Chapter 19: The Only Pair of Hands
The agency woman had arrived at nine forty that morning. Her name was Miss Dunbar.
She was about sixty, with thirty-one years of pediatric experience.
She was, as far as I could tell, extremely good.
I say that because it matters. It was not that they sent somebody bad.
She was in the nursery from nine forty until half past eleven. I read her note later.
Ethan screamed for fifty-one minutes of that.
Not the hurt scream. The other one, the rigid one, the one with the whole body in it.
He refused a bottle. He refused water.
He refused the red ring when she offered it, which is the part that told me how frightened he was.
Roz tried. She had been holding babies in that house since before I was born, and he would not go to her.
Victor tried.
He sat on the floor of the nursery in a suit for twenty minutes, with his son at the other end of the rug looking at him.
At eleven thirty-two they sent for me.
I came in and he saw me from across the room and he did the thing he did.
He put his right arm straight up, palm open, fingers spread, the left one still strapped across him.
And he said his word.
“Up.”
That is his word. Up. The only one he had at fourteen months, since the third week of August.
He did not use it to mean lift me. He used it to mean everything.
He said it when he dropped a spoon. He said it when a light went on.
He said it when a car came up the drive.
He said it at the window at half past six in the evening with both hands on the glass and nobody outside.
I have heard that boy say up in about nine different tones of voice.
I could tell them apart. Nobody else in that house could.
I picked him up. He stopped in nine seconds.
I timed it, because Miss Dunbar was looking at her watch and I was not going to be the only one in that room without a number.
Nine seconds. From a fifty-one-minute scream to nothing, with his face in my neck.
Then he did the other thing, and I am going to describe it once and properly, because it is the whole of him.
He put the crown of his head into the hollow under my collarbone, on the right side, and pushed.
Not hard. He pushed until his head fitted, and then he stopped and went completely still.
Not asleep. Awake, and still, and breathing slow, with his one working hand shut round the neck of my uniform.
He did that with me and with nobody else.
Not his father. Not Roz. Not Miss Dunbar. Not once with the woman marrying into that house in six weeks.
He had done it since about seven months old, and I never told anybody, because it was not a symptom and there is nowhere on a chart to put it.
Miss Dunbar watched the whole thing.
She wrote in her note, and I read it in November: child settles with regular carer. No other carer accepted. See attached.
There was no attached. There never is.
She left at half past twelve. The agency sent nobody else.
After that, they stopped pretending.
So here is what my suspension looked like.
I was not permitted to be his nurse. I was in the room with him nineteen hours a day.
I was not permitted to give any medication, so Roz gave it, standing next to me, while I held him and told her the dose.
I was not permitted to be alone with him, so somebody sat in the corner of the nursery.
Mostly it was Roz. Once it was Marco. Twice it was Victor. None of them ever said anything.
I was not permitted to write in the notebook. I want to be very careful with what I say next.
Nobody said the words do not write in the notebook. Aaronson said it was to remain in the house and be available.
So I wrote in it. Every night. Same hand, same order, the way Dr. Moreno had asked me to in March.
I have never regretted it. I would do it again in front of a judge, and in fact I did.
That first night I was in the nursing chair from half past eight with him asleep across me.
At twenty past ten I moved him into the cot without waking him.
That takes four minutes and it is a skill.
Then I stood in a dark nursery with a torch in my hand.
I opened the second drawer under the changing table.
The blue notebook was where it always was, under the spare cot sheets, with a pen through the elastic.
Somebody had opened that drawer. The sheets were folded the wrong way round.
The notebook was there. I sat down on the floor with my back against the cot and turned to the first page.