by Jodi Picoult
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 fr
ont of a black dude in line at the student cafe. 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.