“I am. Though of course I’m not supposed to.”
“Then why are we doing all this?”
“Because we can. Because we know how. There are sixty available beds in this unit. On any given day, six to ten of those beds will be filled with crack babies like Alouette’s. At least ten others are just as sick, for whatever reasons-other kinds of drug and alcohol abuse, congenital disease, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care. The numbers are climbing every day. When I first came here, there’d be, oh, five to ten babies in this unit. Now there’re never fewer than thirty. And there’ve been times we’ve had to stack cribs in the hallway out there.”
“Are you always this blunt?”
“No. No, I’m not, not really. But we look on all this a bit differently in Britain, you understand. And I think that I may be answering something I see in your face, as well.”
“Thank you.” I held out a hand. She took it without hesitation or deference, as American women seldom can. “My name is Griffin. Lew.”
“Teresa, as you can see. And since Hunt is the name on my nursing license, I use it here. But in real life,
She removed vials from a drawer beneath the incubator, checked them against her lists, drew up portions into three separate syringes and injected these one at a time, and slowly, into crooks (called heplocks) in Baby Girl McTell’s IV tubing. There were four IV sites, swaddled in tape. Almost every day one or another of them had to be restarted elsewhere, in her scalp, behind an ankle, wherever they could find a vein that wouldn’t blow.
She dropped the syringes into the mouth of a red plastic Sharps container, pulled a sheet of paper from beneath the clipboard and, glancing at a clock on the wall nearby, made several notations.
“I don’t know at all why I’m telling you this, Mr. Griffin, but I had a child myself, a son. He was three months early, weighed almost two pounds and lived just over eight days. I was sixteen at the time. And afterwards, because of an infection, I became quite sterile. But it was because of him that I first began thinking about becoming a nurse.”
“Call me Lew. Please.”
“I don’t think the head nurse would care much for that, if she were to hear about it. She’s a bit stuffy and proper, you understand.”
“But what can one more rule matter? Since, as you say, we’ve already started breaking them.”
“Yes, well, we have done that truly, haven’t we, Lew. Do you think you’d be wanting to speak with one of the doctors? They should be along in just a bit. Or I could try paging one of them.”
“Is there anything they can tell me that you can’t?”
“Not really, no.”
“Then I don’t see any reason for bothering them. I’m sure they have plenty to do.”
“That they have. Well, I’ll just step out for a few minutes and leave the two of you to get acquainted. If you should need anything, Debbie will be watching over my children while I’m gone.”
She nodded toward a nurse who sat in a rocking chair across the pod, bottle-feeding one of the babies.
“That’s Andrew. He’s been with us almost a year now, and we all spoil him just awfully, I’m afraid.”
“A year? When will he leave?”
“There’s nowhere for him to go. Most of his bowel had to be removed just after birth, and he’ll always be needing a lot of care. Feedings every hour, a colostomy to manage. His parents came to see him when the mother was in the hospital, but once she was discharged, we stopped hearing from them. The police went out to the address we had for them after a bit, but they were long gone. Eventually I suppose he’ll be moved upstairs to pediatrics. And somewhere farther along they’ll find a nursing home that will take him, perhaps.”
I looked from Andrew back to Baby Girl McTell as Teresa walked away. Names are important. Things are what we call them. By naming, we understand. But what name do we have for a baby who’s never quite made it into life, who goes on clawing after it, all the while slipping further away, with a focus, a hunger, we can scarcely imagine? What can we call the battles going on here? And how can we ever understand them?
Through the shelves I watched people gather over an Isolette in the next pod. First the baby’s own nurse, then another from the pod; next, when one of them went off to get her, a nurse who appeared to be in charge; finally, moments later, the young man in lab coat and Nikes who’d earlier been standing at the desk in front. Various alarms had begun sounding-buzzers, bells, blats-as the young man looked up at the monitors one last time, reached for a transparent green bag at bedside, and said loudly: “Call it.” Overhead, a page started:
Then I could see no more as workers surrounded the Isolette.
“Sir, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to step out,” Debbie said. She stood and placed Andrew back in his open crib. The child’s eyes followed her as she walked away. He didn’t cry.
I filed out alongside skittish new fathers, smiling grandparents, a couple of mothers still in hospital gowns and moving slowly, hands pressed flat against their stomachs. An X-ray machine bore down on us through the double doors and lumbered along the hallway, banging walls and scattering linen hampers, trashcans, supply carts. Where’s this one? the tech asked. Pod 2, Mrs. Heslip told him.
Most of the others, abuzz with rumor, clustered just outside the doors. Some decided to call it a night and went on to the elevators across the hall, where I knew from experience they’d wait a while. I found stairs at the end of a seemingly deserted hall and went down them (they smelled of stale cigarettes and urine) into the kind of cool, gentle rain we rarely see back in New Orleans. There, when it comes, it comes hard and fast, making sidewalks steam, beating down banana trees and shucking leaves off magnolias, pouring over the edges of roofs and out of gutters that can’t handle the sudden deluge.
I turned up the collar of my old tan sportcoat as I stepped out of the hospital doorway just in time to get splashed by a pickup that swerved toward the puddle when it saw me. I heard cackling laughter from inside.
Earlier I had noticed a small cafe on the corner a few blocks over. Nick’s, Rick’s, something like that, the whole front of it plate glass, with handwritten ads for specials taped to the glass and an old-style diner’s counter. I decided to give it a try and headed that way. Moving through the streets of the rural South I’d fled a long time ago. Bessie Smith had died not too far from here, over around Clarksdale, when the white hospital wouldn’t treat her following a car accident and she bled to death on the way to the colored one.
At age sixteen, I had fled. Fled my father’s docility and sudden rages, fled old black men saying “mister” to ten-year-old white kids, fled the fields and the tire factory pouring thick black smoke out onto the whole town like a syrup, fled all those faces gouged out and baked hard and dry like the land itself. I had gone to the city, to New Orleans, and made a life of my own, not a life I was especially proud of, but mine nonetheless, and I’d always avoided going back. I’d avoided a lot of things. And now they were all waiting for me.
Chapter Two
A few weeks before that, at nine in the morning, I’d just finished putting a friend’s son on the bus to send him home. He’d kind of got himself lost in New Orleans, and I’d kind of found him, and I think finally we were all kind of glad, parent, child and myself, that I could still do the work. It was a beautiful morning, unseasonably cool, and I decided to walk home. So I left the Greyhound Terminal and started up Simon Bolivar, with downtown New Orleans (what they’re now calling the CBD, for Central Business District) looming at my back like so many cliffs.
I never have figured out just how a street in this part of the city got named for a South American liberator, but that’s New Orleans. Some of the streets down here actually have double signs, a regular-size one and a smaller one riding piggyback, with different names. Further up, where it becomes La Salle, Simon Bolivar has one of those.
I walked past the projects. Newer ones of slab and plastic looking like cheap college dorms from the fifties, older brick-and-cement ones like World War II institutional housing, most of them with sagging porches, window frames and entryways, air conditioners propped on long boards, spray-painted lovers’ names or exhortations to
