Part Four: The Hospital
Valentina was two years old, or just turning two. She had been sick for several days — a fever that came and went, the kind of illness that in children could be nothing or could be something, and I had been watching it carefully from within the specific anxiety of a parent who had no backup, no family to call, no one to share the watching.
When the fever spiked on a Friday night, I took her to the hospital.
It was a public hospital on the east side of the city, overcrowded in the way of public hospitals, managed by people who were doing a great deal with very little. The doctor who saw us was young and overworked and competent, and she said Valentina needed to be admitted for observation, that it was a precaution, that she would be monitored overnight and probably released by morning.
They took her from the waiting room.
I sat in the waiting room for the first hour. Then I was told that she was stable and I should go home and rest and call in the morning. They had my number, they said. The system had my number.
I did not want to leave.
But I was also, in the way that twenty-six months of single parenthood and building a business in the hours between had made me, exhausted in a way that overrode ordinary decision-making. They had my number. She was stable. I would call first thing.
I went home.
I did not sleep.
I called at six in the morning.
The number went to an automated system. I tried several options. I eventually reached a person who said the name did not appear in their current admissions register and suggested I call back during regular administrative hours.
I went to the hospital in person.
What followed was two hours of conversations with different people at different desks, each of whom had a partial piece of information that did not connect to the other partial pieces. What I eventually assembled was this: there had been a mix-up in paperwork. Valentina had been released. The family had taken her.
The family, I said. What family?
There was confusion. There were apologies. There was a reference to contact information that had been left — a note, someone said, explaining that family had arrived from out of town and she was going home with them, that I had been contacted and had agreed.
I had not been contacted.
I had not agreed.
I spent the next three days in a state that I cannot fully describe — not quite panic, not quite grief, but a kind of suspended horror, a state of not-knowing that was its own form of suffering. I filed reports. I spoke to police. I went back to the hospital four times.
And then I received a call.
The number was a number I recognized, eventually, as a public telephone. A woman’s voice I knew.
My mother.
“Elena,” she said. “Valentina is safe. She is with us.”
