Look Again - Lisa Scottoline [3]
She’d been doing a story on nurses in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit at Dupont Hospital in Wilmington, and Will was in the CICU being treated for a ventricular septal defect, a hole in his septum. He lay at the end of the sunny unit, a tiny boy in a diaper, in an institutional crib with high white bars. He was undersized, failing to thrive, and it made his head a bobblehead doll’s on a bony frame. His large blue eyes were his most prominent feature, and he took in everything around him, except people. He never made or held eye contact with anyone, which Ellen later learned could be a sign of neglect, and his was the only crib with no plush toys or colorful mobiles attached to the bars.
He was between heart operations when she first saw him—the first procedure was to patch the hole with a Dacron graft, and the second to repair the graft when one of the stitches came loose—and he lay silently, never crying or whimpering, surrounded by monitors that relayed his vital signs to the nurses in glowing red, green, and blue numbers. So many tubes led to him that he appeared to be tethered; an oxygen tube was taped in place under his nose, a feeding tube disappeared into a nostril, and a clear tube popped grotesquely from the center of his naked chest, emptying fluids into a plastic canister. His IV snaked to his hand, where it ended, adhesive-taped to a board and topped by half of a plastic cup, jury-rigged to make sure he didn’t pull it free. Unlike the other babies, Will never tried.
Ellen kept doing research for the story and found herself visiting Will more frequently than necessary. The story became a series, and the angle changed from the nurses to the babies, among them, Will. But amid the cooing, gurgling, and crying babies, it was the silent one who held her attention. She wasn’t allowed to approach his crib because of CICU regulations, but she would watch him from a short distance, though he always looked away at the blank white wall. Then one morning, his eyes found her, locking in and latching on, their blue as deep as the sea. They shifted away, but after that stayed on her longer and longer, connecting with her in a way she began to sense was heart to heart. Later, when everyone asked why she’d wanted to adopt him, she would answer:
It was the way he looked at me.
Will never had any visitors, and one of the mothers, who had a baby girl awaiting a heart transplant, told Ellen that his mother was a young girl, unwed, who hadn’t even seen him after his first operation. Ellen followed up with his caseworker, who investigated and told her that adoption was a possibility, and she’d gone home that night, elated and unable to sleep. She’d been elated ever since, and in the past two years had come to realize that even though Will wasn’t born to her, she was born to be his mother.
Her gaze fell again on the white card, and she set it aside, feeling a pang of sympathy for the Braverman family. She couldn’t imagine how any parent lived through such an ordeal, or how she would cope if someone kidnapped Will. A few years ago, she’d done a piece in which a father had kidnapped his children after a custody dispute, and she toyed with the idea of calling the mother, Susan Sulaman, and doing a follow-up. She had to keep the story ideas coming if she wanted to keep her job, and it would give her an excuse to meet with her new editor, Marcelo Cardoso, a sexy Brazilian who’d come to the paper a year ago, having left behind the L.A. Times and a model girlfriend. Maybe a single mother would make a nice change, and if he’d seen enough of the fast lane, she could show him the checkout lane.
Ellen felt a smile spread across her face, which was embarrassing even though the only witness was a cat. She used to think she was too smart to crush on her boss, but Marcelo was Antonio Banderas with a journalism degree. And it had been too long since the man in her life was older than three. Her old boyfriend had told her she was a “handful,” but Marcelo could handle a handful. And a handful was the only woman worth