The baby is gone for fifteen minutes. Maybe less.
The new access control system does its job, the Code Amber careening loud and shivery through every intercom, and all in all, the affair is neat and abbreviated—a disappointment to the med school gunners looking for a war story. A relief to everyone else. Security catches the old woman from the telemetry ward hiding in the Morristown Medical Center basement, curled up between two HVAC furnaces, clutching the swaddled infant to her chest like a rugby ball. The old woman from the telemetry ward is not well. Not right, the radiology techs upstairs will whisper. Her teeth are ground down to half-mast; her EKG leads are spaghetti-ing out of her gown. She is sitting in a wide straddle, one that implies creaturely flexibility, and the security guards who find her have to lift their chins and blur their eyes to avoid a tufty staredown with her crotch.
The baby is alive and not crying.
The baby, sixteen hours old, unnamed and unmothered, is content to rest its head on the fleshed-over hump of the woman’s pacemaker. It’s staring up at her with eyes that have the gloss and color of motor oil. It’s smiling, some nurses upstairs will whisper. Definitely smiling. Then again, others will rebut; it’s always difficult to tell when their little faces are still so raw and pink and fresh.
Upstairs, the baby’s father is notified. His name is Paul. His wife is dead. For fifteen minutes, it seemed his baby was just as irretrievably gone. Paul’s U2 tee feels crusted to his chest with sweat that has poured from him, dried up, poured from him, and dried up again. He is the only member of his immediate family who has not been covered in blood today. And yet, in the grand scheme of things, Paul feels as if he’s winning the great game of agony, seeing that his wife is dead and his baby is a baby.
He is wrong.
Ten years later, the baby, a child now, Sam now, remains at the Morristown Medical Center. He’s on the third floor—the westmost unit. The unit no one really likes to think about. The one with the rounded edges and the impressive doors. The one that is brought to mind when the supply guy with the boxes of youth-sized ankle monitors rolls through the lobby, and everyone keeps their head down.
The whole hospital knows Sam. The janitors, the unit clerks, the surgeons. Sam is the baby from the basement, the killing baby.
Oh, please, scoff the old-school nurses, twirling their keychains, tapping their immaculate white clogs. That’s a nasty fable.
The mother retained the placenta, bled out in maternity, the new grads whisper to each other later. Then the kid got snatched from the nursery by a heart failure patient. They found the lady in the basement, with the baby, who was all cooey and weird, even for a baby. An hour later ,the lady arrested. Two weeks later, the father had a massive STEMI. The boy lived with his grandmother for three years, and then her heart gave out, too. Well, her lungs, really—emphysema, really—but still. He was with fosters and two of their other kids randomly developed asthma. He’s been here since last year, after he ran away with his fosters’ cat. He only eats red things and only speaks in six-word sentences. He’s not well. Not right. Upstairs, on the unit, Sam is eating lukewarm tomato soup.
Sam says, to a behavior tech, “Get me a cherry Italian ice.”
The tech, who has a subtle thickening in her left ventricle that won’t cause any problems for another month or so, until it topples her in the Taco-Tastic off Route 3, obliges. Sam wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He eyes the nearest nurse, who is at the other end of the table, distracted by the mean bulimic from Pittsgrove. The nurse is old. She will go down easily. The security guards will be changing shifts in ninety-three seconds. Sam goes over the schematics in his head.
The maternity ward is right across the floor.
The cherry Italian ices are buried in the bottom of the freezer.
Sam stands up. Smiling red.
There is a baby in the nursery, an hour old, with eyes the color of motor oil.