He Said the Baby Died. I Heard It Cry. · Mira Lang

Chapter 1: Room Six

The last normal thing I did was argue with my husband about a parking space.

We were in the visitor lot at Cardinal Hill at ten past one in the morning, and Drew wanted the spot by the doors, and I told him to take the one under the light because we'd be coming out at some ungodly hour with a car seat and I did not want to be fumbling with straps in the dark. He said we'd be here two days. I said that was exactly my point.

He took the one under the light. He always takes the one I want, eventually, and he always makes me spend the argument first.

That's the last thing. After that there is a hallway, and a woman at a desk who asked me to spell Kavanagh, and then everything belongs to the hospital.

They put us in Room Six.

I know that the way I know my own phone number. Six was the second-to-last door on the left, the number screwed on at a slight tilt, and Drew stood under it with the balloon his mother sent — a silver one, ELIAS in blue letters, because we'd had the name picked out since November — and I made him hold still and I took a picture. He is grinning like an idiot in it. The 6 is right over his head. It's 1:31 in the morning, according to my phone, which does not lie about things like that.

Elias James Kavanagh. Eli. We'd argued about that too, back in the fall, and I'd won that one on the first try, which should have told me something.

* * *

I want to be clear about what I remember and what I don't, because that's going to matter, and because it's my job.

I'm a court reporter. Eight years. I sit at the front of rooms where people are lying and I take down every word of it, verbatim, with time stamps, and I do not get to have an opinion. If a witness says approximately I write approximately. If he coughs in the middle of a number I mark the cough. My whole professional existence rests on one idea, which is that what was said, and the order it was said in, and the time it was said at, are facts, and facts survive people.

So. Facts.

Labor started Saturday evening, at home, unremarkable. We came in at one. Between one and two-thirty I was in Room Six with a monitor strapped around me and Drew feeding me ice chips and reading me the customer reviews of a leaf blower he wanted, because he is not a man who is good at silence.

At two-forty-something the room changed.

I'm not going to give you the medical version, partly because I don't have it and partly because I've since learned that the medical version is a thing people hand you instead of an answer. What I have is this: the room got louder and then it got quieter. The quiet was worse. A nurse I hadn't met before came in fast and did not say hello to me, and Dr. Ferris arrived with his glasses pushed up on his head, and the tone of everybody's voice went flat and professional in a way that is very kind and very frightening, and somebody moved the balloon off the bed rail so it wouldn't be in the way.

They took the balloon off the bed rail. That's what I keep. Somebody had time to think about the balloon.

Then the ceiling tiles were moving, which meant I was moving, and a young man with a beard was walking backward and telling me his name was Curtis, and there was the smell of the mask, and Curtis said just breathe normal for me, Nell, and I said something back that I do not have.

And then there is nothing. A hole with no edges. I have gone at that hole with everything I've got and there's nothing in it.

I was under general anesthesia for the birth of my son. I did not see him born. I never saw him at all.

I want that written down early, because everyone I have talked to since has arrived at it eventually, and always gently, and always like it settles something.

* * *

When I came back it was in pieces. Recovery, someone squeezing my hand, a warm blanket that smelled like a laundromat. Then Room Six again, with the balloon back on the rail, still floating, still saying ELIAS, and Drew in the chair with his elbows on his knees.

There was a clock over the door. Round, white, the kind they put in schools, with a second hand you can hear if the room is quiet enough.

The room was quiet enough.

It said 3:48 when Dr. Ferris came and stood in my doorway.

He didn't come all the way in. That's a thing I noticed at the time and filed and did not understand until much later. He stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame like a man who has one more stop to make.

"Nell," he said.

I said, "Where is he."

And he said — and this is verbatim, this is exactly, I would swear to this in front of anyone —

"He didn't take a breath, Nell. We did everything. He never took a breath."

I have taken down maybe four million words of testimony. I know what a prepared sentence sounds like. It has corners. It comes out whole, the way a stone comes out of a pocket.

We did everything.

I hadn't asked. I hadn't asked what they did. I had asked where he was.

And here's the other thing, the one that took me weeks to be able to say out loud without shaking: Elliot Ferris is fifty-eight years old and he had, by his own account, spent the previous half hour doing everything possible for my son, four minutes down the hall.

He was not out of breath.

He was not out of breath, and his cardigan sleeves were pushed up neat, and he stood in my doorway with one hand on the frame, and he said the sentence, and Drew made a sound behind him like a chair scraping.

* * *

I don't remember agreeing to anything after that. I remember Drew's forehead against my shoulder and how hot his face was. I remember a nurse, an older one with a gray-blonde braid, saying take all the time you need, which is a thing people say in rooms that have a schedule.

And I remember thinking, with the flat clarity you get at four in the morning after your life ends: I have to remember all of this, because later I'm going to want it.

That's not grief. That's eight years of habit.

So I lay there in Room Six and I listened to the second hand and I put things in order. The balloon. Curtis. The mask. Ferris in the doorway at 3:48. Drew's hand. The braid. I was doing what I do. I was building a transcript.

Which is why, when the sound came, I was already listening.

* * *

It came from my left.

Not from the hallway. I want to be extremely precise about this, because it is the entire rest of my life. The hallway was on my right, past the foot of the bed, past the bathroom door. On my left there was a wall, an outlet, a whiteboard with TODAY IS SUNDAY written on it in dry-erase marker and a smiley face, and a laminated card about pain scales.

Through that wall, a baby cried.

Not a whimper. Not a cat, not a cart wheel, not the HVAC, not any of the eleven things I have since been offered. A newborn's cry, which is a sound I had never heard in my life at close range and recognized instantly, the way you recognize a smell from your childhood.

It cried, and it stopped.

I stopped breathing. I remember the effort of not breathing so I could hear better. Drew was in the chair with his hands over his face and he did not move.

I counted. It's what I do. I got to about forty.

Then it cried again.

And I said, out loud, in a voice I didn't recognize, "There's a baby in there."

The door opened.

The nurse who came in was not the one with the braid. She was maybe forty-five, dark hair pulled back so tight it changed the shape of her eyebrows, and her badge said M. DEEL, RN. She had a cup of water in one hand and nothing in the other.

She looked at me. Not at Drew, not at the monitor, not at the whiteboard.

At me. Straight in the eye, and she did not blink, and she did not stop looking while she reached back with her foot, hooked it around the edge of the door, and pushed it shut.

Not fast. Not a slam. The unhurried way you'd close a door on a cold hallway in your own house.

"There's a baby crying," I said. "Next door. In the room next to this one."

Margo Deel set the cup down on my tray table and turned it so the straw faced me.

"You're going to feel a lot of things tonight, honey," she said.

And behind her, through the wall, it cried a third time — I heard it, I heard it, and her chin moved maybe a quarter of an inch, and she did not turn around.

I said, "Drew. Drew. Tell her."

My husband lifted his face out of his hands. His eyes were red and swollen and he looked at me with so much love that I have never gotten over it, and he said:

"Nell. Baby. There's no room past ours. Six is the last one on the hall."