The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [49]
“If only—” she began one afternoon.
“Stop, Tess,” Crow said, taking her hand. This time she listened. She was sitting in one of the rocking chairs placed among the Isolettes. Carla Scout had been here almost a month. Halloween, Thanksgiving, her official due date had come and gone. Tess’s stitches had dissolved, she had pumped gallons of breast milk, hoping she might one day feed her own child. But for now the baby lived in this Isolette. Back home, the leaves had fallen and Stony Run Park was so stark and bare that Tess could see through to the other side—all the way to Blythewood Road. Blythewood. Blithe Wood. A pretty name for a pretty street where two exceedingly ugly people had lived. But she had been the blithe one, thinking she controlled everything.
Spouses can’t be compelled to testify, but there’s no law against volunteering to do so, and the Epsteins proved quite eager to trade allegations. She killed Mary Epstein. He kept two sets of books, bilked his own company, and killed Danielle when she found out. She stole her sister’s jewelry and Annette’s, too. No, he’s the one who had the jewelry all along. Tess wished there were a system in which the two of them could be locked up forever, with only each other’s company. That would be justice. Instead, Don pleaded to twenty years, while Carole was holding out for a trial in Mary Epstein’s death. It couldn’t be proved that she pushed her sister down the stairs, and even if she had sickened Annette with antibiotic-laden muffins, they weren’t the cause of her death. Frankly, Tess thought someone should go back and look at the car accident that had taken the lives of Carole’s parents. She wouldn’t put anything past the woman.
But she had no room in her head for the Epsteins, not anymore. Everything was the baby—the sad, silent journey back and forth to Hopkins, the empty evenings, the spike of fear every time a phone rang. She let her father work on the nursery because it was clearly his way of coping, but it depressed her, watching the room take shape. The days dragged by. Some families triumphed and took their children home. New families arrived to take their place. And some families—well, some families, she just didn’t want to think about.
“I’ve seen much sicker babies than yours get better,” the nurse told Tess. The nurses were goddesses in NICU, the ones the parents trusted. Tess asked them again and again: “Did I do this to my baby?” They always said no. She wanted to believe them.
After the hemorrhage, the doctors had hustled Tess and Crow into a place the parents called the Room. The Room was like something out of a Stephen King novel, a perfectly bland conference room where the most horrible things happened. Unearthly sounds, inhuman sounds, emanated from the Room. The day they took Tess and Crow to the Room, the doctors were quite gentle. No, it wasn’t good that she had hemorrhaged. But it was only a two on a four-point scale. They had seen babies suffer much worse and go on to lead full and normal lives.
“Did I do this to my baby?” Tess asked.
The doctor said no, that her premature labor was a godsend. Her placenta had failed, something absolutely outside her control, the baby had stopped getting nourishment. An emergency C-section would have been ordered after Tess’s next ultrasound. She didn’t believe him.
Christmas zipped by, then New Year’s, squares on a calendar. Tess’s laptop was restored to life, but she seldom turned it on.
On the first Monday in January, she and Crow showed up at the hospital—and were taken to the Room again. She reached for Crow’s hand; it was slick with sweat.
“I want to tell you,” their doctor said, “that I think Carla Scout is ready to go home. You’ll need oxygen and a monitor—”
“She’s going home?” Tess asked. “Just like that?” She didn’t know it was possible to get good news in the Room. She didn’t trust it.
“We’re pretty good at what we do here,” the doctor said. “Think of it this way. She was six weeks early. She’s going home only a few