Small Great Things Read online

  I look down at my uniform. "Because I was in the middle of a shift when the principal's office called me to say my son was going to be expelled."

  "Suspended..."

  I round on him. "You do not get to speak right now. And you most definitely do not get to correct me." We step out of the school, into a day that bites like the start of winter. "You want to tell me why you hit Bryce?"

  "I thought I don't get to speak."

  "Don't you back-talk me. What were you thinking, Edison?"

  Edison looks away from me. "You know someone named Tyla? You work with her."

  I picture a thin girl with bad acne. "Skinny?"

  "Yeah. I've never talked to her before in my life. Today she came up at lunch and said she knew you from McDonald's, and Bryce thought it was hilarious that my mother got a job there."

  "You should have ignored him," I reply. "Bryce wouldn't know how to do a good honest day's work if you held a gun to his head."

  "He started talking smack about you."

  "I told you, he's not worth the energy of paying attention."

  Edison clenches his jaw. "Bryce said, 'Why is yo mama like a Big Mac? Because she's full of fat and only worth a buck.' "

  All the air rushes from my lungs. I start toward the front door of the school. "I'm going to give that principal a piece of my mind."

  My son grabs my arm. "No! Jesus, I'm already the punch line for everyone's jokes. Don't make it worse!" He shakes his head. "I'm so sick of this. I hate this fucking school and its fucking scholarships and its fucking fakeness."

  I don't even tell Edison to watch his mouth. I can't breathe.

  All my life I have promised Edison that if you work hard, and do well, you will earn your place. I've said that we are not impostors; that what we strive for and get, we deserve. What I neglected to tell him was that at any moment, these achievements might still be yanked away.

  It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you've never truly seen yourself at all.

  I am struggling to find the correct response here: to tell Edison that he was right in his actions, but that he could beat up every boy in that school and it would not make a difference in the long run. I am struggling to find a way to make him believe that in spite of this, we have to put one foot in front of the other every day and pray it will be better the next time the sun rises. That if our legacy is not entitlement, it must be hope.

  Because if it's not, then we become the shiftless, the wandering, the conquered. We become what they think we are.

  --

  EDISON AND I take the bus home in silence. As we turn the corner of our block, I tell him he's grounded. "For how long?" he asks.

  "A week," I say.

  He scowls. "This isn't even going on my record."

  "How many times I tell you that if you want to be taken seriously, you gotta be twice as good as everyone else?"

  "Or maybe I could punch more white people," Edison says. "Principal took me pretty seriously for doing that."

  My mouth tightens. "Two weeks," I say.

  He storms away, taking the porch stairs in one leap, pushing through the front door, nearly knocking down a woman standing in front of it, holding a large cardboard box.

  Kennedy.

  I'm so angry about Edison's suspension that I've completely forgotten we have picked this afternoon to review the State's discovery. "Is this a bad time?" Kennedy asks delicately. "We can reschedule..."

  I feel a flush rise from my collar to my cheeks. "No. This is fine--something...unexpected...came up. I'm sorry you had to hear that; my son is not usually so rude." I hold the door open so that she can enter my house. "It gets harder when you can't give them a swat on the behind anymore because they're bigger than you are."

  She looks shocked, but covers it quickly with a polite smile.

  As I take her coat to hang up, I glance at the couch and single armchair, the tiny kitchen, and try to see it through her eyes. "Would you like something to drink?"

  "Water would be great."

  I go to the kitchen to fill a glass--it's only steps away from her, separated by a counter--while Kennedy glances at the photographs on the mantel. Edison's latest school photo is there, as well as one of us on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the picture of Wesley and me on our wedding day.

  She begins to unpack the box of files she lugged inside as I sit down on the couch. Edison is in his bedroom, stewing. "I've had a look through the discovery," Kennedy begins, "but this is where I really need your help. It's the baby's chart. I can read legalese, but I'm not fluent in medical."

  I open the file, my shoulders stiffening when I turn the photocopied page of Marie's Post-it note. "It's all accurate--height, weight, Apgar scores, eyes and thighs--"

  "What?"

  "An antibiotic eye ointment and a vitamin K shot. It's standard for newborns."

  Kennedy reaches across me and points to a number. "What's that mean?"

  "The baby's blood sugar was low. He hadn't nursed. The mom had gestational diabetes, so that wasn't particularly surprising."

  "Is that your handwriting?" she asks.

  "No, I wasn't the delivery nurse. That was Lucille; I took over for her after her shift ended." I flip the page. "This is the newborn assessment--the form I filled out. Temperature of ninety-eight point one," I read, "nothing concerning about his hair whorls or fontanels; Accu-Chek at fifty-two--his sugar was improving. His lungs were clear. No bruising or abnormal shaping of the skull. Length nineteen point five inches, head circumference thirteen point five inches." I shrug. "The exam was perfectly fine, except for a possible heart murmur. You can see where I noted it in the file and flagged the pediatric cardiology team."

  "What did the cardiologist say?"

  "He never got a chance to diagnose it. The baby died before that." I frown. "Where are the results of the heel stick?"

  "What's that?"

  "Routine testing."

  "I'll subpoena it," Kennedy says absently. She starts tossing around papers and files until she finds one labeled with the seal of the medical examiner. "Ah, look at this...Cause of death: hypoglycemia leading to hypoglycemic seizure leading to respiratory arrest and cardiac arrest," Kennedy says. "Cardiac arrest? As in: a congenital heart defect?"

  She hands me the report. "Well, I was right, for what it's worth," I say. "The baby had a grade-one patent ductus."

  "Is that life-threatening?"

  "No. It usually closes up by itself the first year of life."

  "Usually," she repeats. "But not always."

  I shake my head, confused. "We can't say the baby was sick if he wasn't."

  "The defense doesn't have the burden of proof. We can say anything--that the baby was exposed to Ebola, that a distant cousin of his died of heart disease, that he was the first kid to be born with a chromosomal abnormality inconsistent with life--we just have to lay out a trail of bread crumbs for the jury and hope they're hungry enough to follow."

  I sift through the medical file again until I find the photocopy of the Post-it note. "We could always show them this."

  "That does not create doubt," Kennedy says flatly. "That, in fact, makes the jury think you might have a reason for being pissed off in the first place. Let it go, Ruth. What really matters here? The pain from just a little bruise to your ego? Or the guillotine hanging over your head?"

  My hand tightens on the paper, and I feel the sting of a paper cut. "It was not a little bruise to my ego."

  "Great. Then we're in agreement. You want to win this case? Help me find a medical issue that shows the baby might still have died, even if you'd taken every single measure possible to save it."

  I almost tell her, then. I almost say that I tried to resuscitate that child. But then I would have to admit that I had lied to Kennedy in the first place, when here I stand, telling her it's wrong to lie about a cardiac anomaly