by Janis Powers
I was a little taken aback by the emotion in his comments. For all the pressure Dale had been under in his tenure working alongside Bobbie, he seemed to have no interest in slowing down. If anything, he seemed even more focused on his career. We just hadn’t had the time to talk about it.
Dale let go of my arm. “Maybe someday we’ll live the life of the Macalusos. But we both have a good thing going right now. I see no reason to deliberately mess it up.”
I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. The Manhattan skyline loomed before us, its sparkling energy evident in the twinkling lights of the island’s soaring skyscrapers. With all the chaos in our lives, at least Dale and I could agree that there was no place like home.
31
I got the news on my phone while I was pumping in the bathroom. Paul Black had called a meeting for four o’clock in the afternoon. Nancy had circulated the invite, along with an agenda. Apparently, my team’s work was the main focus of the session. Since I was designated as the main speaker, I could make my presentation as pithy as possible, leaving the balance of the time for the partners to talk. If all went well, the meeting would be done in an hour, 90 minutes tops. I would be able to leave the office well before my requisite 6:00 pm.
My team met in the conference room at 3:50, ten minutes before the meeting was supposed to start. I knew Nancy Lallyberry would never allow anyone to appear more prepared than she was, so her team assembled immediately too. Harry, Deirdre and Paul all rolled in shortly after four. Seeing that we were all ready to begin, the partner group sat down quickly.
Paul Black took his seat next to his newly minted mentee, Jeffry Hsu. “Before we begin,” Black started, “I would like to make a brief announcement. This will go out officially to the entire firm, but I have heard through my sources that Jeffry Hsu has passed the New York State Bar Exam! Congratulations, Jeffry!”
Everyone in the room applauded. Jeffry stood up and shook Black’s hand as if he were accepting a Golden Globe award. I couldn’t remember this sort of recognition after I had passed the bar. Maybe if my partner designee had been Paul Black rather than Caine Seaver, things might have been different. But I doubted it.
“O.K.,” continued Paul. “Maxine, you’re on.”
“Thanks, Paul. And congratulations, Jeffry.” Jeffry didn’t acknowledge my compliment, having initiated a side conversation with Paul. There was no tactful way to break that up, and since the clock on the wall read 4:07, I proceeded with the agenda. “Per HKI’s request,
our team has done a thorough review of the regulations related to,
um . . .” I stumbled because my phone was ringing. I couldn’t remember where I put it, so I talked over it, hoping it would stop quickly. “As you can see from the first bullet point . . .”
I had barely made it through the regulatory citation when my ringtone kicked in again. Harry McCale closed his eyes in frustration. Paul Black looked like he wanted to fire me. Nancy Lallyberry leaned over and whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, “You know, we’re supposed to turn our phones off during the meetings. They’re supposed to be on vibrate in case of an emergency.”
With Nancy’s brilliant statement of the obvious, Deirdre chimed in. “Maxine, if that’s an emergency, you should answer it.” The words sounded a lot more compassionate than her tone.
“I’m so sorry,” I apologized. “I’m sure it’s nothing.” I rummaged through my pockets hoping to resolve the matter expeditiously. My heart stopped when I realized that the number in the call logs was Olga’s. And not only had she called me at work, but she had texted me. She never texted me.
I excused myself, and asked Jeffry to carry on. As I walked out of the room, I heard him take responsibility for all the research that had been done. He was probably planning to add a proposal to garnish some of my wages as a bonus for all of his hard work. I’d have to deal with him later.
I buzzed Olga as quickly as possible so I could get back into the meeting and defend myself. “Olga! What is going on? I’m in a meeting!”
“I not sure. Henry look sick. I take him to hospital.”
“What?!” I froze in the hallway. “Where are you? What happened? Is Henry O.K.?”
I rushed to my office, trying to understand the severity of Henry’s condition. After a couple more questions, I was able to ascertain that Henry’s condition was not life-threatening. But something was wrong, and Olga was unable to articulate exactly what it was. Unfortunately, my brain decided to fill in the gaps by conjuring up horrible images of infant morbidity. I grabbed my belongings and ran out of the building.
Outside, I cut about 17 people to grab a taxi and hysterically ordered the driver to Lenox Hill. I didn’t bother explaining my behavior to the cabbie. My son’s at the emergency room, but I don’t know why sounded like something a paranoid, irrational person might say And maybe that’s exactly how I was behaving. Had I just bolted out of an important meeting to find out that Henry had something inconsequential, like a low-grade fever?
I got on my phone and called Joy. I asked her to apologize to everyone, particularly Deirdre, Paul and Harry. I hoped that she could work some magic for me. Why couldn’t I have hired her to be Henry’s nanny?
In the meantime, I texted Dale. Not surprisingly, he didn’t respond. I figured I’d find out what problems there were, if any, before I took on the Herculean task of trying to get him on the phone during business hours. And even though Jeffry was still in the meeting, I emailed him and asked for a full debrief. I was still his superior.
Though the cab ride itself had calmed me down, my anxiety level rocketed when we drove up to the E.R. I threw some bills at the cab driver and ran inside. I charged directly up to the admitting nurse, inserting myself in front of an elderly woman who was, as far as I was concerned, not in distress. “I’m looking for Henry Pedersen. The baby. Where is he? The nanny told me she brought him here.”
Slow as molasses, the nurse batted her eyelids. “Please get in line. I will get to you when it’s your turn.” The old lady uttered something on the order of “You kids. . . .” while she tightened the grip on her cane. I thought she might use it to smack me, so I decamped and reconsidered my entrance strategy.
An E.M.S. van pulled up to the front door of the E.R. “Oh!” exclaimed the old lady. “That must be Gerry!” While a crew of medical professionals flocked to the vehicle, I bolted from the waiting room. I ran through the opened doors into the examination area, ignoring the calls from the nurse.
I faced a line of about a dozen curtained bays. Some were open, some were closed. All of their lights were on. I plunged into the hallway, ready to rip open all of the curtains to find Henry. Double doors boomed open behind me, and I knew someone, probably a security guard, was after me. I had to find Henry before I was detained, and the easiest way to do that was to shout out his name. “Henry! Henry!” I called desperately, as if a five-month-old infant could shout out, “Right here, Mommy!”
A man in scrubs, followed by Olga, emerged from one of the bays. He said something to Olga in Spanish, and she pointed at me and nodded. “You’re the baby’s mother?”
“Yes. I am Henry’s mother,” I said breathlessly as I shoved my way into the bay. The doctor motioned the security guard to stand down. Henry was on a gurney, his little arms outstretched. Some tubes were sticking out of his body. The beeping of a nearby machine was the only indicator that he was still alive.
My throat tightened. It felt like razors were lining my esophagus. I managed to cough out a question before tears streamed down my face. “What happened to him?” I stroked his little hand and touched his cheek, hoping his eyes would open. They didn’t.
“I’m Dr. Sherman. Your son is going to be fine. Your nanny brought him in for severe vomiting. He is dehydrated, so we are administering fluids through an I.V.”
I looked at Olga. She didn’t make eye contact with me. She wasn’t looking at Henry either, just staring at the curtain next to her chair.
“Is
he unconscious?” My voice quivered when I asked the question.
Dr. Sherman rubbed my back consolingly. “No. He’s sleeping. And he doesn’t have a fever. So that rules out infection, which can be very dangerous.”
That news didn’t make me feel any better since I still didn’t know what was wrong. “O.K. So what happened? Did he ingest a poison or something? Why would he just start vomiting?”
“Well, I’d like to talk to you about that.” The doctor once again addressed Olga in Spanish. She left the bay, and the doctor gestured for the security guard to follow her. Then he asked me, more like a detective than a clinician, “Have you noticed vomiting before?”
I gasped. “No! Never! And Olga never said anything about it!”
“Has your son had a regular check up with a pediatrician recently?”
I took a step back and rubbed against the curtain, which startled me. I realized that I had yet to return to the pediatrician for Henry’s follow-up to the awful four-month check up. Henry was eating both milk and solids regularly, so I had pushed the appointment off. “He saw her, the pediatrician, about five weeks ago for his four-month check up,” I stammered.
The E.R. doctor, probably accustomed to drama, kept pressing for data. “Did she indicate that there were any problems?”
“Well, Henry was a little underweight. We started him on solids to see if he’d gain more weight. I was supposed to have brought him back to see her but my work. . . .” As I was making my confession, the scene at the pediatrician’s office whirled through my mind. I remembered the shifty look on Olga’s face that day. I stopped talking when I realized that, today, she wore exactly the same expression.
Something was wrong. I needed to talk to Olga. “Where did you send the nanny?” I darted to the curtain, but my urge to flee was counter-balanced by my need to stay with Henry. “It has to be her. She did something!”
The doctor put his hand on my shoulder. “I think you need to calm down. I’m sorry if I frightened you. I just think that your son might be allergic to the formula he’s on, that’s all. It happens, and the symptoms can sneak up on the care-giver slowly. And with your schedule, something like this might be even harder to detect.”
“Formula?!” Did this guy have the right baby?
The doctor casually signed off on a chart and asked, “Have you switched formulas recently, Mrs. Pedersen? Or maybe you ran out and the nanny bought a different kind? I doubt it’s a systemic manufacturer’s problem because this is the first case we’ve seen.”
“Henry’s not on formula!” I yelled. “What are you talking about?”
The doctor put his chart down. He picked up a bottle which had been left on the stand next to Henry’s gurney. It looked like one of my Avent bottles, but the liquid inside seemed different than breast milk. It was thicker, pastier. “Your nanny brought this here and said that this is what she had been feeding your son. We can run some tests on it, but it looks like formula to me.”
We must have been causing some commotion because a security guard peeked his head through the curtain. “Is everything O.K. in here?”
I yanked him into the bay. “No! Go watch the nanny!”
The guard tucked his shirt under his protruding gut. “Oh, she’s gone. She told me that she couldn’t stay any longer because she had to pick up her kids. She said it was O.K. for her to leave.”
“So you just let her go?” I wailed. “What kind of a place are you running here? That woman is a criminal! I don’t know what she did, but she did something to my son!” My arms were waving all over the place until they landed on his back. I practically shoved him out of the hospital saying, “Go find her!”
The guard held onto the pistol in his holster and waddled out of the facility. With an I.Q. seemingly hovering around 60, this guy would probably accommodate a request to visit the I.C.U. by someone infected with the Ebola virus. We all knew there was no chance that he’d find Olga. At this point, she had probably inserted herself into the N.Y.C. subway system like the rat she truly was.
As much as I wanted to find her, Henry was now my top priority. He was still asleep. Dr. Sherman and I chatted quietly, trying to deduce what had transpired. We ruled out an allergy to my breast milk, as Henry had nursed successfully for the first 12 weeks of his life. And I hadn’t eaten anything unusual recently, so Henry was probably not reacting to any potential irritants from me.
The doctor kept pressing for an answer. He believed that Henry’s supposed cradle cap, which had migrated to his face, was an allergy-induced rash. And that his fitfulness and weight loss had less to do with caregiver confusion and more to do with a reaction to something he was ingesting. We ruled out anything strange with Henry’s toys, home environment, detergent; all of these things had been static since his birth.
Whatever had come over Henry had started when I had gone back to work. I explained that I had plenty of pumped milk in the freezer, and Olga documented just how much was consumed each day. Dr. Sherman picked up the bottle Olga had brought with her. “If this is what your nanny was feeding your son,” and he shook the unrecognizable liquid around, “then what happened to all of the milk you produced?”
Dr. Sherman and I locked eyes as we came to the same conclusion. “She has an infant herself, doesn’t she?” he said. All I could do was nod. Olga must have taken the milk my body had produced for the health and well-being of my own son and fed it to hers. It was sick, and mean, and heart-breaking.
Worse yet, all the evidence against her was circumstantial. I could never prove that she had switched out Henry’s food. Olga had betrayed me in one of the worst ways imaginable, and I was denied the opportunity to legally crucify her.
I walked over to Henry. I couldn’t decide if I felt guilty for being a working mother instead of a stay-at-home, angry that my nanny wound up being a borderline felon, or grateful that, in the end, he was not significantly harmed.
I stroked his little hand and he finally started to let out some cries. I was so overjoyed to hear him that I didn’t get upset when my milk came in and stained my shirt. After the doctor did a quick check of his vitals, I was encouraged to feed him. A nurse tech helped re-arrange Henry’s tubes so I could hold him. Then, she lingered in the bay, ostensibly cleaning up and organizing the four by six foot space. I suspected she was monitoring my behavior, like some sort of spy for Child Protective Services, so I told her to leave.
I took care of Henry and then checked out of the facility as politely and quickly as I could. Henry and I needed to go home and try to forget that any of this had ever happened.
32
According to Dale, word of our horrifying ordeal spread like wildfire through the ranks of Worthington Investments. My inbox was flooded with forwarded emails from his colleagues, expressing concern and offering suggestions. My jaw dropped when I read one from someone who “knew the right people who could help you get that bitch deported.” His tone was crude, his words were derogatory, but his sentiment was spot-on.
Bobbie Macaluso didn’t send an email. Rather, Helen called to offer support. That support came in the form of a catered meal from Mesa Grill, delivered to our home. The gesture was too extravagant to be strictly professional, even for Worthington. I briefly considered how easy it might be to just quit and decamp to Long Island, since the notion of going through the process of finding another nanny was mind-numbing.
I went on auto-pilot with my communications to the folks at McCale. I garnered a handful of concerned responses, but no catered meal. I sent a separate note to Deirdre, requesting the option to work out of my apartment for the next week or so until I could find some replacement childcare. She offered a sincere measure of concern and approved my request. She also added that getting back to a regular work routine might be the best medicine for everyone. It was an interesting thought that I would consider later. At the moment, the best medicine for me came out of the vodka cabinet.
NYC Baby Prep scrambled to find an interim nanny while the search for
permanent help continued. Of course, Tawny Sheen did not admit to any wrong-doing. She reminded me of the no-fault clause I had signed when I became a client of NYC Baby Prep, which basically held them harmless in situations such as mine. Why I had agreed to sign such a ridiculous document and then pay her an exorbitant fee to probably scan Craig’s List for caregivers was beyond me. I just knew that next time around, I was going to be a lot more probing with my questions and demanding with my background checks.
My mother probably spent about a week in medicated isolation after she heard the news about Olga. That’s the only explanation I could come up with for why I hadn’t received my daily phone calls. I could have confirmed my hunch by calling the house in Westchester, but on the off chance that I was wrong, I would have had to listen to one of her surly rants. I decided to stay under the radar as long as possible.
On the night of the tenth day of the no-call stalemate, I was informed that the babysitter I had arranged for the following day had come down with the flu. Under normal circumstances, I might have called in sick to work, or used a vacation day. But I had some critical meetings that I needed to tend to, so I had to at least call into work. Besides, I had to save the vacation days for real emergencies, like when my mother wasn’t available.
Begrudgingly, I called home and asked for her help. She agreed to come into Manhattan after rush hour in the morning, and stay through dinner. This didn’t exactly mesh with my phone call schedule, but I accepted her offer as graciously as I could. After all, I was desperate.
I was on the phone when she arrived at my apartment. She gave me a quick hug and then made a bee-line for Henry’s room. Despite the universal sign of unwelcoming—the closed door—she barged right into the nursery, waking Henry up from the nap he had started just ten minutes earlier. I put my cell phone on mute.
“What are you doing? You woke him up!”
