Chapter 12: The Woman in the Green Scarf

At noon the line at the cafeteria ran out the door and down the corridor, and by the time Nell had a bowl for her mother with a saucer over it to hold the heat in, the floors upstairs had gone quiet.

She came up the long way, past the stairwell. That was how she came on the scarf.

Green, knotted at the back of the head and tied down over the hair so it wouldn’t slip — the same woman who had put her head in at the door and said “Wrong room,” and pulled it shut.

Only this time there was a baby in the crook of her arm, small and wrapped, its mouth working at nothing. Her other hand had a boy by the wrist.

The boy was crying. Not the tired kind that gives out after a while. The kind that has a word in it, and the word was Mom. He had his heels set on the tile and his weight back, both hands working at the wrist she had him by.

“Let me go. I want my mom. Let me go.”

The woman leaned down toward him without slowing.

“Come on, sweetheart. Come on, we’ll get you a candy bar.”

She was moving fast. Baby on one arm, screaming boy on the other, and the hall empty between her and the two women at the far end of it, who had their heads together over a chart.

Nell set the bowl and the saucer down on the floor and stepped sideways into the middle of the hall, in front of her.

“Hey.” She said it loud enough to travel. “What are you doing with my nephew?”

She had never had a nephew. The word had come out of her mouth before she had a chance to check it, and now she had both feet on the tile and she wasn’t moving them.

The woman pulled up short.

For half a second, one side of her face did something the other side didn’t, and then it closed over.

“Your what?”

“My nephew.” Nell didn’t look down at the boy. She kept her eyes up where the woman’s eyes were, the way you keep your eyes on a dog that hasn’t made up its mind about you. “He’s mine to walk out of this building with. Take your hand off him.”

The woman looked at her, and then past her, down the hall, where a woman with a mop had stopped and turned to watch.

Nell watched her do the arithmetic. Baby in one arm, boy on the other wrist, and now a girl standing in the middle of the floor saying Nephew loud enough for the whole building to hear it.

She let go of the wrist and shoved.

“Take him, then.”

The boy came off balance into Nell’s legs. She got a hand on his shoulder and put him behind her against the wall, and when she looked up the woman was past her and going, the baby’s head jogging against her shoulder with every step.

Nell went after her.

She got a fistful of coat at the shoulder and hung on, and turned her head toward the corridor behind her, and shouted it at the ceiling.

“Somebody! She’s got a baby and it isn’t hers! She’s going out the front!”

A door at the far end of the ward came open and Mrs. Hovde came out in her stocking feet with her shoes in one hand. She stopped. She looked down the length of the hall and saw who was doing the shouting.

Nell watched it cross her face and come out the other side.

“You.” Mrs. Hovde pointed at Nell, not at the woman. “You again.”

“She’s got a baby. That one. It isn’t hers.”

“You don’t know whose baby that is, and it’s no business of ours either way.” Mrs. Hovde came down the hall and put herself between them, with her back to Nell, and stood there breathing hard. “This one’s got nothing to do all day but stir. Go on, now. Go on home.”

For a second the woman with the scarf just looked at Mrs. Hovde. Then she pulled, and Nell’s grip came off the coat with her, and the old woman was standing where the grip had been.

The woman went down the corridor with the baby’s head down against her collar.

Nell stood there with her hand still half shut.

She thought about the doors. What was behind them was a parking lot and then the road, and there were rules all over this building — about which bed a body was allowed to sleep in, about whose turn it was at the counter — and not one of them was going to stop a woman at the front door. She had shoes on and a mother upstairs and no way to run after her and still be back.

She turned around.

“Are you with her?”

Mrs. Hovde’s mouth came open.

“Are you in on it?”

“Accomplice.” Mrs. Hovde smacked her hands together and left them open. “Accomplice. I never set eyes on that woman before today. Don’t you stand in a public hall and say that to me.”

Then there were feet on the stairs and people coming up, three and then five, one of them a nurse and one of them a man in his shirtsleeves, and they were all saying it at once at different volumes.

“Where is he? Where’s the boy?”

“Here.” Nell put her hand back down on the boy’s shoulder. He had stayed where she put him, backed against the wall with his hands over his face, and hadn’t moved. “He’s here. He’s all right.”

“There was a little one.” The nurse had a hand pressed to her own chest. “There was a baby with her —“

“Green scarf. She went out the front, just now.” Nell pointed.

The man in the shirtsleeves was already going, and three of the others went with him, and the stairwell door banged shut behind them.

Nell picked up the bowl and the saucer off the floor where she had set them down.

There was a woman at the back of the crowd in a hospital gown with a man’s coat over her shoulders, one hand on the stair rail and one arm straight out, pointing down the corridor at the front doors.

Mrs. Hovde turned and saw her, and something went wrong in her face.

“Charlene. What are you doing out of bed? Where’s the baby?”

“Mom.” Her voice went up and cracked on it. “Mom — she’s got him. The green scarf. She’s got your grandson.”

The corridor went quiet. Heads came around.

Mrs. Hovde was standing there with her shoes in her hand.

Then her knees went, and she sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and her legs straight out in front of her. Nobody in the corridor went over to her.

The boy’s mother got to him first. She was a thin woman in a good coat, and she went down on the tile without a thought for the coat, and the boy came off the wall into her, and she said his name twice into the top of his head.

The father stood over them with his hand on the back of the boy’s head. Then he straightened up all the way and looked at Nell.

“That was you.”

“I heard him. That’s all.”

“No.” He said it the way you close a door. “No, that isn’t all.” He put his hand out. “Dennis Pruitt. That’s my wife, Arlene, and that’s Toby. His grandmother’s a patient upstairs and we came in to sit with her, and he wanted a drink of water, and that’s all it took.”

Nell shook his hand. She had to move the bowl to do it.

She looked down at the boy. He had stopped crying and was talking into his mother’s collar in a voice too low to hear.

“Toby,” she said. He looked up. She put her hand on the top of his head. “Don’t take candy from anybody you don’t know. Not one piece.”

Arlene had her arm hooked through Nell’s by then and showed no sign of letting go. She wanted to know where Nell was from and who her people were and how long they’d been in town, and she asked it all twice, and when Nell said they were from out east of town and had brought her mother in for her shoulder, the woman got quieter and held on harder.

They walked Nell back to the room. Nell set the bowl and the saucer down on the table beside the bed, and Arlene came in after her and stood at the foot of it with her coat still on.

“Arlene Pruitt. I run the egg station at the co-op, in town.” She said it to Nell, not to the bed. “When you’ve got eggs, you don’t sell them off the wagon to whoever’s buying that day. You bring them to me. I’ll see they’re weighed right, and if it’s a day you need to hold them, I’ll hold them for you.”

Nell’s mother had come awake and was up on one elbow watching all of it, and her left hand was moving on the blanket, thumb going off against the fingers, one, two, three, and starting over. She stopped when she saw Nell looking at her.

The Pruitts stayed another ten minutes. Mrs. Pruitt held Nell’s hand in both of hers at the door and made her promise to come by the co-op, and then they were gone down the corridor with Toby between them, holding onto both their hands.

Nell’s mother waited until the steps were out of the hall.

“You could ask her to pick up a few things for us.” She said it low, out of the side of her mouth, not looking at Nell, with the pleased look she got when she had found a way around something. “She’d do it.”

The bowl sat on the table where Nell had put it, and her mother hadn’t touched it.

The nurse looked in about the bottle on the pole. Nell’s mother said something to her with her hand at the side of her mouth, and Nell didn’t catch it. The nurse said the office downstairs was open until four if anybody needed it, and went.

Then the door came open against the wall.

Mrs. Hovde was in it. She had her shoes on now and her hair was down out of its pins, and she was in the middle of the room before the door finished swinging.

“You,” she said, and pointed. “You had her. You had your hand on her back and you stood there flapping your mouth, and now my grandson’s gone. That’s on you. That’s on you, girl.”

Behind her came two more. The man was broad through the shoulders, built like her. He came in and looked at Nell and then at the bed and then at Nell again. The woman stopped at the foot of the bed and put her hand on it.

Neither of them had said anything yet.

Nell stood up out of the chair and got between them and her mother, and stayed there.