Before I Saw You

by Amy Sorrells

  An older man in a uniform comes from the right. “Ma’am, you have to check in at triage—”

  “I’ve got it.” A woman in blue scrubs waves him off and reaches for Jayden. She takes him, holds her ear toward his mouth, his chest. She lifts his eyelids one at a time. Her brow knits and she fixes her eyes on me. “How long’s he been like this?”

  4

  * * *

  “Are you his mother?” asks another nurse when I get back inside from moving my car.

  I might as well be. “No. I’m his sister.”

  “Well, where’s y’all’s mom?” she says, acting a little impatient. She turns to a third nurse and shakes her head. “She doesn’t look older than twelve.”

  The third nurse rolls her eyes. Does she think I can’t see her?

  The second nurse goes back to putting white stickers on Jayden’s chest.

  A man in a different color of scrubs fastens a plastic mask over his face.

  “He’s very sick. And we need consent—” the second nurse says.

  “She’s sick,” I say.

  “Is there someone else? His father?”

  My turn to roll my eyes. “Don’t know who his father is.”

  “What about a grandparent?”

  “There’s no one else.”

  The nurse shifts her weight and crosses her arms, and the way she stops and starts a couple of times, I can tell she’s working on choosing her words. “I’ll have to call social work, then.”

  You go ahead, I want to say, but I don’t waste my breath. The nurse has no doubt already come to the conclusion that I am stupid. Instead, I turn my attention to Jayden. He’s connected to more wires and tubes than I can count, some on his chest, a clear tube running a watery fluid into his arm, another clear tube running pee out of him. His arms and legs aren’t quite as pale as they were when they first laid him out on the gurney, and he looks cold. I’m afraid I’ll mess everything up if I pull the blanket up or touch him.

  He needs his blankie.

  I pull it from the bag and tuck it under his chin, his arm. Nothing is connected to his head, so I smooth his hair to the side. I am ashamed of the smudges of dirt on his face, his neck, his hands and feet I didn’t get clean in the bath last night. The bright light shows everything.

  “It’s all right, Jayden. You’re gonna be all right.”

  A woman in a white lab coat pushes the curtain aside. “I’m Donna Howard. With social services.”

  She is a heavyset woman with soft brown eyes that remind me of the deer that peer at me from the edge of the meadow.

  Ms. Howard straightens the lab coat across her generous bosom and pulls her pretty floral clipboard closer. “The doctor says to tell you they’re waiting on some blood tests and hoping they can move Jayden to the pediatric unit. But if he doesn’t improve in a few hours, we may have to transport him to the big children’s hospital in Indianapolis.”

  “Indianapolis?”

  She nods. “They’re concerned about his breathing. If he needs more support, we can’t provide that here. Have you gotten ahold of your mother?”

  “No.”

  I try to text Mama again, but it’s just one more in a long list of texts that aren’t answered.

  I try to call her, but she doesn’t pick up.

  Ms. Howard comes back later in the afternoon. She asks the usual battery of questions: where Jayden sleeps, what he eats. She asks a lot about his diet. The blood tests probably show he isn’t getting enough of something, which is true since all Mama gives him is Mountain Dew when I’m not around—and which she waters down so it will last longer, even after I tell her the WIC gives us enough to use formula all the time. And Ms. Howard writes all of this down, balancing the clipboard against her arm, the words of Philippians 4:13 inscribed on the back of it: “I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.”

  When Ms. Howard asks what Mama does for work, I mumble something about sales, knowing it’s better to be vague than to lie outright. She will contact Child Protective Services, that’s for certain. And once she does, there’s a good chance they’ll take Jayden away.

  At least he’d have a chance if he lived somewhere else. I scold myself for thinking that, but I can’t help it.

  “We’re going to move him up to our pediatric unit,” two nurses say, and they organize his tubes and wires and set a miniature version of the monitor at the end of his bed.

  The hallway on the way to the elevator is empty except for a janitor at the far end whistling and pushing a broom. When the elevator doors open, a girl from high school is on there, a girl I was friends with when we were younger. Mary Ashby. She startles, averts her eyes when she sees me, and hurries out, but not before I see she is wearing a shoulder sling and has a goose egg–sized bump and bruise on the side of her face.

  The rest of the day is a blur. Jayden has a crib in this new unit, and cheerful paintings hang on the wall. There’s a chair in the room so I can sit by the window and watch cars pull in and out of the gas station and fast-food drive-through next door. Cars pass by the hospital without slowing down at all, the drivers not knowing a thing about the sick people inside. Jayden’s heart bleeps a steady rhythm on the monitor above his bed. Nurses come in to check his breathing, which seems faster by the minute, his tiny chest heaving with the effort. They change his mask out to a different one, something the nurse calls a CPAP, which hums and keeps time with his breaths. A doctor talks to other staff in the hall, using words like transport and sepsis, intubate and blood gas and kidneys.

  Jayden fevers on, the hair around his face damp from the sweat of fighting the pneumonia. That’s what the doctor says he has, but that’s not what’s making him so sleepy. They’re still trying to figure that part out. A younger girl, about my age and wearing a badge that says Volunteer, puts a blanket with planets and rocket ships on the end of the bed, the fleece kind with ties along the edges. She looks at me and smiles and says we can keep it when we go home. Above the bed, a wavy line stretches across a monitor screen and Jayden’s chest rises and falls to the rhythm. Spaces between all the bones of Jayden’s chest tug and pull to inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

  It shouldn’t be that hard to breathe.

  Under the breathing mask, Jayden’s mouth moves rhythmically as if he’s sucking on his pacifier in his dreams, and the sight of this causes tears to spill from my eyes. I stand beside the crib and take his limp hand, run my fingers across his dimpled knuckles, try to memorize the pale-blue cast of his eyelids. The bones of his shoulders and his hips stick out, too angled and harsh for a baby who should be chubby like the ones at church.

  Maybe he’s hungry. Could that make him sleepy? He hasn’t eaten since . . . the bottle he had when I came back from Sudie’s. The one that was empty last night.

  A baby with pneumonia should be awake by now, the doctor said.

  I didn’t make that bottle last night. Mama did.

  The methadone pills were beside the sink. Mama’s not careful about much, but she’s always careful to keep those pills in the bathroom.

  The strangers didn’t like his crying.

  If he woke up when I was gone . . .

  “Nurse?” I reach for the call button, but the nurse is already on her way into the room.

  5

  * * *

  “Has the doctor told you about the transfer?” the nurse says.

  “No.” I shake my head. “But I think I know why he’s so tired—”

  The doctor rounds the corner and interrupts. His bright white coat is ironed stiff; his round, metal-rimmed glasses are shiny, clean. “What did you give him?”

  Fear shoots down my chest and knots up tight in my belly. “I didn’t give him anything.”

  The look on his face softens, as if he senses my terror. “It’s okay, hon.” He rests his hand on my shoulder. “I just want to help Jayden. Can you tell me, did he get into something?”

  I think again about that empty bottle last night, the methadone tha
t was by the sink and fell all over the floor, about the coal-black eyes of the junkies, how angry they got when Jayden was crying until I got him to sleep. Before I left the house. If Jayden woke after I left . . .

  “I—I didn’t—it wasn’t me. There were these people—”

  “What people?” His blue eyes are not cold, but rather desperate, searching.

  “I only left for a little while last night. He was asleep. He was fine when I left. When I came back, they’d given him a bottle, and Jayden—he drank it all. I didn’t think it could be anything but formula, but this morning . . .” Why did I leave him?

  “What happened this morning, hon?”

  “I was looking for something to give him for his fever and there was this bottle . . . a bottle of Mama’s methadone by the sink . . . the lid was loose. She always keeps it in her bathroom so no one gets at it . . .”

  “Methadone.” The doctor nods to the nurse, who pivots and hurries from the room. “That makes sense. You’ve helped your brother a lot by telling us this. Do you think your mom gave it to him?”

  I shake my head. “She never has before. He was addicted to it when he was born ’cause she’d been taking it while she was pregnant . . . took a few weeks to wean him . . . Mama’s done a lot of things, but she wouldn’t hurt Jayden on purpose.”

  “Who else was there?”

  “Junkies. Two men and a lady. I haven’t seen them before. They didn’t like Jayden’s crying, but I’d gotten him to hush and sleep. . . . I was only gone—”

  “It’s not your fault,” he says, and turns to Jayden. “But you need to know . . .” He stops, then gently lifts each of Jayden’s eyelids, shines a light in them.

  “He’s gonna be okay, right?” I step across the crib from the doctor and tuck the turquoise blanket closer to Jayden’s face so he can know it’s there and not be so afraid.

  “We’re doing everything we can,” the kind, clean doctor says.

  I realize as he walks away that he did not answer my question.

  The nurse comes back in, pushing a metal cart and carrying vials of medicine. “We need to fly him up to the children’s hospital in Indianapolis. He’s getting too sick for us to keep taking care of him here.”

  “When?”

  “Soon as we hear from them that they’ve got a bed. An hour or two. But we have to get an airway in him first.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “We have to put a tube in his throat to help him breathe.”

  “But he is breathing,” I say.

  “He won’t be much longer without it.”

  I don’t understand. He is breathing.

  The monitor above the bed starts flashing red and yellow, and the nurse hollers over her shoulder into the hallway. “I need some help in here.”

  Three nurses and the doctor come rushing, followed by a man in scrubs who rolls another machine into the room.

  I can’t feel my legs moving, but somehow I wind up in the corner of the room, the wall holding me up, and everything feels like it’s not real, like I’m watching a movie. All I can see of Jayden is his little hand, palm up and open. Alarms ring and an overhead announcement blares something about a “code in Pediatrics,” which I know from TV means something awful is happening. More nurses, more strangers in scrubs and white coats and suits fill the hall and stare like they’re watching a basketball game or something.

  More tubes.

  Why did I leave him?

  More wires.

  I should never have left.

  More alarms.

  They were just rabbits. Rabbits have a whole slew of litters a year. Wouldn’t matter at all if I had left them be.

  More people hollering for things I can’t understand.

  The lines on the monitor are jagged, the numbers flashing.

  Someone pushes on his chest.

  Sudie did that once to a bird. Somebody brought her a sparrow that had flown into a window. She said it was probably bleeding all inside, but that she had to try to save it. I asked her why bother with a sparrow since there are too many anyway. “Not a one falls to the earth without the Lord knowing it,” she said. “Not a one.”

  The kind doctor’s eyes find me across the room.

  I think about the cemetery by the brick chapel on the way out of Riverton and the row of little white crosses along the back fence line.

  “We need to call it,” he says.

  The nurse stops pushing on Jayden’s chest.

  “We’ve done all we can do.”

  The sparrow didn’t make it either.

  All I can think of is how Shorty and Sudie’ll be digging a new grave this week.

  6

  * * *

  TWO YEARS LATER

  The clock on my dashboard says 7:50 a.m.

  I knew I shouldn’t have pressed the snooze that last time, but I’d been up late helping Sudie with an influx of big brown bats falling like Osage oranges onto the sidewalks, the sudden cold snap forcing them back into a hibernation they weren’t expecting. Most are concussed, a few with wing tears Sudie repairs with superglue. They’re too dazed to fuss much at the mealworms and crickets we offer them, so it still takes a while to feed them.

  The stoplight takes its time to change to green as I tap the beat to the rock song on the radio onto the steering wheel. Thick frost isn’t budging from the windshield despite my defrost blasting on high. Too cold outside—or busted, more likely. One more thing to fix.

  You at work? The text lights up my phone screen, my boyfriend Bryan’s name above.

  You’ll have to wait a hot minute. Besides the fact that I’m driving, I’m tired of answering. If he isn’t sure about where I am, he blows up my phone with texts until I answer him. I cringe at the thought of how mad he gets when I don’t reply right away. Carla was right when she warned me about him. But we’ve been together too long now for me to admit it.

  Finally the light changes and the late-model SUV in front of me moves.

  I swerve to miss the huge chuckhole that seems to have appeared overnight with the crazy mix of freezes and thaws we’ve been having this spring. I swerve again, barely missing the raccoon waddling across the highway. It’s March, the start of breeding season, and in the rearview mirror I can see its fat belly. Must be a female. Of course, the way they scavenge, it could just be a male who’s been feasting on a lot of trash.

  I’m glad when the winding county road widens into Main Street with large riverfront homes that look like they’ve been copied right out of the pages of a storybook—gabled roofs, window boxes stuffed with seasonal greenery or flowers, wrought-iron and picket fences around front yards where an occasional schnauzer or Westie barks. This section of town seems immune to the factory shutdowns, with Riverton College students helping keep the stores in business most of the year. This section of town is where children should be raised. If I ever have children, they’ll have a house like one of these and they’ll have a daddy, that’s for sure. They’ll have clean clothes that fit right and they won’t have to rely on charity sacks of food to eat on the weekends, the kind I had to eat and that church folks hand out Friday afternoons as kids climb onto the bus. And they won’t live where empty syringes hide in the yard and stick them on the side of the foot when they play hide-and-seek with friends.

  My tires squeal as I turn too fast into the parking spot on the town square in front of the diner, condensation frozen around the edges of its wide, shiny windows. A bright-blue, newer-model Jeep I haven’t seen around town before is parked out front. Reverend Payne, pastor of my church, comes out with his daily cup of coffee, which he orders with an inch of room left in the cup for all the cream he likes to add. He sees me and waves, and I nod back.

  I grab the fresh mums for the centerpieces off the passenger seat and make sure my big sweater and my coat are covering everything they need to. I shut the car door and text Bryan back, making sure to add lots of heart and kiss emojis, as I walk toward the diner. I forget about the one annoying pi
ece of sidewalk that’s been jutting out for years, which the town is always promising to fix but never does. My shoe catches on the edge and I trip forward for what must be the hundredth time, bracing myself for another set of skinned knees.

  Impact doesn’t happen.

  Someone grabs me under the arm.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, my face burning with embarrassment. “Thanks for the save.”

  “No problem,” the young man says. He eyes me as if making sure I’m steady before he leans over to pick up my phone and hands it to me. The crisp inflection of his voice lacks the typical drawl of folks native to Riverton. “Maybe we should put one of those bright-orange street cones on top of that.”

  “Right. Because that might make the town notice it and fix it.”

  He grins at my sarcasm. “I’m Gabe. Gabe Corwin,” he says, extending his hand.

  I flush again under the gaze of his kind brown eyes and the way his fingers grasp strong and firm around mine. “Jaycee Givens . . . I . . . you’ll have to excuse me; I’m late for work.”

  “I think we’re headed to the same place.”

  “The diner?”

  “Yep. First day.” He straightens and points both thumbs at his chest. “Meet your newest coworker.” Then he points a key fob at the bright-blue Jeep and locks it.

  “You don’t have to do that here, you know.”

  He shrugs. “Habit.”

  Carla was right when she said the guy she’d just hired was good-looking. I’m the sort of person folks normally bump into without stopping to see what they hit, whether on a sidewalk or at Walmart or refilling cups of coffee. Besides that, the buzz of my phone with another text from Bryan, along with one of the frequent waves of nausea I’m trying to ignore, remind me I’m technically taken.

  The smell of Carla’s fresh-baked cinnamon rolls greets us as we walk into the diner.

  “Morning, Carla,” Gabe says cheerily, disappearing into the back.