Evening Street

 

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I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

—T.S. Eliot

 

It was a good place to go at the end of a long and complicated workday. Not because it was a happy place—God knows it could never be that—but because it instantly sucked all the self-pity out of you, and the petty complaints and minor frustrations, too.

Step through the door and they disappeared. Just like that.

This place was—this place had to be—about other people. It forcibly eliminated the self-indulgence of introspection. And for Belfa Elkins, who looked too long and too often into her own soul, yet had always felt unable to stop, this place was a bracing tonic and a stern corrective. She would never have described it that way out loud, but that was what it was. It provided a rugged sort of solace, and it restored perspective. It cleaned the slate. It cleared her head.

It was called Evening Street.

This was the place where they treated the babies who were born addicted to narcotics. Their mothers were addicts, and a nasty little corollary to addiction was that when you had a baby growing inside you, the baby came along for the ride. The baby had no choice. She was addicted, too. Before that new human being had even crossed the threshold of her mother's body and emerged into the world, she was saddled with a grievous burden.

The year before, the Raythune County Medical Center had run out of space in the neonatal intensive care unit because of all the babies born addicted to opioid painkillers. More and more and more. Each year, the number rose. Addicts' babies were crowding out the babies born with other needs, other maladies.

The solution had come from Henry Smathers, a retired tobacco broker who'd made his fortune from another kind of addiction. Compared to pain pills, cigarettes seemed courtly, benign. They were hardly benign. But they did their damage stealthily, over the long haul. It was easy to ignore it. For a while.

Smathers donated a yellow-brick warehouse that his company no longer used. The warehouse was located at the far end of one of the scruffy side streets of Acker's Gap, West Virginia, a long stretch of empty storefronts and heaved-up sidewalks and burnt-out streetlights known as Evening Street. Smathers also paid to have it remodeled into a specialized medical facility, a clinic that would treat the newborn babies who suffered from the effects of their mothers' addiction. This is where Bell went at the end of her workday, whenever she could.

“Hey, there,” said Lily Cupp. She said it softly. She was the head nurse here, and in her arms she was holding an impossibly tiny infant swaddled in a light yellow blanket. The baby's eyes were closed. He opened his mouth over and over again, like a frantic goldfish missing the water, but he wasn't crying.

“Hey,” Bell replied.

It was 7:20
P.M
. Bell had just arrived in the large square room dotted with basinets. Each small bed was connected to stacked rows of talkative monitors and serious-looking equipment. The overhead lights in the drop ceiling were dim, so that the infants wouldn't have to squint up into the harsh glare, but the space was still well illuminated by the lights on the machines.

Bell had walked over here from the Raythune County Courthouse. At the checkpoint just inside the front door, the guard, a burly man named Delbert Ryerson, had given Bell the once-over, paying particular—and particularly disgusting—attention to her breasts, and then waved her on through. He'd pushed a button under the desk to release the lock. Ryerson's head was as thick and fibrous-looking as a root vegetable, and his tiny gold spectacles were almost lost amid the folds and pinched-fat creases of his face. He was, Bell recalled, related to somebody. Somebody with influence. That's how he'd gotten this job. Such was the usual hiring routine in these parts, she knew; the very few new jobs that ever popped up were almost always spoken for, earmarked for somebody's brother-in-law. She even called it that: the Brother-in-Law Factor. Ryerson might have been qualified for security work, but if he was, you could chalk that up to sheer coincidence. The Brother-in-Law Factor was the salient reality that had netted him this job. Not competence.

On her way in, Bell turned her cell to vibrate. Lily strictly enforced that rule. The infants needed calm and quiet. They also needed—more than medicine, perhaps, more than machines—skin-to-skin contact.

“This is Abraham,” Lily said, holding up the tiny bundle. “Two days old. Abe, say hi to Belfa Elkins. She's our prosecuting attorney. Don't get into any mischief if she's around—that's my advice, mister.”

Bell leaned in to look. The infant resembled a famished old man. His wrinkled skin was an odd gray color. It was the shade of a newspaper left out in a rainstorm.

Abraham began to shake violently. At first, Lily tried to hold him steady, but it wasn't working; the child's shaking intensified. And then, even more suddenly, the shaking stopped. His tiny head reared backwards, and his limbs froze in place.

“Can I do something?” Bell said.

Lily ignored her. She walked quickly across the floor and settled Abraham in his basinet. She prepared an IV.

Someone else spoke. “He's having a seizure.”

Bell turned. She hadn't seen the second nurse approaching, and the sentence took her by surprise.

“It's pretty common,” the nurse added. “With these babies, it happens all the time.”

Bell nodded. “I know. Unfortunately, I've seen it before. I come by as often as I can.” She put out a hand. “You're new. I don't think we've met. I'm Bell Elkins.”

“Oh, right. Lily told me about you. The prosecutor, right? I'm Angie Clark.”

“How long have you worked here?”

The woman looked down at her wristwatch. “About four and a half hours.”

“Wow—you really
are
new.”

“Yeah, first day on the job. There's a lot of turnover. Some people just can't take it—watching newborns suffer like this, from all the drugs they've been exposed to in the womb. You feel so helpless. So useless. But I guess you know that. You've seen it yourself, visiting regular like you do.”

The nurse was about thirty, Bell guessed. She had sallow skin, short straight dark hair, red glasses, and a solid, thick-thighed physique. Her blue scrubs were about one size too small for her.

“I have,” Bell said.

“Want to sit?” Angie gestured toward the row of black folding chairs along one wall of the large room. “Lily might be a while. Abe's got serious problems. Diarrhea. Irritability. Dehydration. He can't sleep, either. I know it's a terrible thing to say, but sometimes I think he'd be better off if—” She bunched up her mouth into a tidy frown, letting silence finish the thought for her. Then she sighed a grave and heavy sigh. All of it struck Bell as theatrical. There was something about this new nurse that she didn't much like.

Bell walked over and sat down in one of the chairs. Angie went with her. There were several rocking chairs on the opposite side of the room, and that was where Bell usually spent her time when she was here; Lily would pick out an infant and bring her or him over, settling the child in Bell's arms. Bell would rock back and forth, humming, talking softly to the wizened lozenge of flesh, flesh that might be black or white or brown. Mostly she murmured vague words of encouragement such as “There's a good girl” or “You're going to grow up to be big and strong and smart, aren't you,” but sometimes Bell ran out of words. If the day had been long and demanding, if she'd had to spend a lot of it talking, she couldn't find any more words. She felt as if she'd used them all up. She needed to say something, though, because it was important for the babies to hear loving human voices, and so Bell would revert to sentences she knew as well as she knew her own name, adding softeners at the end of a curt phrase: “You have the right to remain silent, you precious thing, you. If you give up that right, anything you say can and will be used against you, punkin. In a court of law, sweetie.”

At the moment, though, Lily was too busy with Abraham to set her up in a rocking chair with another infant. Bell would have to wait.

“Hope I'm not keeping you from your work,” Bell said to the new nurse.
Because I'd rather you just went away,
she added to herself, wishing she had the guts—and the bad manners—to say it out loud.

“Oh, no problem. I'm on a break,” Angie replied breezily. She thumped down in the adjacent seat. “And I needed it, you know what I mean? We've been swamped today. We got two more this morning. A little girl named Marie Christine and a boy named Tyler. Funny—these mothers always have the names all picked out. They practically inhale those drugs and they guzzle alcohol all through their pregnancies, and it's pretty obvious they don't give a shit about anything but the next party—but by golly, they know what they're going to name that baby, don't they? First and middle.” She could speak freely because none of the mothers was present now.

When an expectant mother going into labor admitted her drug dependency, the paramedics automatically brought her to Evening Street for the birth, so that treatment for the addicted newborn could begin right away. Not every mother acknowledged her problem up front; sometimes the baby's addiction was discovered only after the birth. Even then, some mothers still denied that they'd ever used drugs. They would feign shock and astonishment at the news that their child exhibited symptoms of drug addiction. Even with evidence so brutal and absolute, right there before them—a sick, trembling, vomiting, severely underweight newborn with mottled skin and with a preloaded sadness embedded in the eyes—some mothers would still rant and scream and claim they were clean. It was the doctor who'd hurt the baby, they'd insist. Had to be. It was the doctor, dammit. And that witch of a nurse.
I'm going to sue. I'm going to
own
this fucking place and all of you fucking fuckers. You watch me.