“My grandson,” I said, breathless and half out of my mind. “He won’t stop crying and I found a bruise on him. He’s only two months old.”
Something in her face sharpened immediately.
“Come with me.”
She came around the desk and led me down a short bright hallway where the floor smelled of bleach and old wax and everything was too clean for the fear I was carrying. Another nurse met us at an exam room door and held it open while I stepped inside with Noah pressed against my chest.
The room was small and overlit, with cartoon stickers peeling slightly from one corner of the wall and a padded exam table under a paper sheet. The air-conditioning was too cold. I remember that with bizarre clarity—how cold the room felt against Noah’s overheated skin when I laid him down and the nurse gently took the blanket back.
The second her fingers touched his stomach, he screamed.
“That’s where it is,” I said. My voice was already getting shrill. “That’s where the bruise is.”
The nurse lifted his onesie.
