The Viewing Room

SAFE SURRENDER

[safe surrender] “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, you know,” Maurice said, as soon as he saw Henrietta coming down the hospital hallway. She frowned at him. “Are you the on-call tonight?” she asked. “No,” he said. “Got an urgent text on my cell to meet someone here. So, I figured the on-call must have bailed.” “Me, too,” she said. “I stopped signing up for the night shift a few weeks ago. My year rotation is almost up. Can you believe that? But it looked to me like this was some kind of emergency.” It was close to midnight on Christmas Eve. Henrietta peered at the one door in the basement hallway that was not decorated for Christmas. She gasped when she saw that the coded lock was missing. The viewing room was never left unlocked, and only Spiritual Care and Janitorial Services had the code, changed weekly, due to the awkward time two nurses were caught doing more than just looking at bodies. They both heard it before they saw it. A kittenlike whimpering. They stared at each other, motionless. The sound stunned them, two hospital chaplains who were not easily stunned, thinking there was nothing about death that they had not seen already within the walls of this room. It can’t be what it sounds like, but it can’t be anything else. And then, they moved together, quickly, across the room, toward the sound of life. Yes, the sound of life! It was coming from the tiny body shaking on the gurney, swaddled to the neck in white, struggling to get its limbs free of its confine- [130] safe surrender ment. Maurice was the first to touch the baby. He gently rolled down the material, soft white cotton, several T-shirts tied together, instead of the usual white vinyl body bag. He freed the baby’s arms first so he could examine the hospital bracelet around the tiny wrist. “No name,” he said, turning toward Henrietta. “No shame, no blame, no names.” Those words were posted in gigantic red letters on the Emergency Room entrance doors, the slogan of the Safe Surrender Laws. The anonymous mother who gave up her baby within seventy-two hours of birth would not be prosecuted for abandonment, and the bracelet had no identification and therefore no way to trace. “But how did the baby end up here, for God’s sake?” Henrietta asked. “Really! Of all the gin joints in the world,” Maurice said, laughing softly. “You have got to stop talking in old movie clichés,” Henrietta said. Maurice raised his eyebrows at her. “Really? Here we are on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, for Christ’s sake, with a newborn baby in the unlikeliest of places, and you think I can talk any other way?” It was true. Nobody—no live body—would ever end up in the viewing room by mistake. This was a place for the living to look upon the dead one last time. The viewing room was a stage carefully set for last acts of human drama—for graceful exits, not grand entrances. “I can’t do this anymore,” Henrietta said. “Oh, you poor, precious thing,” Maurice said. But he was not talking to her. He was talking to the baby, swaying it back and forth in his arms. “You have landed in the worst place with the worst people in this hospital when it comes to handling a baby. Terrible luck. Poor dear.” It was true. Both of them were better prepared for endings than beginnings. They had become close friends at the hospital during their work on the late-night shift helping people face the darkest mo- safe surrender [131] ments of their lives. Each one lived alone, without a partner, without children, and although they were both ministers, neither had enough faith to run a church full of believers. This was a dirty secret they shared, separate from the other chaplains in the office. Henrietta had lost her faith in God, or at least an interventionist God, on the day her brother was killed in a car accident. He bled to death while the ambulance on its way to him crashed and took two more lives. She had started a chaplaincy rotation in hopes that she could find that faith in the very place she lost it. Maurice was the veteran, twelve years as a...