PART 2
My mother was Lorraine Reese.
She was a labor-and-delivery nurse for fourteen years at St. Anselm’s, and she d*ed there — not on shift; as a patient — of a postpartum hem*rrhage after my brother was born, eleven hours after delivery, in a hospital that had not, in 2009, kept enough of the right bl*od product on the floor.
My brother d*ed the next day.
I was twelve.
My father did not speak her name at the fun*ral.
He did not speak it after.
By the time I was fourteen he had married Darlene, who had a daughter my age and a rule about “not living in the past,” and my mother’s photographs had gone into a box in the garage, and I had learned that the fastest way to end a dinner was to say “Mom.”
So I stopped.
I said it elsewhere.
I said it at sixteen to the guidance counselor who asked why I wanted medicine.
I said it at twenty-one on a scholarship essay that a committee later told me they’d read aloud.
I said it at twenty-four, in a lab, to a mentor named Dr. Ingrid Solano, who had studied postpartum hem*rrhage protocols for thirty years and who said, when I told her, “Then you already know what the research is for.
Most of my students have to be taught that.”
The Lorraine Reese Award did not exist when I started medical school.
It exists because of a woman named Bernice Okafor.
Bernice was my mother’s best friend.
They’d nursed together for eleven years, and Bernice had been on the floor the night my mother d*ed, and she had never, in seventeen years, forgiven the hospital, or herself, or the protocol, or the shift schedule, and she had done what a certain kind of nurse does with an unforgivable thing.
She’d organized.
Three years ago, when my research on rapid-response hem*rrhage kits was accepted for a national grant, Bernice — sixty-three, retired, on a pension — had gone to the Dean’s office with a manila folder and eleven thousand dollars of her own savings and said, “I’d like to endow a research award.
I’d like it named for Lorraine Reese.
And I’d like the first one to go to her daughter, if her daughter earns it, and I’d like you to tell me honestly whether she’s earned it, because I’m not doing this for sentiment.”
The Dean had told her honestly.
Bernice was the person I’d given my balcony seat to.
Bernice was the reason I’d been standing in the rain.
And Bernice had in her purse, that morning, a letter that my mother had written in her ninth month, in the hospital, “for the day Ayanna graduates from something,” that Bernice had kept sealed in a Bible for seventeen years because my mother had said, “Not before.
She’ll think I’m being dramatic.”
I did not know about the letter.
I found out about it in the wings.
The Dean got me inside through a service corridor — a maintenance man named Ruben who saw the regalia and the wet graduate and said, “This way, Doc,” and unlocked two doors without asking a question — and I was in a folding chair backstage, in a borrowed towel, with my hair dripping onto a printed speech, when Bernice came through the curtain.
“Baby.
I saw him push you.”
“From the balcony?”
“From the balcony.
I’ve got eyes.
I’ve had them thirty years on a delivery floor.”
She sat down beside me.
“I’m going to give you something, and then you’re going to go out there and read your speech, and I’m going to sit in the balcony and watch a man’s face.”
She took an envelope out of her purse.
“Your mother wrote this at thirty-six weeks.
She gave it to me on the floor, the night before, and she said, ‘Bernie, if anything happens, this is for the day Ayanna graduates from something.
Anything.
Don’t give it to her before.’
I’ve had it in my Bible for seventeen years.
I’ve never opened it.
Today’s the day.”
I held it.
My mother’s handwriting.
AYANNA — FOR GRADUATION DAY.
“I can’t read this before the speech.
I’ll — ”
“Then don’t.
Read it after.
But carry it up there.
She’d want to be on that stage.
She never got to be on one.”
I put it in the pocket of the gown.
Then the Dean came through the curtain with a folder and a face like a man who has just been handed a gift.
“Dr. Reese.
Change of order.
I’m going to present the award first.
Then the speech.
And I’m going to read the citation in full, which I don’t normally do, because I looked at the VIP seating chart in the last four minutes and I’d like the people in row two to hear every word.”
“Dean, I don’t want to — ”
“Dr. Reese, you’re not doing anything.
You’re going to stand there.
I’m going to read what a committee of nine physicians wrote about you.
That’s not revenge.
That’s the minutes.”
