Small Great Things Read online

  I sat for a long time with the transcript in my lap. Reading. Rereading.

  But this is how I see it: if that nigger hadn't been driving that night, my brother wouldn't be dead.

  IN TWENTY YEARS, I'VE BEEN fired once by a patient, and it was for two hours. She screamed bloody murder and threw a vase of flowers at my head while in the throes of labor. But she hired me back when I brought her drugs.

  After Marie asks me to step outside, I stand in the hall for a moment, shaking my head. "What was that about?" Corinne asks, looking up from a chart at the nurses' station.

  "Just a real winner of a dad," I deadpan.

  Corinne winces. "Worse than Vasectomy Guy?"

  Once, I had a patient in labor whose husband had gotten a vasectomy two days before. Every time my patient complained about pain, he complained, too. At one point, he called me into the bathroom and pulled down his pants to show me his inflamed scrotum, as my patient huffed and puffed. I told him he should call the doctor, she said.

  But Turk Bauer is not silly and selfish; based on the way he brandished that Confederate flag tattoo, I'm guessing he is not too fond of people of color. "Worse than that."

  "Well." Corinne shrugs. "Marie's good at talking people off the ledge. I'm sure she can fix whatever the problem is."

  Not unless she can make me white, I think. "I'm going to run to the cafeteria for five minutes. Cover for me?"

  "If you bring me Twizzlers," Corinne says.

  In the cafeteria I stand for several minutes in front of the coffee bar, thinking about the tattoo on Turk Bauer's arm. I don't have a problem with white people. I live in a white community; I have white friends; I send my son to a predominantly white school. I treat them the way I want to be treated--based on their individual merits as human beings, not on their skin tone.

  But then again, the white people I work with and eat lunch with and who teach my son are not overtly prejudiced.

  I grab Twizzlers for Corinne and a cup of coffee for myself. I carry my cup to the condiment island, where there's milk, sugar, Splenda. There's an elderly woman fussing with the top of the cream pitcher, trying to get it open. Her purse sits on the counter, but as I approach, she picks up the handbag and anchors it to her side, crossing her arm over the strap.

  "Oh, that pitcher can be tricky," I say. "Can I help?"

  She thanks me and smiles when I hand her back the cream.

  I'm sure she doesn't even realize she moved her purse when I got closer.

  But I did.

  Shake it off, Ruth, I tell myself. I'm not the kind of person who sees the bad in everyone; that's my sister, Adisa. I get on the elevator and head back to my floor. When I arrive, I toss Corinne her Twizzlers and walk toward Brittany Bauer's door. Her chart and little Davis's chart sit outside; I grab the baby's to make sure that the pediatrician will be flagged about the potential heart murmur. But when I open the folder, there's a hot-pink Post-it on the paperwork.

  NO AFRICAN AMERICAN PERSONNEL

  TO CARE FOR THIS PATIENT.

  My face floods with heat. Marie is not at the charge nurse's desk; I start to methodically search through the ward until I find her talking to one of the pediatricians in the nursery. "Marie," I say, pasting a smile on my face. "Do you have a minute?"

  She follows me back toward the nurses' station, but I really don't want to have this conversation in public. Instead, I duck into the break room. "Are you kidding me?"

  She doesn't pretend to misunderstand. "Ruth, it's nothing. Think of it the way you'd think of a family's religious preferences dictating patient care."

  "You can't possibly be equating this with a religious preference."

  "It's just a formality. The father is a hothead; this just seemed the smoothest way to get him to calm down before he did something extreme."

  "This isn't extreme?" I ask.

  "Look," Marie says. "If anything, I'm doing you a favor. So you don't have to deal with that guy anymore. Honestly, this isn't about you, Ruth."

  "Really," I say flatly. "How many other African American personnel are on this ward?"

  We both know the answer to that. A big, fat zero.

  I look her square in the eye. "You don't want me to touch that baby?" I say. "Fine. Done."

  Then I slam the door behind me so hard that it rattles.

  --

  ONCE, RELIGION GOT tangled up in my care of a newborn. A Muslim couple came into the hospital to have their baby, and the father explained that he had to be the first person to speak to the newborn. When he told me this, I explained that I would do everything I could to honor his request, but that if there were any complications with the birth, my first priority was to make sure that the baby was saved--which required communication, and meant that silence in the delivery room was not likely or possible.

  I gave the couple some privacy while they discussed this, and finally the father summoned me back. "If there are complications," he told me, "I hope Allah would understand."

  As it turned out, his wife had a textbook delivery. Just before the baby was born, I reminded the pediatrician of the patient request, and the doctor stopped calling the arrival of the head, right shoulder, left, like a football play-by-play. The only sound in the room was the baby's cry. I took the newborn, slippery as a minnow, and placed him in a blanket in his father's arms. The man bent close to the tiny head of his son, and whispered to him in Arabic. Then he placed the baby into his wife's arms, and the room exploded with noise again.

  Sometime later that day, when I came in to check on my two patients, I found them asleep. The father stood over the bassinet, staring at his child as if he didn't quite understand how this had happened. It was a look I saw often on the faces of fathers, for whom pregnancy wasn't real until this very moment. A mother has nine months to get used to sharing the space where her heart is; for a father it comes on sudden, like a storm that changes the landscape forever. "What a beautiful boy you have," I said, and he swallowed. There are just some feelings, I've learned, for which we never invented the right words. I hesitated, then asked what had been on my mind since the delivery. "If it's not rude of me to ask, would you tell me what you whispered to your son?"

  "The adhan," the father explained. "God is great; there is no God but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." He looked up at me and smiled. "In Islam, we want the first words a child hears to be a prayer."

  It seemed absolutely fitting, given the miracle that every baby is.

  The difference between the Muslim father's request and the request made by Turk Bauer was like the difference between day and night.

  Between love and hate.

  --

  IT'S A BUSY afternoon, so I don't have time to talk to Corinne about the new patient she's inherited until we are both pulling on our coats and walking to the elevator. "What was that all about?" Corinne asks.

  "Marie took me off the case because I'm Black," I tell her.

  Corinne wrinkles her nose. "That doesn't sound like Marie."

  I turn to her, my hands stilling on the lapels of my coat. "So I'm a liar?"

  Corinne puts her hand on my arm. "Of course not. I'm just sure there's something else going on."

  It's wrong to take out my frustration on Corinne, who has to deal with that awful family now. It's wrong for me to be angry at her, when I'm really angry at Marie. Corinne, she's always been my partner in crime, not my adversary. But I feel like I could talk till I'm blue in the face and she wouldn't really understand what this feels like.

  Maybe I should talk till I'm blue in the face. Maybe then I'd be acceptable to the Bauers.

  "Whatever," I say. "That baby means nothing to me."

  Corinne tilts her head. "You want to grab a glass of wine before we head home?"

  I let my shoulders relax. "I can't. Edison's waiting."

  The elevator dings, and the doors open. It's packed, because it's end of shift. Staring back at me is a sea of blank white faces.

  Normally I don't even thin