I held the tube up to the fluorescent light of the window and turned it slowly between my fingers, and I read the label on it the way I had read ten thousand labels in thirty five years. Owen. A date of birth in the month of June. I looked at the requisition, and the date of birth printed on that was in the month of October. My daughter had stopped breathing on the other side of the glass. I put the tube down in the rack, and I said, in the voice I use at three in the morning, “Courtney, this is not your son.”
“What do you mean?” She came around to the side door, and I buzzed her in, and she stood next to the centrifuge in her pajamas and her good winter coat. I pointed to the label. “Owen Wesley Rudd. Born in June. Your boy is Owen Neil Becker, born in October. They are two different babies with the same first name, who happened to come into the same emergency room on the same night.” My hands, I am glad to say, were perfectly steady. I wrote the discrepancy on a pink form and initialed it.
The requisition, I explained, was a legal one. Somebody had checked the box for paternity and chain of custody, which meant that the sample was part of a case in family court, the kind where a judge needs to know that a tube of blood was handled by the right people at every step. The case number at the bottom, 2207, belonged to a child in the care of the county. The name printed in block capitals as the requesting party was one I had known for thirty years. Judge Pamela Rudd, whom I had once watched win a spelling bee.
“Someone mixed up the tubes at the bedside,” I said. “The nurse had two babies named Owen on the same shift, and a bag with two sets of labels.” I picked up the telephone and called the emergency department. A harried voice answered, and I introduced myself and asked her to check the other baby. There was a silence. Then I heard her say a word that nurses are not supposed to say. She asked me to hold. I held. I looked at my daughter, who was crying silently into her coat.
The steadiest hands in the world are the ones that have done a small thing correctly ten thousand times when no one was watching.
By ten minutes to four, the right tubes were on their way, borne through the corridor by a young orderly at a run. I logged them in. I ran them on the new analyzer, the one I had fixed with a manual on my first night. The results came up on the screen in clean green numbers. A mild infection, treatable, caught in time. I printed the sheet and walked it to the window and pressed it into the hand of Courtney, and I said, plainly, “Take this to the doctor. He will give the antibiotic. Owen is going to be fine.”
She read the sheet twice. She sat down on the stool where I eat my crackers, and she put her face in her hands. The sound she made was one I had not heard since she was twelve, when the dog died. I put my arm around her. I smelled baby shampoo and spit up and the cold of the outdoors, and I held her until the shaking stopped. “I wanted you with me,” she said. “I could not bear to let anyone else touch it. You are the only person I trust.”
I let her say it. When she was done, I said that I had a question for her. “The other baby,” I said. “The little Owen Rudd. His tubes are in the other rack. The judge needs them for a custody case, and the chain of custody has been broken. Somebody must call her. And somebody must say that it was an honest error caught in time, by the night shift.” Courtney looked at me. She wiped her eyes. “Then I am calling her myself, Mom,” she said. “Right now. And I am telling her your name.”
She did. At five in the morning, in the hallway of the hospital, with the monitors beeping in the dark, she made a call to the home of a judge. The judge, to her credit, was gracious. The county re collected the sample from the right infant within the hour. The case of the custody of a small boy was undamaged. Two weeks later, the administrator of the laboratory brought me a certificate of commendation, and a handwritten note from a woman in a black robe. It said, quite simply, thank you for being the one who looks twice.
Courtney came to my apartment that Saturday morning with the boys, both in the back of her car, and a pot of coffee. She sat across from me at my small table, with the brass microscope of Neil between us, and said she had something to ask. She wanted me to know that she had been wrong, about my hands and about everything else. She also wanted to know if I would consider watching the boys one morning a week, after my shift, for pay. Twenty dollars an hour. “And I will not call it a favor,” she said.
I thought about it for the span of one breath. “Saturdays,” I said. “Eight to noon. I sleep from noon to six.” She laughed through the last of her tears and said that was the best offer she had ever received. The boys climbed into my lap, first one and then the other, each smelling of oatmeal. I took them to the window to show them how the light fell on the maple tree. Owen put a damp hand on my cheek and said, quite clearly, his first word of the day. “Nana.”
I work the night shift three times a week. The analyzer hums, the specimens come through the window, and every once in a while I look up at the small photograph of a baby that I keep inside my locker door. At the bottom of the frame, under the glass, Courtney has slipped a note in a neat hand. Mom, you have never shaken once. I read it each morning at seven, as I wash my hands, and I feel the warm light of the corridor on the back of my neck.