Without a scale or measure, Tag couldn’t commit to it, but the baby looked small for that. He unfastened the poppers on the onesie and checked the baby’s chest with careful taps. The congestion was obvious.
“Have his bowel movements been normal?” he asked. When Maria didn’t answer, he glanced up and reframed the question. “Has he pooped?”
“Shit, you mean?” she asked and then pulled a face. “All the time and bad. Worse than other baby.”
“You have another child?” Tag asked. He felt Ribka’s forehead. His skin was damp and hot, but it was hard to tell if that was internal or from the steam.
“Not now,” Maria said. “Not for as long as him.”
She sounded matter-of-fact, almost dismissive. Tag folded Ribka’s onesie back over his chest and wondered if he should push. People didn’t have one-size-fits-all responses to things, even things like the loss of a child, but….
“What happened to the other baby?” Tag asked cautiously as he picked Ribka up off the blanket. The baby coughed at the shift in position and rubbed his not-quite-chubby-enough fists over his eyes. Tag supported his head with one hand and made faces to see how the baby reacted. His dark eyes were filmed, but he traced Tag’s face.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Maria shrug. She finished the burger and crumpled the greasy paper into a ball between her hands.
“They went someplace better,” she said. “What’s wrong with him? You said if you looked at him, you could fix him.”
There was always a mental assessment you did when a child came into the ER. The younger the child, the earlier it started. Maria’s affect was askew, and the mention of the absent child was a concern, but she was still worried about the baby and had obviously cared for him. He had on clean clothes, there were no visible bruises or marks, and if he was underweight, that could be put down to a failure to thrive from illness. Something was off here, but right now it wasn’t something that had to be his business.
“He needs to go to the hospital,” Tag said as he rested the baby against his shoulder. “This isn’t just a cold, Maria. Your baby could be really ill.”
She glanced at the child and looked conflicted, but she shook her head again. Dark hair stuck to her sweat-damp neck and curled under her ears.
“He can’t go,” she said. Her voice tightened, breathy and high in her throat as she stepped forward and reached for Ribka. “It’s a cough. That’s all. You’ll tell them that, yes? It’s a cough, and I’m taking good care of him. I’m doing a good job. Someone was meant to get him already, weeks ago, but I’m still doing my best.”
Tag backed up. The steam made him sweat and itch as tried to get through to her. “It’s not a cough. He could be really ill, Maria. He could die. You don’t want that, for him to….” He pulled up how she’d put it a minute ago about the other baby. “Go somewhere better?”
She pulled her hand down her face in exasperation. “If he’s ill… bad ill… he won’t go somewhere better,” she blurted. Stress cracked the edges of her accent as she struggled to work out how to explain something that needed words she hadn’t come across in English. “They don’t want a baby that’s… sick like that. Bad sick. Healthy babies are what people want. If they find out Ribka is bad sick, they’ll… send him back. If they find out I talked to you? They will kill me. No hospital!”
This time when she lunged for the baby, Tag let her pry Ribka out of his arms. She backed away from him, the baby tucked against her shoulder and her cheek pressed against his head as she murmured reassuringly to him. Dark eyes flicked suspiciously at Tag as she put the kitchen counter between them.
“You should go,” she said agitatedly. “Get out! If you tell, he’ll be mad at you too. Go away, please!”
Tag wished he could. He set broken bones, put people’s guts back into place, stitched on the occasional finger. This was either a delusion or a crime. Unfortunately there was a very sick baby in the middle of it, and Tag had, in a fever of idealism after med school, taken the Hippocratic oath.
He held up his hands, palms out and fingers relaxed, and waited for Maria to look at him again. She finally did, resentfully, and Tag licked his lips.
“Does he taste salty?” he asked.
Maria blinked at him, fear short-circuited by confusion. “What?” she spluttered. “That’s a stupid thing to ask. Just go.”
“If you answer me, I will,” Tag lied. “Does the baby taste salty?”
She looked exasperated but pointedly kissed the baby’s head. Then she hesitated as she licked her lips slowly. She ran her thumb over her lower lip and slowly, grudgingly, nodded.
Tag took a deep breath. “I think Ribka has cystic fibrosis.” He tried to find the right tone to deliver the diagnosis without alarm, but it just sounded vaguely condescending to his ears. It wasn’t that he never had to deliver bad news in the ER, but it was usually confirmation of what they already knew. “It’s a genetic condition to do with the lungs, a sickness he’s had from when he was born and nothing to do with you. But he needs to go to the hospital.”
Tears welled up in Maria’s eyes. She dashed them away with the back of her hand. “They won’t want him if he’s sick like that. Forever sick.”
“Maybe not,” Tag admitted. “But he is. If we take him to the hospital, we can help him… and you.”
She barked out a harsh laugh and sniffed. “You’ll put me in jail. Send me home.”
“That could happen,” Tag admitted. “I hope not, but if he doesn’t get help? He will die. I don’t think you want that.”
Maria grimaced and looked down at the baby. Her lips pleated together in a thin line, bled pale around the edges, and she exhaled shakily before she finally nodded.
“Okay.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve, sniffed hard, and bounced the baby gently. “What now?”
