—
WHEN I RETURN to my house at seven o’clock, Edison comes running to the front door. “What are you doing home?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”
I paste a smile onto my face. “I’m fine, baby. There was just a mix-up with the shifts, so Corinne and I went out to dinner at Olive Garden.”
“Are there leftovers?”
God bless the teenage boy, who can’t see past his own hunger pangs. “No,” I tell him. “We shared an entrée.”
“Well, that seems like a missed opportunity,” he grumbles.
“Did you wind up writing about Latimer?”
He shakes his head. “No. I think I’m going to pick Anthony Johnson. First Black landowner,” he says. “Way back in 1651.”
“Wow,” I reply. “That’s impressive.”
“Yeah, but there’s kind of a hitch. See, he was a slave that came over to Virginia from England and worked on a tobacco plantation until it was attacked by Native Americans and everyone but five people there died. He and his wife, Mary, moved and claimed two hundred and fifty acres of land. The thing is, he owned slaves. And I don’t know if I feel like being the one to tell that to the rest of my class, you know? Like it’s something they can use against me someday in an argument.” He shakes his head, lost in thought. “I mean, how could you do that, if you knew what it was like to be a slave yourself once?”
I think about all the things I’ve done to feel like I belong at the top—education, marriage, this home, keeping a barrier between myself and my sister. “I don’t know,” I say slowly. “In his world, the people with power owned other people. Maybe that’s what he thought he needed to do to feel powerful too.”
“That doesn’t mean it was right,” Edison points out.
I wrap my arms around his waist and hold him tight, pressing my face against his shoulder so he cannot see the tears in my eyes.
“What’s that for?”
“Because,” I murmur, “you make this world a better place.”
Edison hugs me back. “Imagine what I could do if you’d brought me chicken parm.”
Once he goes to bed, I sift through the mail. Bills, bills, and more bills, plus one slim envelope from the Department of Public Health, revoking my nursing license. I stare at it for five whole minutes, but the words don’t materialize into anything other than what it is: the proof that this is not a nightmare I will wake up from, wondering at my own crazy imagination. Instead, I sit in the living room, my thoughts racing too fast for me to think about turning in. It’s a mistake, that’s all. I know it, and I just need to make everyone else see it, too. I’m a nurse. I heal people. I bring them comfort. I fix things. I can fix this.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I glance at the number—it’s the union lawyer calling me back. “Ruth,” he says when I answer. “I hope it’s not too late.”
I almost laugh. As if I’m going to get any sleep tonight. “Why did the Department of Public Health take away my license?”
“Because of an allegation of possible negligence,” he explains.
“But I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve worked there for twenty years. Can they still fire me?”
“You’ve got bigger problems than keeping your job. A criminal prosecution has been filed against you, Ruth. The State is holding you responsible for the death of that baby.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, the sentence sharp as knives on my tongue.
“They already convened a grand jury. My advice is for you to hire a defense attorney. This is out of my league.”
This is not real. This can’t be real. “My supervisor said not to touch the infant, and I didn’t, and now I’m being punished for it?”
“The State doesn’t care what your supervisor said,” the union lawyer replies. “The State just sees a dead baby. They’re targeting you because they think you failed as a nurse.”
“You’re wrong.” I shake my head in the darkness, and I say the words I’ve swallowed down my whole life. “They’re targeting me because I’m Black.”
—
IN SPITE OF all this, I fall asleep. I know this because when I first hear the jackhammer at 3:00 A.M. I think it is part of my dream—me, stuck in traffic, late for work, while a road crew creates a canyon between me and where I need to be. In my dream I honk the car horn. The jackhammer doesn’t stop.
And then just like that I am bursting through the surface of consciousness, and the jackhammer of knocking detonates as the police break the door off its hinges and swarm into my living room, their guns drawn. “What are you doing?” I cry out. “What are you doing?”