Small Great Things

  "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 entree."

  "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 o
f 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."