Little Mercies. Heather Gudenkauf

The watch band, custom-made with each child’s name spelled out in in tiny, delicate silver beads, hangs loosely on my wrist.

      “See,” Adam had said when he placed it around my wrist and lightly kissed the palm of my hand, “there’s room to add more names.”

      “Ma’am,” I hear again, this time more incessantly. “How long was she in the car?”

      “Forty, forty-five minutes, I think,” I say, the words sounding rough and jagged, as if they lost the fight to stay unsaid. Forty-five minutes where no one was watching over my daughter. Forty-five interminable minutes where she sat, ensnared within a rear-facing car seat, unseen and unable to free herself, while the temperature around her climbed.

      “Temperature is one hundred and five point six,” an EMT says, and they immediately begin to remove Avery’s clothes. First the pink dress that Leah had chosen for her this morning, then her tennis shoes and, finally, sliding off her white socks edged with lace trim, revealing her tiny pink toes. I reach out, cupping her bare foot in the palm of my hand. “Ma’am,” the paramedic says. “You will need to give us a little room here to work. We need to get her to the hospital as quickly as we can.”

      “Can I go with you?” I ask, fearful that they are going to tell me no, that I’ve neglected my child and have lost that right. I am a social worker, I know about these things.

      The other paramedic is placing ice packs beneath her neck, beneath each armpit, over her groin. Avery’s eyes flutter open briefly and I whimper in thanks. She is still breathing. She is still alive. “Let’s go,” the paramedic says urgently to the other, and they lift the stretcher and place her in the back of the ambulance followed by two firefighters. Dear God, I think. When did the fire department arrive? I move to join her but am stopped by an outstretched arm. “We’ll have you ride up front with the driver. We need room to work back here.”

      I rush to the passenger side of the ambulance, climb in and, with trembling fingers, struggle to fasten my seat belt. I look out the window and, as the driver pulls away from the curb, I see Kylie and Krissie sitting in the backseat of a police cruiser, while Officer Stamm and his partner lead a disheveled man wearing only boxer shorts out of the Haskinses’ house in handcuffs. Krissie has her thumb in her mouth and is clinging to her big sister whose eyes are shuttered, unreadable. Krissie sees me and a spark of recognition flashes in her eyes. I press my hand to the window and she waggles her fingers in return. The crowd of neighbors still lingers, torn between the unfolding dramas in front of them.

      Jade, the old man with the crowbar and the woman who pulled Avery from the van stand side by side, slump shouldered, faces grim. I realize I haven’t thanked them. I rap on the window trying to get their attention, but they don’t look my way. I roll down my window just as the ambulance gathers speed. “Thank you,” I call out the window, but my words are swallowed by a blare of the siren. I raise the window and reach into my purse for my cell phone. I need to call my husband, tell him to meet me at the hospital, but I can’t bring myself to do it just yet. I try to listen to what is happening in the rear of the ambulance, but I can’t hear anything except the scream of the siren. I want to ask the driver what is happening, what they are doing to my daughter, if she is going to be okay, but I don’t want to distract him from his driving. He is expertly moving through streets, slowing only briefly as he crosses intersections, not stopping for red lights, barely pausing for stop signs. This is bad, I think. This is very, very bad.

      Within minutes we arrive at the hospital and even before we have come to a complete stop, I’ve unbuckled myself from the seat belt. I stumble from the cab of the ambulance and already the back doors are open and two doctors and a nurse are there to meet us. I recognize all three from my experiences as a social worker and Dr. Nickerson was the attending physician when Adam and I brought Leah to the emergency room when she fell off a skateboard and broke her wrist.

      “Eleven-month female, left unattended in a locked van for approximately forty-five minutes,” the paramedic explains. “Temperature currently one hundred and four point nine. Patient was breathing upon our arrival but bystander reported performing CPR. Heart rate is irregular, one hundred and fifty beats per minute, forty breaths per minute. Patient vomited and had a seizure lasting two minutes en route. We administered valium and the seizure activity stopped.” I picture Avery in the throes of a grand mal seizure and want to lie down on the floor and weep. I want to stop the throng moving along with my daughter, want to ask questions, but know this would be time wasted.

      “Parents?” Dr. Nickerson asks. The EMT nods my way and Dr. Nickerson notices me for the first time. If she is surprised to find that I’m there as a parent rather than an advocate for the child left in the locked van, she doesn’t let on. “Ellen...” she begins, searching for my last name.

      “Moore,” I croak. “Ellen Moore.”

      “Ellen, we need to take your daughter back now. Someone will be out to keep you updated with what’s happening.” And before I know it, Avery is being taken away from me. She is very still; her face is covered by an oxygen mask and an IV of some sort coming out of her knee.

      I sink down into the nearest chair. “Avery,” I call after the doctor’s retreating back, my voice breaking. She keeps going, so I yell more loudly, “Avery, her name is Avery.” She looks back at me and nods, letting me know that she has heard me. She will call my daughter by her name as she pokes and prods her, trying to undo the damage that I have done.

      A heavyset woman with a clipboard hovers nearby. “Hon,” she says. “I have some paperwork for you to fill out.” With a shaky hand I write down Avery’s name and birth date and am struck by the thought that the entirety of my daughter’s life only takes up two lines on a medical form. I take the paperwork to the window and hand it to the woman. “When do you think I’ll hear something?” I ask, biting the corners of cheeks to stop from crying.

      She shakes her head, her jowls bobbing with the movement. “I don’t know, hon.” I wish she would stop calling me that. “I’ll check in with a nurse.” She reaches out and touches my hand before I turn to walk away. “Do you have someone to wait with you? Would you like for me to call someone?”

      “No, thank you,” I say coolly, pulling my hand away. The receptionist looks at me, first with bewilderment and then with suspicion. I know she thinks I’m acting oddly for a parent whose daughter has been brought near death into the emergency room. She thinks that I am acting exactly the way the kind of woman who would leave her daughter in a boiling van would act. Inexplicably, my mind turns to James Olmstead. Did he act so strangely after Madalyn was found on the sidewalk? I brush the thought away—I’m in social worker mode. It’s a defense mechanism that I’ve had to employ often in my line of work. I wouldn’t have survived for very long if I didn’t become clinical and detached. I want to explain this to the receptionist. I want to tell her that I will not be able to claw my way through this day if I don’t hold my emotions at bay.

      The emergency waiting room is surprisingly busy for a Tuesday morning. Individuals in various degrees of pain and misery surround me. There is an elderly woman knitting what appears to be a baby’s blanket, her knobbed fingers deftly moving, turning out a mosaic of pink, blue, yellow and green. There is a hunched young man carefully cradling his heavily bandaged hand, blood oozing through the gauze. One woman is crying, hiccuping loudly into her phone, pleading with someone on the other side of the line to please not drop her health-care insurance. A small boy of about three toddles over, alternating happily between eating a cracker and sipping juice from a sippy cup. With a smile he holds out a soggy, half-eaten cracker to me as an offering and I take it, pretending to nibble at the edges. His apologetic mother rushes over, sweeps him into her arms and moves to the other side of the waiting room.

      A woman and her two children approach the receptionist’s window. One of my families. I always make a point to acknowledge my clients, but take their lead as to how much interaction we have when we happen to meet by chance. Today, I hope she doesn’t notice me, hope that she doesn’t want to talk about her children, the damage that has been inflicted upon them. But she turns, eyes scanning the waiting room, landing where I am sitting. I smile in her direction and she makes her way over to where