Getting Paige into the infant carrier felt like trying to solve a puzzle where one wrong movement could hurt her.
I stood beside the open rear door of my car, sweating despite the morning breeze, and tried to remember every demonstration I had ever seen about supporting an injured limb. Paige whimpered whenever her left leg changed position. I kept one palm beneath her thigh while lowering her into the seat.
"I'm sorry, baby. Almost done."
The buckle clicked.
She cried.
I nearly cried with her.
Instead, I fastened the straps loosely enough not to compress her leg, checked them twice, shut the door, and got behind the wheel.
Memorial General's pediatric emergency department was approximately twenty minutes away.
I made it there in eighteen.
The entire drive, I watched Paige in the small mirror mounted above her car seat. Her eyes stayed squeezed shut. Every pothole produced a soft moan.
Traffic lights seemed maliciously slow.
At one intersection, I caught myself whispering, "Change. Come on, change," as though the signal could hear me.
My phone rang through the car speakers.
Kate.
Her name appeared across the dashboard.
I stared at it.
For half a second, I considered answering. Then I imagined explaining everything while driving with one eye on Paige and decided against it.
The call ended.
Thirty seconds later, Kate called again.
I ignored that one too.
A text appeared.
Everything okay?
I did not respond until I pulled beneath the red EMERGENCY entrance.
Then I typed with shaking fingers.
Paige is hurt. I'm at Memorial General pediatric ER. Come now.
I hit send, shoved the phone into my purse, and hurried around the car.
A security guard saw me struggling with the carrier and came toward me.
"She's injured," I said. "Her leg. I don't know what happened."
He did not ask another question. He opened the emergency door and called for a nurse.
Within moments, Paige was transferred from the carrier to a hospital bassinet.
The change in atmosphere was immediate.
People stopped moving casually.
A nurse rolled Paige behind a curtain while another asked me her name, date of birth, allergies, and parents' information. I answered what I knew.
"Relationship to patient?"
"I'm her aunt."
"Legal guardian?"
"No. Her parents left her with me this morning."
"What happened?"
"I don't know."
The nurse looked up.
I heard how terrible those words sounded.
"I mean, I didn't see an accident. She was already crying when my sister brought her. Then the crying got worse. When I tried to change her diaper, I saw the bruise."
The nurse's face remained professionally neutral.
"How long was she in your care before you noticed it?"
"Maybe forty minutes. Less, actually. Twenty minutes before she started screaming differently. Another ten or fifteen before I figured out it was her leg."
The nurse entered something into the computer.
"What time did her parents leave?"
"Around nine forty-five."
"What time did you arrive here?"
I checked the wall clock.
"Ten fifty-six."
She typed again.
The precision of the questions made me uneasy.
A pediatric resident entered with a second nurse. She introduced herself as Dr. Aris and washed her hands before approaching Paige.
"Hi, sweetheart."
Paige had quieted from exhaustion. Her face was pale and damp. She watched the doctor's hands with enormous, suspicious eyes.
Dr. Aris began with Paige's head, neck, arms, and abdomen.
Everything remained calm until she reached the lower body.
She stopped before touching the bruised area.
Her expression changed.
"Did you see this when she arrived at your house?"
"I didn't undress her when she arrived."
"Was she moving both legs normally?"
The question made me search my memory.
Kate walking toward me.
Paige against her chest.
The pale green sleeper.
Her legs hanging partly behind Kate's arm.
"I don't know," I admitted. "She was already fussy. I wasn't paying attention to her legs."
Dr. Aris nodded as if honesty mattered more than certainty.
"Did she fall from anything while she was with you?"
"No."
"Bed? Sofa? Changing table?"
"No."
"Any older children in the home?"
"No one else was home."
"Pets?"
"We have a cat, but he was upstairs. He never went near her."
"Did you trip while carrying her?"
"No."
"Did anything catch her leg?"
"Not that I saw. I barely moved her because moving it made her scream."
Dr. Aris exchanged a brief glance with the nurse.
It lasted perhaps one second.
I noticed it anyway.
"What?" I asked.
The doctor turned back to me.
"We need imaging."
"Do you think it's broken?"
"I don't want to speculate before we see the X-ray."
That meant yes.
Or at least that it might be.
The nurse wheeled Paige away.
I was left alone beneath fluorescent lights with the diaper bag at my feet and the sound of carts moving through the hallway.
My phone vibrated again.
Kate.
I answered.
"Where are you?" she demanded.
"Memorial General. Pediatric ER."
"What happened?"
"I told you. Something is wrong with her leg."
There was a pause.
"Her leg?"
The way Kate repeated it bothered me.
Not What do you mean?
Not Is she okay?
Her leg?
As though I had named something she already knew.
"Kate, she has an enormous bruise on her upper thigh. It hurts her when she moves. The doctor is doing X-rays."
Silence.
Then I heard Ryan in the background asking something I could not make out.
Kate lowered her voice.
"Could you have pinched her putting her in the car seat?"
"No."
"I'm just asking."
"A bruise that size didn't happen because I buckled a seat."
"I didn't say it did."
"Then get here."
"We're coming."
The call ended.
I stared at the phone.
Something about the conversation felt wrong, but I could not identify what.
Maybe Kate was terrified.
Fear made people strange.
I told myself that twice.
A nurse appeared and asked whether I wanted water.
"No, thank you."
"You may be here awhile."
"Is Paige okay?"
"The physician will speak with you after imaging."
Again, the answer was technically polite and emotionally useless.
I paced the narrow space beside the empty bassinet.
My mind kept returning to the bruise.
Had Kate genuinely not seen it?
The sleeper covered it almost completely. If she had changed Paige in dim light during the night, perhaps she had missed the color. But the swelling? The crying? The leg that barely moved?
Maybe the injury had developed after Paige reached my house.
That idea made my stomach turn.
Could I have caused it without knowing?
I replayed every movement.
I had accepted Paige from Kate.
Carried her fifteen feet into the living room.
Sat down.
Warmed the bottle.
Held her.
Rocked her.
Moved her higher against my shoulder.
That movement had caused the first terrible scream.
Which meant the pain was already there.
I knew that.
Didn't I?
I forced myself to reconstruct the morning in exact order, the same way I reconstructed enrollment disputes at work when two parents gave contradictory accounts.
Kate handed Paige to me.
Paige cried while still on the doorstep.
Kate said she had been crying during the night.
Paige rejected the bottle.
Paige screamed when I repositioned her lower body.
I found the bruise.
That was the sequence.
Facts.
Facts were safer than fear.
The curtain opened.
Dr. Aris returned.
She was not smiling.
A nurse rolled Paige in behind her. Someone had wrapped the baby's leg in temporary padding to keep it still.
My knees weakened.
"Is it broken?"
Dr. Aris pulled a rolling stool closer.
"Yes."
The word seemed much too small for what it did to the room.
"What kind?"
She turned a monitor slightly toward me.
Even though I was not trained to read an X-ray, I could see something wrong in the long white line of the thigh bone.
"This is her left femur," Dr. Aris said. "She has a spiral fracture."
I gripped the side of the hospital bed.
"From what?"
"Spiral describes the fracture pattern. It suggests rotational force was involved."
"What does that mean?"
"It means the bone experienced enough twisting force to break."
I looked at Paige.
She was six months old.
She could not stand.
She could barely sit without support.
"Could she do that to herself?"
Dr. Aris did not answer immediately.
"No."
Cold moved through me from my chest outward.
"Could she have done it kicking?"
"No."
"Rolling?"
"Not this injury."
"Then somebody—"
The curtain opened again.
A woman I had never seen stepped inside carrying a tablet and wearing an identification badge clipped to her jacket.
Behind her stood another hospital employee.
The woman looked first at Paige.
Then at me.
"Ms. Ally?"
"Yes."
She pulled the curtain closed.
"My name is Dana Walsh. I'm with county child protective services."
For several seconds I could not understand why those words were directed at me.
Then Dana sat down across from my chair.
"Because Paige is a non-mobile infant with a serious unexplained fracture," she said, "the hospital is required to make a report."
I stared at her.
"Are you saying someone hurt her?"
"I'm saying we have to determine how she was injured."
Her next sentence landed much harder.
"And until we do, we need a complete account of every person who had access to Paige before she arrived here."
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: Before My Sister Reached the Hospital, Investigators Rebuilt My Morning Minute by Minute and Found a Timeline Nobody Could Ignore
Twenty Minutes After My Sister Left Her Baby With Me, One Small Movement Changed an Ordinary Saturday Into an Emergency
Part 2 of 35
