Kate stepped out of the car in the hospital parking lot and took a deep breath of secondhand cigarette smoke and damp asphalt air. Don’t look, she told herself as she walked into the foyer. Don’t look at the babies. But everywhere she turned there they were. Babies. Crying, burping, smiling. Clamped to its mother’s hip or sitting contentedly on someone’s lap. The yearning to hold a baby, to smell his or her milky breath, was so overpowering it almost doubled Kate over. Of course, babies were around the hospital every day, but this day, the day she returned to work, they seemed to be everywhere.
She caught the elevator to her floor, and as soon as the doors opened, she heard the shouting. She hurried down the corridor, following the noise. She found Alice Stanhope trying to lever herself out of bed while shouting at Sonja, who stood across the room from her.
“Alice!” Kate said. “What are you doing?”
Alice looked over at her and exhaled. “I’m discharging myself.”
“What?” Kate put down her bag on the chair and went to Alice’s side. “What’s happened?”
“She”—Alice stabbed her finger toward Sonja—“put my daughter into foster care. She spent the night there. Sonja says she’ll stay there as long as I’m in here. So I’m leaving. Right now.”
Kate looked at Sonja.
“I met Zoe yesterday,” she said, “and I had a number of concerns about her staying home by herself. I called the Children and Family Services and they agreed. Zoe couldn’t name any friends or family members she could stay with so we placed her in a lovely foster home. She can stay there for a few more nights while Alice remains in the hospital and then she’ll—”
“Zoe has never spent a full night out of her own home in her life,” Alice interrupted. “It doesn’t matter how lovely this home is, she will be traumatized. Besides, I haven’t even met this person.”
Kate wondered about this. A fifteen-year-old who had never spent a night away from home?
“She is perfectly safe at home,” Alice continued. “Do you think I would take any risks with my own daughter?”
“Alice, she didn’t have the details of any adults to call in case of an emergency. She had no idea how to escape in the event of a fire. She wasn’t answering the phone at all, and she let me inside with only the slightest prompting. Then she had a panic attack,” Sonja said.
“Because you told her I had cancer!”
Sonja blushed. “I apologize for that. Truly. I assumed Zoe knew and—”
“Why would you assume that?”
Kate listened as they argued back and forth, each exchange more heated. Both women made good points. There was no doubt that it would be traumatic for a teenage girl to be torn from her home, especially when dealing with the illness of her mother. But Zoe was clearly not fit to stay home alone. Finally when there was a lull, Kate said, “Where is Zoe now?”
“She’s at school,” Sonja said, exhaling.
“And after school?”
Sonja looked shamefaced. “Judy, her foster carer, will pick her up.”
“Actually she won’t,” Alice said. “I will. Because I’m leaving.”
“You can’t,” Kate and Sonja said at once.
“Well Zoe is not spending another night in foster care.” Alice thought for a moment. “Look … what if we put a cot next to my bed, here? Zoe can stay here with me tonight.”
Sonja was already shaking her head. There was no way the hospital would allow that. But she also saw from Alice’s expression that she was about to lose her cool.
“What if Zoe stayed with me?” Kate blurted out. “I have the space. I mean, would that be better, for Zoe, than foster care? I don’t live far away and I can bring her back here in the morning when I start my shift.”
This silenced both women for a moment.
“That’s very kind of you,” Sonja said. “But we have protocol to make sure everyone is properly vetted, trained in things such as first aid, background-checked—”
“My husband and I have both had background checks,” Kate said. They’d had to do that in order to do IVF. “Obviously I don’t need first-aid training.”
“Still,” Sonja said, looking quite uncertain now. “It would need to be family or a close friend for us to consider this.”
Alice, Kate noticed, was watching her curiously. Kate could tell she was considering her offer, even if only to spite Sonja.
After a minute Alice looked back at Sonja. “Kate’s a close friend if I say she is.”
Sonja started to speak but Alice was looking at Kate.
“One night,” she said.
“Alice,” Kate protested, “you need to stay for at least—”
“One night.”
Kate nodded. It was, she figured, the best she could do.
But Sonja was still talking. “I’ll have to speak to CFS about this,” she muttered, turning to leave.
“Give them my regards,” Alice called after her. She turned to Kate and raised an eyebrow. “And my good friend Kate’s.”
And it was the strangest thing: As Sonja walked out of the room, Kate had a surprising urge to laugh.
*
“David? It’s me.”
Kate was huddled in the kitchenette behind the nurses’ station, her phone pressed to her ear.
“How’s the first day back so far?” he said at the same time as she said, “Listen, I need to talk to you.”
They both laughed. But inside Kate was wondering when they got so out of sync with each other.
“You go,” David said.
“Okay well, my day has been … interesting so far. One of my patients, Alice, is a single mother, and her teenage daughter has somehow ended up in foster care. Alice is freaking out, understandably, and threatening to check herself out of the hospital, but she just had major surgery and there’s no way she can do that. I know this sounds strange, but I … I offered to have her daughter stay with us tonight.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised.
“I know I should have checked with you first. I just wanted to help and it was the only solution I could come up with on the spur of the moment. Is it all right with you?”
“Well, I mean, sure,” he said. After the miscarriage, he was probably willing to say anything to keep her happy.
“How old is she?”
“She’s fifteen.”
“All right. Scarlett’s staying at Hilary’s tonight but Jake will be here and he’s bringing some buddies back to watch the game so there’ll be some other young people around.”
Kate paused. After what Alice had explained to her about Zoe, she got the sense that the fewer people who were at home, the better. But David had misinterpreted her pause.
“I know you’re still down about this whole baby thing,” he said. “I want to make it up to you.”
There was something about the way he said it—this whole baby thing—that irritated her. Kate wanted to tell him that actually the only thing he could do to make it up to her was give her a baby. Instead she choked it back, thanked him again, and hung up the phone.
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