Chapter 41: No Standing
The reference number began with an S and had eleven digits after it.
I wrote it on the back of the bank statement, because the laundry marker had finally come off my wrist on the Friday.
On Tuesday the sixth I went back to Devon with three dollars ten in quarters.
The same booth. The laundromat had a new card in the window about a missing cat. Nine minutes of hold.
The woman who took my reference was not the man from Monday. She gave her name as Ms. Iyer and said it once, quickly.
“That report was screened out on review.”
I asked what screened out meant.
“It means the information provided does not meet the statutory definition of an allegation.”
“It means nobody goes out.”
“It means no investigation is opened at this time.”
I asked whether the household would be contacted.
“No.”
I stood in that booth and worked out that the answer I had been afraid of for two days was also the answer that made the whole thing pointless.
Nothing had happened. Nothing at all had happened, to anybody, anywhere.
Then she asked me the question, and she asked it pleasantly, and it took the floor out.
“I have the entry in front of me. Are you alleging that a named person did a specific thing to this child?”
“No.”
“Are you alleging that the child’s medical care is inadequate?”
“No. His doctor is the only person in this who is doing anything.”
“Then help me. What are you alleging?”
I said that a fourteen-month-old had stopped breathing properly nineteen times in six months. Always at night. Never in the day. Never with a fever.
And that seventeen of the nineteen fell on nights when one particular adult was out of the state.
Keys. Not many. Six or seven.
“And in your professional judgment,” she said, “are those events consistent with an illness that is being caused?”
There it was. I had prepared for four days. I had not prepared for a woman on a telephone asking me for an opinion.
I said that I could not answer that.
“You’re recorded here as child care personnel. That’s a mandated reporter. What is your qualification?”
“Three years of nursing school.”
“Are you licensed in this state?”
“No. I didn’t finish.”
“Then I can’t record a clinical judgment from you. I can record what you observed.”
“I’ve given you what I observed.”
“You’ve given me a pattern,” she said. “I’m not permitted to enter a pattern as an allegation. Somebody has to say what was done.”
I asked her, because there was nothing left to lose in a phone booth, what I would have had to say for the report to be accepted.
She was quiet for four seconds. I counted them, because there was a clock in the laundromat window.
“A name and an act,” she said. “Or a physician.”
“A physician.”
“A report from a treating physician is weighted differently at screening. I’m not supposed to tell you that and it isn’t a secret.”
I said the physician had ordered tests and would not put a word on paper until he had a finding.
“Then he’s doing it correctly,” she said, “and I’m sorry.”
I said that if anything further occurred it would occur at two in the morning, behind a door I was not allowed through.
I hung up with a dollar forty still in the slot and no way to get it back.
Outside I sat on the bench and did the thing I do, which is to write down what a thing actually cost.
Bus, four dollars fifty. Calls, four ninety-five over two days. Two afternoons. Outcome: one closure code and a sentence I could not say.
I have thought about that sentence for years. I could have said it. I could have said the word out loud on Devon Avenue and a car would have gone to that house within the day.
I did not say it because it was not true yet, and because a woman who says a thing before it is true gets to say nothing afterwards.
That is not virtue. That is the only strategy available to a person with no license and no money.
I telephoned Dr. Moreno from the boot room at nine that evening.
I told him I had called the hotline on Monday. I told him it had been screened out on Tuesday.
“You gave them your name.”
“I’m mandated. I’m not allowed to be anonymous.”
“No. You aren’t.”
“They won’t tell the house.”
“They don’t have to,” he said. “There are four people in that building who know you went out yesterday afternoon and came back with no shopping.”
“How long ago did you make the call?”
“Thirty-one hours.”
“Then we have about a week,” he said, “and I want the oximeter on that child before it runs out.”