Moon Calf

 

Anne Creed

She had security clearance, all right. Most nights she spent teaching girls how to go again after their babies were born, just babies themselves, even the ones from the prison. The guards would stand outside the door, turning the obstetrics hall into a place of caution and silence, not joy like at the other end of the hospital floor. The other end, where women with insurance and freedom and sometimes even husbands, had their babies in big rooms decorated like the Marriott, and then left.

 “Honey, I’m going to run the water now. You listen and try to urinate,” she’d say, then stand in the tiny bathroom and act like she wasn’t there. After they went, she’d show them how to take care of themselves so they’d heal right. The prison girls were no different from the rest of her patients, except they were glad to be in the hospital. Glad for what passed for privacy, glad for what passed for celebration and escape.

 Mozelle had security clearance, all right. They thought she was keeping the girls in. What she was doing was keeping the world out, which with her 185-pound-plus frame and hands big and lively as small dogs, was easy.

 Sometimes she thought about adopting the babies or even the girls herself, taking them all home to her frame house out in the country so they could start out all over again.

 They were all her babies, even the mamas. If she wasn’t too busy, she’d come into their rooms at night and sing to them, sing to them with her big voice that could fill the corners of the room so there wasn’t room for fear or pain, just the knowledge of love, a kind of love some of them hadn’t had. Mozelle could sing, her belly enormous and unashamed and swelling in and out with power like the great instrument she was. Mozelle could sing to them of God. For God. She would sing open the doors of heaven.

 And though she sung loudly and in a hospital, there were never any complaints. Nobody was ever kept up by Mozelle’s voice. There was magic and healing in it. Something lacking in the world.

 Driving to work she’d heard about the murders, heard about the man who killed eight 5-year-old children and their teacher down at the school. He was about to blow his brains out when the police cornered him, too late and too early both. All the so-and-so had to show for his crime was a bullet in his thigh courtesy of the police and a grazed temple where his own gun had missed.

 She hadn’t known why she was summoned to the personnel office. The director of nursing was talking to the DA. She had seen the DA on TV a couple of times. He was shorter in person.

 “You have security clearance?” some strange man asked her, like that meant something other than not having a jail record yourself. The man’s name was something Smith. He had more hair growing out of his ears than anybody she’d ever seen. It was work not to stare.

 “Yes,” Mozelle answered.

 “You worked with prisoners before?” the Smith man continued, trying to put on a performance for the DA who wasn’t paying any attention.

 “Yes,” Mozelle said. “I take care of them all the time.”

 “That’s why I chose her,” said T.R., the nursing supervisor.  T.R. was a former marine who took rules seriously. Mozelle knew he’d be mad to have this intruder looking over his shoulder, like he didn’t know his job.

 The DA frowned at whatever news he was hearing on the phone, and Mozelle watched in fascination as the whole starched cloud that was his hair moved forward over his forehead. He looked at his papers, then whispered something to another man in a suit. The cloud settled back where it started from.

 “Is this all you got, T.R.?” the strange Smith man asked, referring to her like she was furniture, and shabby at that.

 Mozelle’s feet hurt. She wanted to say if I don’t look safe to you, don’t use me. Just let me sit down. But she didn’t say anything. Not even about his ear hair.

 They didn’t want to use her because she was an obstetrical nurse; but a combination of scheduling problems and her good record put her on duty. After years of helping birth babies, she was now going to patch up a baby killer.

 More guards than she’d ever seen stood outside the killer’s door. There were no flowers in the room, not even a worn-out looking carnation from the Daughters of Mercy hospital visitation committee. The prisoner’s chart showed he was long overdue for passing water.

 She looked at him, surprised he looked so ordinary and harmless. He was in his late forties, with narrow shoulders and creases in his ear lobes.

 “I teach girls to pee,” she said to him, holding out a urine collection container by the handle. Drops of water jostled in the bottom; the things were never dry. “I can teach you, too.”

 “I can walk, let me go to the bathroom,” the man said. They said his name was Todd Grant, and he was handcuffed by one wrist and his ankles to the bed.

 “I don’t care if you got wings and can fly, you’re not leaving this bed. You and this bed are one,” Mozelle said, shaking the container at him.

 “I’ll wait,” Todd Grant said.

 “Suit yourself,” Mozelle replied.

 What would make a man do such a thing?  Kill all those 5-year-olds and their teacher?  Mozelle wanted to push his bed out the window to crash down to the pavement six stories below.

 Mozelle usually rinsed out the ice pitcher in the bathroom or took it down the hall, but this time, she stood at the room sink, near Todd Grant’s head, and turned on the water. She rinsed out the pitcher, then left the water running while she went outside the room to get some Jello from the snack delivery cart. She washed her hands, making loud splashes, before turning off the water. She hoped the urgency he was feeling was making him suffer.

 “I brought you something looks like lime Jello. You like lime?”

 “No thanks.”  Todd Grant just stared at the television, which was playing “Wheel of Fortune.”  The clue looked like it was going to turn out to be “Raining Cats and Dogs.”

 Mozelle studied him when she didn’t think he could see her. What would make a man do such a thing?  Todd Grant’s salt-and-pepper hair was in a crew cut; his pinky flesh shown through the short hedge on top. He had a day’s growth of beard, and brown, puffy eyes.

 She didn’t want to be in this room, didn’t want to help this man. Her rage pulled her near, if only to understand why -- or maybe to find some way to fix things. She had a brief fantasy that maybe, if she got friendly with him, he would ask her to help him commit suicide. He had been trying to kill himself when they got him.

 “Quit staring at me,” he said, suddenly turning toward her.

 “A cat can look at the king.”

 “You will go to hell,” he said. “You’re all going to hell.”

 “If I need a tour guide, I know who to call,” Mozelle answered.  She knew she shouldn’t be talking like this to this man; she remembered something about that from her security training class long, long ago. But all this time of working with her girls had erased whatever distance that training had tried to give her. You can’t help somebody have her baby and stay aloof.

 “People have no right to stare,” he ranted.

 “If you didn’t want people staring, you should’ve stayed home,” Mozelle said. “And I’m not staring; I’m looking to see if there’s anything I need to do for you.”

 “Help me get to the bathroom,” he said. “Please.”

 “I handed you the only bathroom you’re getting.”

 He turned back to the TV. When he didn’t answer her second offer of help, she left the room. He didn’t talk to her anymore for the rest of her shift, although she saw he had used the receptacle.

 The children’s funerals were all over the news. Psychologists talked about how parents could help their children feel safe again. The governor and the mayor and the school officials all showed up and pretended to be doing something.

 Mozelle didn’t sleep well; she kept thinking about those children and their parents. Now those were people who were alone and there wasn’t nothing nobody could do for them. Except maybe kill that man, and you just couldn’t kill him enough times for it to do any good.

 The next day the guards in the hall were more sullen than usual. There’d been a problem during the night with one of the dead children’s grandfather trying to get into Todd Grant’s room. Now the grandfather was in jail and Todd Grant was sitting up in bed reading a Bible.

 “Have you read this?” Todd Grant asked her.

 “Most parts,” Mozelle answered as she prepared to change the dressing on his thigh.

 “This is the truth; this is the only thing that matters,” Todd Grant said.

 “If you’re wanting to repent, I’ll get a preacher,” Mozelle said, trying not to talk to this man and trying not to think about ways she could hurt him. She’d already caught herself cutting back on his painkiller, “accidentally” turning back the dosage on his drip.

 “Repent?  I should be glorified!”

 “You killed a bunch of innocent children.”

 “I’ve given them a free ticket to heaven, before they could sin and be denied.”

 Mozelle didn’t know what to say for a minute. Then, finally, “I don’t think that’s what it says in there; or if that’s what it says, it’s not what it means.”

 “A free ticket to heaven.”

 “Who told you you could play God?”  Mozelle said. When he didn’t answer, she left the room, his leg exposed, still undressed.

 She didn’t speak to the guards, not that they looked like they’d talk anyway. She went upstairs to one of the empty rooms in obstetrics and sat in the rocking chair, rocking in the dark.

 He sent those babies to heaven, those sweet babies. Like those babies she helped deliver, and then he came along and took them away. You couldn’t kill that man enough times to make it come out even. You couldn’t do enough to that man. Turning his drip off completely, that’s what she should have done. Put something bad in it. She could have. She knew how.  But now he was making her a murderer like himself.

 She’d have her supervisor take her off of his case. She couldn’t do this. She wanted to pour Clorox on his leg, in his eyes, in his throat. What was he doing to her?

 In the past, when she had trouble with a patient, she’d see them as a baby. See them as their mothers did. But that didn’t work here. The only babies she saw were the faces of the babies she’d seen on TV.

 When she got through crying she started working on a plan.  She was going to sneak Todd Grant out of the hospital in a cart of dirty laundry. She was going to take him home to the country and give him something to care about. Then she was going to take it away. Take it away again and again.

 Mozelle knew it wasn’t really a good idea, knew that she couldn’t think of something to make him care about, even if she could get him out of the hospital. Maybe he cared about something already. Maybe she could find out and take that away. She went back to his room to watch him more carefully.

 The doctor came in to check on the baby killer and said he would be released the next day. At least released from the hospital. Mozelle knew she’d never be able to think of whatever it was she needed to do to make things right in that time, much less carry it off. She found reasons to walk up and down in the hall to think.

 When she went back to Todd Grant’s room to take his temperature and blood pressure, like she was supposed to do every four hours, his lawyers were in there and she couldn’t go in right away.

 “Yeah, think of a way to get him off,” she murmured. “That’s right.”

 That night she made a point of not watching the news. So it wasn’t until the next morning that she found out what had happened to Todd Grant.

 When the grandfather was released from jail, he went straight back to the hospital. This time he got past the guards and stabbed Todd Grant six times in the chest, puncturing one lung three times but missing his heart. Todd Grant was moved to intensive care and hooked up to a ventilator where he lay gasping for life.

 

 Mozelle was reassigned to obstetrics and the nurseries.  Every nurse in that area was encouraged to spend part of each day rocking and holding the infants, especially those who had medical problems and were at risk of “failure to thrive.”

 Mozelle’s supervisor sent her to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where the crack babies, preemies and some of the AIDS babies were. Some of them looked too small to make it, tiny larval humans, impossibly perfect. Mozelle rocked the ones large enough to leave their isolettes one by one, snuggling them to her protective bosom and singing softly in her deep, resonant voice that could fill a church, holding back the power, holding back the rage and turning it into mournful, sweet song. The song her mother had sung to her, “Precious gift, baby mine, sing a song of praise divine....”  These babies didn’t respond; that’s why the supervisor seldom assigned the young nurses who needed to feel appreciated for their work. But Mozelle knew babies, and knew what she was doing mattered.

 She sang to each of them, even the two-pounder named Sylvia who probably wasn’t going to make it and couldn’t be removed from her isolette. Mozelle believed she could sing her alive. She leaned on the isolette so Sylvia could feel the vibrations coming from down deep in her abdomen, coming from down deep in her soul. She reached a gloved hand through the armholes and stroked the baby’s tiny arm, her tiny shoulder. Mozelle sang and the baby squirmed and opened her mouth in a yawn. Mozelle sang and pulled Sylvia’s pink cap down snugly on her head. Mozelle wanted to cry for this baby, but she sang instead, the notes wanting to get bigger, wanting to fill this room but Mozelle kept it down and the music got more powerful, got stronger and grew more quietly intense.  Yes, she would sing this baby alive. Tears came to her eyes, as they often did in this nursery, and she held the fragile child as best she could without disconnecting anything in the plastic contraption that sheltered her from life. Mozelle checked the connections that hooked Sylvia to the clean pure oxygenated air that came from the hospital walls, breathing hope and possibility into new life not yet certain. She tried not to think of the gasping man four floors down, hooked to the same air, hooked to the same clean, pure miracle.

 As she sang, she crowded Todd Grant out of the room, out of the hospital out of her mind. The sound was pure and enormous. Yes, she would sing this baby alive.