Small Great Things

  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, Beyonce--"

  "--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, mor
e 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?"