Appetite

The holding cell is smaller than Lindsay’s walk-in closet was, in the old apartment, and this seems to her the most important fact about the room — more important than the bolted bench, or the toilet with no lid, or the small window of wired glass. She has already found the correct way to sit on the cell’s bench: spine flat to the wall, ankles crossed at a slight angle, hands stacked in her lap like something laid out for a viewing. It takes her no time to find this position.

A man in overalls swept the corners today. She notices the fan of broom-marks in the concrete dust and feels a small hot gratitude, the kind one might feel toward a stranger who holds a door. A room is either clean or it isn't. She has always believed this, the way other people believe in God, or luck, or themselves.

###

At five-forty each morning Lindsay stood at the locker mirror and did the same three things in the same order — pulled her light blonde ponytail low and tight, checked her front teeth for lipstick, said good morning to no one, to the glass. It was an inventory, the kind of inventory you'd run on a car before a road trip. In college she'd been VP of recruitment for her sorority five years ago, a fact she mentioned to almost no one now, though she still sometimes spoke in its old cadence: bright, itemized, an implacable twang, pitched half a note too high for whatever she was saying.
The floor was quiet that morning. Two in the west bay, one on the vent, both stable. She liked the vent baby's numbers. She liked the small clean arithmetic of them, liked entering the four a.m. reading in her looping hand while the rest of the unit was still trickling underwater through the fog of shift-change.

At seven-forty AM she noticed that Denise had charted a potassium wrong (two digits transposed, an easy mistake, already caught, no harm done) and she mentioned it in front of resident Dr. Kumar, pleasantly, just as a fact. Denise's face did something complicated. Lindsay didn't watch it long enough to name what; she’d have to return to the face later, at her journal, to fully interpret it.
Lindsay ate her yogurt standing at the nurses' station. When Priya asked what she'd done that weekend, she said she'd deep-cleaned her apartment, alphabetized her bookshelf (a task she’d been, embarrassingly, procrastinating), been asleep both nights by nine. All of this was true. Lindsay delivered it brightly, and did not understand, even a little, why Priya's eyes went flat and polite and elsewhere. Lindsay tried to extend the interaction by returning the question, and Priya, stepping away from the station, said simply: “I went out with my friends.”

###

Lindsay held the mother's hand for four minutes and eleven seconds — she would clock it later, replaying the recording of it behind her eyes — before the mother took it back to wipe her nose on the sleeve of a cardigan that had been someone else's a decade earlier, thrifted, unraveling slightly at the cuff, a detail Lindsay had filed the first day this mother had worn it to the NICU. The father sat with his knees together, tight, the way a punished schoolboy might. He had not cried yet, not in front of Lindsay, though his jaw kept clenching and unclenching. Lindsay watched this with the same attention she gave a monitor tracing a slow, worsening postnatal heart rate.

Baby boy Xander had been wrapped in the blue blanket with the ducks, the one they kept for this, and Lindsay had arranged it herself so the seam ran along Xander’s spine instead of across his chest, because a seam across the chest was the wrong aesthetic. She had done this without being asked, without deciding to; her hands had simply known.

She told the mother, in a voice she had built out of a hundred better and worse deliveries of the same sentence, that some children are only ever going to be brief, and that briefness is not the same as smallness. She watched the mother's very face come apart along a newly formed seam, a grief not yet experienced. Something in Lindsay’s chest gave, in a way she didn't examine, and settled into something like ease. Not pleasure exactly, not yet, but the beginning shape of it, a large door swinging on a well-oiled hinge, everything working exactly as it should.

She stayed forty minutes past the end of her later-documented time in the room. She sat close enough to the mother that their knees nearly touched, and when the social worker finally arrived, Lindsay rose slowly, reluctantly, something in her now fed.

###

At Thanksgiving her mother asked three times whether the rolls needed another five minutes, and no one answered any of the three times, which did not appear to trouble her. Her father turned the turkey platter a few degrees this way and a few degrees that, as if from a different angle it might resolve into something better carved. Across the table, cousin Meg was home from her last year of law school with a new haircut and an air of ease Lindsay admired.

Someone asked Lindsay how work was going; Meg, probably, being kind, or her mother, filling a silence the way she filled all of them, without checking what she was filling it with — and so, Lindsay told them all about the mother in the thrifted cardigan, about dear departed Xander –

She told it the way she'd told the mother herself the thing about brief and small, in the same voice, unfolding the details in the order that pleased her most: the unraveling cuff, the blanket seam she'd turned so it ran along the spine instead of the chest, because the other way looked wrong, the exact number of minutes she'd stayed after her shift technically ended. She used the word privileged and she said it had been one of the best days she'd had in months.

Her father kept turning the platter. Her mother said, mm, into her wine. Meg had stopped eating somewhere around the seam detail and now sat with her fork resting tines-down against the china, and when Lindsay finished, Meg said, "Anyone want more stuffing?" and did not wait for an answer before standing to get it, though there was a full bowl of it before her. As Meg stood, revealing her belly, Lindsay recalled the news Meg had shared in June: that she was pregnant, hoping to deliver after bar exams. Meg had rested her hands on her stomach, caressing it and fiddling with her bone cutlery, while Lindsay had been speaking.

Lindsay felt about the table's silence and Meg’s perturbation the way she felt a good vitals check (clean, still, correct) and understood it, wrongly and completely, as awe.

###

Detective Anderson had unusually clean hands for a man doing this job, and Lindsay noticed this before she noticed anything else about him, filed it the way she filed everything, uselessly, immediately, an eventual scrabble for her journal.

Anderson had Lindsay’s composition book open on the table between them (pages she recognized by the give in the spine, the ink that had run slightly on page forty-three, where she'd once actually cried over an entry about a baby named Caleb) and he read from it in a voice that made her own words sound as if they were emanating from underwater. Mother wore the same cardigan four days running. Father's hands: cold, unringed. Stayed 43 min past shift — good visit, felt useful.

"You wrote 'felt useful,'" Anderson said. "About a family whose baby had just died."

"Yes," Lindsay said, because it was true, and true things did not usually require extrapolation.
Anderson asked why she stayed so long in those rooms. He asked why the notebook existed at all; thirty months of it, dates, times, small physical details about people who were, in almost every case, strangers to her again by the following week. He said the word pattern four times in six minutes; she counted. He did not say the other word, the medical one, the one with numbers behind it, not directly, though it hovered invisibly in the room with them like a ghost.

Lindsay tried to explain that she remembered people. That this was, in her experience, rare, and had always been treated as a virtue in her line of work. Bedside manner, as they'd called it in her reviews, four years running, exceptional. She said she liked being the person families remembered afterward. She said grief was the only time people were entirely honest, and she found that restful, being around something so honest. She heard her own voice climb slightly on the word restful, an octave she didn't sit with. Detective Anderson’s face did the thing Denise's had once done, a complicated thing she would have filed, if she'd still had the notebook, if it hadn't already gone into a plastic bag with her name misspelled on the label.

Somewhere in the middle of the next part, the part with the other two people, and the small procedural words, and a form pushed toward her that she read closely, out of habit, checking it for errors, Lindsay understood she was being arrested. She noted the time. She always noted the time.

###

The concrete floor has a drain at its center, which Lindsay has been watching for some time now, waiting to feel whatever a person is supposed to feel while watching a drain in a room like this. That nothing arrives doesn't surprise her; these things, in her experience, have always come sideways, in the middle of ordinary tasks, never on command and rarely to whomever they are designed.
She thinks about the mother in the cardigan, though she edits the memory slightly, the way a hand smooths a bedsheet: it was Lindsay, she recalls now, who let go of the hand first, gently, at the correct moment, before the moment could run past what was needed and become something else. She has never once caught herself in the act of straightening a thing.

In the corridor a door opens and shuts (the particular flat sound of institutional doors, a sound she has always privately liked). The sound of something being sealed off. She thinks: some rooms need a person within them who feels that room is their habitat. She has thought this before, many times, about NICUs, about the wards where the beautiful preemies leave her to be with God, about the small curtained bay where families are told the worst thing they will just about ever be told. She thinks it now without noticing that the room has changed.

Tomorrow they will ask her again whether she wants a lawyer, and she will say yes, because that is the correct answer, and she has always been correct. She smooths the fabric of the jumpsuit over one knee until the wrinkle lies flat and stays.

A room is either clean or it isn't and she has always believed this. Tonight she finds she does not know which kind of room she is in. Lying very still on the cot, spine flat, hands stacked, she finds that the not-knowing is, in its own way, restful, though she can no longer tell if that's the shape relief makes, or the shape guilt makes when it finally stops begging to be felt.