The Wall Behind My Baby’s Crib

It was not simply broken drywall and empty stud bays the way you would expect behind a normal interior wall. The cavity was dark in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. When I got my phone flashlight on it, the inside of that wall was stained black and slick looking in patches, a bloom of something that had clearly been growing undisturbed for a very long time, the kind of black that does not happen from a little condensation. It smelled, once I leaned close enough, like a damp basement that had never once seen sunlight. And wedged down near the base of the cavity, half swallowed by that black growth, was something small and metal that had no business being sealed inside a nursery wall at all.

I did not touch it that night. I picked Lily up, carried her out of that room, and put her in the pack and play in our bedroom instead, and I sat on our bed at eleven at night with my hands shaking, waiting for Andy to get home, already running back through four months of hospital visits with a sick, sliding feeling in my stomach.

Andy came home to find me sitting on the floor of the hallway with Moose’s head in my lap, both of us staring at that ragged hole like it might do something else. We did not sleep that night. We spent it on the phone and on forums and, first thing the next morning, on the line with a home inspector and a mold remediation crew, because whatever guilt I felt about screaming at my own dog was nothing next to the fear of what four months of exposure might have done to an eight month old baby’s lungs.

The remediation company sent out a contractor named Roy Hutchins, a heavyset, soft spoken man in his fifties who had done odd jobs around Caldwell for longer than I had been alive. He took one look into that wall cavity with a proper flashlight and a moisture meter and went quiet in a way I did not like.

“That’s not new,” he said. “That’s years old. Somebody patched a leak from the outside and never touched the inside. Painted right over the smell and called it done.”

He explained it to us slowly, the way you explain something to people who are too frightened to hear it fast. A pipe joint behind that wall, feeding the old upstairs bathroom, had been leaking slowly for a long time, weeping moisture down into the wall cavity behind what used to be, he said, a hospital bed setup, back when he’d done a small job for Gene Porter years before. The leak had never been properly repaired, only patched from the exterior siding and papered over inside with fresh drywall mud and paint, sealing the moisture in rather than letting it out, which is exactly how you grow the kind of black mold that does not forgive a small pair of lungs.

“You said hospital bed,” I said.