A Hospital Employee Helped A Stranded New Mom Until Her Boss Revealed The Consequences
At two in the morning, after a twelve-hour shift in the emergency room, I found a woman sitting on a bench outside the hospital with two newborn babies.
One was sleeping.
The other was screaming.
And their mother looked like she was about thirty seconds from joining him.
I almost walked past. I’m ashamed of that, but it’s true. I was so tired I could barely see straight. I’d just spent twelve hours dealing with two car accidents, a kid who’d swallowed a magnet, a man having a heart attack in the waiting room, and a drunk college student who’d tried to fight a vending machine and lost. My scrubs smelled like antiseptic and somebody else’s blood. My feet felt like they’d been hit with a hammer. All I wanted in the whole world was my bed.
But the screaming baby stopped me.
It was a thin, angry, brand-new kind of scream. The kind you only hear from babies who’ve been in the world for about a week and already have complaints about it.
I stopped. I turned around.
The woman was rocking two car seats with her feet. One on each side. Back and forth. Back and forth. Like she’d been doing it for hours.
“Are you waiting for someone?” I asked.
She looked up at me.
She was young. Late twenties, maybe. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that had mostly given up. She was wearing gray sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt with a stain on the shoulder. Her eyes were red and puffy. She’d been crying for a while.
She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.
“No,” she said. “I just don’t know how to get home.”
I sat down on the far end of the bench, leaving plenty of space between us.
“I’m Daniel,” I said. “I work here. In the ER.”
“Emily.”
I looked down at the car seats. Two tiny faces. One of them was wrinkled up and red and furious. The other was sound asleep with his mouth open, like the screaming was happening to somebody else.
“How old are they?” I asked.
“Six days.”
“Six days?” I said. “They’ve barely finished unpacking.”
She managed a weak little smile. It didn’t last long. But it was there.
“We came in because Oliver was having trouble feeding,” she said. She nodded at the screaming one. “He kept spitting everything up. I got scared. The doctor said he’s fine. Just a little reflux. Gave us some tips.” She took a shaky breath. “But then my husband and I argued. In the parking lot.”
“Argued?”
“He drove away.”
I stopped smiling.
“He took my purse. My phone. Even the diaper bag.” Her voice wobbled. “It was all in the car.”
I stared at her.
“He left you here?” I said. “With both babies? At two in the morning?”
She nodded.
She didn’t cry. I think she was past crying. She just nodded, looking down at the car seats.
“I don’t want to go home anyway,” she said quietly. “I just need to get to my sister’s house.”
“Can she pick you up?”
“I don’t know. I can’t call her. He took my phone.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and held it out.
“Give her a call,” I said.
She looked at the phone. Then at me. Then she took it with shaking fingers and dialed a number from memory.
It rang once.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice. Wide awake. Worried. “Who is this?”
“Sophie. It’s me.”
“Emily? Oh my God. Whose phone is this? What’s wrong? It’s two in the morning!”
“Nathan left me at the hospital,” Emily said. Her voice cracked on his name. “Can you come get us?”
Nathan. The name went by me. Lots of people are named Nathan. I didn’t think anything of it. Not then.
“Oh my God! Are the babies okay?”
“They’re fine. They’re fine. Please, Sophie.”
There was a pause on the other end.
“Sweetheart, I would. You know I would. But my car’s still in the shop. The transmission thing. They said Monday.” Sophie’s voice was frantic. “Can you get a taxi? An Uber? I’ll pay when you get here.”
Emily looked down at the twins in their car seats. One screaming. One sleeping.
“I don’t have any money,” she said quietly. “I don’t even have shoes for them, Soph. They’re in their socks.”
She hung up. She handed my phone back to me. She pressed both hands over her face and took a long breath, fighting tears.
I looked at the car seats.
I looked at my watch. 2:14 a.m.
I thought about my bed.
“I can drive you,” I said.
Emily lowered her hands. She looked at me.
She hesitated. I didn’t blame her. A strange man in scrubs, at two in the morning, offering to put her and her six-day-old babies in his car.
“I don’t even know you,” she said.
“Fair point.”
I unclipped my hospital badge and held it out to her.
DANIEL CARVER, MD. EMERGENCY MEDICINE.
“Also,” I said, “the security cameras over there have excellent footage of my terrible haircut. If I turn out to be a bad person, they’ll know exactly who to look for.”
She laughed. She didn’t mean to. It just came out of her, surprised. Her hand went to her mouth.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
I thought the hardest part of that night was over.
I had no idea who was waiting at the other end of it.
We spent ten minutes in the parking garage getting both car seats buckled into the back of my car properly. I made sure the bases were tight. I checked the straps twice. You see enough car accidents in the ER, you get serious about car seats.
Emily climbed into the back and sat between them.
The screaming one, Oliver, finally wore himself out about two minutes after we pulled out of the garage. The car does that to babies. Some kind of magic.
The other one, whose name was Theo, woke up, looked around at the inside of my car with deep suspicion, and went back to sleep.
“Sorry,” Emily whispered from the back seat.
“For what?”
“Making you do this. You just worked all night. You’re probably exhausted.”
“You have two newborns,” I said. “You’re allowed to be inconvenient.”
She stared out the window at the dark streets going by. The traffic lights blinking yellow. The closed-up stores.
“Nathan says I complain too much,” she said after a while. “About being tired. About needing help.”
“Does he help with the babies?”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I asked him to take one night feeding,” she said. “Just one. So I could sleep for more than ninety minutes in a row. He said he’d already worked all day.”
“And keeping two humans alive doesn’t count?”
“Apparently not.”
I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She had one hand resting on each car seat.
“What happened in the parking lot?” I asked gently. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
She took a long breath.
“I told him I couldn’t do everything alone. I said I needed him to help more. I was crying. I was so tired I couldn’t think straight. And he said…” She stopped. “He said maybe I should go find somebody who appreciated my problems.”
“Oh my God.”
Her voice cracked. “And then he got in the car and left.” 