The Juror (18 page)

She claws her way up from her trance-sleep and staggers out into the corridor. Heads down to the neonatal unit, her rotation
this month. No one’s in here but one second-year resident and one nurse. And one newborn on the warming table. Wishing to
howl like any newborn but he keeps choking.

The second-year is a fool even when he’s wide awake, and at present he’s sound asleep with his eyes open. But thank God the
nurse is Henri, Henri from Haiti—her best friend next to Annie. As she crosses to the warming table she gives Henri a questioning
glance.

Henri tells her, “Delivery was normal. But there seems to be some respiratory distress.”

The infant boy is as wrinkled as a walnut. But larger than she expects. As she takes the kid’s pulse she asks, “Not a preemie?”

“Full-term vaginal,” says Henri. He shrugs. Full-terms are rare in this unit. “One-minute APGAR five, five-minute APGAR six.”

She finds a low pulse rate.

She asks, “Where’s the pediatrics resident?”

Henri shrugs. “Crash C-section? So we’ve been told. I’m sorry, my love.”

She uses a DeLee suction trap to clear out the nose. Then she works an endotracheal tube through the child’s mouth past the
vocal cords into the miniature trachea. As she intubates, the tube starts to show a brown stain.

“Shit.”

“What is it?” Henri asks.

“Shit. His own stool. He shit into the placenta, it got into his mouth and as soon as he was born he breathed it in. Meconium
aspiration. Hey you.” She calls to the second-year. The second-year doesn’t stir.

“Hey. Doc.” She snaps her fingers.

The second-year opens his eyes.

She tells him, “Get the ambu-bag.”

“What?”

“
The ambu-bag!”

She’s not in a good mood.

She straps a pulse oximeter to the infant’s earlobe. Reads the 0
₂
saturation—60. Bad news.

The second-year brings the bag, she sets it up and starts pumping.

When she squeezes down with her thumb, air is forced into the baby’s lungs. Then she lets up. Then squeezes again. Every two
seconds. As she watches, the 0
₂
saturation starts to climb. From 60 to 74. Normally a baby draws thirty breaths a minute. She’s pumping the bag twice that
fast, once per second, turning this kid into a turbocharged breathing machine. And still it’s taking a long time to pull the
0
₂
sat out of danger.

She says, “Who’s this child, Henri? You know anything about it?”

“I met the mama.”

“Any problems? Drugs?”

“I could not be sure. But young. Fourteen, fifteen? There was some man with her.”

“The father?”

“Possibly. Possibly the mother’s father as well.”

As Juliet pumps the bag, she lifts one of the infant’s legs. “It doesn’t have the tail of a pig,” she says.

Henri takes a look. “No.”

“Which weakens your incest theory.”

“Perhaps I’m mistaken.”

“Well,
something
sure got fucked up.”

Finally she pulls the 0
₂
sat up to 90. She hands the bag over to the second-year. She tells him, “That’s where we want it, ninety. Keep it there.
OK? I got to get this kid on a respirator.”

She gets on the phone. Tracks down the attending physician at the NICU and tells him her problem. But he’s got problems of
his own.

“Juliet, shit, I’m sorry, we’re working both our respirators now.”

“So what do I do?”

“Whatever you want. I got a kid seizing here, Juliet, I’m no use to you right now. I’ll get by when I can.”

She calls the hospital in White Plains and begs some graveyard-shift asshole to come take this child. He tells her, “We need
an attending to make this request. We need an assessment from an attending, and we need—”

Then Juliet happens to look over at the monitor. It reads 70 and falling.

She yells to the second-year: “Get it UP, god damn it! GET IT UP!”

The voice on the phone: “Doctor?”

She slams the phone down. Charges the second-year.

“Ninety!” she screams. “I want it at ninety!” She wrenches the ambu-bag from his grasp. She starts pumping it furiously.

He says, “Sixty-five is perfectly satisfactory. Sixty-five, he’ll—”

“Sixty-five, he’ll be a vegetable for the rest of his fucking life! ’Cause your thumb is sore!”

“Now wait, wait a minute,” the second-year begins.

“Go get the attending! Tell him to call White Plains, request a transfer. You hear me? GO! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT! DON’T
COME BACK!”

He flees.

“Henri,” she says. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

“You think you’re looking at the witch of St. Ignatius?”

“Precisely so.”

“You think I treated him like dogshit?”

“Precisely.”

“He is dogshit.”

Says Henri, “I seem to remember when you were a second-year trying to put an IV into a sailor. I believe you tried fifty times.
His arm was looking like a target range.”

“Who says he was a sailor?”

“He had a tattoo of a sailing ship.”

“Where?”

“In this very hospital.”

“No, I mean where was the tattoo?”

“Oh.” He shrugs, and smiles. “I don’t seem to recall.”

She says, “It’s your fantasy that he was a sailor. He was a junkie, Henri. He didn’t have any veins left.”

She slowly works the 0
₂
sat back to 90.

Says Henri, “I recall that eventually that young man took the needle from you, and put it in himself.”

“That proves it. He was a junkie.”

“You were so embarrassed, you were about to die.”

“Not my fault he had no veins.”

“I kept a suicide watch on you all day.”

“And the sailing ship, Henri, which you recall perfectly well, was tattooed across his ugly junkie butt.”

She keeps pumping. When her thumb starts to ache, she switches to the other hand. After half an hour of this, when both thumbs
are killing her, she begins to regret having spoken so harshly to that second-year.

She says, “You know what? Annie broke up with me the other day.”

“She did what?”

“She told me to get the hell out of her life.”

“Annie did?”

“She seemed—I’ve never seen her like that. She said I was a bad influence on Oliver. But she knows I’m in love with Oliver.
I love him more than anybody in the world. Except Annie. So why did she say that, Henri?”

“
Annie
said this?”

“You know what bothers me, Henri? What bothers me is that I’m working such long fucking hours I don’t even have time to feel
hurt. That’s what bothers me. Can you can work this thing, honey?”

“The bag? Try.”

“All right, when I count to three you take it. One two three.”

He takes it. The sat dips, but not too much.

She picks up the phone and calls White Plains again. The graveyard asshole tells her that help is on its way. Any minute now, they’ll dispatch an ambulance.

“Yeah, right,” says Juliet. “Any little minute.”

She comes back and takes the bag from Henri. “You know what, darling? I have a feeling we’re going to be here all goddamn
night.”

O
LIVER
eats his Apple Jacks. He sits silently across from his mom, who’s working on half a slice of toast. Her cheeks are hollow,
her skin is grainy. Her big eyes, when she raises them to meet his stare, are bloodshot, with milky sleep-scum caught in the
corners.

He eats as quick as he can. When he’s done he gets his lacrosse stick from the porch and wedges it into the loops on the back
of his bike. He puts his schoolbooks in the basket and he’s about to head off when Mom shows up at the screen door.

“Why aren’t you taking the bus?”

“Lacrosse after school.”

“I thought lacrosse was Wednesdays.”

“Kind of a special practice today. We got that game with Brewster next week.”

She stares. He waits for her to say something else, but she seems to have slipped into her world again. He starts up the hill.

But at Warbler Hollow Road, instead of turning left toward school, he keeps straight. He slowly climbs Onion Creek Ridge.
Past the ravine of the old quarry, past the rock spring. Then he coasts for two miles. Takes the left-hand fork and at Allen’s
Grocery he dismounts and walks the bike down a flight of stone steps.

Juliet lives here, in the apartment beneath the grocery.

Her car’s not in the drive, though.

He cups his hands to look in the window. Her bike’s here, but no lights, no movement. Of course he could have expected this,
since he knows she spends ninety percent of her life at work, but still. Shit.

He’s wondering should he leave a note and go, or should he camp out on her lawn all day? Or maybe he should try to call her
at the hospital?

Then suddenly her ancient VW bug turns into the drive.

She gets out. She’s puzzled to find him here.

“Oliver?”

“Hey.”

“How’d you get here? You rode your bike?”

He nods. He notices that both her thumbs are wrapped in bandages.

She says, “It’s not a school day?”

He shrugs.

“You’re supposed to be in school and you—”

“I had to see you.”

“Well, I’m kinda, I haven’t slept much. I was going to, um. Sleep all day.”

Then she squints at him. She must have some clue that something’s up, because her tone changes. “What’s the matter?”

“I gotta talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About Mom.”

She leads him into the kitchen, with its low ceiling and the bay window that looks out into her garden. The faint smell of
damp basement plaster. Juliet’s home surprises him on every visit by how small and humble it is. Whereas in his dreams it
always
looms
, immense and exotic.

“Want something?” she says. “You thirsty?”

“Water.”

“Just water? No Coke or juice or anything?”

“Water.”

She gives him a glass. Nods toward a chair and he takes it. She takes another chair and leans her elbows on the table. He
has a swallow of water. Studies the bubbles clinging to the edges of the glass. Can’t get started. He says, “So. Juliet. Did
you just get off work?”

“Yeah.”

“Why those bandages?”

She shrugs. “I was squeezing this, this, sort of like a lung? All night. I had a newborn with breathing troubles.”

“So what happened?”

“Finally an ambulance came from White Plains and picked the kid up. About an hour ago.”

“Is it gonna be all right? The kid?”

“No idea. It’s out of my hands. Oliver?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s going on?”

“Oh. Well, I mean. I don’t know. I mean, well, you won’t ever tell anybody this?”

She does a thing that he’s always liked: this little rabbit twitch of her mouth—her pursed lips sliding in a bunch to the
left. “I won’t unless I need to. What’s wrong?”

“You gotta promise.”

“What’s wrong, Oliver?”

“There’s this guy? He gave Mom some money for her art. Then—you remember that guy? That day you came over, she had a date—”

Juliet nods. “I remember.”

“And then the next day Mom was crying. She didn’t say why but she wouldn’t talk about that guy, she just wouldn’t. At all.
And she’s still crying. It’s like she’s lost her mind.”

“You think she fell for him?”

“Fell?”

“In love.”

“Uh-uh.”

“You think he hurt her?”

“I think, well
I
think he threatened her. Just tell me if you think this is all my imagination. OK? But I think it’s true. I think that guy?
He’s got her. In like a trap. The way she’s always snapping now—it’s like she’s in some kind of trap.”

“What kind of trap?”

“Do you know who Louie Boffano is?”

“The Mafia don? The one on trial?”

“Yeah. OK. Well, OK, listen. She’s on that jury.”

A
NNIE
’s upstairs in her room, Oliver stands at the door, and she tells him he’s got to be out of his skull. “Not a chance,” she
says. “If it’s so important you should have remembered to ask me earlier.”

“Mom, I didn’t know this practice was going to be so late. I went right after school, but there was nobody there, so I called
Coach and he told me it doesn’t start till five. By the time it’s over it’ll be dark, I could take my bike but I know you
don’t want me on my bike when it’s dark.”

“I don’t want you on that
team
,” she says. “Wednesdays are one thing. If it’s going to be Tuesdays too, if I have to drive you—”

“Just this once! A special practice. I mean, Mom, if I don’t go they’ll call me a fag.”

“Stop it, Oliver.”

“Don’t blame me for what
they
say, Mom.”

She shakes her head. But really, what difference does it make? She can sit and worry, she can simmer, as easily in the car
as she can in her room.

“You’ll get a ride home?”