Chapter 35: Two Hours
The last thing he gave me was a single printed page with a heading in bold.
IF AN EPISODE OCCURS.
Underneath, in smaller type: this sheet is clinical guidance and is not a legal instruction to any person.
I have read that page more times than I have read anything else in my life.
One. Note the time to the minute before you do anything else.
Two. Do not change the room. Do not open a window. Do not move the child to another room.
Three. Record as you have been recording.
Four. Telephone this number. It is answered at any hour.
Five. The child must be at the hospital within two hours of onset.
Six. Nothing by mouth.
Then a line at the foot of it, added by hand in pencil: BRING THE RECORDER.
I read it on the step outside with the coffee going cold in my other hand, and I understood item five in about nine seconds.
I cannot put that child into a car.
I am not his parent. I am not his guardian. Since the fourteenth of September I am not even his nanny.
I am a suspended employee with a door code that stops working at half past eight in the evening.
An episode ends in forty to seventy seconds. Then what.
Then I go and wake a house.
And every door in that house between me and a car is a door somebody else decides about.
I wrote the sequence out on the bus, because writing it out is what I do instead of the other thing.
02:14. Onset. Fifty seconds. Over.
02:16. I telephone the service.
02:17. I wake the child’s father, who is out of Illinois eighty-nine nights a year.
Or I wake Mr. Foyle, who will telephone Mr. Trask, who does not answer at two.
Or I wake Serena Montigue, who sleeps thirty feet from the nursery, who is on paper nobody, and who would be in the room in eleven seconds.
Or I carry a fourteen-month-old out of a house I do not own, past a gate with a log on it, and put him in a taxi.
That last one has a name and the name is abduction.
I sat on the 146 with the sheet on my knees, past the cemetery and the two churches, and did it six times, and got the same answer every time.
The protocol was perfect and I could not execute one line of it after item four.
That is the whole of what it is to be me, set out on one page by a careful man who had not thought about it.
So I telephoned him from the boot room at eleven that night, sitting on the bench under the coats, with the door shut and my knees up.
He listened to the entire sequence without interrupting once.
Then he said, “That is my error,” which I have never heard another doctor say about anything.
“I wrote a protocol for a parent.”
“Yes.”
“You are not a parent. You are the only competent observer in the building and you have no authority to carry him twenty feet.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Then item five belongs to the father,” he said. “He has to be woken, and he has to have agreed in advance to go.”
“In advance.”
“In writing. On the same form.”
He said he would have a clause added and reprinted and couriered to the house on Monday morning, and he did, and it arrived at ten past nine.
So then there were four boxes.
I am setting this down carefully, because people have since asked me why it took until October.
It took until October because every single thing required a signature from a man who was thinking about something else.
Now the part I am not proud of.
On the Saturday, during my two hours, I put the recorder back on the nursery shelf behind the wipes, where it had lived for six months.
And I switched it on.
I knew what I was doing. I had a reason and the reason was medical and it was also not the whole of my reason.
The monitor had been reassigned to Mrs. Alden’s room on the nineteenth. I had no ears in that room at night and I wanted ears in that room.
Two nights. Nothing happened on either of them.
Fourteen hours of a boiler, a truck on Lake Shore, and a child breathing the way a well child breathes, which is a sound I could pick out of a hundred.
I took it out again on the Monday, in my two hours, with my heart going like a fist.
When I told Dr. Moreno he was silent for six seconds.
Then: “Do not do that again. And do not tell anyone that you did.”
I said I had just told him, and that I had told him because he was the only person left that I could tell anything to.
“Yes,” he said. “I am going to have to think about that.”