“What were the contents of that conversation?”

She looks into her lap. “He did not want any Black people touching his baby. He told me that at the same time he revealed a tattoo of a Confederate flag on his forearm.”

There is actually a gasp from someone in the jury.

“Had you ever experienced a request like this from a parent?”

Marie hesitates. “We get patient requests all the time. Some women prefer female doctors to deliver their babies, or they don’t like being treated by a med student. We do our best to make our patients comfortable, whatever it takes.”

“In this case, what did you do?”

“I wrote a note and stuck it in the file.”

Odette asks her to examine the exhibit with the medical file, to read the note out loud. “Did you speak to your staff about this patient request?”

“I did. I explained to Ruth that there had been a request to have her step down, due to the father’s philosophical beliefs.”

“What was her reaction?”

“She took it as a personal affront,” Marie says evenly. “I didn’t mean it that way. I told her it was just a formality. But she walked out and slammed the door of my office.”

“When did you see the defendant again?” Odette asks.

“Saturday morning. I was in the ER with another patient, who had suffered a complication during delivery. As nurse supervisor, I’m required to make that transfer with the attending nurse, who happened to be Corinne. Corinne had left Ruth watching over her other patient—Davis Bauer—postcircumcision. So as soon as I possibly could, I ran back to the nursery.”

“Tell us what you saw, Marie.”

“Ruth was standing over the bassinet,” she says. “I asked her what she was doing, and she said, Nothing.”

The room closes in on me, and the muscles of my neck and arms tighten. I feel myself frozen again, mesmerized by the blue marble of the baby’s cheek, the stillness of his small body. I hear her instructions:

Ambu bag.

Call the code.

I am swimming, I am in over my head, I am wooden.

Start compressions.

Hammering with two fingers on the delicate spring of rib cage, attaching the leads with my other hand. The nursery too cramped for all the people suddenly inside. The needle inserted subcutaneous into the scalp, the blue barrage of swear words as it slips out before striking a vein. A vial rolling off the table. Atropine, squirted into the lungs, coating the plastic tube. The pediatrician, flying into the nursery. The sigh of the Ambu bag being tossed in the trash.

Time? 10:04.

“Ruth?” Kennedy whispers. “Are you all right?”

I cannot get my lips to move. I am in over my head. I am wooden. I am drowning.

“The patient developed wide complex bradycardia,” Marie says.

Tombstones.

“We were unable to oxygenate him. Finally, the pediatrician called the time of death. We didn’t realize that the parents were in the nursery. There was just so much going on…and…” She falters. “The father—Mr. Bauer—he ran to the trash can and took the Ambu bag out. He tried to put it on the tube that was still sticking out of the baby’s throat. He begged us to show him what to do.” She wipes a tear away. “I don’t mean to…I’m…I’m sorry.”

I manage to jerk my head a few degrees and see that there are several women in the jury box who are doing the same thing. But me, there are no tears left in me.

I am drowning in everyone else’s tears.

Odette walks toward Marie and hands her a box of tissues. The soft sound of sobs surrounds me, like cotton batting on all sides. “What happened next?” the prosecutor asks.

Marie dabs at her eyes. “I wrapped Davis Bauer in a blanket. I put his hat back on. And I gave him to his mother and father.”

I am wooden.

I close my eyes. And I sink, I sink.

—

IT TAKES ME a few minutes to focus on Kennedy, who has already started the cross-examination of Marie when I clear my head. “Did any patient ever complain to you about Ruth’s expertise as a nurse, prior to Turk Bauer?”

“No.”

“Did Ruth provide substandard care?”

“No.”

“When you wrote that note in the infant’s chart, you knew there would only be two nurses working at any given time, and that there might be a possibility the patient might be left without supervision at some point during his hospital stay?”

“That’s not true. The other nurse on duty would have covered.”

“And what if that nurse was busy? What if,” Kennedy says, “she got called away on an emergency C-section, for example, and the only nurse remaining on the floor was in fact African American?”

Marie’s mouth opens and closes, but no sound emerges.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Malone—I didn’t quite get that.”

“Davis Bauer was not left unsupervised at any point,” she insists. “Ruth was there.”

“But you—her supervisor—you had prohibited her from ministering to this particular patient, isn’t that right?”

“No, I—”

“Your note barred her from actively treating this particular patient—”