to and rub over in my mind until it is so smooth I can’t remember every knot and groove and detail. I can’t tell the lawyer that I disobeyed Marie’s orders, because it could cost me my job. But I can’t tell her that I tried to resuscitate the infant, either, because then those orders suddenly seem legitimate.
Since I touched that baby, and he died.
“The baby was fine,” I say carefully. “And then I heard him gasp.”
“What did you do?”
I look at her. “I followed orders. I was told not to do anything,” I tell Carla Luongo. “So I didn’t.” I hesitate. “You know, another nurse in my situation might have looked at that note in the infant’s file and found it…biased.”
She knows what I’m implying: I could sue the hospital for discrimination. Or at least I want her to think I can, when in reality doing so would cost me money I don’t have for a lawyer, as well as my friendships, and my job.
“Naturally,” Carla says smoothly, “that’s not the kind of team player we’d want on staff.” In other words:keep threatening to sue, and your career here is history.She jots something down in her little black leather notebook and then stands up. “Well,” she says. “Thanks for taking the time.”
