Chapter 38: Legally Nothing
Dr. Moreno telephoned me at seven minutes past nine on the Thursday evening.
I took it in the boot room with my knees up and the coats hanging against my back.
“They have queried paragraph four,” he said. “I have answered it.”
“What did you say?”
“That the design is stratified around a variable identified by the child’s principal carer, and that removing the stratification renders five nights of data uninterpretable.”
“Will that work?”
“It is true. Whether it works is a separate department.”
I asked whether a lawyer could simply strike a paragraph out of a medical order.
“A lawyer can advise his client not to consent to it. That is the same thing with better manners.”
He told me two other things and I have thought about the order he chose ever since.
The first was that Victor Blackwood’s office had asked him for a written summary of the breathing episodes on the eighteenth of September.
He had prepared it and sent it on the twenty-eighth.
“Ten days,” I said, and I regret the way I said it.
“I do not have a secretary in the afternoons and I saw sixty-one children in that period. Ten days is fast.”
“Where did the summary go?”
There was a small pause. “It was addressed to Mr. Blackwood. It was acknowledged by a Mr. Trask.”
I said that everything anybody handed to anybody in that house ended up on the same desk within the day, whoever it was addressed to.
“Yes,” he said. “That is what a family lawyer is for.”
The second thing was that he had written in the chart after all.
Not a suspicion. He read it out to me so that I would know exactly what existed.
Nineteen witnessed nocturnal desaturation-type events since March. No diurnal events in six months. No fever recorded at any onset. No response to trial bronchodilator. Overnight oximetry ordered. Aetiology undetermined.
“That is all of it,” he said. “There is not one adjective in there.”
I asked why he had read it to me.
“So that you never have to guess what is in the file. People in your position spend a great deal of energy guessing.”
I said it did not say anything.
“It says a great deal. It says a doctor has looked and cannot explain it, and it is dated, and it is in a file that a court can order.”
Then I asked him the question I had been carrying since Friday.
I asked what my log was worth.
He did not soften it and I have always been grateful.
“Clinically, it is the best document in that child’s file. Better than anything I have written. It is six months of consistent observation by a trained eye and I would not swap it for a hospital chart.”
“And otherwise?”
“In law it is nothing.”
I said all right, in the voice you use when somebody has told you the size of a bill.
“You are not the parent. You are not licensed. You have not witnessed anybody do anything to that child. You have a spreadsheet and an interest.”
“An interest,” I said.
“You are in a dispute with the household. That is the first sentence anybody will say about you and they will say it before they look at a single number.”
I put my forehead on my knees in a boot room and said nothing for a while, and he waited, which cost him nine seconds of a Thursday.
“Miss Carter. Do you know what a mandated reporter is?”
I said I did. We had done a module on it in second year, over two afternoons, and I had got ninety-one percent and never thought about it again.
“Then you know that in this state, child care personnel are mandated reporters.”
“I’ve been suspended.”
“You are the child’s nanny in the eyes of every statute I have read. I am one too, and I am telling you what I am required to tell you.”
“Are you going to report?”
“When I have a finding, yes. Immediately and without consulting anybody.”
“And now?”
“Now I have nineteen dates and no injury and no mechanism, and if I call it in tonight a screener with two hundred calls a day will read one line of it.”
“And you’re telling me I can call it in.”
“I am telling you that you may. I am also going to tell you what happens if you do.”
He set it out in four sentences and none of them were reassuring.
They will contact the household. The household will work out within a day who called.
Nobody with any power in that building will be interviewed under caution. And I would not be in that house afterwards.
“Would you do it?” I said.
“I am not going to answer that.”
Then he gave me the number, slowly, twice.
I had no paper in the boot room, so I wrote it on the inside of my left wrist with a laundry marker, and it took four days to come off.