Small Great Things

by Jodi Picoult

  "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 pinata, 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.

  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 w
ith, 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."