Evening Street (2 page)

But when the mother's addiction was known in advance, she was brought to Evening Street. There were two rooms in the back of the facility that served as mini-ERs, where the on-call obstetrician would do her work. Afterwards, the mothers were ferried back to the main hospital. They could visit their children in a day or so, once the immediate medical crisis was over.

Sometimes, Bell knew, the mothers didn't show up back here at all. Ever. It wasn't that they didn't love their babies. She'd never believe that. They didn't come, because they were ashamed of what they'd done. Ashamed to touch their babies. They were deeply regretful about the suffering they had inflicted upon a guileless child, and the permanent deficits with which that child would now have to reckon. Often, the mothers didn't know how to handle the intense, overwhelming emotion—the gut-punch of self-loathing—that joined with the usual hormonal surge following childbirth. They couldn't look at the living results of their selfishness.

So they did what they'd always done: They panicked. They did whatever they could do to hide from those feelings. And they ran.

“What's the deal with Abraham?” Bell asked.

Angie shook her head. “Poor kid. Lily says he's one of the worst cases she's seen in a long while. The father's a worthless scumbag. The mother's a wreck—she bounced back and forth between OxyContin and black tar heroin during most of her pregnancy. Future's pretty bleak for that kid. Sometimes you wonder if he might be better off if he didn't—” Angie shuddered. “If we could just get these women to
listen.
”

Bell nodded. She'd had the same desire. Sometimes you wanted to shake the addicted mothers, to get in their faces and scream and threaten.
You've got a child to care for. A human being that you created. You've got to take some responsibility.

But that never worked. If she got to know Angie Clark better, she'd explain it to her: No amount of shaming did the trick. Leave the intervention to the experts—the doctors and the social workers. The focus at Evening Street had to be on the infant.

There were times when the county was forced to file suit to have a child removed from the mother's custodial care. Child Protective Services would present the evidence, and Bell signed off on the order. Some mothers acquiesced without a fight; others grew combative. On certain days, Delbert Ryerson had his hands full out in the lobby, trying to keep an angry, guilt-gripped mother away from the very sick child she'd just given birth to, while the court completed its investigation. Fathers, too, had been known to show up here, fists held high, fire in their eyes, demanding that the Evening Street nurses hand over their kids.

But that's not why Bell came by here as often as she did. She didn't come as a prosecutor. She came to hold the infants for an hour or two, and to move gently back and forth in a rocking chair while she held them. She came to offer them, inside the circle of her arms, for as long as she could, a safe place.

“So how will you do it?” Bell said. “Deal with everything you'll be seeing here, I mean.”

Angie shrugged. “I worked in oncology before this. At a hospital over in Charleston. I got used to lost causes, you know?” She thought about her answer, and amended it. “But this is different. Grant you that. I mean, cancer comes, and it's sad. You can't do much about it. Not with kids. It's not like adults who get lung cancer because they've smoked four hard packs of Marlboros every day since 1979. Or pancreatic cancer from drinking a six-pack every night. No, with cancer, the kids are the innocent victims of fate.” She stirred in her seat, rearranging herself. “With this—with these kids born addicted to drugs—fate's in the clear. It's the mothers who are to blame. And the fathers, too. Let's not forget the fathers. I mean, a lot of these guys, they know what the woman's doing. They see her using, all during her pregnancy. And they don't do a damned thing to stop her, even when she's pregnant. Because they don't want to lose their drug buddy, you know? Then the kid's born—and all the sudden, Daddy's mad as hell at the mother. Because of what
she's
done to
his
child. I've seen some fathers cuss out their women, just rip 'em a new one, right in the middle of the maternity ward, for all the world to hear. Calling them every bad name in the book. It's scary as hell, all that out-of-control ranting and raving and threatening. Can't imagine the emotional impact that has on a child. You know what? Some of these folks don't deserve to be parents.”

Angie stood up. Bell had been listening so intently, and thinking so deeply about the words she was hearing, that the sudden motion startled her.

“Back to work,” Angie said. “I don't like to sit around, but Lily insists on break time. She says we have to get away for a few minutes every couple of hours. To keep us going.”

“She's right.”

No one could endure the steady diet of sadness that was endemic to the work here at Evening Street, Bell knew. She'd discussed it with Lily. Breaks were not just a good idea; they were as essential as oxygen. And because Bell had been coming so long, she knew what lay upon this night's horizon: Abraham would receive a dose of methadone. The drug was necessary to lessen his withdrawal symptoms. Abe was paying the price for the drug dependency his mother had given him, just as surely as she'd given him her blue eyes and her snub nose.

Bell remembered the first time she'd seen Lily administer methadone. It seemed, on the face of it, unimaginably cruel and counterintuitive: to put into the body the kind of substance that had done the damage in the first place. But it was the only option. Without the drug, the child would be going cold turkey, in effect, and the shock to the system could be lethal.

The procedure had often struck Bell as a bleak metaphor for the prosecutor's role in a place like Acker's Gap: Sometimes you had to do harsh things in order to achieve desirable ends. Ugliness and beauty shared the same road around here. Anguish and joy traveled side by side, and sometimes, in the dark places that lived between the mountains, it was hard to tell them apart.

*   *   *

“Time for you to take it easy, okay?”

Bell smiled at Lily, who had just spoken to her. In the hour and a half since she arrived here, Bell had rocked two infants and then stood over the basinet of a third, singing fragments of a soft, lilting song that she half-remembered from her own childhood—something about a little green frog. The child in the basinet was gravely ill. Lily had told Bell about her, about how she'd been left on the doorstep of the Rising Souls Baptist Church in Acker's Gap, just two blocks from here, the day before, and was discovered at sunrise by the minister, the Reverend Stanley Cholly. So that's what he decided to call the infant: Sunny. For the light that surrounded her when she was found. The first time he saw her, Cholly said, she was swaddled in sunlight.

No note, no clues, nothing to indicate where Sunny had come from. She was terribly dehydrated, and the withdrawal symptoms of the drug addiction from which her unknown mother clearly suffered had already caused such violent seizures that Sunny's brain activity was affected. At this point, there was little chance that Sunny would survive. “But no matter how long she has,” Lily had said to Bell earlier that night, “she's in a place where she's cared for, and where somebody is singing to her.”

Bell had nodded. She tried to recall the songs she'd sung to Carla, her own daughter, all those years ago when Carla was a little girl. The frog song—did she remember enough of the lyrics to sing it to Sunny? Well, the words didn't really matter. She'd hum the tune and make up words to cover the places where her memory was sketchy.

Now Lily had come up alongside Bell. “I'm serious,” the nurse said. “I want you to go over there for a while, okay? You've been doing too much tonight. You usually don't stay this long, Bell. You know the drill—you have to pace yourself.”

Bell patted the hand that Lily had placed on her shoulder. It was the same speech she'd often given to her assistant prosecutors, Hickey Leonard and Rhonda Lovejoy. You had to take care of yourself first, or you'd be of no use to the people you were trying to help.

“Can you join me?” Bell asked.

“Sure. Let me tell Angie she's on her own for a couple of minutes. Meet you over at the rocking chairs.”

Bell watched Lily move across the room. She was a tall, lean woman in her early fifties who'd let her short hair go gray without a fight. She had the largest hands that Bell had ever seen on a woman, yet they didn't look odd or excessively masculine; they looked like the efficient instruments they were, as she used them to transfer infants from gurneys to basinets, wrangle mobile X-ray units into place, enter data into an iPad with quick-fingered ease.

“So,” Lily said, settling into the chair beside Bell. “How're things over at the courthouse?”

“About like here. Busy for all the wrong reasons.”

Lilly smiled. It was a tired, rueful smile, but it was still a smile. “Figures.” She stretched out her arms, and then her legs, holding the stretch before relaxing back against the chair. “Got a call this morning from a TV station over in Charleston. They're doing another series on the prescription drug problem in Appalachia. They want to send over a reporter to interview me about the clinic and the neonatal addiction issue.” She paused. “Rule still applies, right?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so.”

When Bell first began dropping in at the Evening Street clinic, she had sought Lily's promise that the visits would remain confidential. Not secret—Bell walked through the front door when she came, and if asked, she didn't lie about where she was going—but well out of the spotlight. She didn't require compliments for the fact that she sometimes spent her free time rocking drug-addicted babies to sleep. The prosecutor's post was an elected office, and Bell didn't want anyone to think she did this as a photo op. The idea was repulsive to her.

“Frankly, though, I don't mind the attention,” Lily went on. “After a story like that airs, I'm told, we always get a bunch of new donations. Not that I'm implying,” she said hurriedly, “that you should participate in publicity.”

“Wouldn't matter if you
were
implying it. You'd still get a no. But I'm glad there's a positive outcome.” Bell changed the subject. “So. Abraham's mother. Any idea why she named him that?”

“She did mention it. She'd just given birth here. I pushed her sweaty hair out of her face and she looked down at the child in her arms and she sort of giggled and said, ‘I've always wanted a son named Abraham. Dreamed of it, even. It's so dignified. Makes him sound real important, right from the start.'” Lily shook her head. “I was mighty tempted to say, ‘Really? And just when did you have that particular dream, lady? During the time you were cramming narcotics into your mouth so fast that you almost choked on 'em? Was it then?' But I didn't say that. I didn't say anything like that. I just said, ‘He's beautiful.' Because you know what, Bell? He is. Even with all his problems, he is.”

Bell let a length of time go by. “Sounds like I need to bring in Child Protective Services to make an evaluation.”

Lily let a longer length of time go by. “Maybe. I'll let you know.” The delay in beginning the process that would allow the court to take custody of Abraham from his birth mother and put him into foster care had nothing to do with any optimism that she might suddenly acquire maturity and responsibility, or stop using drugs for good. Instead the hesitation came from the reality—acknowledged out loud by neither Lily nor Bell—that, chances were, it was a moot point. Abraham might not last the night.

“Okay,” Bell said. She looked around the large room, a room filled with complex, state-of-the-art equipment, but a room that was, at its core, an exceedingly simple place. The sick were tended to. The dying were comforted. “The coffeepot over there looks almost empty,” Bell said. “I'll start a fresh pot.”

Lily nodded. She put both hands on the knees of her pale blue scrubs, preparatory to pushing herself up and out of the rocker and returning to work. Before she got that far, however, there was a sudden cloudburst of shouting and then a loud rackety crash. It came from the small front lobby, a place hidden behind the locked security door.

“What the hell is—?” Lily said, turning to Bell.

Now an alarm started up. Delbert Ryerson, Bell knew, had a switch rigged to the wall next to his desk.

“Stay here,” Bell said. She moved quickly toward the door, which was kept unlocked from this side for use as an emergency exit. Part of her knew that she should wait; part of her knew that charging into the lobby without knowing exactly what was happening there was foolish and reckless. But this wasn't a bank or a courtroom or a high school, where the people at risk might be able to fend for themselves until the authorities arrived on the scene. This was a hospital, and the occupants here were so totally and absolutely vulnerable that she had to rush forward.

She opened the door. Ryerson, his round face a scary, heart-attack shade of red, was up on his feet. Both pudgy hands were high in the air above his head, exposing the crusty yellow sweat stains under his arms. Ryerson's posture was almost comical. It resembled a tableau of a robbery in the Old West, just after Jesse James bellows, “Hands up!” and heads for the bank vault. The desk chair, knocked on its back with its little wheels still spinning, looked like an animal begging for its belly to be rubbed.

In front of the desk stood a heavy-breathing, black-eyed stranger. He had a hard, yellowish, dry face, a thin mouth circled by a gray-white goatee, and a thick trailing mane of frizzy gray hair. He wore a black leather jacket, tight jeans, and dirty black boots. He was as large as Ryerson, but his bulk was muscle, not fat. He appeared to have no weapon, and his stance suggested agitation, not aggression, which made Bell question the security guard's instant capitulation—as well as the need for the ear-wrecking siren.