Chapter 45: Miss Devlin
Mrs. Alden left on Wednesday the fourteenth at half past seven, with one case and a bag of books.
She had folded everything in the nursery before she went, including things that did not need folding.
She gave me a school notebook with eleven pages in it.
Feeds, naps, weights, and the times he woke. Four weeks of careful handwriting about a child who would not settle for her.
“I kept it because you keep one,” she said. “It seemed rude not to.”
At the service door she said the last useful thing anybody said to me that month.
“Whoever they have coming, tell her everything on the first morning. After that they stop being able to hear you.”
The new one arrived at eight.
Corinne Devlin. Twenty-nine. A different agency, one with the word clinical in its name and a lanyard with a photograph on it.
Four years on a children’s ward. Two years agency. A registered nurse, currently licensed in the state of Illinois.
I want to be honest about the first thirty seconds.
I looked at the lanyard before I looked at her face.
Serena introduced us in the morning room, with Mr. Foyle by the door. She was warm, and there was nothing wrong with it.
“Corinne, this is Lily. Lily has been with Ethan the longest. She’ll tell you everything.”
Then she went out to the lawn, where a man was measuring for a floor.
The handover took forty minutes and Miss Devlin wrote the whole of it down.
Bottle at half past six, seven nights a week. Left foot out of the blanket, and if you cover it he takes it out again.
Two pats on your collarbone going down. Two, always. Then he stops and that is the signal.
One word, ba. It is the bead ball, the neighbor’s dog, and a request to be carried to a door.
He goes still when a door opens, for about a second, and then decides. Do not fill that second.
She wrote all of it and smiled at none of it, which I appreciated, because it is not charming, it is a specification.
Then she turned the page and asked the question nobody in that house had asked me in a month.
“Tell me about the breathing.”
I gave her the numbers. Nineteen since the eleventh of March. Earliest onset 01:20, latest 03:11.
Durations forty-one to sixty-eight seconds, and the last five are the five longest.
No fever at any onset, highest reading 37.1. No daytime event in six months, across about seven hundred naps.
She put her pen down.
“Who has that?”
“Dr. Elias Moreno on Wabash. And the hospital, since Monday. It’s in the chart as collateral history.”
“Somebody entered a nanny’s log as collateral history.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t happen,” she said, and wrote it down.
Then, without any particular emphasis: “You’re a nurse.”
“No.”
“You did three years.”
“Three years. I’m not licensed. I never finished.”
“That’s a nurse who wasn’t allowed to finish.”
I said it was not the same thing, that I had spent a fortnight being told so by four institutions, and that she should not say it to anybody else here.
She looked at me for a second and let it go, and I have never decided whether that was tact or agreement.
At ten she did something I had wanted done since March and could not have ordered.
She emptied the medicine cupboard onto the nursery table and counted it.
Nine oral syringes, five milliliter. One bottle of vitamin D drops, level marked with tape on the day it was opened.
Acetaminophen suspension, two-thirds. The salbutamol inhaler and spacer from May, unused since.
Barrier cream, saline, a thermometer, a box of bandages.
She wrote a stock sheet, dated it, signed it, and pinned it inside the cupboard door.
“I do a cupboard on day one everywhere I go,” she said. “Then nothing in it is anybody’s word against anybody’s.”
Everything reconciled. Every bottle, every count.
I felt my whole theory take a blow it did not deserve to survive, and it survived anyway, because I still believed it went in by hand.
I was wrong for another five months. I want that on the record where I was wrong, not later, where it would look like modesty.
At noon I had my two hours, and he came across the rug at speed on all four limbs, which he had not done since September.
He put the bead ball in my lap and then took it back, which is a game and not a mistake.
Miss Devlin watched that from the window seat and wrote something down.
At two I gave him over and she took him without trouble, because she is good, and a fifteen-month-old will accept a competent stranger for eleven minutes.
At the door she said one more thing, in the tone of an administrative detail.
“By the way. I’ve been asked for a written report on the current arrangements by Friday.”
I asked who had asked.
“Mr. Foyle asked me,” she said. “He said Miss Montigue had asked him.”