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

Chapter 2: What the Anesthetic Does

Nobody argued with me that night. That's what I want you to understand about the first twelve hours. Nobody argued.

Drew said there's no room past ours and then he came and sat on the edge of the bed and held the side of my head against his chest, and Margo Deel wrote something on the whiteboard and left, and the door stayed shut, and the wall stayed a wall.

At some point I slept, the chemical kind of sleep that isn't rest, and when I came up out of it the light was gray and the whiteboard said TODAY IS SUNDAY still, and somebody had drawn a second smiley face under the first.

I lay there and did the thing I had not been able to do at four in the morning, which was to be reasonable.

I had been under general anesthesia. My son had died. I was thirty-one years old and I had wanted this for four years and lost two before him, and at the moment the sound came through the wall I had been awake for twenty-three hours.

Reasonable is a trap. I want to say that now so you'll see it coming later. Reasonable is what they hand you so you'll do the work yourself.

* * *

They brought the box at nine.

It's a real thing they do, and I didn't know it existed, and I don't think it's cruel. A white cardboard box about the size of a shirt box, with a paper heart on the lid, and inside: a knit hat, ivory, a little uneven at the brim where somebody's stitch count went wrong. A square of flannel. A card with two footprints in gray ink, and his name written under them in someone's careful round handwriting. And a photograph.

I am not going to describe the photograph.

I looked at it for a long time. I have looked at it since more times than is good for me, and there is nothing in it, and it proves nothing, and I could tell you every detail of the blanket.

The one thing I will say is this. The hat in the box was ivory. In the photograph the hat is ivory. And I sat there in the bed at nine in the morning holding both, and my brain — which was not working, which I will grant anybody — said, why would you take the hat off him.

I put it down. I put it all down and shut the lid, because I was afraid of what I was doing.

* * *

Dr. Ferris came at eleven. He came all the way in this time.

He pulled the chair over and sat, which put his eyes below mine, and I have since learned that this is a thing they're taught. He had a coffee. He put it on the floor by the chair leg, out of the way, like a man in his own kitchen.

"I hear you had a rough night after," he said.

Not you had a rough night. A rough night after. After the thing we've agreed on.

He asked about pain, and about whether I'd eaten, and he told me a thing about his own daughter's first baby that was warm and slightly funny and had nothing to do with anything, and it worked, is the truth. I liked him. I have liked Elliot Ferris since my first appointment, when he remembered that I'd said I was a court reporter and asked me, six months later, whether the transcripts were still on paper.

Then he said, "Margo mentioned you heard a baby."

I said, "I did hear a baby."

"Okay," he said. He nodded like I'd given a good answer. "Can I tell you something that isn't in a pamphlet?"

And he told me about emergence.

That's the word. Emergence phenomena, emergence delirium — the ragged edge where general anesthesia lets go of you. He said the brain comes back in the wrong order. He said hearing comes back before you can put things where they belong. He said people hear phones, alarms, their mothers, dogs. He said, and this is verbatim too, "The mind is a very good machine for finding the thing you're listening for."

He said it kindly. He said it without one single note of impatience.

And here's what he did not say, and I want it on the record: he did not ask me what time it was when I heard it. He did not ask how many times. He did not ask which direction it came from.

I have sat through eleven hundred depositions. A man who believes you're mistaken asks questions. A man who needs you to be mistaken makes statements.

I said, "It came through that wall. Not the hallway. That wall."

He looked at the wall. It took him a second, and in that second something went across his face that was not warmth and was not anything else I can name, and then he picked his coffee up off the floor and said, "Storage on the other side of that, I think. Might be the compressor cycling."

I think. Might be.

Then he stood up and touched the foot of the bed with two fingers, twice, like you'd pat a dog, and said we'd talk about follow-up on Tuesday.

* * *

Cass called at noon. My sister. She's twenty-seven and she works in insurance claims in Cleveland and she is the only person in my life who does not need a story to be finished before she'll listen to it.

I told her about the wall.

There was a pause, and I braced for it, and then she said, "Okay. Tell me again from the start, and tell me what time."

I could have wept. I did weep, actually, but that was about eighty percent unrelated.

"Three forty-eight when he told me," I said. "Then a while. Then it cried, then about forty seconds, then it cried again. Then the nurse. Then a third time while she was standing there."

"How do you know forty seconds?"

"Because I counted, Cass."

"Right," she said. "Of course you counted." And then, after a second: "Nell, is there any way to know what time it was when you heard it?"

I said no.

I said no, and even while I was saying it, some back part of my head was walking around the room looking for a clock it could trust.

* * *

At two I asked the desk for my delivery record.

I did it politely. I know how to ask for a document; it is approximately forty percent of my life. I said I understood there was a process and I was happy to fill out whatever form.

The woman at the desk — Vonnie Teague, charge nurse, reading glasses on a beaded chain — was lovely about it. She said of course. She said there's a records request form, and she'd bring it, and she brought it, and I filled it out with a pen that said CARDINAL HILL on it in gold.

Then she said, "They'll get that out to you. It's up to thirty days."

I said, "It's my chart. It's in the building."

"It is," she agreed, warmly, "and thirty days is the window they give us. It's usually faster."

Nobody said no to me. I want that understood. In fourteen hours nobody had said no to me about anything at all. They said of course and absolutely and up to thirty days, and every single one of those is a door closing so slowly you can't hear the latch.

* * *

Drew went home at four to shower and feed the cat. Patrice, his mother, came at five with a container of soup that had somebody else's lid on it, and sat in the chair where Ferris had sat, and held my hand, and cried harder than I did, and said the word blessing twice in a context I couldn't follow.

And around six-thirty, when the shift changed and the hall got loud with people saying goodnight to each other, a nurse I hadn't seen before came in to do my vitals. Young. Twenty-three, twenty-four. Badge said K. PRINZ.

She did not say hello. She did the cuff, and the thermometer, and she wrote the numbers on the board, and the whole time her eyes stayed at the level of my collarbone.

At the door she stopped. Her hand was on the frame and she stood there for what I would put at three seconds, which is a very long time, and I said, "Are you okay?"

And she said, "Do you need anything else," in a flat line with no question mark at the end of it, and left.

* * *

They gave me my phone back that evening. It had gone into the belongings bag with my clothes when they took me down, and at some point in the night Drew had fished it out and set it on the tray table where I could see it, the way you do. It was at nine percent. He plugged it in on the far side of the bed and went to find the vending machine.

I opened it to text Cass.

There was a notification I didn't understand at first, from the voice memo app. I use it constantly — for job prep, for the parts of a hearing where you want the tone and not just the words, for reminding myself to buy dish soap. It's on my home screen. My thumb finds it without me.

There was a new recording at the top of the list.

It was named the way they name themselves, just the date, and under the name it said the length, and under that it said the time it was started.

Started 4:02 a.m.

Forty-one seconds long.

I do not remember touching my phone that night. I do not remember my phone being anywhere near my hand.