Detour

FIVE

This is how they met Galina.

They’d fallen into a half-stupor by the armchair and awakened to a shrill, deafening alarm that turned out to be their daughter. They immediately knew they were in trouble.

They’d forgotten to sterilize the bottles they’d brought with them from New York.

They’d forgotten to sterilize the nipples.

All the things the nurse at Fana had gone over with them ad nauseam.

There was a kitchenette just off the sitting room. Paul threw a pot of water on the stove, then began frantically looking for something to open up the cans of baby formula. Joelle’s screams reached heretofore unknown decibel levels.

Paul dropped two bottles and nipples into barely boiling water, but there wasn’t a can opener to be found. Both kitchen drawers were starkly empty.

Joanna rocked Joelle while walking back and forth from the kitchenette to the bed, which only seemed to cause Joelle to scream louder, if that were humanly possible. Joanna, fearless, indomitable, a four-year subscriber to Mother & Baby magazine, looked scared out of her mind.

There was a knock on the door.

Paul began rehearsing his apologies on the way to open it. New baby, hungry, sorry for any —

It was Pablo. And a woman.

“Galina,” he said, evidently the woman’s name. “She’s your nurse.”

PABLO’S JOB DESCRIPTION PROVED TO BE A MODEST ONE.

Technically, Galina might’ve been a nurse, but she was really a miracle worker.

Joanna, who still maintained at least a tenuous connection to the Catholic Church of her youth, was ready to nominate her for sainthood.

“Do you see this?” Joanna whispered to him.

Galina had managed to calm Joelle, retrieve the sterilized bottles and nipples, and locate a can opener for the formula, all in less than two minutes. At the moment, she was providing a startling display of ambidexterity, feeding Joelle in the crook of her left arm while arranging an impromptu changing table with her right.

Paul thought she looked pretty much like what a baby nurse should look like—anywhere from her mid-fifties to her mid-seventies, with a gentle face highlighted by pronounced laugh lines and soft gray eyes that seemed to resonate with the patience of, well . . . a saint.

“Can I do that?” Joanna asked her, but she was gently waved away.

“Plenty times to do this when you take your baby home,” Galina said. Her English was excellent. “You watch me now.”

So Joanna did. Paul too, who’d vowed to be the kind of hands-on father that actually pitched in.

Galina finished feeding Joelle, then proceeded to demonstrate her burping technique, which was, of course, perfect. One firm pat on the back and Joelle made a noise that sounded like a bottle of sparkling Evian being opened. Galina gently placed Joelle down on the kitchen-counter-turned-changing-table and relieved her of her soiled diaper, with Paul acting as number one helper.

He was happy to note that the unpleasantness of changing a baby’s diapers was mitigated by the baby in question being yours .

The hotel had placed a small white crib in the corner of their bedroom. Galina put Joelle facedown on the freshly laundered sheets and pulled a pink coverlet up to her neck.

“Um . . .” Joanna looked plainly uncomfortable about something.

“Yes, Mrs. Breidbart?” Galina said.

“Call me Joanna, please.”

“Joanna?”

“Isn’t . . . I thought a baby needs to be put on her back . When she sleeps. So she doesn’t choke or get SIDS.”

“SIDS?” Galina smiled and shook her head. “The stomach is fine,” she said.

“Well, yes, but . . . I read something, there were some studies done five years ago and they said—”

“Stomach is fine, Joanna,” she repeated, and patted her on the shoulder.

Now Joanna didn’t look so happy at being called by her first name.

An uncomfortable silence suddenly permeated the room.

Paul thought that a kind of trespass had been committed, only he wasn’t sure who’d trespassed upon whom. Joanna was Joelle’s mother, true. Galina was her nurse. Her highly experienced and, by all evidence, highly competent nurse. A jury might have a tough time with this one.

Galina broke the silence first.

“If it makes you more comfortable, Joanna,” she said, and reached into the crib, gently turning Joelle over onto her back.

In the battle of wills the other guy had apparently blinked.