Chapter 14: Because the Doctor Asked Me To
They put me in a room off the corridor with a sofa and two chairs and a box of tissues on a low table.
There is a laminated sign on the inside of the door of that room. I read it eleven times.
It says that the room is available to families and asks that personal belongings not be left overnight.
There were two crayons on the table and a coloring sheet with a lion on it that somebody had done half of.
I have never been able to walk past that kind of room in a hospital since.
The woman was Detective Ruth Hale. The young one was Officer Pryor and he wrote everything down and said nothing for forty minutes.
Detective Hale sat on the edge of the chair rather than back in it, which I have since learned is deliberate.
She said the hospital had made a report. She said that is automatic and it is not an accusation.
She said it twice, that it is not an accusation, and both times I heard the shape of the sentence underneath it.
The shape of it is: a child under two has a broken bone, and somebody in that building did it.
Then she asked me to tell her what happened, from the beginning, in my own time.
It took nineteen minutes. Officer Pryor wrote for all nineteen.
I did not editorialise and I did not cry and I gave her every time to the minute.
I have been told since that this made me sound rehearsed. I did not know how else to be.
I gave her the times off the parking receipt. She asked to see it and I gave it to her and she read it and gave it back.
She said, “You wrote this tonight?”
“In the corridor.”
“Why?”
I said, “Because I was going to forget the order.”
She nodded and wrote something and did not comment, and eleven months later I found out what she had written, and it was: writes everything down.
Then she came to the recorder.
“We’re told there was a recording device in the room.”
I said, “There was. It’s mine.”
“Where is it now?”
And I said, “Mr. Blackwood has it. It’s in his jacket.”
That stopped both of them.
Detective Hale did not look at Officer Pryor and Officer Pryor did not look at Detective Hale, and that is exactly how I knew.
She wrote three words on the pad and underlined one of them.
She said, “He has it on his person. Right now. Through that door.”
“Yes.”
She wrote for about eight seconds.
Then she put her pen flat across the top of the pad, which she had not done once in nineteen minutes, and she looked up at me.
She said, “Ms. Carter, why does a nanny carry a voice recorder?”
I have thought about the way she asked it more than I have thought about the question.
She did not ask it unkindly. She asked it the way you ask a thing you already have an answer to.
There is only one answer that question has, if you are a woman of forty-five who has sat in a lot of rooms like that one.
A nanny carries a voice recorder because she is building something. Because she wants leverage, or a lawsuit, or a story to sell.
That is a reasonable thing to think and I do not hold it against her and it was the single most dangerous moment of my entire life.
If I had hesitated there, or improved it, or said one word about Serena Montigue, I would have been finished.
I said, “Because his doctor asked me to.”
Officer Pryor stopped writing.
Detective Hale said, “His doctor.”
“Dr. Elias Moreno. He’s a pediatrician in Evanston. He’s had Ethan since he was born.”
“And Dr. Moreno asked you to record.”
“He asked me to log the episodes. He asked me to talk into something while they were happening, and to say the time, and to count out loud.”
She said, “Episodes.”
And I understood, in that room, at twenty to three in the morning, that nobody had told them.
Not the hospital. Not the family. Not the man sitting sixteen metres away with the recorder in his coat.
It was on the intake form. It was on the referral. It was in a filing cabinet in Evanston.
Six months of a fourteen-month-old boy not breathing, and the police in the building did not know it existed.
I said, “He has breathing episodes. He’s had them since March.”
I said it flatly, the way you say a thing you have already said to four adults and been believed by one.
Detective Hale did not move for a second.
Then she took her pen back off the top of the pad.
She said, “All right, Ms. Carter.”
“Start at the eleventh of March.”