An hour before midnight, you find yourself on your hands and knees scrubbing dried afterbirth off the vinyl floors of a labor and delivery room. You’re a little pissed about this turn of events because it’s been a long day, and you forgot to bring the headphones you normally wear for the whole eight-hour shift. You’re even more pissed off because you tried to scrape a raisin out of the sink drain with your bare fingers. Only, it wasn’t a raisin; it was a blood clot, and after several minutes of scrubbing, you’re still not convinced you got all the placenta out from under your fingernail. 

It’s the type of day that makes you feel like you earned the title Environmental Services Tech even if it’s just an inflated way of saying hospital janitor. Well, most days you feel like you’ve earned the title after running from unit to unit to deal with whatever problems are labeled the most urgent. Piss, shit, and vomit usually sit at the top of the list while clogged toilets and coffee spills are always a problem you let the morning shift handle. It’s a crap job—pun intended—one that you know most people couldn’t handle, but you honestly don’t mind it. Sure, you deal with the unsavory parts of life, but you’d rather deal with human shit than the bullshit you see in retail and food service. 

You’re pretty damn good at it, too. You’ve got the whole sweeping and mopping thing down to an exact science, and you hold the current record for fastest clean time out of the whole crew. You’re so good, in fact, they offer you the not-so-coveted spot as team lead only a couple months into the gig. They give you master keys and computer access and far more control than a twenty-year-old college student knows what to do with when it comes to your thirty- and forty-year-old coworkers, not that they respect you anyway. 

Which is how you ended up in this labor and delivery room that your coworkers refused to clean, pissed off and ready for the night to be over with, when the woman in the next room lets out a scream. In any other part of the hospital, you’d be scared out of your mind, but you figure this is par for the course around these parts. There’s no podcast host to drown out the pregnant woman so you try to tune her out on your own by turning back the floor. Those itty-bitty bits of blood want to stay as badly as you want to leave, and you’re putting all your weight into the scrubbing when there’s a hiccup in this woman’s cries like it’s taken on a life of its own; like it’s aware of what’s going on; like it has a heart and a brain and the vocal cords to hold for a beat of sacred silence. Just as it went, it resumes, but this time as the two-fold harmony that belongs to a mother and a newborn baby.

You know you’re supposed to, but you don’t like babies much. You don’t find them very cute, and their constant fussing makes you anxious. One day, people tell you, and you nod along like you agree, but you know that’s not the case, not for someone like you. There are some things that you just know.

Even so, this moment feels special and private, and you’re a part of it. The woman next door and her baby may never know your name, but you’ll wipe theirs from the whiteboard with a wet rag in half an hour or so. On your hands and knees again, you’ll remove every bit of evidence that they were ever here for the next patient and then the next. That’s the cycle, and at the beginning and end, there you are with a mop and a bucket of sanitizer.

Today though, right now, you get a call on your old-as-sin walkie-talkie from a pediatric nurse. She asks you how long it’ll be until you make your way to her floor where the only available rooms are dirty. Soon, you tell her, mentally placing that at the top of the list.

The rest of the afterbirth stain comes up without much fuss.

The nurses always shoot you annoyed looks when you pass through the halls so late in the night, your stupid cleaning cart squeaking from a broken wheel and sloshing chemicals all over the floor. One nurse wearing a scrub top decorated with rubber ducks lifts her pointer finger to her lips. 

If there’s anything waking up the sleeping patients, it isn’t you. It’s the screams coming from the only room with its doors open. As you pass, you can see a baby waving its arms in a crib. The whines it emits rise high above any noise you’re making, but you ignore it and park your cart in front of the room one door down from the baby’s. It was a room kept under isolation, probably the type of sickness that is hell-bent on killing the old and the young but nothing in between. Knowing the specifics, that isn’t your job, but wearing a plastic gown and N95 mask is. By the time you step into the dirty room, you’re already sweating.

Halfway through the nine-step cleaning process, the baby’s whines begin to pick up speed and pitch before morphing into a cry. No, not a cry. A wail, like the woman from the labor and delivery room. The sound is visceral, instinctual, primal; the kind of noise that makes the less evolved parts of your brain go apeshit and search for a threat that doesn’t exist. At least, not to you.

It’s not long after that the cries are replaced with the rapid, mechanical beeping that signals the sudden decline of a patient’s vitals. Over the hospital intercom, a woman with a voice too calm for the situation reports a rapid response. Not a minute later, she returns with an update.

“Code blue,” she says. You know that one.

You keep the door closed, but you listen to the clamor of the code blue team setting up for what should be a long fight, hear the panic of what you assume are the parents. CPR, intubation, whatever it takes. 

Whatever it takes lasts less than thirty minutes and is not enough.

When you dare to leave the room, the crowd has dispersed, and the neighboring door has been shut. The bed tracking system buzzes, informing you that there is a new dirty room. You don’t need to look at the identification code to know it’s the one right next to you.

You want to make somebody else do it. You have that much power at least, but a nurse approaches you and asks you to clean it as soon as possible. They have multiple kids waiting for rooms in the emergency department, and you are right there after all.

You mop the walls. You wipe down the crib. You refuse to look at the baby’s name as you erase it from the board. You sweep the cracker crumbs from the floor and change the curtains to stop the disease that killed one baby from killing the next. You make an addendum to the cycle. Sometimes things don’t go as planned.

On your way home, even though it’s late, you call your mom because she always picks up. You tell her what happened casually, like it doesn’t bug you. It was just another day at work. She cries when you talk about the baby. Good. At least somebody can do it.

From then on, you can’t cry about anything, but you think about it often. Every time you see the chubby cheeks of a child, you wonder if they have eighty years or three months left. You have become accustomed to assuming the latter. Once annoyances, they have morphed into individual ticking time bombs, ready to detonate at any moment. A month after that night, when you hear a baby cry across the grocery store, you tense up, clench your fists, swear you can smell the stinging scent of concentrated sanitizer. 

It isn’t until a routine checkup with your therapist that you break. She asks you how you’ve been, says she can tell you aren’t being honest when you tell her you’ve been okay. That’s all it takes before it comes out of you hot and all at once, like the watery cries of a new mother, a dying baby, or the thing that has been building up in you for months.

“Tell me about it,” she says, and when you don’t know where to start, “Keep it short and simple for now. Just the facts.”

Get it out. Get it over with.

Okay.

Short and simple like the life of the baby you heard take its final breaths but never saw the face of. A baby you didn’t know the name of, how many pounds it weighed, how tall it was. A baby who spent its last moments surrounded by doctors and nurses trying to coach breath back into its brand-new-but-failing lungs. A baby that will never go to school or ride a bike or drink chocolate milk or know that you didn’t have the strength to cry for it until somebody finally asked. A baby whose screams have long since died but tear you apart all the time, silently ripping all the resolve you thought you had until all you are is a husk, scared of the cries of a thing that cannot hurt you. A baby that is not yours to grieve.