Caution! Cute Baby Alert! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Chief of Staff

Della tears the check, goes to Lakeshore General for her chart, and the guard greets the driver as Mr. Pendelton.

I tore the check in half.

Then I tore the halves in half, and let the pieces fall on her pale stone steps.

Two gardeners had stopped trimming the hedge to watch.

"Keep your ten thousand dollars," I said. "I want to know how you spelled my middle name."

Constance Pendelton looked at the paper on her steps.

"Pendelton Foundation keeps records on everyone who has come to our desk," she said. "You came once. Years ago."

"I did," I said. "Seven months pregnant. I left my name and number for the man in a black mask. Nobody ever called."

"A great many people leave numbers."

"Not with a middle name you've spelled right."

"Mommy," Polly said.

"Polly, go inside."

"But she's my mommy."

"Inside. Now."

A nurse in gray scrubs appeared from nowhere and took the child by the hand.

Polly looked back at me over her shoulder the whole way up the steps.

She mouthed something.

It looked like call me.

I walked down the long drive alone.

The gate opened without anyone touching it.

I stopped at the road and held the bracelet up to the light.

I had been twenty-two.

I had walked into Lakeshore General at thirty-nine weeks with a bag, a library card and nobody to call.

I remembered a bleed.

I remembered a nurse's warm hand, a doctor's calm voice, a sharp pinch in my arm.

Then it was two days later, and I was lying in a bed with a different nurse, who was crying.

They had told me the baby didn't make it.

They had shown me a form.

I had been too sedated to read it, and too broken to ask for it back.

Now, at twenty-eight, I took the bus to the hospital and walked to the records window.

I had never asked for my chart in six years.

I'd been afraid of what I'd find.

"Sealed," the clerk said, tapping her keyboard. "That's flagged by administration. You'll have to see the chief of staff."

"I'll wait."

I didn't have to wait long.

A man in a white coat came down the corridor with his hand already out.

He had silver glasses and a very gentle face.

It was the face of somebody who had given a lot of bad news and meant every word of sympathy.

"Miss Foley," he said. "I'm Dr. Lyle. I was your obstetrician."

I knew his voice before I knew his face.

It was the one from the night of the bleed.

"You told me my baby was gone," I said.

"I'm so sorry. I did. I think about you often."

"Do you."

"Yes. Come into my office."

I followed him to a small room that smelled of coffee, and he sat me down and laid a thin folder in front of me.

"Stillborn," he said, softly. "You'd had a hard bleed. We tried everything. I signed the record myself."

I looked at the form.

It was a death record, with a time and a date.

I read it, and read it again.

The time was 3:50 a.m.

I remembered pushing at 5:40.

I remembered it because there was a clock over the door.

And I'd stared at it through the whole last hour, praying for the numbers to change.

"Dr. Lyle," I said. "Is this right?"

"It is the record."

"But I wasn't delivered at 3:50."

For a half second his eyes changed.

Then they were kind again.

"Memory is unreliable in trauma," he said. "I would be very careful about reopening this, Miss Foley. For your own sake."

"Why does a hospital send a child with my bracelet to my baby's grave?"

His hand, on the desk, went still.

"I beg your pardon?"

A voice cut through the door before I could answer.

"Della!"

A small blazer came barreling down the corridor and wrapped itself around my legs.

Polly's curls were wild and she was out of breath.

"I told Nate I had a dentist," she said, panting. "I did not have a dentist. I came to find you."

Behind her, in the corridor, a man in a gray jacket and a cap stood absolutely still.

He was looking at Dr. Lyle.

Dr. Lyle was looking at him.

Neither of them said anything for a long beat, and it was not the look of two strangers.

I picked Polly up.

I walked out of the office past both of them, toward the glass doors of the Pendelton Wing.

The strange man followed a step behind me.

A security guard at the entrance, a big older man, straightened up and touched two fingers to his forehead.

"Good morning, Mr. Pendelton," he said.

The man in the cap closed his eyes.

I stopped walking.

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