Small Great Things

Ruth

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BABY I ever saw was born without a face.

From the neck down, he was perfect: ten fingers, ten toes, chubby belly. But where his ear should have been, there was a twist of lips and a single tooth. Instead of a face there was a swirling eddy of skin with no features.

His mother-my patient-was a thirty-year-old gravida 1 para 1 who had received prenatal care including an ultrasound, but the baby had been positioned in a way that the facial deformity hadn’t been visible. The spine, the heart, the organs had all looked fine, so no one was expecting this. Maybe for that very reason, she chose to deliver at Mercy-West Haven, our little cottage hospital, and not Yale-New Haven, which is better equipped for emergencies. She came in full term, and labored for sixteen hours before she delivered. The doctor lifted the baby, and there was nothing but silence. Buzzy, white silence.

“Is he all right?” the mother asked, panicking. “Why isn’t he crying?”

I had a student nurse shadowing me, and she screamed.

“Get out,” I said tightly, shoving her from the room. Then I took the newborn from the obstetrician and placed him on the warmer, wiping the vernix from his limbs. The OB did a quick exam, silently met my gaze, and turned back to the parents, who by now knew something was terribly wrong. In soft words, the doctor said their child had profound birth defects that were incompatible with life.

On a birth pavilion, Death is a more common patient than you’d think. When we have anencephalies or fetal deaths, we know that the parents still have to bond with and mourn for that baby. This infant-alive, for however long that might be-was still this couple’s son.

So I cleaned him and swaddled him, the way I would any other newborn, while the conversation behind me between the parents and the doctor stopped and started like a car choking through the winter. Why? How? What if you…? How long until…? Questions no one ever wants to ask, and no one ever wants to answer.

The mother was still crying when I settled the baby in the crook of her elbow. His tiny hands windmilled. She smiled down at him, her heart in her eyes. “Ian,” she whispered. “Ian Michael Barnes.”

She wore an expression I’ve only seen in paintings in museums, of a love and a grief so fierce that they forged together to create some new, raw emotion.

I turned to the father. “Would you like to hold your son?”

He looked like he was about to be sick. “I can’t,” he muttered and bolted from the room.

I followed him, but was intercepted by the nurse in training, who was apologetic and upset. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just…it was a monster.”

“It is a baby,” I corrected, and I pushed past her.

I cornered the father in the parents’ lounge. “Your wife and your son need you.”

“That’s not my son,” he said. “That…thing…”

“Is not going to be on this earth for very long. Which means you’d better give him all the love you had stored up for his lifetime right now.” I waited until he looked me in the eye, and then I turned on my heel. I did not have to glance back to know he was following me.

When we entered the hospital room, his wife was still nuzzling the infant, her lips pressed to the smooth canvas of his brow. I took the tiny bundle from her arms, and handed the baby to her husband. He sucked in his breath and then drew back the blanket from the spot where the baby’s face should have been.

I’ve thought about my actions, you know. If I did the right thing by forcing the father to confront his dying baby, if it was my place as a nurse. Had my supervisor asked me at the time, I would have said that I’d been trained to provide closure for grieving parents. If this man didn’t acknowledge that something truly horrible had happened-or worse, if he kept pretending for the rest of his life that it never had-a hole would open up inside him. Tiny at first, that pit would wear away, bigger and bigger, until one day when he wasn’t expecting it he would realize he was completely hollow.

When the father started to cry, the sobs shook his body, like a hurricane bends a tree. He sank down beside his wife on the hospital bed, and she put one hand on her husband’s back and one on the crown of the baby’s head.

They took turns holding their son for ten hours. That mother, she even tried to let him nurse. I could not stop staring-not because it was ugly or wrong, but because it was the most remarkable thing I’d ever seen. It felt like looking into the face of the sun: once I turned away, I was blind to everything else.

At one point, I took that stupid nursing student into the room with me, ostensibly to check the mother’s vitals, but really to make her see with her own eyes how love has nothing to do with what you’re looking at, and everything to do with who’s looking.

When the infant died, it was peaceful. We made casts of the newborn’s hand and foot for the parents to keep. I heard that this same couple came back two years later and delivered a healthy daughter, though I wasn’t on duty when it happened.

It just goes to show you: every baby is born beautiful.

It’s what we project on them that makes them ugly.

–

RIGHT AFTER I gave birth to Edison, seventeen years ago at this very hospital, I wasn’t worried about the health of my baby, or how I was going to juggle being a single parent while my husband was overseas, or how my life was going to change now that I was a mother.

I was worried about my hair.

The last thing you’re thinking about when you’re in labor is what you look like, but if you’re like me, it’s the first thing that crosses your mind once that baby’s come. The sweat that mats the hair of all my white patients to their foreheads instead made my roots curl up and pull away from the scalp. Brushing my hair around my head in a swirl like an ice cream cone and wrapping it in a scarf each night was what kept it straight the next day when I took it down. But what white nurse knew that, or understood that the little complimentary bottle of shampoo provided by the hospital auxiliary league was only going to make my hair even frizzier? I was sure that when my well-meaning colleagues came in to meet Edison, they would be shocked into stupor at the sight of the mess going on atop my head.

In the end, I wound up wrapping it in a towel, and told visitors I’d just had a shower.

I know nurses who work on surgical floors who tell me about men wheeled out of surgery who insist on taping their toupees into place in the recovery room before their spouses join them. And I can’t tell you the number of times a patient who has spent the night grunting and screaming and pushing out a baby with her husband at her side will kick her spouse out of the room postdelivery so I can help her put on a pretty nightgown and robe.

I understand the need people have to put a certain face on for the rest of the world. Which is why-when I first arrive for my shift at 6:40 A.M.-I don’t even go into the staff room, where we will shortly receive the night’s update from the charge nurse. Instead I slip down the hall to the patient I’d been with yesterday, before my shift ended. Her name was Jessie; she was a tiny little thing who had come into the pavilion looking more like a campaigning First Lady than a woman in active labor: her hair was perfectly coiffed, her face airbrushed with makeup, even her maternity clothes were fitted and stylish. That’s a dead giveaway, since by forty weeks of pregnancy most mothers-to-be would be happy to wear a pup tent. I scanned her chart-G1, now P1-and grinned. The last thing I’d said to Jessie before I turned her care over to a colleague and went home for the night was that the next time I saw her, she’d have a baby, and sure enough, I have a new patient. While I’ve been sleeping, Jessie’s delivered a healthy seven-pound, six-ounce girl.

I open the door to find Jessie dozing. The baby lies swaddled in the bassinet beside the bed; Jessie’s husband is sprawled in a chair, snoring. Jessie stirs when I walk in, and I immediately put a finger to my lips. Quiet.

From my purse, I pull a compact mirror and a red lipstick.

Part of labor is conversation; it’s the distraction that makes the pain ebb and it’s the glue that bonds a nurse to her patient. What other situation can you think of where one medical professional spends up to twelve hours consulting with a single person? As a result, the connection we build with these women is fierce and fast. I know things about them, in a mere matter of hours, that their own closest friends don’t always know: how she met her partner at a bar when she’d had too much to drink; how her father didn’t live long enough to see this grandchild; how she worries about being a mom because she hated babysitting as a teenager. Last night, in the dragon hours of Jessie’s labor, when she was teary and exhausted and snapping at her husband, I’d suggested that he go to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. As soon as he left, the air in the room was easier to breathe, and she fell back against those awful plastic pillows we have in the birthing pavilion. “What if this baby changes everything?” she sobbed. She confessed that she never went anywhere without her “game face” on, that her husband had never even seen her without mascara; and now here he was watching her body contort itself inside out, and how would he ever look at her the same way again?

Listen, I had told her. You let me worry about that.

I’d like to think my taking that one straw off her back was what gave her the strength to make it to transition.

It’s funny. When I tell people I’ve been a labor and delivery nurse for more than twenty years, they’re impressed by the fact that I have assisted in cesareans, that I can start an IV in my sleep, that I can tell the difference between a decel in the fetal heart rate that is normal and one that requires intervention. But for me, being an L & D nurse is all about knowing your patient, and what she needs. A back rub. An epidural. A little Maybelline.

Jessie glances at her husband, still dead to the world. Then she takes the lipstick from my hand. “Thank you,” she whispers, and our eyes connect. I hold the mirror as she once again reinvents herself.

–

ON THURSDAYS, MY shift goes from 7:00 A.M. till 7:00 P.M. At Mercy-West Haven, during the day, we usually have two nurses on the birthing pavilion-three if we’re swimming in human resources that day. As I walk through the pavilion, I note idly how many of our delivery suites are occupied-it’s three, right now, a nice slow start to the day. Marie, the charge nurse, is already in the room where we have our morning meeting when I come inside, but Corinne-the second nurse on shift with me-is missing. “What’s it going to be today?” Marie asks, as she flips through the morning paper.

“Flat tire,” I reply. This guessing game is a routine: What excuse will Corinne use today for being late? It’s a beautiful fall day in October, so she can’t blame the weather.

“That was last week. I’m going with the flu.”

“Speaking of which,” I say. “How’s Ella?” Marie’s eight-year-old had caught the stomach bug that’s been going around.

“Back in school today, thank God,” Marie replies. “Now Dave’s got it. I figure I have twenty-four hours before I’m down for the count.” She looks up from the Regional section of the paper. “I saw Edison’s name in here again,” she says.

My son has made the Highest Honors list for every semester of his high school career. But just like I tell him, that’s no reason to boast. “There are a lot of bright kids in this town,” I demur.

“Still,” Marie says. “For a boy like Edison to be so successful…well. You should be proud, is all. I can only hope Ella turns out to be that good a student.”

A boy like Edison. I know what she is saying, even if she’s careful not to spell it out. There are not many Black kids in the high school, and as far as I know, Edison is the only one on the Highest Honors list. Comments like this feel like paper cuts, but I’ve worked with Marie for over ten years now, so I try to ignore the sting. I know she doesn’t really mean anything by it. She’s a friend, after all-she came to my house with her family for Easter supper last year, along with some of the other nurses, and we’ve gone out for cocktails or movie nights and once a girls’ weekend at a spa. Still, Marie has no idea how often I have to just take a deep breath, and move on. White people don’t mean half the offensive things that come out of their mouths, and so I try not to let myself get rubbed the wrong way.

“Maybe you should hope that Ella makes it through the school day without going to the nurse’s office again,” I reply, and Marie laughs.

“You’re right. First things first.”

Corinne explodes into the room. “Sorry I’m late,” she says, and Marie and I exchange a look. Corinne’s fifteen years younger than I am, and there’s always some emergency-a carburetor that’s dead, a fight with her boyfriend, a crash on 95N. Corinne is one of those people for whom life is just the space between crises. She takes off her coat and manages to knock over a potted plant that died months ago, which no one has bothered to replace. “Dammit,” she mutters, righting the pot and sweeping the soil back inside. She dusts off her palms on her scrubs, and then sits down with her hands folded. “I’m really sorry, Marie. The stupid tire I replaced last week has a leak or something; I had to drive here the whole way going thirty.”

Marie reaches into her pocket and pulls out a dollar, which she flicks across the table at me. I laugh.

“All right,” Marie says. “Floor report. Room two is a couplet. Jessica Myers, G one P one at forty weeks and two days. She had a vaginal delivery this morning at three A.M., uncomplicated, without pain meds. Baby girl is breast-feeding well; she’s peed but hasn’t pooped yet.”

“I’ll take her,” Corinne and I say in unison.

Everyone wants the patient who’s already delivered; it’s the easier job. “I had her during active labor,” I point out.

“Right,” Marie says. “Ruth, she’s yours.” She pushes her reading glasses up on her nose. “Room three is Thea McVaughn, G one P zero at forty-one weeks and three days, she’s in active labor at four centimeters dilated, membranes intact. Fetal heart rate tracing looks good on the monitor, the baby’s active. She’s requested an epidural and her IV fluid bolus is infusing.”

“Has Anesthesia been paged?” Corinne asks.

“Yes.”

“I’ve got her.”

We only take one active labor patient at a time, if we can help it, which means that the third patient-the last one this morning-will be mine. “Room five is a recovery. Brittany Bauer is a G one P one at thirty-nine weeks and one day; had an epidural and a vaginal delivery at five-thirty A.M. Baby’s a boy; they want a circ. Mom was a GDM A one; the baby is on Q three hour blood sugars for twenty-four hours. The mom really wants to breast-feed. They’re still skin to skin.”

A recovery is still a lot of work-a one-to-one nurse-patient relationship. True, the labor’s finished, but there is still tidying up to be done, a physical assessment of the newborn, and a stack of paperwork. “Got it,” I say, and I push away from the table to go find Lucille, the night nurse, who was with Brittany during the delivery.

She finds me first, in the staff restroom, washing my hands. “Tag, you’re it,” she says, handing me Brittany Bauer’s file. “Twenty-six-year-old G one, now P one, delivered vaginally this morning at five-thirty over an intact perineum. She’s O positive, rubella immune, Hep B and HIV negative, GBS negative. Gestational diabetic, diet controlled, otherwise uncomplicated. She still has an IV in her left forearm. I DC’d the epidural, but she hasn’t been out of bed yet, so ask her if she has to get up and pee. Her bleeding’s been good, her fundus is firm at U.”

I open the file and scan the notes, committing the details to memory. “Davis,” I read. “That’s the baby?”

“Yeah. His vital signs have been normal, but his one-hour blood sugar was forty, so we’ve got him trying to nurse. He’s done a little bit on each side, but he’s kind of spitty and sleepy and he hasn’t done a whole lot of eating.”

“Did he get his eyes and thighs?”

“Yeah, and he’s peed, but hasn’t pooped. I haven’t done the bath or the newborn assessment yet.”

“No problem,” I say. “Is that it?”

“The dad’s name is Turk,” Lucille replies, hesitating. “There’s something just a little…off about him.”

“Like Creeper Dad?” I ask. Last year, we had a father who was flirting with the nursing student in the room during his wife’s delivery. When she wound up having a C-section, instead of standing behind the drape near his wife’s head, he strolled across the OR and said to the nursing student, Is it hot in here, or is it just you?

“Not like that,” Lucille says. “He’s appropriate with the mom. He’s just…sketchy. I can’t put my finger on it.”

I’ve always thought that if I wasn’t an L & D nurse, I’d make a great fake psychic. We are skilled at reading our patients so that we know what they need moments before they realize it. And we are also gifted when it comes to sensing strange vibes. Just last month my radar went off when a mentally challenged patient came in with an older Ukrainian woman who had befriended her at the grocery store where she worked. There was something weird about the dynamic between them, and I followed my hunch and called the police. Turned out the Ukrainian woman had served time in Kentucky for stealing the baby of a woman with Down syndrome.

So as I walk into Brittany Bauer’s room for the first time, I am not worried. I’m thinking: I’ve got this.

I knock softly and push open the door. “I’m Ruth,” I say. “I’m going to be your nurse today.” I walk right up to Brittany, and smile down at the baby cradled in her arms. “Isn’t he a sweetie! What’s his name?” I ask, although I already know. It’s a means to start a conversation, to connect with the patient.

Brittany doesn’t answer. She looks at her husband, a hulking guy who’s sitting on the edge of his chair. He’s got military-short hair and he’s bouncing the heel of one boot like he can’t quite stay still. I get what Lucille saw in him. Turk Bauer makes me think of a power line that’s snapped during a storm, and lies across the road just waiting for something to brush against it so it can shoot sparks.

It doesn’t matter if you’re shy or modest-nobody who’s just had a baby stays quiet for long. They want to share this life-changing moment. They want to relive the labor, the birth, the beauty of their baby. But Brittany, well, it’s almost like she needs his permission to speak. Domestic abuse? I wonder.

“Davis,” she chokes out. “His name is Davis.”

“Well, hello, Davis,” I murmur, moving closer to the bed. “Would you mind if I take a listen to his heart and lungs and check his temperature?”

Her arms clamp tighter on the newborn, pulling him closer.

“I can do it right here,” I say. “You don’t have to let go of him.”

You have to cut a new parent a little bit of slack, especially one who’s already been told her baby’s blood sugar is too low. So I tuck the thermometer under Davis’s armpit, and get a normal reading. I look at the whorls of his hair-a patch of white can signify hearing loss; an alternating hair pattern can flag metabolic issues. I press my stethoscope against the baby’s back, listening to his lungs. I slide my hand between him and his mother, listening to his heart.

Whoosh.

It’s so faint that I think it’s a mistake.

I listen again, trying to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, but that slight whir is there behind the backbeat of the pulse.

Turk stands up so that he is towering over me; he folds his arms.

Nerves look different on fathers. They get combative, sometimes. As if they could bluster away whatever’s wrong.

“I hear a very slight murmur,” I say delicately. “But it could be nothing. This early, there are still parts of the heart that are developing. Even if it is a murmur, it could disappear in a few days. Still, I’ll make a note of it; I’ll have the pediatrician take a listen.” While I’m talking, trying to be as calm as possible, I do another blood sugar. It’s an Accu-Chek, which means we get instant results-and this time, he’s at fifty-two. “Now, this is great news,” I say, trying to give the Bauers something positive to hold on to. “His sugar is much better.” I walk to the sink and run warm water, fill a plastic bowl, and set it on the warmer. “Davis is definitely perking up, and he’ll probably start eating really soon. Why don’t I get him cleaned up, and fire him up a little bit, and we can try nursing again?”

I reach down and scoop the baby up. Turning my back to the parents, I place Davis on the warmer and begin my exam. I can hear Brittany and Turk whispering fiercely as I check the fontanels on the baby’s head for the suture lines, to make sure the bones aren’t overriding each other. The parents are worried, and that’s normal. A lot of patients don’t like to take the nurse’s opinion on any medical issue; they need to hear it from the doctor to believe it-even though L & D nurses are often the ones who first notice a quirk or a symptom. Their pediatrician is Atkins; I will page her after I’m done with the exam, and have her listen to the baby’s heart.

But right now, my attention is on Davis. I look for facial bruising, hematoma, or abnormal shaping of the skull. I check the palmar creases in his tiny hands, and the set of his ears relative to his eyes. I measure the circumference of his head and the length of his squirming body. I check for clefts in the mouth and the ears. I palpate the clavicles and put my pinkie in his mouth to check his sucking reflex. I study the rise and fall of the tiny bellows of his chest, to make sure his breathing isn’t labored. Press his belly to make sure it’s soft, check his fingers and toes, scan for rashes or lesions or birthmarks. I make sure his testicles have descended and scan for hypospadias, making sure that the urethra is where it’s supposed to be. Then I gently turn him over and scan the base of the spine for dimples or hair tufts or any other indicator of neural tube defect.

I realize that the whispering behind me has stopped. But instead of feeling more comfortable, it feels ominous. What do they think I’m doing wrong?

By the time I flip him back over, Davis’s eyes are starting to drift shut. Babies usually get sleepy a couple of hours after delivery, which is one reason to do the bath now-it will wake him up long enough to try to feed again. There is a stack of wipes on the warmer; with practiced, sure strokes I dip one into the warm water and wipe the baby down from head to toe. Then I diaper him, swiftly wrap him up in a blanket like a burrito, and rinse his hair under the sink with some Johnson’s baby shampoo. The last thing I do is put an ID band on him that will match the ones his parents have, and fasten a tiny electronic security bracelet on his ankle, which will set off an alarm if the baby gets too close to any of the exits.

I can feel the parents’ eyes, hot on my back. I turn, a smile fastened on my face. “There,” I say, handing the infant to Brittany again. “Clean as a whistle. Now, let’s see if we can get him to nurse.”

I reach down to help position the baby, but Brittany flinches.

“Get away from her,” Turk Bauer says. “I want to talk to your boss.”

They are the first words he has spoken to me in the twenty minutes I’ve been in this room with him and his family, and they carry an undercurrent of discontent. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to tell Marie what a stellar job I’ve done. But I nod tightly and step out of the room, replaying every word and gesture I have made since introducing myself to Brittany Bauer. I walk to the nurses’ desk and find Marie filling out a chart. “We’ve got a problem in Five,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “The father wants to see you.”

“What happened?” Marie asks.

“Absolutely nothing,” I reply, and I know it’s true. I’m a good nurse. Sometimes a great one. I took care of that infant the way I would have taken care of any newborn on this pavilion. “I told them I heard what sounded like a murmur, and that I’d contact the pediatrician. And I bathed the baby and did his exam.”

I must be doing a pretty awful job of hiding my feelings, though, because Marie looks at me sympathetically. “Maybe they’re worried about the baby’s heart,” she says.

I am just a step behind her as we walk inside, so I can clearly see the relief on the faces of the parents when they see Marie. “I understand that you wanted to talk to me, Mr. Bauer?” she says.

“That nurse,” Turk says. “I don’t want her touching my son again.”

I can feel heat spreading from the collar of my scrubs up into my scalp. No one likes to be called out in front of her supervisor.

Marie draws herself upright, her spine stiffening. “I can assure you that Ruth is one of the best nurses we have, Mr. Bauer. If there’s a formal complaint-”

“I don’t want her or anyone who looks like her touching my son,” the father interrupts, and he folds his arms across his chest. He’s pushed up his sleeves while I was out of the room. Running from wrist to elbow on one arm is the tattoo of a Confederate flag.

Marie stops talking.

For a moment, I honestly don’t understand. And then it hits me with the force of a blow: they don’t have a problem with what I’ve done.

Just with who I am.

Turk

THE FIRST NIGGER I EVER met killed my older brother. I sat between my parents in a Vermont courtroom, wearing a stiff-collared shirt choking me, while men in suits argued and pointed at diagrams of cars and tire skids. I was eleven and Tanner sixteen. He’d just got his driver’s license two months before. To celebrate, my mother baked him a cake decorated with a Fruit Roll-Up highway and one of my old Matchbox cars. The guy who killed him was from Massachusetts and was older than my father. His skin was darker than the wood of the witness box, and his teeth were nearly electric by contrast. I couldn’t stop staring.

The jury couldn’t reach a verdict-hung, they called it-and so this man was free to go. My mother completely lost it, shrieking, babbling about her baby and justice. The murderer shook hands with his lawyer and then turned around, walking toward us, so that we were only separated by a railing. “Mrs. Bauer,” he said. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

As if he had nothing to do with it.

My mother stopped sobbing, pursed her lips, and spit.

–

BRIT AND ME, we’ve been waiting forever for this moment.

I’m driving with one hand on the steering wheel of the pickup and the other one on the bench seat between us; she clenches it every time a contraction hits her. I can tell it hurts like a bitch, but Brit just narrows her eyes and sets her jaw. It’s not a surprise-I mean, I’ve seen her knock out the teeth of a beaner who dented her car at the Stop & Shop with a runaway cart-but I don’t think she’s ever been quite so beautiful to me as she is right now, strong and silent.

I steal glimpses at her profile when we idle at a red light. We have been married for two years, but I still can’t believe that Brit is mine. She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen, for one, and in the Movement, she’s about as close to royalty as you can get. Her dark hair snakes in a curly rope down her back; her cheeks are flushed. She’s puffing, little breaths, like she’s running a marathon. Suddenly she turns, her eyes bright and blue, like the middle of a flame. “No one said it would be this hard,” she pants.

I squeeze her hand, which is something, because she’s already squeezing mine to the point of pain. “This warrior,” I tell her, “is going to be just as strong as its mom.” For years, I was taught that God needs soldiers. That we are the angels of this race war, and without us, the world would become Sodom and Gomorrah all over again. Francis-Brit’s legendary dad-would stand up and preach to all the fresh cuts the need to increase our numbers, so that we could fight back. But now that Brit and I are here, in this moment, about to bring a baby into the world, I’m filled with equal parts triumph and terror. Because as hard as I’ve tried, this place is still a cesspool. Right now, my baby is perfect. But from the moment it arrives, it’s bound to be tainted.

“Turk!” Brittany cries.

Wildly, I take a left-hand turn, having nearly missed the hospital entrance. “What do you think of Thor?” I ask, turning the conversation to baby names, desperate to distract Brit from the pain. One of the guys I know from Twitter just had a kid and named him Loki. Some of the older crews were big into Norse mythology, and even though they’ve broken up into smaller cells by now, old habits die hard.

“Or Batman or Green Lantern?” Brittany snaps. “I’m not naming my kid after a comic book character.” She winces through another contraction. “And what if it’s a girl?”

“Wonder Woman,” I suggest. “After her mother.”

–

AFTER MY BROTHER died, everything fell apart. It was like that trial had ripped off the outside layer of skin, and what was left of my family was just a lot of blood and guts with nothing to hold it together anymore. My father split and went to live in a condo where everything was green-the walls, the carpet, the toilet, the stove-and every time I visited, I couldn’t help but feel queasy. My mother started drinking-a glass of wine with lunch and then the whole bottle. She lost her job as a paraprofessional at the elementary school when she passed out on the playground and her charge-a kid with Down syndrome-fell off the monkey bars and broke her wrist. A week later we put everything we owned into a U-Haul and moved in with my grandfather.

Gramps was a vet who had never stopped fighting a war. I didn’t know him all that well, because he’d never liked my dad, but now that that obstacle was out of the way, he took it upon himself to raise me the way he thought I should have been raised all along. My parents, he said, had been too soft on me, and I was a sissy. He was going to toughen me up. He’d wake me up at dawn on weekends and drag me into the woods for what he called Basic Training. I learned how to tell poisonous berries apart from the ones you could eat. I was able to identify scat so I could track animals. I could tell time by the position of the sun. It was sort of like Boy Scouts, except that my grandfather’s lessons were punctuated by stories of the gooks he fought in Vietnam, of jungles that would swallow you if you let them, of the smell of a man being burned alive.

One weekend he decided to take me camping. The fact that it was only six degrees outside and that snow was predicted did not matter. We drove to the edge of the Northeast Kingdom, close to the Canadian border. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back out my grandfather was gone.

His truck, which had been parked at a pump, was missing. The only hints that he’d been there at all were the impressions of the tire tracks in the snow. He’d left with my backpack, my sleeping bag, and the tent. I went into the gas station again and asked the attendant if she knew what had happened to the guy in the blue truck, but she just shook her head. “Comment?” she said, pretending like she didn’t even speak English even though she was still technically in Vermont.

I had my coat, but no hat or mittens-they were still in the truck. I counted sixty-seven cents in my pocket. I waited until another customer pulled into the gas station and then, when the cashier was occupied, I shoplifted a pair of gloves and a hunter-orange hat and a bottle of soda.

It took me five hours to track my grandfather-a combination of racking my brain to remember what he’d been yammering on about in terms of directions that morning when I was half asleep, and walking down the highway looking for clues-like the wrapper from the tobacco he liked to chew, and one of my mittens. By the time I found his truck pulled off on the side of the road and could follow his footprints through the snow into the woods, I wasn’t shivering anymore. I was a furnace. Anger, it turns out, is a renewable source of fuel.

He was bent over a campfire when I stepped into the clearing. Without saying a word, I walked up and shoved him so that he nearly fell into the burning embers. “You son of a bitch,” I yelled. “You can’t just walk away from me.”

“Why not? If I don’t make a man out of you, who the hell will?” he said.

Even though he was twice as big as me, I grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and hauled him upright. I drew back my fist and tried to punch him, but he grabbed my hand before the blow could land.

“You want to fight?” my grandfather said, backing away and circling me.

My father had taught me how to punch someone. Thumb on the outside of your fist, and twist the wrist at the very end of the throw. It was all talk, though; I’d never hit someone in my life.

Now, I drew back my fist and shot it forward like an arrow, only to have my grandfather twist my arm behind my back. His breath was hot in my ear. “Did your pansy-ass father teach you that?” I struggled, but he had me pinned. “You want to know how to fight? Or do you want to know how to win?”

I gritted my teeth. “I…want…to win,” I ground out.

Gradually he relaxed his grip, keeping one hand clamped on my left shoulder.

“You’re small, so you come in real low. Then you’ll be blinding me with your body, and I’m expecting you to bring the punch up. If I duck, my fist will hit you in the face, which means I’ll stay upright, and leave myself wide open. The last thing I’ll be expecting is for you to come up over the shoulder like this.”

He raised his right fist, looping it up and over in a dizzy arc that stopped a breath before it kissed my cheekbone. Then he let go of me and took a step back. “Go on.”

I just stared at him.

This is what it feels like to beat someone up: like a rubber band stretched so tight it aches, and starts to shake. And then when you throw that punch, when you let go of the elastic, the snap is electric. You’re on fire, and you didn’t even realize you were combustible.

Blood sprayed from my grandfather’s nose onto the snow; it coated his smile. “That’s my boy,” he said.

–

EVERY TIME BRIT gets up during labor, the contractions get so bad that the nurse-a redhead named Lucille-tells her to lie back down. But when she does, the contractions stop, and so Lucille tells her to take a walk. It’s a vicious circle, and it’s been seven hours already, and I’m starting to wonder if my kid is going to be a teenager before he decides to come into this world.

Not that I’m saying any of that to Brit.

I’ve held her steady while an anesthesiologist put in an epidural-something that Brit begged for, which totally surprised me, since we had planned to do a natural birth without drugs. Anglos like us stay away from them; the vast majority of people in the Movement look down on addicts. I whispered to her as she bent over the bed, the doctor feeling along her spine, asking if this was a good idea. When you have the baby, Brit said, you get to decide.

And I have to admit, whatever they’ve got pumping through her veins has really helped. She’s tethered to the bed, but she’s not writhing anymore. She told me that she can’t feel anything below her belly button. That if she wasn’t married to me she’d propose to the anesthesiologist.

Lucille comes in and checks the printout from the machine that’s hooked up to Brit, which measures the baby’s heartbeat. “You’re doing great,” she says, although I bet she says that to everyone. I tune out as she talks to Brit-not because I don’t care, but because there’s just some mechanical stuff you don’t want to think about if you ever want to see your wife as sexy again-and then I hear Lucille tell Brit that it’s time to push.

Brit’s eyes lock on mine. “Babe?” she says, but the next word jams up in her throat, and she can’t say what she wants to.

I realize that she is scared. This fearless woman is actually afraid of what comes next. I thread my fingers through hers. “I’m right here,” I tell her, although I’m just as terrified.

What if this changes everything between me and Brit?

What if this baby shows up and I don’t feel anything at all for it?

What if I turn out to be a lousy role model? A lousy father?

“The next time you feel a contraction,” Lucille says, “I want you to bear down.” She looks up at me. “Dad, get behind her, and when she has the contraction, you help her sit up so she can push.”

I’m grateful for the direction. This I can do. As Brit’s face reddens, as her body arcs like a bow, I cup her shoulders in my hands. She makes a low, guttural noise, like something in its last throes of life. “Deep breath in,” Lucille coaches. “You’re at the top of the contraction…now bring your chin to your chest for me and push right down into your bottom…”

Then, with a gasp, Brit goes limp, shrugging away from me as if she can’t stand having my hands on her. “Get off me,” she says.

Lucille beckons me closer. “She doesn’t mean it.”

“Like hell I don’t,” Brit spits out, another contraction rising.

Lucille arches her eyebrows at me. “Stand up here,” she suggests. “I’m going to hold Brit’s left leg and you’re going to hold the right…”

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. An hour later, Brit’s hair is matted to her forehead; her braid is tangled. Her fingernails have cut little moons in the back of my hand, and she’s not even making sense when she talks anymore. I don’t know how much more of this either of us can take. But then Lucille’s shoulders square during one long contraction, and the look on her face changes. “Hang on a minute,” Lucille says, and she pages the doctor. “I want you to take some slow breaths, Brit…and get ready to be a mom.”

It’s only a couple of minutes before the obstetrician bursts into the room and snaps on a pair of latex gloves, but trying to help Brit to not push feels like being told to hold back a tidal wave with a single sandbag. “Hello, Mrs. Bauer,” the doctor says. “Let’s have a baby.” He crouches down on a stool as Brit’s body tenses up again. My elbow is hooked around her knee so that she can strain against it, and as I look down, the brow of our baby rises like a moon in the valley of her legs.

It’s blue. Where there was nothing a breath ago, there is now a perfectly round head the size of a softball, and it’s blue.

Panicked, I look at Brit’s face, but her eyes are screwed shut with the force of the work she’s doing. Anger, which always seems to be on a low simmer in my blood, starts to boil over. They’re trying to pull one over on us. They’re lying. These goddamned-

And then the baby cries. In a rush of blood and fluid, it slips into this world, screaming and punching at the air with tiny fists, pinking up. They put my baby-my son-on Brit’s chest and rub him with a cloth. She’s sobbing, and so am I. Brit’s gaze is focused on the baby. “Look at what we made, Turk.”

“He’s perfect,” I whisper against her skin. “You’re perfect.” She cups her hand around our newborn’s head, like we are an electrical circuit that’s now complete. Like we could power the world.

–

WHEN I WAS fifteen, my grandfather dropped like a stone in the shower and died from a heart attack. I reacted the way I reacted to everything those days-by getting into trouble. No one seemed to know what to do with me-not my mom, who had faded so much sometimes she blended into the walls and I walked right past her without realizing she was in the room; and not my dad, who lived in Brattleboro now and sold cars at a Honda dealership.

I met Raine Tesco when I was staying with my dad for a month the summer after my freshman year of high school. My dad’s friend Greg ran an alternative coffeehouse (What did that even mean? That they served tea?) and had offered me a part-time job. Technically I wasn’t old enough to work, so Greg was paying me under the table to do things like reorganize the stockroom and run errands. Raine was a barista with a sleeve of tattoos who chain-smoked out back during all his breaks. He had a six-pound Chihuahua named Meat that he’d taught to puff on a cigarette, too.

Raine was the first person who really got me. The first time I saw him out back, when I went to put the trash in the dumpster, he offered me a smoke-even though I was only a kid. I pretended I knew what I was doing, and when I coughed my lungs out he didn’t make fun of me. “Must suck to be you, man,” he said, and I nodded. “I mean, your dad?” He screwed up his face and did a perfect imitation of my father, ordering a medium half-caf no-foam nonfat soy latte.

Every time I went to visit my dad, Raine made time to see me. I’d talk to him about how unfair it was to get detention for whaling on a kid who had called my mom a drunk. He’d say that the problem wasn’t me but my teachers, who didn’t realize how much potential I had and how smart I was. He gave me books to read, like The Turner Diaries, to show me I wasn’t the only guy who felt like there was a conspiracy of people keeping him down. He’d give me CDs to take home, white power bands with beats that sounded like a hammer pounding nails. We’d drive around in his car and he’d say things like how the heads of all the major networks had Jewish last names like Moonves and Zucker and were feeding us all the news, so that we’d believe whatever they wanted us to believe. What he talked about were the things that people might have thought about, but never were brave enough to say in public.

If anyone felt it was strange that a twenty-year-old might want to hang out with a fifteen-year-old kid, no one commented. Probably my parents were relieved to know that when I was with Raine, I wasn’t actively beating anyone up or cutting school or getting into trouble. So when he invited me to a festival with some friends, I jumped at the chance to go. “Are there, like, bands there?” I asked, figuring that it was one of the music gatherings that dotted the Vermont countryside in July.

“Yeah, but it’s more like summer camp,” Raine explained. “I told everyone you’re coming. They’re psyched to meet you.”

No one was ever psyched to meet me, so I was pretty pumped. That Saturday, I packed up a knapsack and a sleeping bag and sat in the passenger seat with Meat the Chihuahua in my lap while Raine picked up three friends-all of whom knew me by name, as if Raine had really been talking about me after all. They were all wearing black shirts with a logo over the chest: NADS. “What’s that stand for?” I asked.

“North American Death Squad,” Raine said. “It’s kind of our thing.”

I wanted one of those T-shirts so bad. “So, like, how do you get to be part of it?” I asked, as casually as I could manage.

One of the other guys laughed. “You get asked,” he said.

I decided at that moment I was going to do whatever it took to get an invitation.

We drove for about an hour and then Raine got off an exit, turning left at a handwritten sign on a stick that said simply IE. There were more signs like this, indicating turns through cornfields and past sagging barns and even through a field of milling cows. As we crested a ridge, I saw about a hundred cars parked in a muddy field.

It looked like a carnival. There was a stage, and a band playing so loud my heart thumped like a backbeat. There were families milling around eating corn dogs and fried dough, toddlers balanced on their fathers’ shoulders wearing T-shirts that said I’M THE WHITE CHILD YOU’RE SECURING THE RACE FOR! Meat wove around my feet on his leash, getting tangled as he scarfed down bits of popcorn that had been dropped. A guy clapped Raine on the shoulder and gave him a big reunion-style hello, leaving me to wander a few feet away toward a shooting range.

A fat man with eyebrows crawling like caterpillars across his brow grinned at me. “You want to give it a go, boy?”

There was a kid about my age firing at a target that was pinned up against a stump pile. He handed the semiautomatic Browning to the old man and then went to retrieve his bull’s-eye. It was a profile of a man with an exaggerated, hooked nose. “Looks like you killed that Jew, Gunther,” the man said, grinning. Then he scooped Meat up in his arms and pointed to a table. “I’ll hold the pooch,” he told me. “You pick the one you want.”

There were stacks of targets: more Jewish profiles, but also black ones, with giant lips and sloping foreheads. There was Martin Luther King, Jr., in a bull’s-eye with words printed across the top: MY DREAM DID COME TRUE.

For a moment I felt sick to my stomach. The pictures reminded me of political cartoons we had been studying in history class, gross exaggerations that led to world wars. I wondered what sorts of companies manufactured targets like this, because they sure as hell weren’t being sold in places like Wal-Mart’s hunting aisle. It was as if there was a whole secret society I’d never known about, and I’d just been whispered the password for admission.

I snagged a target with a bushy Afro bursting through the borders of the bull’s-eye. The man affixed it to a clothesline. “Can’t even tell it’s a silhouette,” he said with a snicker. He put Meat on the table to sniff at the targets as he zipped mine back to the edge of the stump pile. “You know how to handle a weapon?” he asked.

I’d taken shots with my grandpa’s handgun, but I’d never used anything like this. I listened to the man explain how the gun worked; then I put on the headphones and goggles for protection, tucked the stock against my shoulder, squinted, and squeezed the trigger. There was a volley of shots, like a coughing fit. The sound drew Raine’s attention, and he clapped, impressed, as the target zipped back to me with three clean shots in the forehead. “Look at you,” he said. “A natural.”

Raine folded the target and tucked it into his back pocket, so he could show his friends later how good a marksman I was. I took Meat’s leash again, and we walked across the meeting grounds. On the stage, a man was grandstanding. His presence was so commanding that his voice became a magnet, and I found myself being pulled to see him more clearly. “I want to tell you all a little story,” the man said. “There was a nigger in New York City, homeless, of course. He was walking through Central Park and several people heard him ranting, saying that he would punch a White man in his sleep. But these people, they didn’t realize we are fighting a war. That we are protecting our race. So they did not act. They ignored the threats as the raving of a crazy fool. And what happened? This beast of the field approached a White Anglo-a man like you, maybe, or me, who was doing nothing but living the life God intended him to live-a man who cared for his ninety-year-old mother. This beast of the field punched this man, who fell down, struck his head on the pavement, and died. This White man, who had only been taking a walk in the park, suffered a fatal injury. Yet, I ask you-what happened to the nigger? Well, my brothers and sisters…absolutely nothing.”

I thought of my brother’s killer, walking free out of a courtroom. I watched the people around me nod and clap, and thought: I am not alone.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Francis Mitchum,” Raine murmured. “He’s one of the old guard. But he’s, like, mythic.” He said the speaker’s name the way a pious man spoke of God-part whisper, part prayer. “You see the spiderweb on his elbow? You can’t get that tat until you’ve killed someone. For every kill, you get a fly inked.” Raine paused. “Mitchum, he’s got ten.”

“Why do niggers never get charged with hate crimes?” Francis Mitchum asked, a rhetorical question. “Why are they being given a free pass? They would not even be domesticated, if not for the help of Whites. Look at where they came from, in Africa. There’s no civilized government. They’re all murdering each other in the Sudan. The Hutus are killing the Tutsis. And they’re doing it in our country too. The gangs in our cities-that’s just tribal warfare among niggers. And now, they’re coming after Anglos. Because they know they can get away with it.” His voice rose as he looked out at the crowd. “Killing a nigger is equal to killing a deer.” Then he paused. “Actually, I take that back. At least you can eat venison.”

Many years later, I realized that the first time I went to Invisible Empire camp-the first time I heard Francis Mitchum speak-Brit must have been there, too, traveling with her father. I liked to think that maybe she was standing on the other side of that stage, listening to him hypnotize the crowd. That maybe we had bumped into each other at the cotton candy stand, or stood side by side when sparks from the cross lighting shot into the night sky.

That we were meant to be.

–

FOR AN HOUR, Brit and I toss out names like baseball pitches: Robert, Ajax, Will. Garth, Erik, Odin. Every time I think I’ve come up with something strong and Aryan, Brit remembers a kid in her class with that name who ate paste or who threw up in his tuba. Every time she suggests a name she likes, it reminds me of some asshole I’ve crossed paths with.

When it finally comes to me, with the subtlety of a lightning strike, I look down into my son’s sleeping face and whisper it: Davis. The last name of the president of the Confederacy.

Brit turns the word over in her mouth. “It’s different.”

“Different is good.”

“Davis, but not Jefferson,” she clarifies.

“No, because then he’ll be Jeff.”

“And Jeff’s a guy who smokes dope and lives in his mother’s basement,” Brit adds.

“But Davis,” I say, “well, Davis is the kid other kids look up to.”

“Not Dave. Or Davy or David.”

“He’ll beat up anyone who calls him that by mistake,” I promise.

I touch the edge of the baby’s blanket, because I don’t want to wake him. “Davis,” I say, testing it. His tiny hands flare, like he already knows his name.

“We should celebrate,” Brit whispers.

I smile down at her. “You think they sell champagne in the cafeteria?”

“You know what I really want? A chocolate milkshake.”

“I thought the cravings were supposed to happen before the birth…”

She laughs. “I’m pretty sure I get to play the hormone card for at least another three months…”

I get to my feet, wondering if the cafeteria is even open at 4:00 A.M. But I don’t really want to leave. I mean, Davis just got here. “What if I miss something?” I ask. “You know, like a milestone.”

“It’s not like he’s going to get up and walk or say his first word,” Brit answers. “If you miss anything it’s going to be his first poop, and actually, that’s something you want to avoid.” She looks up at me with those blue eyes that are sometimes as dark as the sea, and sometimes as pale as glass, and that always can get me to do anything. “It’s just five minutes,” she says.

“Five minutes.” I look at the baby one more time, feeling like my boots are stuck in pitch. I want to stay here and count his fingers again, and those impossibly tiny nails. I want to watch his shoulders rise and fall as he breathes. I want to see his lips purse up, like he’s kissing someone in his dreams. It’s crazy to look at him, flesh and blood, and know that Brit and I were able to build something real and solid out of a material as blurry and intangible as love.

“Whipped cream and a cherry,” Brit adds, breaking my reverie. “If they’ve got it.”

Reluctantly I slip into the hallway, past the nurses’ station, down an elevator. The cafeteria is open, staffed by a woman in a hairnet who is doing a word-search puzzle. “Do you sell milkshakes?” I ask.

She glances up. “Nope.”

“How about ice cream?”

“Yeah, but we’re out. Delivery truck comes in the morning.”

She doesn’t seem inclined to help me, and focuses her attention on her puzzle again. “I just had a baby,” I blurt out.

“Wow,” she says flatly. “A medical miracle, in my very own checkout line.”

“Well, my wife had a baby,” I correct. “And she wants a milkshake.”

“I want a winning lottery ticket and Benedict Cumberbatch’s undying love, but I had to settle for this glamorous life instead.” She looks at me as if I’m wasting her time, as if there are a hundred people waiting in line behind me. “You want my advice? Get her candy. Everyone likes chocolate.” She reaches blindly behind her and pulls down a box of Ghirardelli squares. I flip it over, scanning the label.

“Is that all you have?”

“The Ghirardelli’s on sale.”

I flip it over and see the OU symbol-the mark that proves it’s kosher, that you’re paying the Jewish mafia a tax. I put it back on the shelf and set a pack of Skittles down on the counter instead, with two bucks. “You can keep the change,” I tell her.

–

JUST AFTER SEVEN, the door opens, and just like that I’m on full alert.

Since Davis arrived, Lucille’s been in twice-to check on Brit and the baby, and to see how he was nursing. But this-this isn’t Lucille.

“I’m Ruth,” she announces. “I’m going to be your nurse today.”

All I can think is: Over my dead body.

It takes every ounce of willpower for me to not shove her away from my wife, my son. But security is only a buzzer away, and if they throw me out of the hospital, what good does that do us? If I can’t be here to protect my family, then I’ve already lost.

So instead, I perch on the edge of the chair, every muscle in my body poised to react.

Brit grabs Davis so tightly I think he’s going to start screaming. “Isn’t he a sweetie!” the black nurse says. “What’s his name?”

My wife looks at me, a question in her eyes. She doesn’t want to have a conversation with this nurse any more than she’d have a conversation with a goat or any other animal. But like me, she’s aware that Whites have become the minority in this country and that we’re always under attack; we have to blend in.

I jerk my chin once, so infinitesimally I wonder if Brit will even see it. “His name is Davis,” she says tightly.

The nurse moves closer to us, saying something about examining Davis, and Brit recoils. “You don’t have to let go of him,” she concedes.

Her hands start moving over my son, like some kind of crazy witch doctor. She presses the stethoscope against his back and then in the space between him and Brit. She says something about Davis’s heart, and I can barely even hear it, because of the blood rushing in my own ears.

Then she picks him up.

Brit and I are so shocked that she just took our baby away-just over to the warmer for a bath, but still-that for a beat neither of us can speak.

I take a step toward her, where she’s bent over my boy, but Brit grabs the tail of my shirt. Don’t make a scene.

Am I supposed to just stand here?

Do you want her to know you’re pissed off and take it out on him?

I want Lucille back. What happened to Lucille?

I don’t know. Maybe she left.

How can she do that, when her patient is still here?

I have no idea, Turk, I don’t run this hospital.

I watch the black nurse like a hawk while she wipes Davis down and washes his hair and wraps him up in a blanket again. She puts a little electronic bracelet on his ankle-like the ones you sometimes see on prisoners who’ve been released on probation. As if he’s already being punished by the system.

I am staring so hard at the black nurse that I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes up in flames. She smiles at me, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Clean as a whistle,” she announces. “Now, let’s see if we can get him to nurse.”

She goes to pull aside the neck of Brit’s hospital johnny, and I’m done. “Get away from her,” I say, my voice low and true as an arrow. “I want to talk to your boss.”

–

A YEAR AFTER I went to Invisible Empire camp, Raine asked me if I’d like to be part of the North American Death Squad. It was not enough to just believe what Raine believed in, about Whites being a master race. It was not enough to have read Mein Kampf three times. To be one of them, truly, I had to prove myself, and Raine promised me I’d know where and when the right moment came to pass.

One night when I was staying at my dad’s, I woke up to hear banging on my bedroom window. I wasn’t really worried about them waking up the household; my father was out at a business dinner in Boston, not due back till after midnight. As soon as I threw up the sash, Raine and two of the guys spilled inside, dressed in ninja black. Raine immediately tackled me onto the floor, forearm against my throat. “Rule number one,” he said, “don’t open the door if you don’t know who’s going to come inside.” He waited until I was seeing stars and then let me go. “Rule number two: take no prisoners.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Tonight, Turk,” he told me, “we are custodians. We are going to clean Vermont of its filth.”

I found a pair of black sweats and a screen-printed sweatshirt I wore inside out, so that it was black, too. Since I didn’t have a black knit cap, Raine let me wear his, and he pulled his hair back in a ponytail. We drove in Raine’s car, passing a bottle of Jägermeister back and forth and blasting punk through the speakers, to Dummerston.

I hadn’t heard of the Rainbow Cattle Company, but as soon as we got there, I understood what kind of place this was. There were men holding hands as they walked from the parking lot into the bar, and every time the door opened there was a flash of a brightly lit stage and a drag queen lip-synching. “Whatever you do, don’t bend down,” Raine told me and snickered.

“What are we doing here?” I asked, not sure why he’d dragged me to a gay bar.

Just then two men walked out, their arms slung around each other. “This,” Raine said, and he jumped on one of the guys, slamming his head against the ground. His date started to run in the other direction but was tackled by one of Raine’s friends.

The door opened again, and another pair of men stumbled out into the night. Their heads were pressed together as they laughed at some private joke. One reached into his pocket for a set of keys, and as he turned toward the parking lot, his face was lit by the glow of a passing car.

I should have put the pieces together earlier-the electric razor in the medicine cabinet, when my dad always used a blade; the detour my father made to stop for coffee every day to and from work at Greg’s store; the way he had left my mother all those years ago without explanation; the fact that my grandfather had never liked him. I tugged my black cap down lower and yanked up the fleece neck warmer Raine had given me, so that I wouldn’t be recognized.

Panting, Raine delivered another kick to his victim and then let the guy scurry into the night. He straightened, smiled at me, and cocked his head, waiting for me to take the lead. Which is how I realized that even if I’d been totally clueless, Raine had known about my father all along.

When I was six, the boiler in our house exploded at a time that no one was home. I remember asking the insurance adjuster who came to assess the damage what went wrong. He said something about safety valves and corrosion, and then he rocked back on his heels and said that when there’s too much steam, and a structure is not strong enough to hold it, something like this is bound to happen. For sixteen years, I’d been building up steam, because I wasn’t my dead brother and never would be; because I couldn’t keep my parents together; because I wasn’t the grandson my grandfather had wanted; because I was too stupid or angry or weird. When I think back on that moment, it’s white hot: grabbing my father by the throat and smacking his forehead against the pavement; wrenching his arm up behind his back and kicking him in the back till he spit out blood. Flipping his limp body over, and calling him a faggot, as I drove my fist into his face again and again. Struggling against Raine as he dragged me to safety when the sirens grew louder and blue and red lights flooded the parking lot.

The story spread, the way stories do, and as it did, it swelled and morphed: the newest member of the North American Death Squad-namely, me-had jumped six guys at once. I had a lead pipe in one hand and a knife in the other. I ripped off a guy’s ear with my teeth and swallowed the lobe.

None of that, of course, was true. But this was: I had beaten my own father up so badly that he was hospitalized, and had to be fed through a straw for months.

And for that, I became mythic.

–

“WE WANT THE other nurse back,” I tell Mary or Marie, whatever the charge nurse’s name is. “The one who was here last night.”

She asks the black nurse to leave, so that it’s just us. I’ve pushed down my sleeves again, but her eyes still flicker to my forearm.

“I can assure you that Ruth has more than twenty years of experience here,” she says.

“I think you and I both know I’m not objecting to her experience,” I reply.

“We can’t remove a provider from care because of race. It’s discriminatory.”

“If I asked for a female OB instead of a male one, would that be discriminatory?” Brit asks. “Or a doctor instead of a medical student? You make those allowances all the time.”

“That’s different,” the nurse says.

“How, exactly?” I ask. “From what I can tell, you’re in a customer service business, and I’m the customer. And you do what makes the customer feel comfortable.” I stand up and take a deep breath, towering over her, intimidating by design. “I can’t imagine how upsetting it would be to all those other moms and dads here if, you know, things got out of control. If instead of this nice, calm conversation we’re having, our voices were raised. If the other patients started to think that maybe their rights would be ignored too.”

The nurse presses her lips together. “Are you threatening me, Mr. Bauer?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I answer. “Do you?”

There is a hierarchy to hate, and it’s different for everyone. Personally, I hate spics more than I hate Asians, I hate Jews more than that, and at the very top of the chart, I despise blacks. But even more than any of these groups, the people you always hate the most are antiracist White folks. Because they are turncoats.

For a moment, I wait to see whether Marie is one of them.

A muscle jumps in her throat. “I’m sure we can find a mutually agreeable solution,” she murmurs. “I will put a note on Davis’s file, stating your…wishes.”

“I think that’s a good plan,” I reply.

When she huffs out of the room, Brit starts to laugh. “Baby, you are something when you’re fierce. But you know this means they’re going to spit in my Jell-O before they serve it to me.”

I reach into the bassinet and lift Davis into my embrace. He is so small he barely stretches the length of my forearm. “I’ll bring you waffles from home instead,” I tell Brit. Then I lower my lips to my son’s brow, and whisper against his skin, a secret for just us. “And you,” I promise. “You, I’ll protect for the rest of my life.”

–

A COUPLE OF years after I became involved in the White Power Movement, when I was running NADS in Connecticut, my mother’s liver finally quit on her. I went back home to settle the estate and sell my grandfather’s house. As I was sorting through her belongings, I found the transcripts of my brother’s trial. Why she had them, I don’t know; she must have gone out of her way to get them at some point. But I sat on the wooden floor of the living room, surrounded by boxes that would go to Goodwill and into the trash dumpster, and I read them-every page.

Much of the testimony was new to me, as if I hadn’t lived through every minute of it. I couldn’t tell you if I was too young to remember, or if I’d intentionally forgotten, but the evidence focused on the median line of the road and toxicology screens. Not the defendant’s-but my brother’s. It was Tanner’s car that had drifted into oncoming traffic, because he was high. It was in all the diagrams of the tire skids: the proof of how a man on trial for negligent homicide had done his best to avoid a car that had veered into his lane. How the jury could not say, without a doubt, that the car accident was solely the defendant’s fault.

I sat for a long time with the transcript in my lap. Reading. Rereading.

But this is how I see it: if that nigger hadn’t been driving that night, my brother wouldn’t be dead.

Ruth

IN TWENTY YEARS, I’VE BEEN fired once by a patient, and it was for two hours. She screamed bloody murder and threw a vase of flowers at my head while in the throes of labor. But she hired me back when I brought her drugs.

After Marie asks me to step outside, I stand in the hall for a moment, shaking my head. “What was that about?” Corinne asks, looking up from a chart at the nurses’ station.

“Just a real winner of a dad,” I deadpan.

Corinne winces. “Worse than Vasectomy Guy?”

Once, I had a patient in labor whose husband had gotten a vasectomy two days before. Every time my patient complained about pain, he complained, too. At one point, he called me into the bathroom and pulled down his pants to show me his inflamed scrotum, as my patient huffed and puffed. I told him he should call the doctor, she said.

But Turk Bauer is not silly and selfish; based on the way he brandished that Confederate flag tattoo, I’m guessing he is not too fond of people of color. “Worse than that.”

“Well.” Corinne shrugs. “Marie’s good at talking people off the ledge. I’m sure she can fix whatever the problem is.”

Not unless she can make me white, I think. “I’m going to run to the cafeteria for five minutes. Cover for me?”

“If you bring me Twizzlers,” Corinne says.

In the cafeteria I stand for several minutes in front of the coffee bar, thinking about the tattoo on Turk Bauer’s arm. I don’t have a problem with white people. I live in a white community; I have white friends; I send my son to a predominantly white school. I treat them the way I want to be treated-based on their individual merits as human beings, not on their skin tone.

But then again, the white people I work with and eat lunch with and who teach my son are not overtly prejudiced.

I grab Twizzlers for Corinne and a cup of coffee for myself. I carry my cup to the condiment island, where there’s milk, sugar, Splenda. There’s an elderly woman fussing with the top of the cream pitcher, trying to get it open. Her purse sits on the counter, but as I approach, she picks up the handbag and anchors it to her side, crossing her arm over the strap.

“Oh, that pitcher can be tricky,” I say. “Can I help?”

She thanks me and smiles when I hand her back the cream.

I’m sure she doesn’t even realize she moved her purse when I got closer.

But I did.

Shake it off, Ruth, I tell myself. I’m not the kind of person who sees the bad in everyone; that’s my sister, Adisa. I get on the elevator and head back to my floor. When I arrive, I toss Corinne her Twizzlers and walk toward Brittany Bauer’s door. Her chart and little Davis’s chart sit outside; I grab the baby’s to make sure that the pediatrician will be flagged about the potential heart murmur. But when I open the folder, there’s a hot-pink Post-it on the paperwork.

NO AFRICAN AMERICAN PERSONNEL

TO CARE FOR THIS PATIENT.

My face floods with heat. Marie is not at the charge nurse’s desk; I start to methodically search through the ward until I find her talking to one of the pediatricians in the nursery. “Marie,” I say, pasting a smile on my face. “Do you have a minute?”

She follows me back toward the nurses’ station, but I really don’t want to have this conversation in public. Instead, I duck into the break room. “Are you kidding me?”

She doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Ruth, it’s nothing. Think of it the way you’d think of a family’s religious preferences dictating patient care.”

“You can’t possibly be equating this with a religious preference.”

“It’s just a formality. The father is a hothead; this just seemed the smoothest way to get him to calm down before he did something extreme.”

“This isn’t extreme?” I ask.

“Look,” Marie says. “If anything, I’m doing you a favor. So you don’t have to deal with that guy anymore. Honestly, this isn’t about you, Ruth.”

“Really,” I say flatly. “How many other African American personnel are on this ward?”

We both know the answer to that. A big, fat zero.

I look her square in the eye. “You don’t want me to touch that baby?” I say. “Fine. Done.”

Then I slam the door behind me so hard that it rattles.

–

ONCE, RELIGION GOT tangled up in my care of a newborn. A Muslim couple came into the hospital to have their baby, and the father explained that he had to be the first person to speak to the newborn. When he told me this, I explained that I would do everything I could to honor his request, but that if there were any complications with the birth, my first priority was to make sure that the baby was saved-which required communication, and meant that silence in the delivery room was not likely or possible.

I gave the couple some privacy while they discussed this, and finally the father summoned me back. “If there are complications,” he told me, “I hope Allah would understand.”

As it turned out, his wife had a textbook delivery. Just before the baby was born, I reminded the pediatrician of the patient request, and the doctor stopped calling the arrival of the head, right shoulder, left, like a football play-by-play. The only sound in the room was the baby’s cry. I took the newborn, slippery as a minnow, and placed him in a blanket in his father’s arms. The man bent close to the tiny head of his son, and whispered to him in Arabic. Then he placed the baby into his wife’s arms, and the room exploded with noise again.

Sometime later that day, when I came in to check on my two patients, I found them asleep. The father stood over the bassinet, staring at his child as if he didn’t quite understand how this had happened. It was a look I saw often on the faces of fathers, for whom pregnancy wasn’t real until this very moment. A mother has nine months to get used to sharing the space where her heart is; for a father it comes on sudden, like a storm that changes the landscape forever. “What a beautiful boy you have,” I said, and he swallowed. There are just some feelings, I’ve learned, for which we never invented the right words. I hesitated, then asked what had been on my mind since the delivery. “If it’s not rude of me to ask, would you tell me what you whispered to your son?”

“The adhan,” the father explained. “God is great; there is no God but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” He looked up at me and smiled. “In Islam, we want the first words a child hears to be a prayer.”

It seemed absolutely fitting, given the miracle that every baby is.

The difference between the Muslim father’s request and the request made by Turk Bauer was like the difference between day and night.

Between love and hate.

–

IT’S A BUSY afternoon, so I don’t have time to talk to Corinne about the new patient she’s inherited until we are both pulling on our coats and walking to the elevator. “What was that all about?” Corinne asks.

“Marie took me off the case because I’m Black,” I tell her.

Corinne wrinkles her nose. “That doesn’t sound like Marie.”

I turn to her, my hands stilling on the lapels of my coat. “So I’m a liar?”

Corinne puts her hand on my arm. “Of course not. I’m just sure there’s something else going on.”

It’s wrong to take out my frustration on Corinne, who has to deal with that awful family now. It’s wrong for me to be angry at her, when I’m really angry at Marie. Corinne, she’s always been my partner in crime, not my adversary. But I feel like I could talk till I’m blue in the face and she wouldn’t really understand what this feels like.

Maybe I should talk till I’m blue in the face. Maybe then I’d be acceptable to the Bauers.

“Whatever,” I say. “That baby means nothing to me.”

Corinne tilts her head. “You want to grab a glass of wine before we head home?”

I let my shoulders relax. “I can’t. Edison’s waiting.”

The elevator dings, and the doors open. It’s packed, because it’s end of shift. Staring back at me is a sea of blank white faces.

Normally I don’t even think about that. But suddenly, it’s all I can see.

I’m tired of being the only Black nurse on the birthing pavilion.

I’m tired of pretending that doesn’t matter.

I’m tired.

“You know what,” I say to Corinne. “I think I’m going to just take the stairs.”

–

WHEN I WAS five, I couldn’t blend. Although I’d been reading since age three-the result of my mother’s diligent schooling each night when she came home from work-if I came across the word tree I pronounced it “ree.” Even my last name, Brooks, became “rooks.” Mama went to a bookstore and got a book on consonant blends and tutored me for a year. Then she had me tested for a gifted program, and instead of going to school in Harlem-where we lived-my sister and I rode the bus with her for an hour and a half every morning to a public school on the Upper West Side with a mostly Jewish student population. She’d drop me off at my classroom door, and then she’d take the subway to work at the Hallowells’.

My sister, Rachel, was not the student I was, though, and the bus trip was draining for all of us. So for second grade, we moved back to our old school in Harlem. I spent a year being dulled at all my bright edges, which devastated Mama. When she told her boss, Ms. Mina got me an interview at Dalton. It was the private school her daughter, Christina, attended, and they were looking for diversity. I received a full scholarship, stayed at the top of my class, received prizes at every assembly, and worked like mad to reward my mama’s faith in me. While Rachel made friends with kids in our neighborhood, I knew no one. I didn’t really fit in at Dalton, and I definitely didn’t fit in in Harlem. As it turned out, I was a straight-A student who still couldn’t blend.

There were a few students who invited me to their houses-girls who said things like “You don’t talk like you’re Black!” or “I don’t think of you that way!” Of course, none of those girls ever came to visit me in Harlem. There was always a conflicting dance class, a family commitment, too much homework. Sometimes I imagined them, with their silky blond hair and braces, walking past the check casher on the corner of the street where I lived. It was like picturing a polar bear in the tropics, and I never let myself think on it long enough to wonder if that was how they saw me, at Dalton.

When I got into Cornell, and many others from my school didn’t, I couldn’t help but hear the whispers. It’s because she’s Black. Never mind that I had a 3.87 average, that I’d done well on my SATs. Never mind that I could not afford to go to Cornell, and would instead be taking the full ride offered me by SUNY Plattsburgh. “Baby,” my mama said, “it’s not easy for a Black girl to want. You have to show them you’re not a Black girl. You’re Ruth Brooks.” She would squeeze my hand. “You are going to get everything good that’s coming to you-not because you beg for it, and not because of what color you are. Because you deserve it.”

I know I wouldn’t have become a nurse if my mama hadn’t worked so hard to put me smack in the middle of the path of a good education. I also know that I decided long ago to try to circumvent some of the problems I had, when it came to my own child. So when Edison was two, my husband and I made the choice to move to a white neighborhood with better schools, even though that meant we would be one of the only families of color in the area. We left our apartment near the railroad tracks in New Haven, and after having multiple listings “disappear” when the realtor found out what we looked like, we finally found a tiny place in the more affluent community of East End. I enrolled Edison in a preschool there, so that he started at the same time as all the other kids, and no one could see him as an outsider. He was one of them, from the start. When he wanted to have his friends over for a sleepover, no parent could say it was too dangerous an area for their kid to visit. It was, after all, their neighborhood, too.

And it worked. My, how it worked. It took me advocating for him at first-making sure that he had teachers who noticed his intelligence as well as his skin color-but as a result, Edison is in the top three of his class. He’s a National Merit Scholar. He is going to college and he will be anything he wants to be.

I’ve spent my life making sure of it.

When I get home from work, Edison is doing his homework at the kitchen table. “Hey, baby,” I say, leaning down to kiss the top of his head. I can only do that now when he’s seated. I still remember the moment I realized he was taller than me; how strange it felt to reach my arms up instead of down, to know that someone I’d been supporting his whole life was in a position to support me.

He doesn’t glance up. “How was work?”

I paste a smile on my face. “You know. Same old.”

I shrug off my coat, pick up Edison’s jacket from where it’s been slung on the back of the couch, and hang them both in the closet. “I’m not running a cleaning service here-”

“Then leave it where it was!” Edison explodes. “Why does everything have to be my fault?” He shoves away from the table so fast that he nearly knocks over his chair. Leaving his computer and his open notebook behind, he storms out of the kitchen. I hear the door of his bedroom slam.

This is not my boy. My boy is the one who carries groceries up three flights of stairs for old Mrs. Laska, without her even having to ask. My boy is the one who always holds open the door for a lady, who says please and thank you, who still keeps in his nightstand every birthday card I’ve ever written him.

Sometimes a new mother turns to me, a shrieking infant in her arms, and asks me how she’s supposed to know what her baby needs. In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn’t all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they’re incapable of saying exactly what it is that’s causing pain.

So although all I want to do is go into Edison’s room and gather him up close and rock him back and forth the way I used to when he was little and hurting, I take a deep breath and go into the kitchen instead. Edison has left me dinner, a plate covered with foil. He can make exactly three dishes: macaroni and cheese, fried eggs, and Sloppy Joes. The rest of the week he heats up casseroles I make on my days off. Tonight’s is an enchilada pie, but Edison’s also cooked up some peas, because I taught him years ago a plate’s not a meal unless there’s more than one color on it.

I pour myself some wine from a bottle I got from Marie last Christmas. It tastes sour, but I force myself to sip it until I can feel the knots in my shoulders relax, until I can close my eyes and not see Turk Bauer’s face.

After ten minutes pass, I knock softly on the door of Edison’s room. It’s been his since he was thirteen; I sleep on the pullout couch in the living room. I turn the knob and find him lying on his bed, his arms behind his head. With his T-shirt stretched over his shoulders and his chin tilted up, I see so much of his daddy in him that for a moment, I feel like I’ve fallen through time.

I sit down beside him on the mattress. “Are we gonna talk about it, or are we gonna pretend nothing’s wrong?” I ask.

Edison’s mouth twists. “Do I really get a choice?”

“No,” I say, smiling a little. “Is this about the calculus test?”

He frowns. “The calc test? That was no big deal; I got a ninety-six. It’s just that I got into it with Bryce today.”

Bryce has been Edison’s closest friend since fifth grade. His mother is a family court judge and his father is a Yale classics professor. In their living room is a glass case, like the kind you’d find at a museum, housing a bona fide Grecian urn. They’ve taken Edison on vacation to Gstaad and Santorini.

It feels good to have Edison hand me this burden, to wallow in someone else’s difficulties for a while. This is what’s so upsetting to me about the incident at the hospital: I’m known as the fixer, the one who figures out a solution. I’m not the problem. I’m never the problem.

“I’m sure it’ll blow over,” I tell Edison, patting his arm. “You two are like brothers.”

He rolls onto his side and pulls the pillow over his head.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey.” I tug at the pillow and realize that there’s one single streak, left by a tear, darkening the skin of his temple. “Baby,” I murmur. “What happened?”

“I told him I was going to ask Whitney to homecoming.”

“Whitney…” I repeat, trying to place the girl from the tangle of Edison’s friends.

“Bryce’s sister,” he says.

I have a brief flash of a girl with strawberry-blond braids I met years ago when picking Edison up from a playdate. “The chubby one with braces?”

“Yeah. She doesn’t have braces anymore. And she’s definitely not chubby. She’s got…” Edison’s eyes soften, and I imagine what my son is seeing.

“You don’t have to finish that sentence,” I say quickly.

“Well, she’s amazing. She’s a sophomore now. I mean, I’ve known her forever, but lately when I look at her it’s not just as Bryce’s little sister, you know? I had this whole thing planned, where one of my buddies would be waiting outside her classroom after each period, holding a note. The first note was going to say WILL. The second was going to say YOU. Then GO, TO, HOMECOMING, and WITH. And then at the end of school, I’d be waiting with the ME sign, so she’d finally know who was asking.”

“This is a thing now?” I interrupt. “You don’t just ask a girl to the homecoming dance…you have to produce a whole Broadway event to make it happen?”

“What? Mama, that’s not the point. The point is that I asked Bryce to be the one who brought her the HOMECOMING note and he freaked out.”

I draw in my breath. “Well,” I say, carefully picking through my words, “it’s sometimes hard for a guy to see his little sister as anyone’s potential girlfriend, no matter how close he is to the person who wants to date her.”

Edison rolls his eyes. “That’s not it.”

“Bryce may just need time to get used to the idea. Maybe he was surprised that you’d think of his sister, you know, that way. Because you are like family.”

“The problem is…I’m not.” My son sits up, his long legs dangling over the edge of the bed. “Bryce laughed. He said, ‘Dude. It’s one thing for us to hang out. But you and Whit? My parents would shit a brick.’ ” His gaze slides away. “Sorry about the language.”

“That’s okay, baby,” I said. “Go on.”

“So I asked him why. It didn’t make any sense to me. I mean, I’ve been to Greece with his family. And he said, ‘No offense, but my parents would not be cool with my sister dating a Black guy.’ Like it’s okay to have a Black friend who comes on family vacations but it’s not okay for that friend to get involved with your daughter.”

I have worked so hard to keep Edison from feeling this line being drawn, it never occurred to me that when it happened-which, I guess, was inevitable-it would burn even more, because he had never seen it coming.

I reach for my son’s hand and squeeze it. “You and Whitney would not be the first couple to find yourselves on opposite sides of a mountain,” I say. “Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina and Vronsky. Maria and Tony. Jack and Rose.”

Edison looks at me in horror. “You do realize that in every example you just gave me, at least one of them dies?”

“What I’m trying to say is that if Whitney sees how special you are, she’ll want to be with you. And if she doesn’t, she’s not worth the fight.”

I put my arm around his shoulders; Edison leans into me. “That doesn’t make it suck any less.”

“Language,” I say automatically. “And no, it doesn’t.”

Not for the first time, I wish Wesley were still alive. I wish he hadn’t gone back on that second tour of duty in Afghanistan; I wish that he hadn’t been driving in the convoy when the IED exploded; I wish that he had gotten to know Edison not just as a child but as a teen and now a young man. I wish he were here to tell his son that when a girl makes your blood rush it’s just the first time of many.

I wish he were here, period.

If only you could see what we made, I think silently. He’s the best of both of us.

“Whatever happened to Tommy?” I ask abruptly.

“Tommy Phipps?” Edison frowns. “I think he got busted for dealing heroin behind the school last year. He’s in juvie.”

“Do you remember in nursery school, when that little delinquent said you looked like burnt toast?”

A slow smile stretches across Edison’s face. “Yeah.”

It was the first time a child had mentioned to Edison that he was different from everyone else in his class-and had done so in a way that also made it seem bad. Burnt. Charred. Ruined.

Before that maybe Edison had noticed, maybe he hadn’t. But that was the first time I had the Talk with my son about skin color.

“You remember what I told you?”

“That my skin was brown because I had more melanin than anyone else in the school.”

“Right. Because everyone knows it’s better to have more of something than less. And melanin protects your skin from damage from the sun, and helps make your eyesight better, and Tommy Phipps would always be lacking. So actually, you were the lucky one.”

Slowly, like water on parched pavement, the smile evaporates from Edison’s face. “I don’t feel so lucky now,” he says.

–

AS LITTLE GIRLS, my older sister and I looked nothing alike. Rachel was the color of fresh-brewed coffee, just like Mama. Me, I was poured from the same pot, but with so much milk added, you couldn’t even taste the flavor anymore.

The fact that I was lighter got me privileges I didn’t understand, privileges that drove Rachel crazy. Tellers at banks gave me lollipops, and then, as an afterthought, offered one to my sister. Teachers called me the pretty Brooks sister, the good Brooks sister. During class portraits, I would be moved up to the front row; Rachel got hidden in the back.

Rachel told me that my real father was white. That I wasn’t really part of our family. Then, Rachel and I got into it one day and started yelling at each other and I said something about going to live with my real daddy. That night my mama sat me down and showed me pictures of my father, who was also Rachel’s father-a man with light brown skin like mine-holding me as a newborn. The date on the photo was a full year before he left all three of us for good.

Rachel and I grew up as different as two sisters could be. I’m short, and she’s tall as a queen. I was an avid student; she was naturally smarter than I was, but hated school. She embraced what she referred to as her “ethnic roots” in her twenties, legally changed her name to Adisa, and started wearing her hair in its natural kinky state. Although a lot of ethnic names are Swahili, Adisa comes from the Yoruba language, which she’ll tell you is West African-“where our ancestors actually came from when they were brought here as slaves.” It means, One who is clear. See, even her name judges the rest of us for not knowing the truths that she does.

Now, Adisa lives near the train tracks in New Haven in a neighborhood where drug deals go down in broad daylight and young men shoot at each other throughout the night; she has five kids, and she and the father of her children have minimum-wage jobs and barely scrape by. I love my sister to death, but I don’t understand the choices she’s made any more than she can understand mine.

I’ve wondered, you know. If my drive to become a nurse, to want more, to achieve more for Edison all came from the fact that even between two little Black sisters, I had a head start. I’ve wondered if the reason Rachel turned herself into Adisa was because feeding that fire inside herself was exactly what she needed to believe she had a chance to catch up.

–

ON FRIDAY, MY day off, I have an appointment at the nail salon with Adisa. We sit side by side, our hands under the UV drying vents. Adisa looks at the bottle of my chosen OPI nail color and shakes her head. “I can’t believe you picked a polish called Juice Bar Hopping,” she says. “That’s got to be the whitest color ever.”

“It’s orange,” I point out.

“I meant the name, Ruth, the name. You ever see a brotha in a juice bar? No. Because nobody goes to a bar to drink juice. Just like nobody asks for a sippy cup full of tequila.”

I roll my eyes. “Really? I just told you all about getting barred from a patient’s care and you want to talk about what color I’m putting on my nails?”

“I’m talking about what color you chose to live your life, girl,” Adisa says. “What happened to you happens to the rest of us every day. Every hour. You’re just so used to playing by their rules you forgot you got skin in the game.” She smirks. “Well. Lighter skin, but still.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugs. “When was the last time you told someone Mama still works as a domestic?”

“She hardly works now. You know that. She’s basically a charity Mina contributes to.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

I scowl. “I don’t know when I mentioned it last. Is that the first thing you bring up in conversation? Plus, it doesn’t matter what color I am. I’m good at my job. I didn’t deserve to be taken off that case.”

“And I don’t deserve to be living in Church Street South, but it’s going to take more than me to change two hundred years of history.”

My sister likes to play the victim. We’ve had some pretty heated exchanges about that before. If you don’t want to be seen as a stereotype, then the way I see it, don’t be one. But to my sister, that means playing a white man’s game, and being who they want her to be, instead of being unapologetically herself. Adisa says the word assimilation with so much venom that you’d think anyone who chooses it-like I did-is swallowing poison.

It’s also very like my sister to take a problem I have and turn it into her own rant.

“None of what happened at the hospital is your fault,” my sister says, surprising me. I figured she’d say I had this coming to me, because I’ve been pretending to be someone I’m not and somewhere along the pretending, I forgot the truth. “It’s their world, Ruth. We just live in it. It’s like if you up and moved to Japan. You could choose to ignore the customs and never learn the language, but you’re going to get along a lot easier if you do, right? Same thing here. Every time you turn on the TV or the radio you see and hear about white people going to high school and college, eating dinner, getting engaged, drinking their pinot noir. You learn how they live their lives, and you speak their language well enough to blend in with them. But how many white people you know who go out of their way to see Tyler Perry movies so they can learn how to act around Black people?”

“That’s not the point-”

“No, the point is you can do as the Romans do all you want, but it don’t mean the Emperor will let you into his palace.”

“White people do not run the world, Adisa,” I argue. “There are plenty of successful people of color.” I name the first three that pop into my head. “Colin Powell, Cory Booker, Beyoncé-”

“-and ain’t none of them dark, like me,” Adisa counters. “You know what they say: the deeper you go into the projects, the darker the skin.”

“Clarence Thomas,” I pronounce. “He’s darker than you and he’s on the Supreme Court.”

My sister laughs. “Ruth, he’s so conservative he probably bleeds white.”

My phone dings, and I carefully extract it from my purse so I don’t mess up my nails.

“Edison?” Adisa asks immediately. Say what you will about her, but she loves my son as much as I do.

“No. It’s Lucille from work.” Just seeing her name pop up on my phone makes my mouth go dry; she was the nurse during the delivery of Davis Bauer. But this isn’t about that family at all. Lucille’s got a stomach bug; she needs someone to fill in for her tonight. She’s willing to trade me, so that instead of working all day Saturday, I can leave at eleven. It means pulling a double shift, but I’m already thinking of what I could do with that time on Saturday. Edison needs a new winter coat this year-I swear he’s grown four inches over the summer. I could treat him to lunch, after shopping. Maybe there’s even a movie coming out that Edison and I could go see. It’s been hitting me hard lately-the realization that getting my son to a point where he’s accepted to college also means that I will be left alone. “They want me to come in to work tonight.”

“Who’s they? The Nazis?”

“No, another nurse who’s sick.”

“Another white nurse,” Adisa clarifies.

I don’t even respond.

Adisa leans back in her chair. “Seems to me they’re not in a position to be asking you for favors.”

I am about to defend Lucille, who had absolutely nothing to do with Marie’s decision to put a Post-it note on the baby’s file, when the nail technician interrupts us, checking our fingers to see if the polish is dry. “Okay,” she says. “All done.”

Adisa waggles her fingers, a shocking shade of hot pink. “Why do we keep coming here? I hate this salon,” she says, her voice low. “They don’t look me in the eye and they won’t put my change right in my hand. It’s like they think my Black is gonna rub off on them.”

“They’re Korean,” I point out. “Did you ever think that maybe, in their culture, neither of those things are polite?”

Adisa raises a brow. “All right, Ruth,” she says. “You just keep telling yourself it’s not about you.”

–

NOT TEN MINUTES into my unscheduled shift, I’m already sorry I said yes. There’s a storm crackling outside, one the weathermen didn’t see coming, and the barometric pressure’s tanked-which leads to early ruptured membranes, to women going into premature labor, to patients who are writhing in the halls because we don’t have enough space for them. I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off, which is a good thing, because it keeps me from thinking about Turk and Brittany Bauer and their baby.

But not so much that I don’t casually check the chart when I first come on duty. I tell myself that I just want to make sure that someone-someone white-has scheduled that consult with a pediatric cardiologist before the baby is discharged. And yes, there it is in the schedule, along with a record of Corinne doing the baby’s heel stick on Friday afternoon to draw blood for the state newborn screening. But then someone calls my name and I find myself pulled into the orbit of a laboring woman, who is being wheeled up from Emergency. Her partner looks terrified, the kind of man who is used to being able to fix things who has come to the sudden realization that this is outside his wheelhouse. “I’m Ruth,” I say to the woman, who seems to have telescoped further into herself with each subsequent contraction. “I’m going to be here with you the whole time.”

Her name is Eliza and her contractions are four minutes apart, according to her husband, George. This is their first pregnancy. I get my patient settled in the last birthing room we have available and take a urine sample, then hook her up to the monitor, scanning the gravestone printout. I grab her vitals and start asking questions: How strong are the contractions? Where are you feeling them-the front or the back? Are you leaking any fluid? Are you bleeding? How’s the baby moving?

“If you’re ready, Eliza,” I say, “I’m going to check your cervix.” I put on a pair of gloves and move to the foot of the bed, touch her knee.

An expression flickers across her face that gives me pause.

Now, most laboring women will do anything to get that baby out of them. There’s fear about getting through childbirth, yes, but that’s different from the fear of being touched. And that’s what I’m reading all over Eliza’s face.

A dozen questions jockey their way to the tip of my tongue. Eliza changed in the bathroom with her husband’s help, so I didn’t see if she had any bruises that might flag an abusive relationship. I glance at George. He looks like an ordinary father-to-be-nervous, out of place-not like a guy with anger management issues.

Then again, Turk Bauer looked pretty normal to me until he rolled up his sleeves.

Shaking my head to clear it, I turn to George and pin a smile over my instincts. “Would you mind going to the kitchenette and getting some ice chips for Eliza?” I say. “It’d be a tremendous help.”

Never mind that’s a nurse’s job-George looks supremely relieved to be given a task. The minute he’s out of the room I turn to Eliza. “Is everything all right?” I ask, looking her in the eye. “Is there something you need to tell me that you couldn’t say with George in the room?”

She shakes her head, and then bursts into tears.

I strip off my gloves-the cervical exam can wait-and reach for her hand. “Eliza, you can talk to me.”

“The reason I got pregnant is because I was raped,” she sobs. “George doesn’t even know it happened. He’s so happy about this baby…I couldn’t tell him it might not be his.”

The story comes out, whispered, in the middle of the night, when Eliza has stalled at seven centimeters dilated, and George has gone to get to a snack from the cafeteria. Labor is like that-a shared trauma bond, an accelerant that makes relationships stronger. And so even though I am little more than a stranger to Eliza, she pours out her soul to me, as if she has fallen overboard and I am the only glimpse of land on the horizon. She was on a business trip, celebrating the close of a deal with an important, elusive client. The client invited her out to dinner with some others and bought her a drink, and the next thing Eliza remembered was waking up in his hotel room, and feeling sore all over.

When she finishes, we both sit, letting the words settle. “I couldn’t tell George,” Eliza says, her hands bunched on the rough hospital linens. “He would have gone to my boss, and believe me, they wouldn’t risk losing this deal just because of something that happened to me. The best-case scenario is that I would have been given a severance package to keep my mouth shut.”

“So nobody knows?”

“You do,” she says. Eliza looks at me. “What if I can’t love the baby? What if every time I look at her, I see what happened?”

“Maybe you should get DNA testing,” I tell her.

“What good would it do?”

“Well,” I say, “you’d know.”

She shakes her head. “And then what?”

It is a good question, one that I feel all the way to my own core. Is it better not knowing the ugly truth, and pretending it doesn’t exist? Or is it better to confront it, even though that knowledge may be a weight you carry around forever?

I am about to give her my opinion when Eliza is seized by another contraction. Suddenly, we are both in the trenches again, fighting for a life.

It takes three hours, and then Eliza pushes her daughter into the world. Eliza starts crying, like many new mothers do, but I know it’s not for the same reasons. The OB hands the newborn to me, and I stare down into the angry ocean of that baby’s eyes. It doesn’t matter how she was conceived. It just matters that she made it here.

“Eliza,” I say, settling the baby on her chest, “here’s your daughter.”

Even as George reaches over his wife’s shoulder to stroke the newborn’s mottled thigh, Eliza won’t look at the baby. I lift the baby up, hold her closer to Eliza’s face. “Eliza,” I say, more firmly. “Your daughter.”

She drags her gaze toward the baby in my hands. Sees what I see: the blue eyes of her husband. The identical nose. The cleft that matches the one in his chin. This baby might as well be a tiny clone of George.

All the tension fades from Eliza’s shoulders. Her arms close around her daughter, holding the child so close there is no room for but what if. “Hello, baby,” she whispers.

This family, they’ll make their own reality.

I just wish it were that easy for the rest of us.

–

BY NINE THE next morning, it feels like the entirety of New Haven has come to the hospital to give birth. I have been mainlining coffee, running back and forth among three postpartum patients, and praying fervently in between that we don’t get another woman in active labor before I leave here at eleven. In addition to Eliza’s delivery, I had two more patients last night-a G3 P3 who, truth be told, could have had that baby on her own and nearly did-and a G4 P1 who had an emergency C-section. Her baby, only twenty-seven weeks, is in the NICU.

When Corinne comes on duty at seven, I’m in the OR with the emergency C-section, so we don’t cross paths until it’s 9:00 A.M. and I’m in the nursery. “I heard you pulled a double,” she says, wheeling a bassinet into the room. “What are you doing in here?”

The nursery used to be where the babies were kept while mothers got a decent night’s sleep, before they stayed twenty-four/seven in their mothers’ hospital rooms. So now, it’s used mostly for storage, and for routine procedures like circumcisions, which no parent wants to watch. “Hiding,” I tell Corinne, pulling a granola bar out of my pocket and devouring it in two bites.

She laughs. “What the hell is going on today? Did I miss the memo for the Apocalypse or something?”

“Tell me about it.” I glance at the infant for the first time, and feel a shudder run down my spine. BABY BOY BAUER, the card on the bassinet reads. Without even meaning to, I take a step backward.

“How’s he doing?” I ask. “Is he eating any better?”

“His sugar’s up but he’s still logy,” Corinne answers. “He hasn’t nursed for the past two hours because Atkins is going to do the circ.”

As if Corinne has conjured the pediatrician, Dr. Atkins comes into the nursery. “Right on schedule,” she says, seeing the bassinet. “The anesthesia’s had enough time to kick in and I’ve already talked to the parents. Ruth, did you give the baby sweeties?”

Sweeties are a little bit of sugar water, rubbed on the babies’ gums to soothe and distract them from the discomfort. I would have given the baby sweeties before a circ, if I were his nurse.

“I’m not taking care of this patient anymore,” I say stiffly.

Dr. Atkins raises a brow and opens the patient file. I see the Post-it note, and as she reads it, an uncomfortable silence swells, sucking up all the air in the room.

Corinne clears her throat. “I gave him sweeties about five minutes ago.”

“Great,” Dr. Atkins says. “Then let’s get started.”

I stand for a moment, watching as Corinne unwraps the baby and prepares him for this routine procedure. Dr. Atkins turns to me. There’s sympathy in her eyes, and that’s the last thing I want to see. I don’t need pity just because of a stupid decision Marie made. I don’t need pity because of the color of my skin.

So I make a joke of it. “Maybe while you’re at it,” I suggest, “you can sterilize him.”

–

THERE ARE FEW things scarier than a stat C-section. The air becomes electric once the doctor makes that call, and conversation becomes parsed and vital: I’ve got the IV; can you get the bed? Someone grab the med box and book the case. You tell the patient that something is wrong, and that we have to move fast. A page gets sent from the hospital operator to anyone on the team who’s outside the building, while you and the charge nurse take the patient to the OR. While the charge nurse rips the instruments from their sterilized paper bag and turns on the anesthesia equipment, you get the patient onto the table, prep the belly, get the drapes up and ready. The minute the doctor and the anesthesiologist run through the door, the cut is made, the baby’s out. It takes less than twenty minutes. At big hospitals, like Yale-New Haven, they can do it in seven.

Twenty minutes after Davis Bauer has his circumcision, another of Corinne’s patients has her water break. A loop of umbilical cord spools out between her legs, and Corinne is paged from the nursery, an emergency. “Monitor the baby for me,” she says, as she rushes into the woman’s room. A moment later I see Marie at the head of the patient’s bed, wheeling it with an orderly into the elevator. Corinne is crouched on the bed between the patient’s legs, her gloved hand in the shadows, trying to keep the umbilical cord inside.

Monitor the baby for me. She means that she wants me to watch over Davis Bauer. It is protocol that a circumcised baby has to be checked routinely to make sure that he’s not bleeding. With both Marie and Corinne in the thick of a stat C-section, there is literally no one else to do it.

I step into the nursery, where Davis is sleeping off the morning trauma.

It will only be twenty minutes till Corinne comes back, I tell myself, or until Marie relieves me.

I fold my arms and stare down at the newborn. Babies are such blank slates. They don’t come into this world with the assumptions their parents have made, or the promises their church will give, or the ability to sort people into groups they like and don’t like. They don’t come into this world with anything, really, except a need for comfort. And they will take it from anyone, without judging the giver.

I wonder how long it takes before the polish given by nature gets worn off by nurture.

When I look down at the bassinet again, Davis Bauer has stopped breathing.

I lean closer, certain that I’m just missing the rise and fall of his tiny chest. But from this angle, I can see how his skin is tinged blue.

Immediately I reach for him, pressing my stethoscope against his heart, tapping his heels, unwrapping his swaddling blanket. Lots of babies have sleep apnea, but if you move them around a bit, change the position from the back to the belly or the side, respiration begins again automatically.

Then my head catches up to my hands: No African American personnel to care for this patient.

Glancing over my shoulder at the door of the nursery, I angle my body so that if someone were to come inside, they’d only see my back. They wouldn’t see what I’m doing.

Is stimulating the baby the same as resuscitating him? Is touching the baby technically caring for him?

Could I lose my job over this?

Does it matter if I’m splitting hairs?

Does anything matter if this baby starts breathing again?

My thoughts whip quickly into a hurricane: it has to be a respiratory arrest; newborns never have cardiac events. A baby might not breathe for three to four minutes, and still have a heart rate of 100, because its normal heart rate is 150…which means even if blood isn’t reaching the brain, it’s perfusing the rest of the body and as soon as you can get the baby oxygenated that heart rate will come up. For this reason, it’s less important to do chest compressions on an infant than to breathe for them. In this, it’s the opposite of the way you’d care for an adult patient.

But even when I shove aside my doubts and try everything short of medical interaction, he doesn’t resume breathing. Normally, I’d grab a pulse ox probe to get a monitor on his oxygenation and heart rate. I’d find an oxygen mask. I’d make calls.

What am I supposed to do?

What am I not supposed to do?

Any moment now, Corinne or Marie might walk into the nursery. They’d see me interfering with this infant, and then what?

Sweat runs down my spine as I hastily wrap the baby up in his swaddling blanket again. I stare at his tiny body. My pulse throbs in my eardrums, a metronome of failure.

I’m not sure if three minutes have passed, or only thirty seconds, when I hear Marie’s voice behind me. “Ruth,” she says, “what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I respond, paralyzed. “I’m doing nothing.”

She looks over my shoulder, sees the blue skin of the baby’s cheek, and for a hot beat meets my gaze. “Get me an Ambu bag,” Marie orders. She unwraps the baby, taps his little feet, turns him over.

Does exactly what I did.

Marie fits the pediatric face mask over Davis’s nose and mouth and starts to squeeze the bag, inflating his lungs. “Call the code…”

I follow her order; dial 1500 into the nursery phone. “Code blue in the neonatal nursery,” I say, and I imagine the team being pulled from their regular jobs in the hospital-an anesthesiologist, an intensive care nurse, a recording nurse, a nursing assistant from a different floor. And Dr. Atkins, the pediatrician who saw this baby only minutes ago.

“Start compressions,” Marie tells me.

This time I don’t waver. With two fingers, I push down on the baby’s chest, two hundred compressions per minute. As the crash cart is jostled into the nursery, I reach with my spare hand for the leads and affix the electrodes to the baby so that we can see the results of my efforts on the cardiac monitor. Suddenly the tiny nursery is jammed with people, all jockeying for a spot in front of a patient who is only nineteen inches long. “I’m trying to intubate here,” the anesthesiologist yells at an ICU nurse who’s attempting to find a scalp vein.

“Well, I can’t get an antecubital line,” she argues.

“I’m in,” the anesthesiologist says, and he falls back to let the nurse have better access. She prods, and I push harder with my fingers, hoping to make a vein-any vein-stand out in stark relief.

The anesthesiologist stares at the monitor. “Stop compressions,” he calls, and I raise my hands like I’ve been caught in the middle of a crime.

We all look at the screen, but the baby’s rhythm is 80.

“Compressions aren’t effective,” he says, so I press down harder on the rib cage. It’s such a fine line. There are no abdominal muscles protecting the organs beneath that little pouch of belly; bear down a bit too much or a tad off center and I might rupture the infant’s liver.

“The baby isn’t pinking,” Marie says. “Is the oxygen even on?”

“Can someone get blood gases?” the anesthesiologist asks, his question tangling with hers over the baby’s body.

The ICU nurse reaches into baby’s groin for a pulse, trying to stick the femoral artery for a blood sample to see if the baby’s acidotic. A runner-another member of the code team-rushes the vial off to the lab. But by the time we get the results in a half hour, it won’t matter. By then, this baby will be breathing again.

Or he won’t.

“Dammit, why don’t we have a line yet?”

“You want to try?” the ICU nurse says. “Be my guest.”

“Stop compressions,” the anesthesiologist orders, and I do. The heart rate on the monitor reads 90.

“Get me some atropine.” A syringe is handed to the doctor, who pulls off the tip, removes the Ambu bag, and squirts the drug down the tube into the baby’s lungs. Then he continues to bag, pushing oxygen and atropine through the bronchi, the mucous membranes.

In the middle of a crisis, time is viscous. You swim through it so slowly you cannot tell if you’re living or reliving each awful moment. You can see your hands doing the work, ministering, as if they do not belong to you. You hear voices climbing a ladder of panic, and it all becomes one deafening, discordant note.

“What about cannulating the umbilicus?” the ICU nurse asks.

“It’s been too long since birth,” Marie replies.

This is going downhill fast. Instinctively, I press harder.

“You’re being too aggressive,” the anesthesiologist tells me. “Lighten up.”

But what breaks my rhythm is the scream. Brittany Bauer has entered the room and is wailing. She’s being held back by the recording nurse as she fights to get closer to the baby. Her husband-immobile, stunned-stares at my fingers pushing against his son’s chest.

“What’s happening to him?” Brittany cries.

I don’t know who let them in here. But then again, there was nobody available to keep them out. Labor & Delivery has been overworked and understaffed since last night. Corinne is still in the OR with her stat C-section, and Marie is here with me. The Bauers would have heard the emergency calls. They would have seen medical personnel rushing toward the nursery, where their newborn was supposed to be sleeping off the anesthesia from a routine procedure.

I would have run there, too.

The door flies open, and Dr. Atkins, the pediatrician, immediately shoves her way to the head of the bassinet. “What’s going on?”

There is no answer, and I realize I am the one who is supposed to reply.

“I was here with the baby,” I say, my syllables accented in rhythm to the compressions I am still doing. “His color was ashen and respirations had ceased. We stimulated him, but there was no gasping or spontaneous breath, so we began CPR.”

“How long have you been at it?” Dr. Atkins asks.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Okay, Ruth, please stop for a sec…” Dr. Atkins looks at the cardiac monitor. The heart rate, now, is 40.

“Tombstones,” Marie murmurs.

It’s the term we use when we see wide QRS complexes on the cardiogram-the right side of the heart is responding too slowly to the left side of the heart; there’s no cardiac output.

There’s no hope.

A few seconds later, the heartbeat stops completely. “I’m calling it,” Dr. Atkins says. She takes a deep breath-this is never easy, but it’s even worse when it’s a newborn-then tugs the Ambu bag off the tube and tosses it into the trash. “Time?”

We all look up at the clock.

“No,” Brittany gasps, falling to her knees. “Please don’t stop. Please don’t give up.”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Bauer,” the pediatrician says. “But there’s nothing we can do for your son. He’s gone.”

Turk wrenches away from his wife and grabs the Ambu out of the trash. He shoves the anesthesiologist out of the way and tries to affix it again to Davis’s breathing tube. “Show me how,” he begs. “I’ll take over. You don’t have to quit.”

“Please-”

“I can get him to breathe. I know I can…”

Dr. Atkins puts her hand on his shoulder, and Turk collapses into himself, an implosion of grief. “There is no way you can bring Davis back,” she says, and he covers his face and starts to sob.

“Time?” Dr. Atkins repeats.

Part of the protocol of death is that everyone in the room consents to the moment it occurs. “Ten oh four,” Marie says, and we all murmur, a somber chorus: I agree.

I step back, staring at my hands. My fingers are cramped from performing the compressions. My own heart hurts.

Marie takes the baby’s temperature, a cool 95. By now Turk is anchored to his wife’s side, holding her upright. Their faces are blank, numb with disbelief. Dr. Atkins is talking softly to them, trying to explain the impossible.

Corinne walks into the nursery. “Ruth? What the hell happened?”

Marie tucks Davis’s blanket tight around him and slips the little stocking cap back on his head. The only evidence of the trauma he’s suffered is a small tube, like a little straw, coming out of his pursed mouth. She cradles the baby in her arms, as if tenderness still counts. She hands him to his mother.

“Excuse me,” I say to Corinne, when maybe what I really mean is Forgive me. I push past her and skirt the grieving parents and the dead baby and barely make it to the restroom before I am violently ill. I press my forehead to the cool porcelain lip of the toilet and close my eyes, and even then I can still feel it: the give of the rippled rib cage under my fingers, the whoosh of his blood in my own ears, the acid truth on my tongue: had I not hesitated, that baby might still be alive.

–

I HAD A patient once, a teenage girl, whose baby was born dead due to class 3 placental abruption. The placenta had peeled away from the uterine lining and the baby had no oxygen; the severity of the bleeding meant we almost lost the mother as well as the newborn. The baby was sent to our morgue pending autopsy-which is automatic in Connecticut for the death of a neonate. Twelve hours later, the girl’s grandmother arrived from Ohio. She wanted to hold her great-grandchild, just once.

I went down to the morgue, to where the dead babies are kept in an ordinary Amana refrigerator, stacked on the shelves in tiny body bags. I took the baby out and slipped him from the bag, stared for a minute at his perfect little features. He looked like a doll. He looked like he was sleeping.

I just couldn’t find it in myself to hand this woman an ice-cold baby, so I wrapped him up again and went to the emergency room for some heated blankets. In the morgue, I swaddled the baby in them, one after another, trying to take the chill from his skin. I took one of the knit caps we usually put on newborns to cover the peak of his head, mottled purple with settled blood.

We have a policy, if a newborn dies: we never take him away from the mother. If that grieving woman wants to hold her baby for twenty-four hours, to sleep with him tucked against her heart, to brush his hair and bathe him and have all the moments with her child she will never get to have, we make it happen. We wait until the mother is ready to let go.

That grandmother, she held her great-grandson for the entire afternoon. Then she put the infant back into my arms. I put a towel over my shoulder, as if I were nursing him, and got into the elevator, taking him down to the basement level of the hospital, where our morgue is located.

You’d think that the hardest part of an experience like this is the moment the mother gives you her child, but it’s not. Because at that moment, it’s still a child, to her. The hardest part is taking off the little knit hat, the swaddling blanket, the diaper. Zipping him into the body bag. Closing the refrigerator door.

–

AN HOUR LATER I am in the staff room, taking my coat from the locker, when Marie pokes her head inside. “You’re still here? Good. Got a minute?”

I nod, sitting down across from her at the table. Someone has tossed a handful of hard candy on it. I take a piece and unwrap it, let the butterscotch bleed onto my tongue. I hope it will keep me from saying what I shouldn’t say.

“What a morning,” Marie sighs.

“What a night,” I answer.

“That’s right, you pulled a double.” She shakes her head. “That poor family.”

“It’s horrible.” I may not agree with their beliefs, but that doesn’t mean I think they deserve to lose a baby.

“We had to sedate the mom,” Marie tells me. “The baby’s gone downstairs.”

Wisely, she does not mention the father to me.

Marie flattens a form on the table. “This is obviously just protocol. I need to write up what officially happened when Davis Bauer went into respiratory arrest. You were in the nursery?”

“I was covering for Corinne,” I reply. My voice is steady, soft, even though every syllable feels as dangerous as a blade at my throat. “She got called to the OR unexpectedly. The Bauer baby had his circ at nine, and couldn’t be left unattended. Since you were at the stat C, too, I was the only body even available to stand in for observation.”

Marie’s pen scratches across the form; none of this is anything she doesn’t know or expect. “When did you notice that the infant had stopped breathing?”

I curl my tongue around the candy. Tuck it high in my cheek. “A moment before you arrived,” I say.

Marie starts to speak, and then bites her lip. She taps the pen twice, then puts it down with a definitive click. “A moment,” she repeats, as if she is weighing the scope and size of that word. “Ruth…when I came in, you were just standing there.”

“I was doing what I was supposed to do,” I correct. “I wasn’t touching that baby.” I get up from the table, buttoning my coat, hoping she cannot see that my hands are shaking. “Is there anything else?”

“It’s been a tough day,” Marie says. “Get some rest.”

I nod and leave the break room. Instead of taking the elevator to street level, though, I plunge to the bowels of the hospital. In the overexposed fluorescent fixtures of the morgue, I blink, letting my eyes adjust. I wonder why clarity is always so damn white.

He’s the only dead baby there. His limbs are still pliable, his skin hasn’t taken on a chill. There’s mottling in his cheeks and feet, but that is the only clue that he is anything other than what he seems to be at first glance: someone’s beloved.

I lean against a steel gurney, cradling him in my arms. I hold him the way I would have, if I’d been allowed to. I whisper his name and pray for his soul. I welcome him into this broken world and, in the same breath, say goodbye.

Kennedy

IT’S BEEN QUITE THE MORNING.

First, we all overslept because I thought Micah had set his alarm and he thought I had set my alarm. Then our four-year-old, Violet, refused to eat a bowl of Cheerios and sobbed until Micah agreed to fry an egg for her, at which point she was so far gone down the path of nuclear meltdown that she burst into tears again when the plate was set down. “I want a fuckin’ knife!” she screamed, and it was quite possibly the only thing that could have stopped both Micah and me in our frenetic tracks.

“Did she say what I think she said?” Micah asked.

Violet wailed again-this time more clearly. “I want a fork and knife!”

I burst out laughing, which made Micah give me a withering look. “How many times have I told you to stop swearing?” he says. “You think it’s funny that our four-year-old sounds like a sailor?”

“Technically she wasn’t. Technically, you misheard it.”

“Don’t lawyer me,” Micah muttered.

“Don’t lecture me,” I said.

So by the time we left-Micah taking Violet to preschool before he went to perform six back-to-back surgeries; me, driving in the opposite direction to my office-the only family member in a good mood was Violet, who had breakfast with all her utensils and was wearing her fancy sequined Mary Janes because neither of her parents had the energy to fight her about that, too.

–

AN HOUR LATER, my day has gone from bad to worse. Because although I went to law school at Columbia, graduated in the top 5 percent of my class, spent three years clerking for a federal judge, today my boss-the head of the New Haven Judicial District of the Division of Public Defender Services in the state of Connecticut-has sent me to negotiate about bras.

Warden Al Wojecwicz, the director of corrections at the New Haven facility, is sitting in a stuffy conference room with me, his deputy director, and a lawyer from the private sector, Arthur Wang. I’m the only woman in the room, mind you. This convening of what I’ve come to call the Itty Bitty Titty Committee has been precipitated by the fact that two months ago, female lawyers were barred from entering the prison if we were wearing underwire bras. We kept setting off the metal detectors.

The prison wouldn’t settle for a pat-down, insisting on a strip search, which was illegal and time-consuming. Ever resourceful, we started going into the ladies’ room and leaving our underwear there, so that we could go in and visit our clients. But then the prison said we couldn’t go inside braless.

Al rubs his temples. “Ms. McQuarrie, you have to understand, this is just about minimizing risk.”

“Warden,” I reply, “they let you go inside with keys. What do you think I’m going to do? Bust someone out of jail with a foundation garment?”

The deputy warden cannot meet my gaze. He clears his throat. “I went to Target and looked at the bras they have for sale there-”

My eyebrows shoot up to my hairline, and I turn to Al. “You sent him to do field research?”

Before he can answer, Arthur leans back in his chair. “You know, it does beg the question of whether the entire clothing policy should be under review,” he muses. “Last year I was trying to see a client last-minute, before I headed out for vacation. I was wearing sandals, and was told I couldn’t enter the prison with them. But the only other shoes I had were golf cleats, which were perfectly acceptable.”

“Cleats,” I repeat. “The shoes with actual spikes on the bottom? Why would you send someone in with cleats but not flip-flops?”

The warden and the deputy exchange a glance. “Well, because of the toe-lickers,” says the deputy.

“You’re afraid that someone is going to suck our toes?”

“Yes,” the deputy says, deadpan. “Trust me, it’s for your own protection. It’s like a conjugal visit with your foot.”

For just a heartbeat I picture the life I could have had if I’d joined a sterile corporate law firm, on the partner track. I imagine meeting my clients in paneled wood conference rooms, instead of repurposed storage closets that smell like bleach and pee. I imagine shaking the hand of a client whose hand isn’t trembling-from meth withdrawal or abject terror at a justice system he doesn’t trust.

But there are always trade-offs. When I met Micah, he was a fellow in ophthalmology at Yale-New Haven. He examined me and said I had the most beautiful colobomas he’d ever seen. On our first date I told him I really did believe justice was blind, and he said that was only because he hadn’t had a chance to operate yet. If I hadn’t married Micah, I would have probably followed the rest of the law review staff to sleek chrome offices in big cities. Instead, he went into practice, and I stopped clerking to give birth to Violet. When I was ready to go back to work, Micah was the one who reminded me of the sort of law I used to champion. Thanks to his salary, I was able to practice it. I’ll make the money, Micah used to tell me. You make the difference. As a public defender I was never going to get rich, but I’d be able to look at myself in the mirror.

And since we live in a country where justice is supposed to be meted out equally, no matter how much money you have or what age you are or what your race or gender or ethnicity is, shouldn’t public defenders be just as smart and aggressive and creative as any attorney for hire?

So I flatten my hands on the table. “You know, Warden, I don’t play golf. But I do wear a bra. You know who else does? My friend Harriet Strong, who’s a staff attorney for the ACLU. We went to law school together, and we try to have lunch once a month. I think she’d be fascinated to hear about this meeting, considering Connecticut prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and given that only female lawyers or those lawyers identifying as female would even be wearing bras when visiting clients in this facility. Which means that your policy is infringing on attorneys’ rights and is preventing us from providing counsel. I’m also pretty sure Harriet would love to talk to the Women’s Bar Association of Connecticut to see how many other female lawyers have complained. In other words, this falls smack into the category of You are fucked if this gets out in the press. So the next time I come to see a client, I am going to take my thirty-four C Le Mystère demi-cup with me, and-pardon the metaphor-I am going to assume there will not be any fallout. Would I be assuming correctly?”

The warden’s mouth tightens. “I’m confident we can revisit the underwire ban.”

“Good,” I say, gathering my briefcase. “Thanks for your time, but I have to get to court.”

I sail out of the little room, Arthur at my heels. As soon as we are outside the prison, in the blinding sunlight, he grins. “Remind me not to wind up opposite you in court.”

I shake my head. “Do you really play golf?”

“I do when it means sucking up to a judge,” he says. “Are you really a thirty-four C?”

“You’ll never know, Arthur,” I laugh, and we head to our separate cars in the parking lot, off to minister to two very different worlds.

–

MY HUSBAND AND I do not sext. Instead our phone conversations consist of a roll call of nationalities: Vietnamese. Ethiopian. Mexican. Greek. As in “Where should we get takeout from tonight?” But when I get out of my meeting at the jail, there is a message waiting for me from Micah: Sorry I was an asshole this morning.

I grin, and text him back. No wonder our kid curses.

Date 2nite? Micah writes.

My thumbs fly over my phone. U had me at asshole, I type. Indian?

I vindalook forward to it, Micah responds.

See, this is why I can’t ever stay mad at him.

–

MY MOTHER, WHO grew up in North Carolina on the debutante circuit, believes there is nothing a little cuticle softener and eye cream can’t fix. To this end, she is always trying to get me to take care of myself, which is code for try to make an effort to look nice, which is completely ridiculous, given that I have a small child and about a hundred needy clients at any given moment, all of whom deserve my time more than the hairdresser who could put highlights in my hair.

Last year, for my birthday, my mother gave me a gift I have consciously avoided until today: a gift certificate to a day spa for a ninety-minute massage. I can do a lot in ninety minutes. File one or two briefs, argue a motion, make and feed Violet breakfast, even (if I’m going to be honest) squeeze in a rollicking romp in the sheets with Micah. If I have ninety minutes, the last thing I want to do is spend it naked on a table while some stranger rubs oil all over me.

But, as my mother points out, it’s expiring in a week, and I haven’t used it yet. So-because she knows I’m too busy to take care of details like this, she has taken the liberty of booking me into Spa-ht On, a day spa catering to the busy professional woman, or so it says on the logo. I sit in the waiting room until I am called, wondering if they really thought that name through. Spa-ht on? Or Spat on?

Either one sounds unpalatable to me.

I stress about whether or not I am supposed to wear panties under my robe, and then struggle to figure out how to open my locker and secure it. Maybe this is the grand plan-clients are so frustrated by the time they get to the massage that they cannot help but leave in a better state than they started. “I’m Clarice,” my therapist tells me, in a voice as soft as a Tibetan gong. “I’m just going to step out while you get comfortable.”

The room is dark, lit with candles. There is some insipid music playing. I shrug off my robe and slippers and climb under the sheet, fitting my face into the little hole in the massage table. A few moments later, there is a soft knock. “Are we ready?”

I don’t know. Are we?

“Now, you just relax,” Clarice says.

I try. I mean, I really do. I close my eyes for about thirty seconds. Then I blink them open and stare at her feet in their sensible sneakers through the face hole of the massage table. Her firm hands begin to run the length of my spine. “Have you worked here a long time?” I ask.

“Three years.”

“I bet there are some clients you walk in and see and wish you didn’t have to touch,” I muse. “I mean, like back hair? Ugh.”

She doesn’t answer. Her feet shift on the floor. I wonder if she’s thinking that I’m one of those clients, now.

Does she really see my body like a doctor would-a slab to be worked upon? Or is she seeing the cellulite in my ass and the roll of fat that I usually hide under my bra strap and thinking that the yoga mom she rubbed down last hour was in much better shape?

Clarice, wasn’t that the name of the girl from Silence of the Lambs?

“Fava beans and a nice Chianti,” I murmur.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry,” I mutter, my chin mashed into the massage table. “Hard to talk in this contraption.” I can feel my nose getting stuffy. When I lie facedown like this too long, that happens. And then I have to mouth-breathe and I think that the therapist is listening and sometimes I even drool through the hole. More reasons I don’t like massages.

“Sometimes I think about what would happen if I got into a car crash and was stuck upside down like that,” I say. “Not in the car, you know, but at the hospital in one of those neck braces that get screwed into your skull so that your vertebrae don’t shift? What if the doctors flipped me onto my belly, and I got congested like I am right now and couldn’t tell them? Or if I was in that kind of coma where you’re awake but trapped inside your body and you can’t talk, and you desperately need to blow your nose.” My head is pounding now, from being in this position. “It doesn’t even have to be that complicated. What if I live to a hundred and five and I’m in a rest home and I get a cold and no one thinks to get me a few drops of Afrin?”

Clarice’s feet move away from my range of view, and then I feel cool air on my legs as she begins to massage my left calf. “My mother got me this treatment for my birthday,” I say.

“That’s nice…”

“She is a big fan of moisturizing. She actually said that it wouldn’t kill me to not have dinosaur hide for skin if I wanted my husband to stick around. I pointed out that if lotion was what was keeping my marriage intact I had a much bigger problem than whether or not I had time to schedule a massage…”

“Ms. McQuarrie?” the therapist says. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a client who needed a massage quite as much as you do.”

For some reason, this makes me proud.

“And at the risk of losing my tip, I also don’t think I’ve ever had a client who was so bad at getting a massage.”

This makes me even prouder. “Thanks,” I say.

“Maybe you could just try…to relax. Stop talking. Clear your mind.”

I close my eyes again. And start going over my to-do list in my head.

“For what it’s worth,” I murmur, “I’m bad at yoga too.”

–

ON DAYS WHEN I work late and Micah is still at the hospital, my mother picks Violet up from school. It’s a win-win-win-I don’t have to pay for a sitter, my mother gets time with her only grandchild, and Violet adores her. No one throws a tea party like my mom, who insists on using her old wedding china and linen napkins and pouring sweet tea from the pot. I know, when I come home, that Violet will have been bathed, read to, and tucked in. There will be leftover lemon drops or oatmeal raisin cookies from the afternoon’s tea party, still warm inside a Tupperware. My kitchen will be cleaner than I left it that morning.

My mother also drives Micah crazy. “Ava means well,” he is fond of saying. “But so did Joseph McCarthy.” He says that my mother is a bulldozer dressed as a southern belle. In a way, this is true. My mother has a way of getting what she wants before you consciously realize you’ve been played.

“Hi,” I say, dropping my briefcase on the couch as Violet launches herself into my arms.

“I finger-painted,” Violet announces, holding her palms up to me. They are still slightly blue. “I couldn’t take the picture home yet because it’s still wet.”

“Hey, sugar,” my mother says, coming out of the kitchen. “How was your day?” Her voice always makes me think of heliotrope and a convertible ride and the sun beating on the crown of your head.

“Oh, the usual,” I tell her. “I didn’t have a client try to kill me today, so that was a plus.” Last week, a man I was representing in an aggravated assault charge tried to strangle me at the defense table when the judge set bail unusually high. I’m still not sure if my client was angry, or planting a seed for an insanity defense. If it was the latter, I sort of have to give him props for thinking ahead.

“Kennedy, not in front of the C-H-I-L-D. Vi, honey, can you go get Grandma’s purse?” I set Violet on her feet, and she sprints into the mudroom. “You know when you say things like that it makes me want to get a prescription for Xanax,” my mother sighs. “I thought that you were going to start looking for a real job when Violet went to school.”

“A, I do have a real job, and B, you’re already taking Xanax, so that’s a specious threat.”

“Must you argue everything?”

“Yeah. I’m a lawyer.” I realize then that my mother is wearing her coat. “Are you cold?”

“I told you I couldn’t stay late tonight. Darla and I are going to that counterdance to meet some silver foxes.”

“Contra dance,” I correct. “Number one, ew. Number two, you never told me.”

“I did. Last week. You just chose not to listen, sugar.” Violet comes into the room again and hands her her purse. “That’s a good girl,” she says. “Give me a kiss now.”

Violet throws her arms around my mother. “But you can’t go,” I say. “I have a date.”

“Kennedy, you’re married. If anyone needs a date, it’s me. And Darla and I have big plans for just that.”

She sails out the door and I sit down on the couch. “Mommy,” Violet says, “can we have pizza?”

I look at the sequined shoes on her feet. “I’ve got a better idea,” I tell her.

–

“WELL!” MICAH SAYS, when he sees me sitting at the table of the Indian restaurant with Violet, who has never been anywhere fancier than a Chili’s. “This is a surprise.”

“Our babysitter skipped town,” I tell him, and I glance sidelong at Violet. “And we are skating the thin edge of DEFCON Four, so I already ordered.”

Violet is coloring on the paper tablecloth. “Daddy,” she announces, “I want pizza.”

“But you love Indian food, Vi,” Micah says.

“No I don’t. I want pizza,” she insists.

Just then, the waiter comes over with our food. “Perfect timing,” I murmur. “See, honey?”

Violet turns her face up to the waiter, her blue eyes wide as she stares at his Sikh turban. “How come he’s wearing a towel?”

“Don’t be rude, sweetie,” I reply. “That’s called a turban, and that’s what some Indian people wear.”

She furrows her brow. “But he doesn’t look like Pocahontas.”

I want the floor to open up and swallow me, but instead, I paste a smile on my face. “I’m so sorry,” I tell the waiter, who is now unloading our dishes as quickly as he can. “Violet…look, your favorite. Chicken tikka masala.” I spoon some onto her plate, trying to distract her until the waiter goes away.

“Oh my God,” I whisper to Micah. “What if he thinks we’re horrible parents? Or horrible people?”

“Blame Disney.”

“Maybe I should have said something different?”

Micah takes a spoonful of vindaloo and puts it on his plate. “Yeah,” he says. “You could have picked Italian.”

Turk

I’M STANDING IN THE MIDDLE of the nursery my son is never going to use.

My fists are like two anvils at my sides; I want to swing them. I want to punch holes in the plaster. I want the whole fucking room to come tumbling down.

Suddenly there is a firm hand on my shoulder. “You ready?”

Francis Mitchum-my father-in-law-stands behind me.

This is his duplex-Brit and I live on one side, and he lives on the other. Francis crosses the room and yanks down the Peter Rabbit curtains. Then he pours paint into a little tray and begins to roll the walls white again, washing away the pale yellow that Brit and I brushed onto the walls less than a month ago. The first coat doesn’t quite cover the paint beneath, so the color peeks through, like something trapped under ice. With a deep breath I lie down under the crib. I lift the Allen wrench and begin to loosen the bolts that I had so carefully tightened, because I didn’t want to be the reason anything bad happened to my son.

Who knew there didn’t have to be a reason?

I left Brit sleeping off a sedative, which was an improvement over the way she was this morning at the hospital. I’d thought nothing could be worse than the crying that wouldn’t stop, the sound of her breaking into pieces. But then, at about 4:00 A.M., all of that stopped. Brit didn’t make a sound. She just stared, blank, at the wall. She wouldn’t answer when I called her name; she wouldn’t even look at me. The doctors gave her medicine to make her sleep. Sleep, they told me, was the best way for a body to heal.

Me, I hadn’t slept, not a wink. But I knew it wasn’t sleep that was going to make me feel better. That was going to take some wilding, a moment of destruction. I needed to pound out the pain inside me, give it a home someplace else.

With one last turn of the wrench, the crib collapses, the heavy mattress landing on my chest. Francis turns at the sound of the crash. “You all right there?”

“Yeah,” I say, the wind knocked out of me. It hurts, but this is a kind of hurt I understand. I’ll have a bruise; it will fade. I slide myself out from the tangle of wood and kick at it with my boot. “Probably a piece of crap anyway.”

Francis frowns. “What are you going to do with it?”

I can’t keep it. I know that Brit and I might have another baby one day, if we’re lucky, but putting this crib back into a nursery would be like making our new child sleep with a ghost.

When I don’t answer, Francis wipes his hands clean with a rag and begins to gather up the pieces of wood. “The Aryan Women’s League will take it,” he says. Brit had gone to a few of their meetings. They were a bunch of former skinchicks who went to WIC with fake IDs and got baby formula for free, bilking the system to bring formula to women whose men were serving time for fighting for the cause.

Francis isn’t much to look at now. He runs the drywall crew I work for, has a decent rating on Angie’s List, and votes Tea Party. (Old skinheads don’t die. They used to join the KKK, but now they join the Tea Party. Don’t believe me? Go listen to an old Klan speaker and compare it to a speech by a Tea Party Patriot. Instead of saying Jew, they now say Federal government. Instead of saying Fags, they say Social ilk of our country. Instead of saying Nigger, they say Welfare.) But in the eighties and nineties, he was a legend. His White Alliance Army had as much clout as Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, Matt Hale’s World Church of the Creator, William Luther Pierce’s National Alliance, and Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations. Back then he was raising Brit on his own, and his terror squad would roam the streets of New Haven with tack hammers, broken hockey sticks, blackjacks, lead pipes-beating up niggers and faggots and Jews while Brit, still a baby, napped in the car.

But when things began to change in the mid-nineties-when the government cracked down on skinhead crews-leaders like Francis found themselves strung up by their own brass balls, headed to prison. Francis understood that if you don’t want to break, you have to bend. He was the guy who changed the structure of the White Power Movement from an organization to small cells of friends with common political leanings. He told us to grow our hair out. To go to college. To join the military. To blend in. With my help, he created and ran a website and message board. We aren’t crews anymore, he’d tell me over and over. We are pockets of discontent within the system.

And as it turned out, it was even more terrifying to people to know we walked and lived among them unseen.

I think about the Aryan Women’s League taking the crib. The changing table that I got at a garage sale and sanded down. The baby clothes that Brit picked through at Goodwill, that are folded up in the dresser. The baby powder and shampoo and bottles. I think about some other baby, some live baby, using it.

I stand up so fast I get dizzy, and find myself staring into a mirror with little balloons painted on its frame. I’d come home from work to find Brit at the table with a brush in her hand, and I teased her about becoming Martha Stewart. She said the only thing she had in common with Martha Stewart was a record, but she was laughing. She painted a balloon on my cheek and then I kissed her, and for that one moment, holding her in my arms with the unborn baby balanced between us, everything was perfect.

Now my eyes are ringed with dark circles; my beard’s started to grow in; my hair is matted. I look like I’m on the run from something.

“Fuck this,” I whisper, and I slam out of the nursery into the bathroom.

There, I find my electric razor. I plug it in and in one clean swoop mow a clear trail down the center of my head. I buzz each side, letting tufts of hair fall on my shoulders and into the sink. Like magic, as the hair falls away, a picture is revealed right on the crown of my head, just above the hairline: a thick black swastika, with my initials and Brit’s forming its knotted center.

I’d gotten it when she said yes, she’d marry me.

I had been twenty-one, and pretty shitfaced at the time.

When I came to show Brit this testament to my love, she didn’t even have a chance to comment before Francis walked up and smacked me hard on the back of the head. “Are you as stupid as you look?” he asked. “What part of undercover don’t you understand?”

“It’s my secret,” I told him, and I smiled at Brit. “Our secret. When my hair grows in no one will know it’s there, but us.”

“And what if you go bald?” Francis asked.

He could tell, from the expression on my face, that I hadn’t thought about that.

Francis didn’t let me out of his house for the next two weeks, until all you could see was a dark shadow under my buzz cut that sort of looked like mange.

Now, I take a straightedge and some shaving cream and finish the job. I run my hand over my smooth head. It feels lighter. I notice the movement of air behind my ears.

I walk back into the nursery, which isn’t a nursery anymore. The crib is gone, and the rest of the furniture is stacked in the hall. Everything else is in boxes, thanks to Francis. Before Brit is discharged this afternoon, I will haul back in a bed frame and a nightstand, and she will see it as the guest room it was a few months ago.

I stare at Francis, daring him to challenge me. His eyes trace the lines of my tattoo, like he is feeling for a scar. “I get it, boy,” he says softly. “You’re going to war.”

–

THERE’S NOTHING WORSE than leaving a hospital without the baby you went in to have. Brit’s in the wheelchair (hospital protocol) being driven by an orderly (more hospital protocol). I have been relegated to bringing up the rear, a stocking cap pulled low on my forehead. Brit keeps her eyes on her hands, folded in her lap. Is it just me, or is everyone staring at us? Are they wondering what’s the medical issue with the woman who doesn’t have a bald head or a cast or anything else visibly wrong?

Francis has already pulled the SUV up to the horseshoe driveway of the hospital. A security guard opens the back door as I help Brit out of the chair. I’m surprised by how light she feels, and I wonder if she will just float away from me once her hands stop gripping the arms of the wheelchair.

For a moment, pure panic crosses over her face. I realize she’s recoiling from the dark cave of the backseat, as if there might be a monster hiding inside.

Or a car seat.

I slide my arm around her waist. “Baby,” I whisper. “It’s okay.”

Her spine stiffens, and she steels herself before ducking into the car. When she realizes that she is not sitting next to an empty baby carrier, every muscle relaxes, and Brit leans back against the seat with her eyes closed.

I slip into the front seat. Francis catches my eye and raises his brows. “How are you feeling, ladybug?” he asks, using the term of endearment he used to call her as a child.

She doesn’t answer. Just shakes her head, as one fat tear snakes down her cheek.

Francis revs the engine and peels out of the hospital driveway, as if he could outrun everything that happened there.

Somewhere, in a freezer in the basement, is my child. Or maybe by now he’s gone, carved open like a Thanksgiving turkey on the coroner’s table.

I could tell him what happened. I could tell him the Horrible Thing I see every time I close my eyes: that black bitch beating on my son’s chest.

She was alone with Davis. I overheard the other nurses talking about it, in the hallway. She was alone, when she wasn’t supposed to be. Who knows what happened, when no one was looking?

I glance back at Brit. When I look in her eyes, they’re empty.

What if the worst thing isn’t that I’ve lost my child? What if it’s that I’ve also lost my wife?

–

AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, I moved to Hartford and got a job at Colt’s Manufacturing. I took a few classes at the community college there, but the liberal shit those professors dished out made me so sick I quit. I didn’t stop hanging around the college, though. My first recruit was a skateboarder, a skinny kid with long hair who cut in front of a black dude in line at the student café. The nigger shoved him, and Yorkey shoved him back and said, “If you hate it here so much, go back to Africa.” The food fight that ensued was epic, and it ended with me reaching out a hand to Yorkey and pulling him from the fray. “You know,” I told him as we stood outside smoking, “you don’t have to be the victim.”

Then I handed him a copy of The Final Call, the Nation of Islam newsletter that I’d planted on bulletin boards all over the campus. “You see this?” I said, starting to walk, knowing he’d follow. “You want to tell me why no one’s marching into the black student union and arresting them for hate speech? For that matter, how come there’s not a White student union?”

Yorkey snorted. “Because,” he said, “that would be discrimination.”

I looked at him as if he was Einstein. “Exactly.”

After that, it was easy. We’d find the kids who were bullied by jocks and interfere, so that they knew they had protectors. We invited them to hang out with us after classes, and as we drove, I’d plug in a playlist of Skrewdriver, No Remorse, Berzerker, Centurion. White Power bands that sounded like a demon growling, that made you want to mess with the world.

I made them believe they had worth, simply because of the color they were born. When they complained about anything on campus, from the registration process to the food, I reminded them that the president of the school was a Jew, and that it was all part of a bigger plan by the Zionist Occupation Government to suppress us. I taught them “Us” meant “White.”

I took their weed and molly and tossed it in the dumpster, because addicts snitched. I made them over in my image. “I’ve got a great pair of Doc Martens,” I told Yorkey. “They’re just your size. But there’s no way I’m passing them on to a guy with greasy hair in a man bun.” The next day, he showed up with his hair neatly trimmed, his scruff shaved. Before long, I’d created my own wilding squad: the newly minted Hartford division of NADS.

I wager I taught the students at that school more than any hotshot professor. I showed them the elemental differences between the races. I proved that if you’re not the predator, you’re the prey.

–

I WAKE IN a pool of sweat, fighting my way out of a bad dream. Immediately, I feel across the covers for Brit, but there’s no one there.

I swing my legs over the side of the bed and start moving, fighting through the dark like it’s a crowd. I might as well be sleepwalking, the way I’m drawn to the room that Francis and I worked so hard to repaint before Brit was released from the hospital.

She is standing in the doorway, her hands bracing her, like she needs help staying upright. The moon’s coming through the window, so she’s trapped in her own shadow. As my eyes adjust to the night, I try to see what she sees: the old armchair with a doily over its top; the iron frame of the twin guest bed. The walls, white again. I can still smell the fresh paint.

I clear my throat. “We thought it would help,” I say, my voice small.

She pivots, but only halfway, so that for a second it looks like she’s made out of light. “What if it never happened?” Brit whispers. “What if it was just a nightmare?”

She’s wearing one of my flannel shirts-that’s what she likes to sleep in-and her hands are splayed over her belly.

“Brit,” I say, taking a step toward her.

“What if no one remembers him?”

I pull her into my arms, feel the hot circle of her breath on my chest. It’s like fire. “Baby,” I vow, “I’m not going to let anyone forget.”

–

I HAVE ONE suit. Actually, Francis and I have one suit that we share. There’s just not much of a need for fancy clothing when you work drywall during the day and run a White Power website at night. But the next afternoon, I put on the suit-black, pinstripes, the kind of thing I imagine Al Capone would have looked really sharp in-and a white shirt and a tie, and Brit and I drive back to the hospital to meet with Carla Luongo, the lawyer in Risk Management who has agreed to see us.

But when I come out of the bathroom freshly shaved, the tattoo on the back of my head stark and unmistakable, I am surprised to find Brit curled on the bed in my flannel shirt and sweatpants. “Baby,” I say. “We have a meeting with the lawyer, remember?” I’ve told her this a half hour ago. There’s no way she forgot.

Her eyes roll toward me like they are ball bearings, loose in her head. Her tongue pushes words around her mouth like they’re food. “Don’t…wanna…go…back.”

She turns away from me, pulling up the covers, and that’s when I see the bottle on the nightstand: the sleeping pills that the doctor gave her to help her transition. I take a deep breath and then haul my wife upright. She feels like a sandbag, heavy and immobile. Shower, I think, but that would require me to get in with her, and we don’t have time. Instead, I take the glass of water on the bedside table and throw it in her face. She sputters, but it gets her to sit up on her own. I pull off her pajamas and grab the first things I can find in her drawer that look decent-a pair of black pants and a sweater that buttons up the front. As I am dressing her, I have a sudden flash of myself doing this same thing to my baby, and I wind up yanking so hard on Brit’s arm that she yelps and I kiss her on the wrist. “Sorry, baby,” I murmur, and more gently, I pull a comb through her hair and do my best to bunch it together into a ponytail. I stuff her feet into a pair of little black shoes that might actually be bedroom slippers and then haul her into my arms, and out to the car.

By the time we reach the hospital, she is near catatonic. “Just stay awake,” I beg her, anchoring her to my side as we walk in. “For Davis.”

Maybe that gets through to her, because as we are ushered into the lawyer’s office, her eyes open a fraction wider.

Carla Luongo is a spic, just like I guessed from her name. She sits down on a chair and offers us a couch. I watch her nearly swallow her tongue when I take off my wool hat. Good. Let her know who she’s dealing with, right up front.

Brit leans against me. “My wife,” I explain, “is still not feeling well.”

The lawyer nods sympathetically. “Mr. and Mrs. Bauer, let me first just say how sorry I am for your loss.”

I don’t respond.

“I’m sure you have questions,” she says.

I lean forward. “I don’t have questions. I know what happened. That black nurse killed my son. I saw her with my own eyes, beating at his chest. I told her supervisor I didn’t want her touching my baby, and what happened? My worst fear came true.”

“I’m sure you realize that Ms. Jefferson was only doing her job…”

“Oh, yeah? Was it also her job to go against what her boss ordered? It was all in Davis’s file.”

The lawyer stands so that she can grab a file on her desk. It’s got the little colored confetti of stickers on the side that is some secret code, I imagine. She opens it, and even from here I can see the Post-it note. Her nostrils flare, but she doesn’t comment.

“That nurse wasn’t supposed to be taking care of my son,” I say, “and she was left alone with him.”

Carla Luongo looks at me. “How do you know that, Mr. Bauer?”

“Because your staff can’t keep their voices down. I heard her say she was covering for the other nurse. The day before, she was screaming her head off, just because I made a request to take her off my son’s case. And what happened? She was pounding on my baby. I watched her,” I say, tears springing to my eyes. I wipe them away, feeling foolish, feeling weak. “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to take this hospital to the bank. You killed my son; you’re going to pay for it.”

Honestly, I have no idea how the legal system works; I’ve done my best to stay away from getting caught by the cops. But I’ve watched enough TV infomercials to believe that if you can get cash in a class-action lawsuit for having some lung disease brought about by asbestos, you most certainly have a bone to pick if your baby dies when he’s supposed to be receiving choice medical care.

I grab my suit jacket in one fist and half-drag Brit to the office door. I’ve just managed to open it when I hear the lawyer’s voice behind me. “Mr. Bauer,” she asks. “Why would you sue the hospital?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She takes a step forward, gently but firmly closing the door of her office again. “Why would you sue the hospital,” she repeats, “when everything suggests that Ruth Jefferson was the individual who killed your baby?”

–

ABOUT A YEAR into my running the Hartford NADS crew, we had a steady income. I was able to lift guns from Colt’s by forging inventory, and then sell them on the street. Mostly, we sold to blacks, because they were just going to kill each other with them anyway, and also because they paid three times more for a weapon than the Italians would. Yorkey and I ran the operation, and one night we were on our way home from a deal when a cop car pulled up behind me, its lights flashing.

Yorkey nearly shit a brick. “Fuck, man. What do we do?”

“We pull over,” I told him. It wasn’t like we had the stolen gun in the car anymore. As far as the police were concerned, Yorkey and I were headed back from a party at a buddy’s apartment. But when the cops asked us to step out of the car, Yorkey was sweating like a coal miner. He looked like he was guilty as sin, which is probably why the police searched the car. I waited, because I knew I had nothing to hide.

Apparently, Yorkey couldn’t say the same thing. That gun hadn’t been the only deal going down that night. While I was negotiating, Yorkey had bought himself an eight ball of meth.

But because it was in my glove compartment, I went down for it.

The thing about doing time is that it was a world I understood, where everyone was separated by race. My sentence for possession was six months, and I planned to spend every minute planning my revenge. Yorkey had used before he became part of NADS; it was part of the skater culture. But my squad, they didn’t touch drugs. And they sure as hell didn’t squirrel them away in my glove compartment.

In prison, the black gangs have everyone outnumbered, so sometimes the Latinos and the White gangs will band together. But in jail, you just basically try to keep your head straight and keep out of trouble. I knew that if there was anyone in the White Power Movement who happened to be in doing time, they would find me sooner or later-but I was hoping that the niggers wouldn’t find me first.

I took to keeping my nose buried in a Bible. I needed God in my life, because I had a public defender, and when you have a public defender, you’d better hope that God’s on your side, too. But I wasn’t reading the parts of Scripture I’d read before, when I was learning the doctrines of Christian Identity theology. Instead, I found myself dog-earing the pages about suffering, and salvation, and hope. I fasted, because I read something about it in the Bible. And during my fast God told me to surround myself with other people like me.

So the next day, I showed up at the jail Bible study group.

I was the only guy there who wasn’t black.

At first we just stared at each other. Then, the dude running the meeting jerked his chin at a kid who couldn’t have been much older than me, and he made a space next to himself. We all held hands, and when I held his, it was soft, like my father’s hands used to be. I have no idea why that popped into my head, but that’s what I was thinking when they started to say the Lord’s Prayer, and then suddenly I was saying it along with them.

I went to Bible study every day. When we finished reading Scripture, we’d say Amen, and then Big Ike, who ran the group, would ask, “Who’s got court tomorrow?” Usually, someone would say they had a preliminary hearing or that the arresting officer was testifying or something like that, and Big Ike would say, “All right, then, let’s pray that the officer don’t throw you under no bus,” and he’d find a passage in the Bible about redemption.

Twinkie was the black kid who was my age. We talked a lot about girls, and how we missed hooking up with them. But believe it or not, we talked more about the food we craved on the outside. Me, I would have committed a felony for Taco Bell; Twinkie only wanted Chef Boyardee. Somehow, it didn’t matter so much what color his skin was. Had I met him on the streets of Hartford, I would have kicked his ass. But in jail, it was different. We’d team up when we played Spades, cheating with hand signals and eye rolls that we made up in private, because no one expected the White Power guy and the black kid to be working together.

One day, I was sitting in the common room with a bunch of White guys when a gang shooting came in on the midday news. The anchor on the TV was talking about how the bullets sprayed, how many people had been hit by accident. “That’s why if we ever go at it with the gangs,” I said, “we win. They don’t go target shooting like us. They don’t know how to hold weapons, look at that death grip. Typical nigger bullshit.”

Twink wasn’t sitting with us, but I could see him across the room. His eyes sort of skated over me, and then back to whatever he was doing. Later that day, we were playing cards for cigarettes, and I gave him a sign to come back in diamonds, because I was cutting diamond spades. Instead, he threw clubs, and we lost. As we were walking out of the common room, I turned on him. “What the hell, dude? I gave you a sign.”

He looked right at me. “Guess it’s just typical nigger bullshit,” he said.

I thought: Shit, I hurt his feelings. Then: So what?

It’s not like I stopped using that word. But I’ll admit, sometimes when I said it, it stuck in my throat like a fish bone before I could cough it free.

–

FRANCIS FINDS ME just as I put my boot through the front window of our duplex, pushing out the old casing so that it explodes onto the porch in a rain of splinters and glass. He folds his arms, raises a brow.

“Sill’s rotted out,” I explain. “And I didn’t have a pry bar.”

With a gaping hole in the wall, the cold air rushes into the house. It feels good, because I’m on fire.

“So this has nothing to do with your meeting,” Francis says, in a way that suggests it has everything to do with the last half hour I’ve spent at the local police department. It was my next stop after the hospital. I’d dropped off Brit, who crawled back into bed, and drove straight there.

My meeting, really, was not even a meeting. Just me sitting across from a fat cop named MacDougall who filed my complaint against Ruth Jefferson. “He said he’d do a little research,” I mutter. “Which means I’ll never hear from him again.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That that bitch killed my baby.”

MacDougall didn’t know anything about my son, or what had happened at the hospital, so I had to tell the whole sorry story over again. MacDougall asked me what I wanted from him, as if it wasn’t evident.

“I want to bury my son,” I told him. “And I want her to pay for what she did.”

The cop asked if, maybe, I was just overcome with grief. If I had misinterpreted what I saw. “She wasn’t just doing CPR,” I told MacDougall. “She was hurting my baby. Even one of the other doctors told her to lighten up.”

I said she had it in for me. Immediately the cop glanced at my tattoos. “No kidding,” he said.

“It’s a fucking hate crime, that’s what it is,” I tell Francis now. “But God forbid anyone stand up for the Anglos, even though we’re a minority now.”

My father-in-law falls into place beside me, ripping a piece of flashing out of the window cavity with his bare hands. “You’re preaching to the choir, Turk,” he says.

Francis may not have talked publicly about White Power in years, but I happen to know that in a locked storage facility three miles away from here, he is stockpiling weapons for the racial holy war. “I hope you’re planning on sealing this up,” he says, and I pretend he isn’t talking about the window.

Just then my cellphone rings. I fish it out of my pocket but don’t recognize the number on the screen. “Hello?”

“Mr. Bauer? This is Sergeant MacDougall. I spoke with you earlier today?”

I curl my hand around the phone and turn away, forging a wall of privacy with my back.

“I wanted to let you know that I had a chance to talk to Risk Management at the hospital, as well as to the medical examiner. Carla Luongo corroborated your story. The ME was able to tell me that your son died due to hypoglycemic seizure, which led to respiratory and then cardiac arrest.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Well,” he says, “the death certificate’s been released to the hospital. You can bury your son.”

I close my eyes, and for a moment, I can’t even find a response.

“Okay,” I manage.

“There’s one more thing, Mr. Bauer,” MacDougall adds. “The medical examiner confirmed that there was bruising on your son’s rib cage.”

My whole future hinges on the breath between that sentence and his next.

“There’s evidence that Ruth Jefferson may have been at fault in the death of your son. And that it could have been a racially motivated incident,” MacDougall says. “I’m putting in a call to the district attorney’s office.”

“Thank you,” I say gruffly, and I hang up the phone. Then my knees give out, and I land heavily in front of the damaged sill. I can feel Francis’s hand on my shoulder. Even though there’s no barrier between me and the outside, I struggle to breathe.

“I’m sorry, Turk,” Francis says, misinterpreting my response.

“Don’t be.” I pull myself up and run to the dark bedroom where Brit is hibernating beneath a mound of covers. I throw open the curtains and let the sun flood the room. I watch her roll over, wincing, squinting, and I take her hand.

I can’t give her our baby. But I can give her the next best thing.

Justice.

–

WHILE I HAD been plotting my revenge against Yorkey during my six months in jail, he had been busy, too. He’d allied himself with a group of bikers called the Pagans. They were hulking thugs who were, I assumed, somehow involved with meth, like him. And they were more than delighted to have his back, if it meant they could take down the leader of the Hartford NADS. Street cred like that went a long way.

I spent my first day out of jail trying to round up the old members of my crew, but they all knew what was about to go down, and they all had an excuse. “I gave up everything for you,” I said, when I had exhausted even the freshest cut in the squad. “And this is how you repay me?”

But the last thing I was going to do was let anyone think going to jail had dulled my edges. So that night, I went to the pizza place that used to be the unofficial headquarters of my crew, and waited until I heard the growl of a dozen bikes pull up. I threw down my jacket, cracked my knuckles, and walked out to the alley behind the restaurant.

Yorkey, the son of a bitch, was hiding behind a wall of muscle. Seriously, the smallest Pagan was about six-five and three hundred pounds.

I may have been smaller, but I was fast. And none of those guys had grown up ducking from my grandfather’s fists.

I wish I could tell you what happened that night, but all I have to go on is what I’ve heard from others. How I ran like a freaking berserker at the biggest guy, and revved up my arm so that my punch caught him square in the mouth and knocked out his entire front row of teeth. How I lifted one dude off his feet and sent him like a cannonball into the others. How I kicked a biker so hard in his kidney he allegedly pissed red for a month. How blood ran in the alley like rain on pavement.

All I know is I had nothing left to lose but my reputation, and that’s enough ammunition to power a war. I don’t remember any of it, except waking up the next morning in the pizza joint, with a bag of ice on my broken hand and one eye swollen shut.

I don’t remember any of it, but word spread. I don’t remember any of it, but once again, I was the stuff of legend.

–

ON THE DAY I bury my son, the sun is shining. The wind’s coming from the west, and it has teeth. I stand in front of the tiny hole in the ground.

I don’t know who organized this whole funeral. Someone had to call to get a plot, to let people know there would be a service. I assume it was Francis, who now stands at the front of the casket, reading a verse from Scripture: “ ‘For this child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him,’ ” Francis recites. “ ‘Therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord. And he worshiped the Lord there.’ ”

There are guys from the drywall crew here, and some of Brit’s friends in the Movement. But there are also people I don’t know, who have come to pay their respects to Francis. One of them is Tom Metzger, the man who founded the White Aryan Resistance. He’s seventy-eight now, a loner like Francis.

When Brit starts sobbing during the reading of the psalm, I reach out to her, but she pulls away. Instead, she turns to Metzger, who she called Uncle Tommy when she was growing up. He puts an arm around her, and I try not to feel the absence of her as a slap.

I’ve heard plenty of platitudes today: He’s in a better place; he’s a fallen soldier; time heals all wounds. What no one told me about grief is how lonely it is. No matter who else is mourning, you’re in your own little cell. Even when people try to comfort you, you’re aware that now there is a barrier between you and them, made of the horrible thing that happened, that keeps you isolated. I had thought that, at the very least, Brit and I would hurt together, but she can barely stand to look at me. I wonder if it’s for the same reason I have avoided her: because I look at her eyes and I see them in Davis’s face; because I notice the dimple in her chin and think that my son had it, too. She-who used to be everything I ever wanted-is a constant memory now of everything I’ve lost.

I focus my attention on the casket being lowered into the ground. I keep my eyes extra wide, because if I do that, the tears won’t spill over, and I won’t look like a pussy.

I start making a list in my head, of all the things I will never get to do with my son: see him smile for the first time. Celebrate his first Christmas. Get him a BB gun. Give him advice to ask a girl out. Milestones. But the road of parenthood, for me, has been wiped clean of landmarks.

Suddenly Francis is standing in front of me with the shovel. I swallow hard, take it, and become the first person to start to bury my child. After pushing a scoop of dirt into the rip in the ground, I jam the shovel into the earth again. Tom Metzger helps Brit lift it, her hands shaking, and do her part.

I know I’m supposed to stand vigil while everyone else here helps to put Davis underground. But I’m too busy fighting the urge to dive into that tiny pit. To shovel the dirt out with my bare hands. To lift the casket, to pry it open, to save my baby. I’m holding myself in check so hard that my body is vibrating with the effort.

And then, something happens that diffuses all that tension, that twists the escape valve so that the steam inside me disappears. Brit’s hand slips into mine. Her eyes are still vacant with drugs and pain; her body is angled away from me, but she definitely reached out. She definitely needed me.

For the first time in a week, I start to think that, maybe, we will survive.

–

WHEN FRANCIS MITCHUM summons you, you go.

In the aftermath of my rout of the Pagans, I received a handwritten note from Francis, telling me that he’d heard the rumors, and wanted to see if they were true. He invited me to meet him the following Saturday in New Haven, and included an address. I was a little surprised to drive there and find it smack in the middle of a subdivision, but I assumed it was a gathering of his squad when I saw all the cars parked out front. When I rang the doorbell, no one answered, but I could hear activity in the backyard, so I edged around the side of the house and let myself in through the unlocked fence.

Almost immediately, I was run down by a swarm of kids. They were probably about five years old, not that I had too much experience with humans of that size. They were racing toward a woman who was holding a baseball bat, trying to direct the unruly group into some form of a line. “It’s my birthday,” one little boy said. “So I get to go first!” He grabbed for the bat and began to swing it at a piñata: a papier-mâché nigger hanging from a noose.

Well, at least I knew I was in the right place.

I turned in the other direction, and came face-to-face with a girl who was holding stars in her hands. She had long curly hair, and her eyes were the palest shade of blue I’d ever seen.

I’d been hit a hundred times before, but never like that. I couldn’t remember the word hello.

“Well,” she said, “you’re a little old for games, but you can have a turn if you want.”

I just stared at her, confused, until I realized that she was referring to the hook-nosed profile poster taped up on the side of the house. I wanted to play, yes, but Pin the Star on the Jew wasn’t what I had in mind.

“I’m looking for Francis Mitchum,” I said. “He asked me to meet him here?”

She looked at me, her eyes narrowing. “You must be Turk,” she said. “He’s expecting you.” She turned on her heel and walked into the house with the easy grace of someone who is used to having people follow in her wake.

We passed a few women in the kitchen, who were bouncing from fridge to cabinets and back like popcorn kernels on a hot griddle, exploding one at a time with commands: Get the plates! Don’t forget the ice cream! There were more kids inside, but they were older-preteen, I was guessing, because they reminded me of me not that long ago-held in thrall by the man who stood in front of them. Francis Mitchum was shorter than I remembered, but then, I’d last seen him on a podium. His silver hair was lush and swept back from his face, and he was lecturing on Christian Identity theology. “The snake,” he explained, “has sex with Eve.” The kids looked around at each other when he said the word sex, as if hearing it spoken out loud so casually was their welcome into the sanctum of adulthood. “Why else would God say she couldn’t eat an apple? They’re in a garden, for Pete’s sake. The apple is a symbol, and the downfall of man is getting laid. The Devil comes to Eve in the form of a snake, and she’s tricked into messing around, and she gets pregnant. But then she goes back to Adam and tricks him into having sex. She has Cain, who’s born with the mark of the Devil on him-a 666, a Star of David. That’s right, Cain is the first Jew. But she also gives birth to Abel, who’s Adam’s kid. And Cain kills Abel because he’s jealous, and he’s the seed of Satan.”

“You believe in this bullshit?” asked the beautiful girl beside me. Her voice was as even as a seam. It felt like a trick.

Some White Power folks were Christian Identity followers, and some weren’t. Raine was. Francis was. I was. We believed that we were the real House of Israel, God’s chosen ones. The Jews were impostors, and would be wiped out during the race war.

I grinned. “When I was about their age, I was starving and I stole a hot dog at a gas station. I didn’t care so much about stealing, but for two weeks I was convinced God was going to smite me for eating pork.”

When she met my gaze, it felt like the space between the moment you turned on a stove’s pilot light, and the moment it was blue and burning. It felt like the possibility of an explosion.

“Daddy,” she announced. “Your guest is here.”

Daddy?

Francis Mitchum glanced at me, turning his attention away from the clot of preteens he’d been talking to, who were staring at me, too.

He stepped over the tangle of adolescent limbs and clapped me on the shoulder. “Turk Bauer. It’s good of you to come.”

“It’s an honor to be asked,” I replied.

“I see you’ve already met Brittany,” Francis said.

Brittany. “Not officially.” I held out my hand. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Brit repeated, laughing. She held on a moment too long, but not enough for anyone to notice.

Except Mitchum, who-I assumed-did not miss much. “Walk with me a bit?” he said, and I fell into step beside him as we returned to the backyard.

We chatted about the weather (late start to spring this year) and the drive from Hartford to New Haven (too much construction on I-91S). When we reached a corner of the yard, near an apple tree, Mitchum sat down on a lawn chair and gestured for me to do the same. From here, we had a bird’s-eye view of the piñata game. The birthday boy was up to bat again, but so far, no candy had been spilled. “That’s my godson,” Mitchum said.

“I was wondering why I got invited to a kids’ party.”

“I like talking to the next generation,” he admitted. “Makes me still feel relevant.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, sir. I’d say you’re still pretty relevant.”

“Now, you,” Mitchum said. “You’ve made quite a name for yourself lately.”

I just nodded. I wasn’t sure why Francis Mitchum had wanted to meet me.

“I hear your brother was killed by a nigger,” he said. “And your father’s a flamer-”

My head swung up, cheeks hot. “He’s not my father anymore.”

“Take it easy, boy. None of us can pick our parents. It’s what we choose to make of them that’s important.” He looked at me. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“When I was beating him unconscious.”

Again, I felt like I was being given a quiz, and I must have answered correctly, because Mitchum kept talking. “You’ve started your own crew, and by many accounts, you’re the best recruiter on the East Coast. You took the rap for your second in command, and then taught him a lesson as soon as you got out of jail.”

“Just doing what needed to be done.”

“Well,” Mitchum answered, “there aren’t too many like you, nowadays. I thought honor was a commodity that was going extinct.”

Just then, one of the other little boys snapped the neck off the piñata, and the candy cascaded onto the grass. The kids fell on it, grabbing up sweets in their fists.

The birthday boy’s mother came out of the kitchen carrying a platter of cupcakes. “Happy birthday to you,” she started to sing, and the children crowded around the picnic table.

Brittany stepped out onto the porch. Her fingers were blue with icing.

“Back when I was running a squad,” Mitchum said, “no one in the Movement would have been caught dead being a junkie. Now, for the love of God, Aryan boys are teaming up with redskins on reservations to make meth somewhere the feds can’t intervene.”

Happy birthday to you!

“They’re not teaming up,” I told Mitchum. “They’re banding together against common enemies: the Mexicans and the blacks. I’m not defending what they’re doing, but I understand why they might be unlikely allies.”

Happy birthday, dear Jackson!

Mitchum narrowed his gaze. “Unlikely allies,” he repeated. “For example, an old guy with experience…and a young guy with the biggest balls I’ve ever seen. A man who knows the former generation of Anglos, and one who could lead the next. A fellow who grew up on the streets…and one who grew up with technology. Why, that could be quite a pairing.”

Happy birthday to you!

Across the yard, Brit caught my eye and blushed.

“I’m listening,” I said.

–

AFTER THE FUNERAL, everyone comes back to the house. There are casseroles and pies and platters, none of which I eat. People keep telling me they’re sorry for our loss, as if they had something to do with it. Francis and Tom sit outside on the porch, which still has some shards of glass on it from my window project, and drink the bottle of whiskey Tom’s brought.

Brit sits on a couch like the middle of a flower, surrounded by the petals of her friends. When someone she doesn’t know well comes too near, they close around her. Eventually, they leave, saying things like Call me if you need me and Every day it’ll get a little easier. In other words: lies.

I am just walking the last guest out when a car pulls up. The door opens, and MacDougall, the cop who took my complaint, gets out. He walks up the steps to where I am standing, his hands in his pockets. “I don’t have any information for you yet,” he says bluntly. “I came to pay my respects.”

I feel Brit come up behind me like a shadow. “Babe, this is the officer who’s going to help us.”

“When?” she asks.

“Well, ma’am, investigations into these things take time…”

“These things,” Brit repeats. “These things.” She shoves past me, so that she is toe-to-toe with the cop. “My son is not a thing. Was,” she corrects, her voice snagging. “Was not a thing.”

Then she turns on her heel and disappears into the belly of the house. I look at the cop. “It’s been a tough day.”

“I understand. As soon as the prosecutor contacts me I’ll be in-”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, however, before the sound of a crash fills all the space behind me. “I have to go,” I tell him, but I’m already closing the door in his face.

There’s another crash before I reach the kitchen. As soon as I step inside, a casserole dish flies by my face, striking the wall behind me. “Brit,” I cry out, moving toward her, and she wings a glass at my head. It glances off my brow, and for a moment, I see stars.

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?” Brit screams. “I fucking hate mac and cheese.”

“Baby.” I grasp her by the shoulders. “They were trying to be nice.”

“I don’t want them to be nice,” she says, tears streaming down her face now. “I don’t want their pity. I don’t want anything, except that bitch who killed my baby.”

I fold my arms around her, even though she stays stiff in them. “This isn’t over yet.”

She shoves at me so hard and so unexpectedly that I stumble backward. “It should be,” she says, with so much venom in her words that I am paralyzed. “It would be, if you were a real man.”

A muscle ticks in my jaw and I ball my hands into fists, but I don’t react. Francis, who’s entered the room at some point, comes up behind Brit and slips an arm around her waist. “Come on now, ladybug. Let’s get you upstairs.” He leads her out of the kitchen.

I know what she’s saying: that a warrior isn’t much of a warrior when he’s fighting behind a computer. True, going underground with our movement was Francis’s idea, and it’s been a brilliant and insidious plan-but Brit’s right. There’s a big difference between the instant gratification that comes from landing a punch and the delayed pride that comes from spreading fear through the Internet.

I grab the car keys off the kitchen counter, and a moment later I’m cruising downtown, near the railroad tracks. I think, for a heartbeat, about finding that black nurse’s address. I have the technological expertise to do it in less than two minutes.

Which is about as long as it would take the cops to point a finger at me if anything happened to her or her property.

Instead, I park under a railroad overpass and get out of the car. My heart’s pounding, my adrenaline is high. It’s been so long since I’ve been wilding that I’ve forgotten the high of it, unlike anything that alcohol or sports or even falling in love can produce.

The first person that gets in my way is unconscious. Homeless, he’s drunk or drugged or asleep on a cardboard pallet under a mountain of plastic bags. He’s not even black. He’s just…easy.

I grab him by the throat, and he startles from one nightmare into another. “What are you looking at?” I scream into his face, even though I have him pinned by the neck, so that he couldn’t be looking at anything but me. “What the fuck is your problem?”

Then I head-butt him in the mouth, so that I knock his teeth loose. I throw him back on the pavement, hearing a satisfying crack as his skull meets the ground.

With every blow, I can breathe a little easier. It has been years since I did this, but it feels like yesterday-my fists have a muscle memory. I pound this stranger into someone who will never be recognized, since it’s the only way to remember who I am.

Ruth

WHEN YOU ARE A NURSE, you know better than most anyone else that life goes on. There are good days and there are bad days. There are patients who stay with you, and those you can’t wait to forget. But there is always another mother in labor, or delivering, who drives you forward. There is always a new crop of tiny humans who haven’t even written the first sentence in the story of their lives. The process of birth is such an assembly line, in fact, that it always surprises me when I am forced to stop and look twice-like when a baby I helped deliver seemingly yesterday is suddenly my patient, about to have her own child. Or when the phone rings, and the hospital lawyer asks if I could just come in to talk.

I am not sure that I have ever conversed with Carla Luongo. In fact I’m not sure that I knew the hospital lawyer-pardon me, risk management liaison-was named Carla Luongo. But then I’ve never been in trouble before. I’ve never been a risk that needs to be managed.

It’s been two weeks since Davis Bauer’s death-fourteen days of me going in to work and doing my business hanging IVs and telling women to push and teaching them how to get a newborn to latch on. But more important, it’s been fourteen nights when I’ve awakened with a start, reliving not that infant’s death but the moments before. Playing them in slow motion and reversing them and erasing the edges of the narrative in my head so that I start to believe what I’ve told myself. What I’ve told others.

What I tell Carla Luongo, on the phone, when she calls.

“I’d be happy to meet with you,” I say, when what I really mean is: Am I in trouble?

“Terrific,” she replies. “How does ten o’clock sound?”

Today my shift begins at eleven, so I tell her that’s fine. I scribble down the floor number where her office is just as Edison walks into the kitchen. He crosses, opens the fridge, and takes the orange juice from inside. He looks like he’s about to drink right from the bottle, but I raise one eyebrow and he thinks otherwise.

“Ruth?” Carla Luongo says into my ear. “Are you still there?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“See you soon, then?”

“Looking forward to it,” I say brightly and hang up.

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.”

–

CARLA LUONGO HAS a 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 a friend-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.”

“No problem. You know where to find me.”

“Oh yes,” she says, and the whole way back to the birthing pavilion, I try to shake the sense that those two simple words could be a threat.

When I get back to my floor, however, I don’t have time to wallow in self-doubt. Marie sees me step out of the elevator and grabs my arm with relief. “Ruth,” she says. “Meet Virginia. Virginia, this is Ruth, one of our most experienced L and D nurses.”

I look at the woman standing in front of me, wide-eyed as she watches a gurney being wheeled down the hallway for what must be a stat C-section. That’s all I need to understand what’s going on here. “Virginia,” I say smoothly, “Marie’s got a lot on her plate right now, so why don’t you shadow me?”

Marie tosses me a silent thank-you and runs after the gurney. “So,” I say to Virginia. “Nontraditional student?”

Unlike most of the baby-faced nursing candidates we get parading through here, Virginia is in her thirties. “Late start,” she explains. “Or early, depending on how you look at it. I had my kids young, and wanted them out of the house before I started my official career. You probably think I’m crazy to be going back to school this old.”

“Better late than never,” I say. “Besides, being a mom ought to count as on-the-job training for L and D, don’t you think?”

I intercept the nurse who’s coming off duty and figure out which rooms I’m taking over: a couplet with a GDM G1 now P1 at forty weeks and four days who had a vaginal delivery at 5:00 A.M.; baby is on Q3 hour blood sugars for twenty-four hours; a G2 P1 at thirty-eight weeks and two days in active labor. “It’s like alphabet soup,” Virginia says.

“It’s just shorthand,” I laugh. “You get used to it. But I’ll translate for you-we’re taking over two rooms. One is a mom with gestational diabetes who delivered this morning and whose baby needs sugars every three hours. One is a woman in labor who already has one kid,” I say, “so at least she’s done this before. Just follow my lead.”

With that, I push into her room. “Hello, Mrs. Braunstein,” I say to the patient, who is holding on to her partner’s hand in a death grip. “I hear you’re a repeat customer. My name’s Ruth, and this is Virginia. Virginia, it looks like Mr. Braunstein here could use a chair. Can you pull one closer?” I keep up a constant, calm chatter as I examine her strip and feel her belly. “Everything looks good.”

“Doesn’t feel good,” the woman grits out.

“We can take care of that,” I say smoothly.

Mrs. Braunstein turns to Virginia. “I want a water birth. That’s on my plan.”

Virginia nods tentatively. “Okay.”

“Once we monitor you for twenty minutes or so, we’ll see how the baby’s doing, and if it’s possible, we will definitely get you into the tub,” I say.

“The other thing is that we don’t want a circumcision, if it’s a boy,” Mrs. Braunstein says. “We’re having a bris.”

“Not a problem,” I tell her. “I’ll make a note in the file.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m at about six centimeters,” she says. “When I had Eli, I threw up just about then, and I’m starting to feel queasy now…”

I reach for the emesis basin and pass it to Virginia.

“Let’s see if we can examine you before that happens,” I suggest, and I slip on a pair of latex gloves, pulling up the sheet at the end of the bed.

Mrs. Braunstein turns to Virginia. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Um.” She turns to me. “Yes?”

I lower the sheet. “Mrs. Braunstein,” I say. “Virginia’s a nursing student. I’ve been in this business for twenty years. If you want, I’m sure she’d be delighted to add to her education by seeing how many centimeters you’re dilated. But if you’re in any sort of discomfort and just want to get that part of this over with, I’d be happy to accommodate you.”

“Oh!” The patient turns bright red. “I just assumed…”

That she is in charge. Because even though Virginia is ten years younger than me, she is white.

I exhale, the same way I tell my imminent mothers to exhale, and-like them-with that breath, I let the frustration go. I put a gentle hand on Mrs. Braunstein’s knee, and offer her a professional smile. “Let’s just get this baby out,” I suggest.

–

MY MAMA STILL works for Mina Hallowell in her Upper West Side brownstone. Ever since Mr. Sam passed, it’s Ms. Mina that my mom is supposed to be helping. Her daughter, Christina, lives nearby, but has her own life. Her son, Louis, lives in London with his husband, a director in the West End. Apparently I’m the only person who finds it ironic that Mama is three years older than the woman she’s supposed to be assisting. Every time I’ve talked to my mama about retiring, though, she shrugs me off and says the Hallowells need her. I’d venture that my mama needs the Hallowells just as much, if only to feel like she still has a purpose.

My mother only has off on Sundays, and since I usually am asleep that day after a long Saturday-night shift, when I visit her it has to be at the brownstone instead. I don’t visit very often, though. I tell myself it’s because I have work or Edison or a thousand other reasons that take precedence, but in reality, it’s because a little piece of me dies every time I walk inside and see my mama in that shapeless blue uniform, with a white apron wrapped around her hips. You’d think that after all this time, Ms. Mina would just tell Mama to dress the way she likes, but no. Maybe this is the reason why, when I do visit, I make a point of using the front entrance, with the doorman, instead of the servants’ elevator in the back of the building. There is just some perverse part of me that likes knowing I will be announced like any other guest. That the name of the maid’s daughter will be written down in a log.

Today when my mother lets me inside, she gives me a big hug. “Ruth! If this isn’t the best surprise! I just knew today was going to be a good one.”

“Really?” I say. “Why?”

“Well, I put on my heavy coat because the weather’s turning, and wouldn’t you know I found a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket left behind from last fall when I wore it. And I said to myself, Lou, this is either a good omen, or else it’s the start of Alzheimer’s.” She grins. “I chose the former.”

I love the way her wrinkles have weathered her smile. I love seeing how age will look on my face, one day.

“Is my grandbaby here too?” she asks, looking behind me in the hall. “Did you bring him for another one of those college visits?”

“No, Mama, he’s in classes now. You’re gonna have to make do with just me.”

“Just you,” she teases. “As if that was never enough.” She closes the door behind her as I unbutton my coat. She holds out her hand for it, but I reach into the closet instead for a hanger. The last thing I’m going to do is make my mama wait on me, too. I put my coat next to hers, and just for old times’ sake, run my hand down the soft underbelly of Mama’s lucky scarf before closing the closet door.

“Where’s Ms. Mina?” I ask.

“Shopping, downtown, with Christina and the baby,” she says.

“I don’t want to interrupt you if you’re busy -”

“For you, baby, I always have time. Come into the dining room. I’m just doing a little cleaning.” She starts down the hallway, and I follow, carefully noticing the way she’s favoring her right knee because of the bursitis in her left.

On the dining room table a white sheet is spread, and the strings of crystal that form the massive chandelier overhead are laying on it like trails of tears. A pungent bowl of ammonia solution sits in the center. My mother sits down and resumes her task of dipping each strand, then letting it air dry.

“How did you get those down?” I ask, eyeing the chandelier.

“Carefully,” my mama replies.

I think about her balancing on the table, or a chair. “It’s too dangerous for you to do that kind of stuff anymore-”

She waves me away. “I been doing this for fifty years,” my mama says. “I could clean crystal in a coma.”

“Well, keep climbing up to get them down from the chandelier and you might get your wish.” I frown. “Did you go to the orthopedist whose name I gave you?”

“Ruth, stop babying me.” She starts to fill in the space between us by asking about Edison’s grades. She says that Adisa is worried about her sixteen-year-old dropping out of high school (something she failed to mention to me at the nail salon). As we talk, I help lift strands of crystal and dip them into the ammonia solution, feeling the liquid burn my skin, and pride-even more bitter-burn the back of my throat.

When my sister and I were little, Mama used to bring us here on Saturdays to work. She framed this as a big deal, a privilege-not all kids are well behaved enough to shadow a parent at a job! If you’re good, you get to push the button on the dumbwaiter that brings the dishes up from the dining room to the kitchen! But what started as a treat soured quickly for me. True, sometimes we got to play with Christina and her Barbies, but when she had a friend over, Rachel and I were evicted to the kitchen or the laundry room, where Mama showed us how to iron cuffs and collars. At ten, I finally rebelled. “Maybe you’re okay with this, but I don’t want to be Ms. Mina’s slave,” I told my mother, loud enough to maybe be overheard, and she slapped me. “You do not use that word to describe an honest, paying job,” my mama corrected. “The same job that put that sweater on your back and those shoes on your feet.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that our apprenticeship had a higher purpose. We were learning the whole time-how to make hospital corners on a bed, how to get stains out of the grout, how to make a roux. My mama had been teaching us to be self-sufficient, so that we’d never be in the position Ms. Mina was in, unable to do things for ourselves.

We finish cleaning the crystal drops, and I stand on a chair while my mama hands them to me one by one to hang from the chandelier again. They are blinding in their beauty. “So,” Mama says when we are nearly finished, “are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or do I have to pry it loose?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I was just missing you, that’s all.”

It’s true. I came to Manhattan because I wanted to see her. I wanted to go somewhere where I knew I’d be valued.

“What happened at work, Ruth?”

When I was a child my mother’s intuition was so uncanny it took me many years to realize she wasn’t psychic. She didn’t know the future; she just knew me.

“Usually you can’t stop talking about a set of triplets or a father-in-law who punched out a new daddy in the waiting room. Today, you haven’t mentioned the hospital at all.”

I step down from the chair and fold my arms. The best lies are the ones that are wrapped around a core of truth. So although I conspicuously leave out any mention of Turk Bauer or the dead baby or Carla Luongo, I tell Mama about the nursing student and the patient who so easily assumed that she was the one in charge, instead of me. The words spill like a waterfall, with more force behind them than I expect. By the time I am finished, we are both sitting in the kitchen, and my mother has set a cup of tea down in front of me.

Mama purses her lips, as if she’s weighing evidence. “Maybe you just imagined it.”

I wonder if this is why I’m the way I am, the reason I tend to make excuses for everyone but myself and try so hard to fit in seamlessly. My mother modeled that behavior for years.

But what if she is right? Could I be overreacting? I replay the interaction in my head. It’s not the same as the incident with Turk Bauer-Mrs. Braunstein didn’t even mention the color of my skin. What if my mama’s right and I’m the one who’s being overly sensitive? What if I’m making the assumption that the patient’s comments were made because Virginia’s white and I’m not? Doesn’t that make me the one who can’t see past race?

Clear as a bell, I hear Adisa’s voice in my head: That’s just what they want: for you to doubt yourself. As long as they can make you think you’re not worthy, they still got you in chains.

“I’m sure the lady didn’t mean anything by it,” Mama pronounces.

But it didn’t make me feel any less small.

I don’t say it out loud, but I think it, and it sends a shiver down my spine. This isn’t me. I don’t accuse; I don’t believe the majority of white people judge me because I’m Black or assume they are superior to me. I don’t prowl the world looking for an excuse to pick a fight. I leave that to Adisa. Me, I do my best to fly under the radar. Sure, I know that racism exists and that people like Turk Bauer are waving that banner, but I don’t judge all white folks by the historical actions of a few.

Or, rather, I never have before.

It’s as if the little Post-it note on the patient file of Davis Bauer has nicked a vital artery, and I can’t figure out how to stop the bleeding.

Suddenly we hear a jangle of keys and bluster as Ms. Mina and her daughter and grandson return to the brownstone. Mama hurries into the foyer to take their coats and their shopping bags, and I trail after her. Christina’s eyes widen when she sees me, and she throws her arms around me while Mama peels the snowsuit off her four-year-old son, Felix. “Ruth!” she cries. “This is fate. Mom, wasn’t I just talking to you about Ruth’s son?”

Ms. Mina looks up at me. “She was indeed. Ruth, dear, aren’t you just beautiful. Not a single wrinkle on that skin. I swear, you don’t age.”

Again, I hear Adisa in my head: Black don’t crack. Very forcefully, I tamp down on that voice and gently fold tiny Ms. Mina into an embrace. “Neither do you, Ms. Mina,” I say.

“Oh, go on with those lies.” She pretends to wave away my words, and then smiles slyly. “No, seriously. Go on with them. I love hearing every one.”

I try to signal to my mama. “I should probably be going-”

“Don’t you cut your visit short on our account,” Ms. Mina says, taking Felix from Mama’s arms. “You stay as long as you want.” She turns to Mama. “Lou, we’ll take our tea in the gold room.”

Christina grabs my hand. “Come with me,” she says, and she drags me up the stairs to the bedroom where we used to play.

It’s a shrine of sorts, with the same furniture she had as a child, but now there is a crib and a litter of toys on the floor. I step on something that nearly hobbles me, and Christina rolls her eyes. “Oh, God, Felix’s Playmobil men. Crazy, right, to spend hundreds of dollars on something plastic? But you know Felix. He loves his pirates.”

I crouch down, examining the intricate ship as Christina rummages through the closet. There is a captain in a red coat and a feathered black hat, and several pirates tangled in the plastic web of rigging. On the deck is a character with plastic skin that’s an orange-brown, with a little silver collar around his neck.

Good lord, is this supposed to be a slave?

Yes, it’s historically accurate. But still, it’s a toy. Why this slice of the past? What’s next-the Japanese POW internment camp play set? The Trail of Tears Lego? The Salem Witch Hunt game?

“I wanted to tell you before you read it in the paper,” Christina says. “Larry’s thinking of running for Congress.”

“Wow,” I answer. “How do you feel about that?”

She throws her arms around me. “Thank you. Do you realize you’re the first friend I’ve told who doesn’t act like this is the first step to the White House or start talking about whether we should get a place in Bethesda or Arlington? You’re the first person, period, who it occurred to that I might have a choice in the matter.”

“Well, don’t you? It seems like a pretty big disruption for the whole family.”

“Yeah,” Christina says. “I’m not sure I have the fortitude to be the wife of a politician.”

I laugh. “You have the fortitude to run the country by yourself.”

“That is exactly what I mean. Apparently I’m supposed to forget the fact that I graduated summa cum laude and instead I get to stand around holding my cute kid and smiling like the only thought I can hold in my head is what shade of lipstick matches my blouse,” Christina sighs. “Promise me something? If I ever cut my hair into a bob that kind of looks like a helmet, you’ll euthanize me?”

You see, I tell myself. Here is proof. I’ve known Christina my whole life. And yes, maybe there are differences between us-socioeconomic, political, racial-but that doesn’t mean we can’t connect, human to human, friend to friend.

“Sounds to me like you’ve already made up your mind,” I point out.

She looks at me, hopeless. “I can’t say no to him,” Christina sighs. “That’s why I fell for him in the first place.”

“I know,” I tell her. “But it could be worse.”

“How?”

“Congressmen serve for two years,” I point out. “Two years is a blink. Imagine if he’d set his heart on being a senator.”

She shudders, then grins. “If he makes it to the White House,” Christina says, “I’m hiring you as my chief of staff.”

“Maybe surgeon general,” I counter.

Christina links her arm through mine as we walk back to the gold room, where my mama is now setting out a tray of china and a teapot, a platter of homemade almond cookies. Felix sits on the floor, playing with a wooden train. “Mmm, Lou, I dream about these cookies,” Christina says. She hugs my mama before reaching for one. “We are so lucky to have you as part of our family.”

Family doesn’t get a paycheck, I think.

I smile. But like anything you wear that doesn’t fit, it pinches.

–

DURING ONE OF those Indentured Servant Saturdays when I was playing hide-and-seek with Christina and Rachel, I took a wrong turn and found myself in a room that was off-limits. Mr. Hallowell’s study was usually locked, but when I turned the knob, desperate to hide from the high-pitched squeal of Christina calling, “Ready or not, here I come…” I found myself stumbling inside the secret sanctum.

Rachel and I had spent a good deal of time imagining what might be behind that closed door. She thought it was a laboratory, with rows and rows of pickled body parts. I thought it was candy, because in my seven-year-old mind, that was the most valuable stash worth locking up. But when I landed on my hands and knees on the Oriental rug in Mr. Hallowell’s study, the reality was pretty disappointing: there was a leather couch. Shelves and shelves of what looked like silver wheels. A portable movie screen. And feeding the film into the chattering teeth of a projector was Sam Hallowell himself.

I always thought Mr. Hallowell looked like a movie star, and Mama used to say he practically was one. As he turned around, pinning me with his gaze, I tried to come up with an excuse for why I had breached this forbidden territory but was distracted by the grainy picture, on the screen, of Tinker Bell lighting animated fireworks over a castle.

“This is all you’ve ever known,” he said, and I realized that his speech was funny, that the words blurred into each other. He lifted a glass to his mouth and I heard the ice cubes clink. “You have no idea what it was like to see the world change in front of your eyes.”

On the screen, a man I didn’t recognize was speaking. “Color does brighten things up, doesn’t it?” he said, as a black-and-white wall of photos behind him bloomed into all the shades of the rainbow.

“Walt Disney was a genius,” Mr. Hallowell mused. He sat down on the couch and patted the seat beside him, and I scrambled over. A cartoon duck with glasses and a thick accent was sticking his hand in animated cans of paint and dumping the contents on the floor. You mix them all together and they spell muddy…and then you got black, the cartoon duck said, stirring the paint with his flippered foot so that it turned ebony. That’s exactly the way things were in the very beginning of time. Black. Man was completely in the dark about color. Why? Because he was stupid.

Mr. Hallowell was close enough now for me to smell his breath-sour, like that of my uncle Isaiah, who’d missed Christmas last year because Mama said he had gone somewhere to dry out. “Christina and Louis and you and your sister, you don’t know any different. For you it’s always looked like this.” He stood up suddenly and turned to me so that the projector shadowed his face, a dance of bright silhouettes. “The following program is brought to you in Living Color on NBC!” he boomed, spreading his arms so wide that the liquid in his glass sloshed over the side and onto the carpet. “What do you think, Ruth?” he asked.

I thought that I wanted him to move, so I could see what the duck was going to do next.

Mr. Hallowell’s voice softened. “I used to say that before every program,” he told me. “Until color TV was so common, no one needed reminding that it was a miracle. But before that-before that-I was the voice of the future. Me. Sam Hallowell. The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC!”

I didn’t tell him to move over, so that I could see the cartoon. I sat with my hands in my lap, because I knew that sometimes when people spoke, it wasn’t because they had something important to say. It was because they had a powerful need for someone to listen.

Late that night after my mama had brought us back home and tucked us into our beds, I had a nightmare. I opened my eyes and everything was cast in shades of gray, like the man on the movie screen before he pinked up and the background exploded with color. I saw myself running through the brownstone, pulling at locked doors, until Mr. Hallowell’s study opened. The film we had watched was ticking through the projector, but the picture was black and white now, too. I started screaming, and my mama rushed in and Rachel and Ms. Mina and Christina and even Mr. Hallowell, but when I told them my eyes weren’t working and that all the color in the world had vanished, they laughed at me. Ruth, they said, this is the way it always has been. Always will be.

–

BY THE TIME my train gets back to New Haven, Edison is already home and bent over the kitchen table doing his schoolwork. “Hey, baby,” I say, dropping a kiss on the crown of his head as I walk in, and giving him an extra squeeze. “That’s from Grandma Lou.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“I had a half hour before my shift starts, and I decided I’d rather spend it with you than in traffic.”

His eyes flicker toward me. “You’re gonna be late.”

“You’re worth it,” I tell him. I grab an apple from a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table-I always keep something healthy there, because Edison will eat whatever’s not nailed down-and take a bite, reaching for some of the papers spread out in front of my son. “Henry O. Flipper,” I read. “Sounds like a leprechaun.”

“He was the first African American graduate from West Point. Everyone in AP History has to teach a class profiling an American hero, and I’m trying to figure out what my lesson’s going to be.”

“Who else is in the running?”

Edison looks up. “Bill Pickett-a Black cowboy and rodeo star. And Christian Fleetwood, a Black Civil War soldier who won the Medal of Honor.”

I glance at the grainy photos of each man. “I don’t know any of these people.”

“Yeah, that’s the point,” Edison says. “We get Rosa Parks and Dr. King and that’s about it. You ever hear of a brotha named Lewis Latimer? He drew telephone parts for Alexander Graham Bell’s patent applications, and worked as a draftsman and patent expert for Thomas Edison. But you didn’t name me after him because you didn’t know he existed. The only time people who look like us are making history, it’s a footnote.”

He says this without bitterness, the way he would announce that we are out of ketchup or that his socks turned pink in the wash-as if it is something he’s not thrilled about, but can’t get worked up over, because it’s unlikely to change the outcome at this particular moment. I find myself thinking about Mrs. Braunstein and Virginia again. It feels like a splinter my mind keeps getting caught on, and Edison just pressed deep on it again. Have I really never noticed these things before? Or have I been very studiously keeping my eyes shut tight?

Edison glances at his watch. “Mama,” he says, “you’re gonna be really late.”

He’s right. I tell him what he can heat up for dinner, what time he should go to bed, what time my shift is over. Then I hurry to my car and drive to the hospital. I take as many shortcuts as I can, but I’m still ten minutes late. I take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, and by the time I reach the birthing pavilion I am out of breath and sweating. Marie is standing at the nurses’ desk, as if she’s waiting on me. “I’m sorry,” I say immediately. “I was in New York with my mother, and then stuck in traffic, and-”

“Ruth…I can’t let you work tonight.”

I am dumbfounded. Corinne is late more than 50 percent of the time, but I have a single transgression and I get punished for it?

“It won’t happen again,” I say.

“I can’t let you work,” Marie repeats, and I realize that she hasn’t met my gaze, not once. “I’ve been informed by HR that your license is being suspended.”

Suddenly, I am made of stone. “What?”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “Security will escort you out of the building after you clear out your locker.”

“Wait,” I say, noticing the two goons who are hovering behind the nurses’ desk. “You’re kidding me. Why is my license being suspended? And how am I supposed to work if it is?”

Marie draws in her breath and turns to the security guards. They step forward. “Ma’am?” one of them says, and he gestures toward the break room, as if after twenty years I might not know the way.

–

THE LITTLE CARDBOARD box I carry out to the car has a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of Advil, a cardigan sweater, and a collection of photos of Edison. That’s all I kept in my locker at work. It sits in the backseat and keeps drawing my attention in the rearview mirror, surprising me, like a passenger I wasn’t expecting.

I have not even pulled out of the parking lot before I call the union lawyer. It’s 5:00 P.M., and the chances of him being at his desk are slim, so when he answers the phone I burst into tears. I tell him about Turk Bauer and the baby and he calms me down and says he will do some digging and call me back.

I should go home. I should make sure Edison is all right. But that will spark a conversation about why I’m not at work, and I’m not sure I can cope with that right now. If the union lawyer does his job, maybe I can even be reinstated before I’m supposed to work tomorrow night.

Then my phone rings. “Ruth?” Corinne says. “What the fuck is going on?”

I lean back against the driver’s seat, closing my eyes. “I don’t know,” I admit.

“Hang on,” she says, and I hear muffled noises. “I’m in the goddamned supply closet for privacy. I called you as soon as I heard.”

“Heard what? I don’t know anything, except that my license is apparently being suspended.”

“Well, that bitchy hospital lawyer said something to Marie about professional misconduct-”

“Carla Luongo?”

“Who’s she?”

“The bitchy hospital lawyer. She threw me under the bus,” I say, bitter. Carla and I had each gotten a glimpse of the other’s cards, and I’d thought that was enough for us to implicitly agree we both had aces. I just never expected her to play her hand so quickly. “That racist father must have threatened a lawsuit, and she sacrificed me to save the hospital.”

There’s a pause. It’s so small that maybe if I wasn’t listening for it, I might not have heard it. And then Corinne-my colleague, my friend-says, “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.”

At Dalton, there was one table at lunch where all the Black kids sat, except me. Once, another scholarship student of color invited me to join them for lunch. I said thanks, but I usually spent that time tutoring a white friend who didn’t understand trig. This was not the truth. The truth was that the Black table made my white friends nervous, because even if they’d sat down there with me, they would have been tolerated but not welcomed. In a world where they always fit in, the one place they didn’t chafed hard.

The other truth was that if I sat with the other kids of color, I couldn’t pretend I was different from them. When Mr. Adamson, my history teacher, started talking about Martin Luther King and kept looking at me, my white friends shrugged it off: He didn’t mean it that way. At the Black table, if one student talked about Mr. Adamson staring at her during that same lesson, another African American student would validate the experience: That totally happened to me, too.

I so badly wanted to blend in in high school that I surrounded myself with people who could convince me that if I felt like I was being singled out because of the color of my skin, I was making things up, overthinking, being ridiculous.

There was no Black table in the cafeteria at the hospital. There were a handful of janitors of color, and one or two doctors, and me.

I want to ask Corinne when she was last Black, because then and only then would she have the right to tell me if Carla Luongo’s actions were intentional or accidental. But instead I tell her I have to go, and I hang up while she is still responding. Then I drive out of the hospital where I’ve been hiding for two decades, underneath the highway that pulses with New York-bound traffic, like an artery. I pass a small tent city of homeless vets and a drug deal going down and park outside the projects where my sister lives. She answers the door with a toddler on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand and an expression on her face that suggests she has been expecting me for years.

–

“WHY ARE YOU surprised?” Adisa asks. “What did you think was going to happen, moving into Whiteville?”

“East End,” I correct, and she just gives me a look.

We are sitting at her kitchen table. Given the sheer number of children she lives with, the apartment is remarkably clean. Pages from coloring books are taped to the wall, and there is a macaroni casserole in the oven. In the kitchen, Adisa’s oldest, Tyana, is feeding the baby at her high chair. Two of the boys are playing Nintendo in the living room. Her other child is MIA.

“I hate to say I told you so…”

“No, you don’t,” I mutter. “You’ve been waiting to tell me that forever.”

She shrugs, agreeing. “You’re the one who kept saying, Adisa, you don’t know what you talking about. My skin color isn’t even a factor. And go figure, you’re not just like one of them, are you?”

“You know, if I wanted to be a punching bag, I could have just stayed at the hospital.” I bury my face in my hands. “What am I supposed to tell Edison?”

“The truth?” Adisa suggests. “There’s no shame in it. It’s not like you did anything wrong. It’s better he learn earlier than his mama that he can run with the white crowd but it don’t make him any less Black.”

When Edison was younger, Adisa used to babysit him after school if I pulled an afternoon shift, until he begged to stay home alone. His cousins ribbed him for not being able to understand their slang, and when he did start to master it, his white friends in school looked at him like he had grown a second head. Even I was having trouble understanding my nephews, elbowing each other on the couch and laughing until Tyana whacked them both with a dish towel so that she could put the baby to sleep. (Oh, we out chea, I heard one of the boys say, and it took me a few minutes to realize that translated to We’re out here, and that Tabari was teasing his brother for thinking he was all that because he won a round of the game.) Edison might not have fit in with the white kids in his school, but that at least he could blame on his skin. He didn’t fit in with his cousins, either, and they looked like him.

Adisa folds her arms. “You need to find a lawyer and sue that damn hospital right back.”

“That costs money,” I groan. “I just want this all to go away.”

My heart starts to hammer. I can’t lose our home. I can’t take my savings-all of which is Edison’s college fund-and liquidate it just so that we can eat and pay the mortgage and buy gas. I can’t ruin my son’s opportunities just because mine blew up in my face.

Adisa must see that I’m on the verge of a total breakdown because she reaches for my hand. “Ruth,” she says softly. “Your friends may have turned on you. But you know what the good thing is about having a sister? It’s forever.”

She locks her eyes on mine-hers are so dark that you can barely see the edge between iris and pupil. But they’re steady, and she doesn’t let go of me, and slowly, slowly, I let myself breathe.

–

WHEN I RETURN to my house at seven o’clock, Edison comes running to the front door. “What are you doing home?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”

I paste a smile onto my face. “I’m fine, baby. There was just a mix-up with the shifts, so Corinne and I went out to dinner at Olive Garden.”

“Are there leftovers?”

God bless the teenage boy, who can’t see past his own hunger pangs. “No,” I tell him. “We shared an entrée.”

“Well, that seems like a missed opportunity,” he grumbles.

“Did you wind up writing about Latimer?”

He shakes his head. “No. I think I’m going to pick Anthony Johnson. First Black landowner,” he says. “Way back in 1651.”

“Wow,” I reply. “That’s impressive.”

“Yeah, but there’s kind of a hitch. See, he was a slave that came over to Virginia from England and worked on a tobacco plantation until it was attacked by Native Americans and everyone but five people there died. He and his wife, Mary, moved and claimed two hundred and fifty acres of land. The thing is, he owned slaves. And I don’t know if I feel like being the one to tell that to the rest of my class, you know? Like it’s something they can use against me someday in an argument.” He shakes his head, lost in thought. “I mean, how could you do that, if you knew what it was like to be a slave yourself once?”

I think about all the things I’ve done to feel like I belong at the top-education, marriage, this home, keeping a barrier between myself and my sister. “I don’t know,” I say slowly. “In his world, the people with power owned other people. Maybe that’s what he thought he needed to do to feel powerful too.”

“That doesn’t mean it was right,” Edison points out.

I wrap my arms around his waist and hold him tight, pressing my face against his shoulder so he cannot see the tears in my eyes.

“What’s that for?”

“Because,” I murmur, “you make this world a better place.”

Edison hugs me back. “Imagine what I could do if you’d brought me chicken parm.”

Once he goes to bed, I sift through the mail. Bills, bills, and more bills, plus one slim envelope from the Department of Public Health, revoking my nursing license. I stare at it for five whole minutes, but the words don’t materialize into anything other than what it is: the proof that this is not a nightmare I will wake up from, wondering at my own crazy imagination. Instead, I sit in the living room, my thoughts racing too fast for me to think about turning in. It’s a mistake, that’s all. I know it, and I just need to make everyone else see it, too. I’m a nurse. I heal people. I bring them comfort. I fix things. I can fix this.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. I glance at the number-it’s the union lawyer calling me back. “Ruth,” he says when I answer. “I hope it’s not too late.”

I almost laugh. As if I’m going to get any sleep tonight. “Why did the Department of Public Health take away my license?”

“Because of an allegation of possible negligence,” he explains.

“But I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve worked there for twenty years. Can they still fire me?”

“You’ve got bigger problems than keeping your job. A criminal prosecution has been filed against you, Ruth. The State is holding you responsible for the death of that baby.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, the sentence sharp as knives on my tongue.

“They already convened a grand jury. My advice is for you to hire a defense attorney. This is out of my league.”

This is not real. This can’t be real. “My supervisor said not to touch the infant, and I didn’t, and now I’m being punished for it?”

“The State doesn’t care what your supervisor said,” the union lawyer replies. “The State just sees a dead baby. They’re targeting you because they think you failed as a nurse.”

“You’re wrong.” I shake my head in the darkness, and I say the words I’ve swallowed down my whole life. “They’re targeting me because I’m Black.”

–

IN SPITE OF all this, I fall asleep. I know this because when I first hear the jackhammer at 3:00 A.M. I think it is part of my dream-me, stuck in traffic, late for work, while a road crew creates a canyon between me and where I need to be. In my dream I honk the car horn. The jackhammer doesn’t stop.

And then just like that I am bursting through the surface of consciousness, and the jackhammer of knocking detonates as the police break the door off its hinges and swarm into my living room, their guns drawn. “What are you doing?” I cry out. “What are you doing?”

“Ruth Jefferson?” one of them yells, and I can’t find my voice, I can’t speak at all, so I just jerk my chin: Yes. Immediately he pulls my arm behind my back and pushes me facedown onto the floor, his knee in the small of my back as he zips a plastic tie around my wrists. The others are overturning furniture, dumping drawers onto the floor, sweeping books off the shelves. “A grand jury has charged you with murder and involuntary manslaughter,” the policeman says. “You’re under arrest.”

Another voice pierces through the tinny echo of these words. “Mama?” Edison asks. “What’s going on?”

All eyes turn to the doorway of the bedroom. “Don’t move!” shouts another cop, aiming his gun at my baby. “Hands in the air!”

I start to scream.

They are all over Edison, three of them wrestling him onto the ground. He is handcuffed like me. I see him straining toward me, panic lining every muscle of his neck, the whites of his eyes rolling as he tries to see if I am all right.

“Leave him be,” I sob. “He has nothing to do with this!”

But they don’t know that. All they see is a six-foot-tall black boy.

“Do what they say, Edison,” I cry. “And call your aunt.”

My joints crack as the policeman who is holding me down suddenly yanks me upright by my wrists, pulling my body in a way it doesn’t want to go. The other policemen file behind, leaving the contents of my kitchen cabinets, my bookshelves, my drawers in heaps on the floor.

I am wide awake now, being dragged in my nightgown and slippers down my porch steps so that I stumble and scrape my knee on the pavement before I am pushed headfirst into the back of a police car. I pray to God that someone will remember to cut my son’s hands loose. I pray to God that my neighbors, who have been awakened by the hullaballoo in our sleepy neighborhood at 3:00 A.M., and who stand in their doorways with their white faces reflecting the moon, will ask themselves one day why they remained dead silent, not a single one asking if there was anything they could do to help.

–

I HAVE BEEN to the police station before. I went when my car was sideswiped in the grocery store parking lot and the fool who did it just drove off. I held the hand of a patient who had been sexually assaulted and couldn’t get the courage to tell the authorities. But now I am brought into the station the back way, where the bright fluorescent lights make me blink. I am handed off to another officer, just a boy really, who sits me down and asks me for my name, my address, my date of birth, my Social Security number. I speak so softly that a few times he has to ask me to be louder. Then I am led to what looks like a copy machine, except it’s not. My fingers are rolled one by one across the glass surface and the prints appear on a screen. “Pretty awesome, right?” the boy says.

I wonder if my fingerprints are already in the system. When Edison was in kindergarten I had gone with him to a community safety day, to get him fingerprinted. He was scared, so I did it first. Back then, I believed that the worst thing that could ever happen was that he might be taken from me.

It never occurred to me that I might be taken from him.

I am then placed up against a cinder-block wall and photographed straight on, and in profile.

The young cop leads me to the only cell that our police department has, which is small and dark and freezing cold. There’s a toilet in the corner, and a long-necked sink. “Excuse me,” I say, clearing my throat as the door locks behind me. “How long do I stay here?”

He looks at me, not without sympathy. “As long as it takes,” he says cryptically, and then he is gone.

I sit down on the bench. It is made of metal, and the chill goes right through my nightgown. I have to pee, but I am too embarrassed to do it here, in the open, because what if that’s the moment they come for me?

I wonder if Edison has called Adisa, if even now she is trying to get me out of here. I wonder if Adisa has filled him in, told him about the baby that died. I wonder if my own boy blames me.

I have a sudden flash of myself just twelve hours ago, dipping strands of a crystal chandelier into an ammonia solution while classical music played in the Hallowells’ brownstone. The incongruity makes me choke on a laugh. Or perhaps it is a sob. I can’t tell anymore.

Maybe if Adisa can’t get me out of here, the Hallowells can. They know people who know people. But my mama would have to be told what happened first, and although she would defend me to her death, I know there would be a part of her thinking, How did it come to this? How did this girl, whose lucky life I broke my back for, wind up in a jail cell?

And I wouldn’t know the answer. On one side of the seesaw is my education. My nursing certification. My twenty years of service at the hospital. My neat little home. My spotless Toyota RAV4. My National Honor Society-inductee son. All these building blocks of my existence, and yet the only quality straddling the other side is so hulking and dense that it tips the balance every time: my brown skin.

Well.

I didn’t do all this hard work for nothing. I can still use that fancy college degree and the years I’ve spent in the company of white people to turn this around, to make the policemen understand that this is a misunderstanding. Like them, I live in this town. Like them, I pay my taxes. They have so much more in common with me than with the angry bigot who started this debacle.

I have no idea how long it is until someone returns to the cell; I don’t have a watch or a clock. But it’s enough time for me to get that spark of hope burning in my chest again. So when I hear the tumblers click, I look up with a grateful smile.

“I’m going to take you for questioning,” the young officer says. “I have to, um, you know.” He gestures to my hands.

I stand up. “You must be exhausted,” I tell him. “Staying awake all night.”

He shrugs, but he also blushes. “Someone’s gotta do it.”

“I bet your mama’s so proud of you. I know I would be. I think my son’s only a couple of years younger than you.” I hold my hands out in front of me, innocent and wide-eyed, as he glances down at my wrists.

“You know, I think we’re okay without them,” he says after a beat. He puts his hand on my arm, still firmly guiding me.

I hide my smile inside. I take this as a victory.

I am left alone in a room with a large mirror that I am sure is a window to another space on the other side of the wall. There is a tape recorder on the table, and a fan that is whirring overhead, although it is freezing here, too. I flex my hands on my lap, waiting. I don’t stare at my reflection, because I know they are watching, and because of this I can only catch a glimpse of myself. In my nightgown, I might as well be a ghost.

When the door opens, two detectives enter-a bull of a man and a tiny sprite. “I’m Detective MacDougall,” says the man. “And this is Detective Leong.”

She smiles at me. I try to read into it. You are a woman too, I think, hoping for telepathy. You are Asian American. You’ve been in my seat metaphorically, if not literally.

“Can I get you some water, Mrs. Jefferson?” asks Detective Leong.

“That would be nice,” I say.

While she goes to get me water, Detective MacDougall explains to me that I don’t have to talk to them, but if I do, what I say might be used against me in court. Then again, he points out, if I have nothing to hide, maybe I’d like to give them my side of the story.

“Yes,” I say, although I have watched enough cop shows to know that I am supposed to shut up. But that is fiction; this is real life. I didn’t do anything illegal. And if I don’t explain, how will anyone ever know that? If I don’t explain, doesn’t that just make me look like I’m guilty?

He asks if it’s all right to turn on the tape recorder.

“Of course,” I say. “And thank you. Thank you so much for being willing to hear me out. This is all a very big misunderstanding, I’m afraid.”

By now Detective Leong is back. She hands me the water and I drink it all, a full eight-ounce glass. I did not know until I started how thirsty I was.

“Be that as it may, Ms. Jefferson,” says MacDougall, “we have some pretty strong evidence to contradict what you’re saying. You don’t deny that you were present when Davis Bauer died?”

“No,” I reply. “I was there. It was awful.”

“What were you doing at the time?”

“I was part of the crash team. The baby became very ill, very fast. We did the best we could.”

“Yet I just finished looking at photos from the medical examiner that suggest the child was physically abused-”

“Well, there you are,” I blurt out. “I didn’t touch that baby.”

“You just said you were part of the crash team,” MacDougall points out.

“But I didn’t touch the baby until he started to code.”

“At which point you started hammering on the baby’s chest-”

My face flushes with heat. “What? No. I was doing CPR-”

“A bit too enthusiastically, according to eyewitnesses,” the detective adds.

Who? I think, running through my brain to list all the people who were there with me. Who would have seen what I was doing and not recognized it for what it was: emergency medical care?

“Mrs. Jefferson,” Detective Leong asks, “did you have any discussions with anyone in the hospital about your feelings for this baby and his family?”

“No. I was taken off the case, and that was that.”

MacDougall narrows his eyes. “You didn’t have a problem with Turk Bauer?”

I force myself to take a deep breath. “We didn’t see eye to eye.”

“Do you feel that way about all white people?”

“Some of my best friends are white.” I meet his gaze squarely.

MacDougall stares at me for so long I can see his pupils shrink. I know he is waiting to see if I’ll turn away first. Instead, I notch up my chin.

He pushes back from the table and stands up. “I have to make a call,” he says, and he walks out of the room.

I take this as a victory, too.

Detective Leong sits on the edge of the table. Her badge is at her hip; it’s shiny, like a new toy. “You must be so tired,” she says, and I can hear in her voice the same game I was trying to play with the young cop in the holding cell.

“Nurses get used to working on very little sleep,” I say evenly.

“And you’ve been a nurse for a while, right?”

“Twenty years.”

She laughs. “God, I’ve been on the job for nine months. I can’t imagine doing anything for that long. I guess it’s not work if you love it, right?”

I nod, still wary. But if I have any chance of making these detectives understand that I’m being railroaded, it’s going to be with her. “That’s true. And I love what I do.”

“You must have felt awful when you were told by your supervisor you couldn’t take care of that baby anymore,” she says. “Especially given your level of expertise.”

“It wasn’t the best day I’ve ever had, no.”

“My first day on the job? I totaled a police car. Drove it into a highway barrier at a construction site. Seriously. I scored highest on the detective exam, but in the field, I was a joke. The other guys in my class still call me Crash. I mean, let’s be honest, a female detective has to work twice as hard as the guys, but the only thing they remember me for is a simple mistake. I was so upset. I still am.”

I look at her, the truth balanced on my tongue like a hard candy. I wasn’t supposed to touch the baby. But I did, even though I could have gotten in trouble. And it still wasn’t enough.

“Look, Ruth,” the detective adds, “if this was an accident, now would be the time to say so. Maybe the hurt you were feeling got the best of you. It would be totally understandable, given the circumstances. Just tell me, and I’ll do what I can to make this go down easier.”

That is when I realize that she still thinks I’m at fault.

That she’s not being nice to me by sharing her own story. She’s being manipulative.

That those TV shows are right.

I swallow hard, so that honesty sits in the pit of my belly. Instead, I speak four short words in a voice I do not recognize. “I want a lawyer,” I say.