Chapter 5
I thought about her voice on the speakerphone. I thought about the word stunts. I thought about humiliated and drama and the particular sound of a woman who had decided that her birthday toast was a legitimate competing interest against her grandchild's arrival. I thought about four years of implications and pauses and questions whose answers had already been dismissed.
"You left us outside your mercy," I said. "Now the court is outside yours."
The papers in my hand were the protective order, the criminal filing Carol had prepared with the documentation from the 911 call and the body camera footage and the hospital's own records, and the civil petition that named both Ethan and, specifically and deliberately, Patricia, for the conduct on the speakerphone that the 911 recording had captured in its entirety, because my phone had been on when I called dispatch and the dispatch system had recorded everything from the moment the call connected, including the two minutes of audio from before I dialed, because the call had auto-captured ambient sound through a feature I had not known my phone had until Carol told me.
Patricia had been on speakerphone.
Patricia's voice was in the record.
Ethan looked at his mother. Patricia looked at the floor. The officer was already speaking quietly into her radio, and the doctor near the monitors had stepped into the hallway, and one of the nurses had moved to the bassinet as if to confirm that Ivy was where Ivy was supposed to be, which was with me, which was the only answer to that question that the court was going to recognize going forward.
Carol arrived twenty minutes later. She had been in the building, which was not a coincidence, and she came in with the second set of copies and handed one to the officer and one to the nurses' station and one to the attending physician per the protocol she had arranged the previous afternoon, and she sat in the chair beside my bed and said nothing, because nothing needed to be said.
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Ethan retained an attorney three days later. I know this because Carol told me, and Carol told me with the specific calm of a lawyer who has reviewed the record and found it to be what it is, which is the kind of record that does not benefit from additional legal interpretation. The criminal filing moved on its own timeline, through the DA's office, through the channels that the evidence was sufficient to move through, and that timeline was not mine to hurry or to slow.
Ivy came home from the NICU eleven days after she was born, which is the number I carry with me the way you carry a number that has been placed in your body and will not leave it. Eleven days. She came home in the car seat I had bought and installed myself in the third trimester, in the car that was in my name, to the apartment I had moved into the week after the hospital because the house had a hallway with a repaired door and a floor that had been cleaned but whose cleaned surface was not a thing I intended to step on again with my daughter in my arms.
