He stared at the ceiling, at the swirls in the plaster. How could someone who was so uncommonly observant not see that something was badly wrong with her baby? She always knew where he left his keys, his checkbook, his Visa card, his hammer. Whenever he was low on deodorant, she bought a couple cans for him. She knew when Bullet’s kitty litter needed changing, when they were nearly out of milk. She had even spotted a patch of morel mushrooms that sprouted in the mulch beside the back fence last summer. This was different, not minor little managerial duties. This was the most important thing in their lives, the well-being of their child, and they had both missed the ominous signs that threatened Eddie’s existence.
Jake turned on his side, dragging the sheet and blanket as he rolled. Ordinarily Anna’s body would have anchored the covers. The room was unbearably solemn.
An hour later, he was still awake. Every minute of the last three days had played through his head, with answers to none of the many questions that nagged him. He tossed back the bed covers and wandered, bare feet padding on the carpet, down the hallway past the open door to Chris’s room. He stopped at the doorway to Eddie’s room. His father-in-law’s snoring burbled from the hide-a-bed downstairs.
He didn’t switch on the light in Eddie’s room, didn’t need to see the details. The crib rails, the footboard, a knit blanket wadded in the corner as if it were tossed in a storm—no different than last week, yet very different from last week. By day, the foam diamonds, squares, rectangles, and circles of the mobile that dangled over the mattress were bright crayon colors. Now they were shades of gray, seemingly suspended by cobwebs and eerily still, except for the diamond that, caught in the current of his movements, twisted almost imperceptibly to the left. It was here that Anna had found their baby nearly lifeless. He imagined the look on her face when she spotted Eddie lying there—her eyes wide and disbelieving, her lips parted in terror. He could hear the shriek that surely sputtered from deep inside her.
If he had been home, he would have seen the first stages of the chalky color sick babies get, would have felt the weak tone of his muscles and heard the change in his cry. If he had been home, they would have taken Eddie to the hospital that night; the antibiotic would have been started at least eight hours earlier than it had been. Eight hours is merely a heartbeat in a lifetime, but it’s the difference between life or death, damaged or normal, in a baby with meningitis.
But, he hadn’t been home the night it all happened. Because of that, and because Anna hadn’t recognized the extent of his illness, Eddie might die. Or, worse in many ways, be terribly handicapped. During his pediatric rotation as a medical student, he had started an IV on Marcus, a kid with microcephaly from a congenital infection. The little guy’s virus-wracked brain didn’t grow, so his head didn’t grow, either. He looked like a monkey, with big ears, a forehead that slowly sloped back from his dull, blue eyes, and a bewildered, uncomprehending look on his face. In another era, the boy could have been the pinhead in a sideshow. Eddie might end up like that, a ten-year-old unable to walk or talk, a boy with a feeding tube dangling from the side of his abdomen into which he and Anna would squirt thick, milky formula.
If only he had asked Anna the right questions, had taken her phone call seriously. It had been, after all, a call for help. He tried to imagine a son with no language, no way to express pleasure, no ability to relate to other human beings in meaningful ways. He had heard parents speak in dreamy tones about the joy their handicapped children brought to their lives. He could see no joy whatsoever in Eddie being a vegetable.
With a bad neurologic outcome, Eddie would grow bigger and more difficult to handle. And then, he would go through puberty and be a baby in the body of a teenager, with facial hair and pubic hair and a man’s penis—a useless, pitiable member. His grunts and groans, uttered in a deep, adult voice, would sound like a jungle animal. All because Jake hadn’t been home that night, because he hadn’t understood that his son was terribly ill.
As he left Eddie’s room, he passed the easy chair, lost in the shadows, where Anna used to sit and nurse Eddie in the middle of the night. It was empty. Everything, the chair, Eddie’s room, their bed, his life, seemed indescribably empty.
Chapter 17
Anna
T
he nurse, pen in hand, stepped toward Eddie. She pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket, smoothed the folds, read the lab report, and wrote on the bedside chart,
WBC 9,400; 64 polys, 4 bands, 31 lymphs, 1 mono
.
Anna watched as the nurse printed the letters. It was a foreign language, strange words that, as the nurse had explained, meant different kinds of white blood cells. She wanted to understand these numbers, as they seemed to be a key to Eddie’s improvement. The WBC number from yesterday morning was 10,300 and by evening was 11,200.
“It’s going up. Is that bad?” she had asked Dr. Farley. He explained that numbers like that weren’t really different.
“How much do you weigh?” he asked. “About one thirty or so?”
“Close enough,” she answered.
“It’s like your weight—one thirty or one thirty-two or one twenty-eight. No difference,” he said. “You go up or down by a couple pounds every day. Same with Eddie’s white count. A thousand or two either way doesn’t mean anything.”
The nurse folded the paper with Eddie’s numbers and slipped it back into her pocket. “Eddie has a visitor,” she said. “Do you want to see her now?”
“Who is it?” Maybe her mother. She had spoken to her parents briefly when they first arrived, but she didn’t want to see either of them yet. She wasn’t ready to answer their questions—the ones about what happened to Eddie. Why didn’t you call the pediatrician? they would wonder. It would have been the easy, logical thing to do. Why didn’t Jake come home when you and Eddie were ill? How could you sleep through the night without checking on a sick baby? She had no explanations they would accept.
She could lie. She could tell them Eddie had been fine when she put him to bed, had taken his last feeding with no trouble, hadn’t had a fever, had smiled and gurgled as she laid him in his crib. But, eventually, they would find out what really happened. Besides, lies wouldn’t change anything that mattered. If only she could live that night all over again, with the lies becoming the truth the second time through, with Eddie still healthy.
Why did Jake have to be at the hospital that night? She remembered the afternoon at the rest stop near the Mackinac Bridge. He had lost Chris then. Now they would lose Eddie because of Jake. Lose Eddie? Lose her baby? She closed her eyes against the thought, stared into the darkness. Chris had been found. Eddie wouldn’t be lost, either.
“Her name is Elizabeth Tucker.” The nurse hung the bedside chart on the end of his crib. “Says she works with you.”
“Oh, yes. Elizabeth. Sure. Let her in.”
She watched Elizabeth walk past the nurses’ station, past Charlotte’s moaning teenaged daughter in the corner bed. Elizabeth seemed to be a mirage, a page from a Talbots’ catalog in her tweed pantsuit and maroon neck scarf. Yet here she was in the ICU, her shining black hair pulled away from her face, her eyes framed by mascara. Elizabeth belonged in the other world, the one that seemed a million years ago, a million miles away.
She glanced at her watch. Elizabeth had come directly from work, was still dressed in her teaching clothes. She looked at her own lap, at the wrinkles in her pants, at the grease smudge from a packet of French fries. She wished away her rumpled, grimy clothes and oily, straggly hair.
“Anna, honey.” Elizabeth slipped her arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.
She had never felt Elizabeth’s body. It was soft and warm, even through her business attire. Touching Elizabeth, feeling her humanness, was like walking in a dream.
“This is unbelievably horrible. I don’t know what to say.” Elizabeth continued to hold her and together their bodies swayed—a bit to the left, a bit to the right.
She stepped back from the crib, leaving Elizabeth at the metal rail. Her friend leaned toward Eddie. “Poor baby,” she murmured as she wiped a tear from her eye. The scent of Elizabeth’s hand lotion, like a field of waving lavender, rose from the fingers that patted the flannel blanket covering Eddie’s legs. She stroked the patch of cheek between the strips of tape that held his breathing tube in place. She didn’t back away from him, didn’t think he was too freaky to touch.
Elizabeth—neat, organized—seemed terribly out of place here, didn’t belong among blood stains and tracheal secretions and urine bags. Rather, she and Elizabeth should be together at the school, planning field trips for their students, logging grades into the computer, assisting nervous youths as they practiced making telephone appointments in English.
“What’s happening to my class?” Anna tried to grab a distant memory. “Are the kids okay?” She couldn’t name a single student right now.
“Well . . .” Elizabeth paused as she reached for Anna’s hand and laced their fingers together. Her skin was smooth as lamb’s leather. “Bonita has stepped up to the plate nicely—I understand she’s working well with the subs. It’s not the same without you, but it’s satisfactory. Maybe a C plus.” Elizabeth dropped Anna’s hand and then straightened her scarf. “Don’t worry about them. They’ll limp along until you get back. You need to focus on Eddie. And yourself.”
Anna sank into the chair beside the crib. She and Elizabeth seemed to be acting in a mind-twister movie. Nothing was real. Everything was distorted. Irregular. Out of sync.
“And, how’s Chris?” Elizabeth asked. “This must be hard on him.”
Anna wrapped her arms around her chest. If only she could wrap them around Chris. He was only three, not much more than a baby himself. He needed her, too. “Well, yes, it’s hard on him.” She shook her head, hoping to rid her mind of the bad-mother thoughts. “My parents are here. He begs for me to come home, but I can’t leave Eddie.”
“Can he visit here?”
“They don’t allow kids his age in the ICU. Besides, I think he shouldn’t see Eddie like this. It’d scare him too much.”
Elizabeth patted Anna on the shoulder. “Maybe he can visit later.”
“Yes, later. I miss him so much. I wish I could hack myself down the middle . . . one side for Eddie and one for Chris.”
“Ugh, that’s pretty gruesome.” Elizabeth twisted her mouth and wiped her hand across her eyes. “Soon, I bet, you’ll figure out how to halve your time between them, not halve yourself.”
“I hope so.”
“I brought you something.” Elizabeth handed her a package wrapped in brown paper with a huge, floppy bow of lacy ribbon. “Here’s something to distract your thoughts for a while. When Eddie goes home, we’ll work on some of these.”
Anna’s hands trembled as she untied the bow. With her fingernail, she slit the Scotch tape that held the wrapping paper together. Inside was a craft magazine, its cover decorated with pictures of brightly painted chairs—one was cobalt blue with clouds across the backrest, another was rainbow colors, the third was ink black with a white and yellow daisy on the seat.
“Great.” She strained to sound cheerful. This woman, beautiful, thoughtful Elizabeth, was a friend and yet a stranger. Did she know her? Had they ever laughed together? Whispered secrets? Figured out projects? She felt herself float up into the corner of the room where she could peer down on the two of them sitting shoulder to shoulder beside Eddie’s crib.
“See . . .” Elizabeth rubbed her fingertips over the rainbow chair. “I thought we could do something like this to that ugly thing in your basement.” They called it the Old King Cole chair, the huge wooden throne Jake had found in the back reaches of their basement after they moved in.
Anna nodded. Maybe someday she could paint furniture again.
Now Elizabeth had gone, carrying the dream of the other world with her. Anna curled up in the chair beside the crib. Outside, the sun had set, leaving a tangerine halo that outlined the building across the street. The light in one of the building’s windows flicked out. Someone was leaving work for the day.
Soon Eddie was going to be dead. She pictured him, pale and lifeless, inside the toy-box-turned-coffin that was covered with the nodding violets. She had decorated the box to hold her children’s toys. It would be the perfect size for him.
Or maybe they would make him a real casket. Jake could build it and she could paint Eddie’s favorite things on the lid—a stack of graham crackers, his one-eyed teddy bear, the mobile that dangled over his crib at home. She’d put the teddy bear in the casket with him. The bottom would be hard. He needed something to cushion his body from the wooden floor. The blanket Jake’s mother had knit would be good for that, a nice soft bed for her dead baby. Where was that blanket, the one Eddie liked to suck on? Probably still in his crib. What outfit would he wear? She tried to think of the clothes in his drawers, but could remember only the little suits Chris had had as a baby. Didn’t Eddie have any clothes of his own? Poor, second-born Eddie with his secondhand wardrobe.
First-born Chris. That had been a long pregnancy. She had been nauseated, exhausted, weepy for months and months and months. With each passing day, the baby grew, her belly bloated, her ankles and hands swelled. She ended up starting her maternity leave three weeks earlier than originally scheduled. Her pregnancy with Eddie had been completely different. She had more energy, gained less weight, worked until two days before he was born. Boisterous Chris had been hard on her from the moment of his conception. Placid Eddie, even as a fetus, was an unending joy.
Something was happening on her left; something was moving. She turned her head. It was Eddie. He was jerking. His legs kicked at the air and his arms shook as if he were working a pump handle.
She leaped from her chair and grabbed his flailing hands. “He’s having another seizure,” she screamed. Where was his nurse? She held Eddie’s arms, trying to quell the spasms. “Another seizure,” she screamed again.
The nurse rounded the corner. “Dr. Farley,” she shouted.
In three breaths, he was at her side. “Let’s give him . . .”
Anna couldn’t hear the rest of his words. Another nurse was guiding her toward the visitors’ lounge.
“Why don’t you wait out there? You can come back as soon as things settle down. It’ll only be a few minutes.”
“No.” Anna stopped. She felt the nudge of the nurse’s arm. She didn’t want to languish in the lounge. “Please let me stay.”
“Mrs. Campbell, you know what these seizures are like. They aren’t fun to watch. We’re giving him more meds to stop this one. When it’s under control, we’ll come for you.”
She looked back at his crib but couldn’t see Eddie. All she saw were the back sides of one nurse and two doctors.
In the lounge, she edged into her chair, the one with the pillow and the blanket Jake had brought. Another seizure. The drugs they had given him didn’t stop the seizures. What was going to happen to him? What was the infection doing to his brain? What happens to a baby without a brain?
She drew her fingers through her hair. Maybe they should just throw him away, like a bruised tomato or an ear of corn with a borer stuck between the kernels. Eddie was a cull. She didn’t want him anymore. She and Jake could make a new baby, a perfect one. She stared at her wedding ring, at the way it circled her finger, and began sobbing. How could she think that? Eddie was her precious baby. How could she want to make him go away?
His smile was precious, as was the way he gurgled when he heard her voice. His little hands were precious in the way they wrapped around her finger and grabbed at her hair and palmed Cheerios from the high chair tray. The first time he rolled over, he scared himself. After he flopped on his back, his eyes grew huge and he gasped, seemingly in terror. But then his body relaxed and he seemed proud as a prince at his new trick. No, he couldn’t go away. He needed to stay with her, to stay her precious little baby.
She wrapped her blanket around her head, leaned against the arm of the chair, and wept.