I hoped that the pill would, as the box warned, cause drowsiness. Sleep was exactly what I wanted that night.
When I awoke in the morning, the cold was worse. I ached and my eyes were two spheres of itch. The back of my throat was raw from the waterfall that had begun cascading behind my nose as I'd slept.
Of course, the idea of calling my doctor didn't even cross my mind. This was, after all, a cold. The important thing was to wash my hands and face like a madman around Abby. Pour Lucky Charms and Kix, wash hands. Pour milk. Wash hands again.
Eventually, over the next day or two, my nose did stop running. The nasal glacier in the back of my head receded, and my eyes no longer yearned to be rubbed and pressed and scratched.
The problem was that I still felt...out of sorts. Out of kilter. Out of whack. I just didn't feel great. As the summer slowly gave way to the fall, I told myself that I was simply exhausted, beaten down by the demands of the way I had chosen to live my life. I decided that sometime that winter, perhaps in January, Abby and I would take a vacation. I'd find a Caribbean resort with the hemisphere's most creative and nurturing children's program, and the two of us would go someplace warm and fun.
On that island I might even meet a woman, and the two of us would have monster amounts of sex. Maybe, in addition to being the author of a best-selling handbook on sex, she'd be the perfect new mother for Abby.
That summer I seemed to be fantasizing often about finding the perfect woman for both father and daughter. But I also thought frequently of Elizabeth. Sometimes it would be the desperate way that I'd loved the small of her back--the river of spine that disappeared abruptly into the land just below her waist--and sometimes it would be the astonishingly quick and clever way she could make Abby's lunch those nights it was her turn. Juice box, pieces of apple or apple sauce, pretzels, cookies, a small tangle of spaghetti and sauce in a dish that could be zapped in the center's microwave oven. Maybe a banana and some goldfish-shaped crackers.
She'd worked in Burlington, too, and some days we'd have lunch together, a luxurious treat in the middle of our harried, gray-suited lives. She was a commercial loan officer in the main branch of a bank only two blocks from the courthouse where I spent most of my days.
Somehow, she was always back in Bartlett by five.
To this day, I have no idea how she did it. Just no idea.
In an effort to feel better, I started to make small changes in my life that seemed, at first, easy to implement. I cut back from seven or eight cups of coffee a day to a mere five or six, and I made some of those cups decaf. Then I threw my old toothbrush away, even though I knew that my body had already built an immunity to any germ on those pathetic, curlicue bristles.
For a while, I even had fruit for breakfast--and nothing but fruit--instead of the doughnuts or bear claws that I usually bought on my way into work. And yet while I discovered that Abby loved melon, it was hard to find the time to split a honeydew each morning, or pull the seeds from a watermelon slice. It was difficult to finish getting dressed with banana peel slime on my hands. A doughnut at my desk was just so much easier.
But no one said good health was going to be easy, and so for a time I went to the health club I'd joined before Elizabeth died. Clearly it was going to be impossible to go there before or after work, and so I tried working out during lunch. But then what seemed to be my annual murder trial began, and this one would take some effort because there was no witness or weapon. The defendant, an auto dealer whose affluence stemmed from the enormous amounts of hashish he was floating into the country via Lake Champlain and not from the cars that he sold, had shot a fisherman who'd stumbled upon his operation in a cove just south of the border.
I'd probably gone to the health club next to the courthouse a dozen times before the trial began. Once it was under way, though, I had to begin relying instead on isometrics in the car and in meetings and while sitting through testimony that was particularly irritating because it was perjurious.
And then the cold came back in full force, just about the time that the trial ended and the dealer was sent to prison for whole generations. In all likelihood, I decided, I'd never kicked the disease. It had been lurking inside me all along, resting, rallying, and now it was back. I really never had gotten better.
This time I didn't expect to defeat it with mere OTC cold relievers or big glasses of juice. I decided to get a physical. It had been, after all, years.
"What's wrong?" my doctor asked, and I told him that I hadn't been feeling well for months, and I had a cold that seemed to want to stick around.
He nodded. My doctor was tall and trim and muscular. He was probably fifty, but it was clear he could bench-press 240 pounds and run two miles without breaking a sweat.
I, on the other hand, was pretty sure I couldn't walk two miles without needing cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
And so the physical began. I squatted and breathed, I gave up blood and blood pressure. I lay flat on my back for the EKG, I rolled on my side and curled my knees up to my chest for the glove. I grew embarrassed about the ten or fifteen too many pounds I couldn't hide on the scale.
And then I listened as my doctor told me that I really must start getting some exercise. I really must drop ten pounds. I really must start eating right.
The lab results would be back in a few days.
"My cholesterol might be a little high," I heard myself saying, and then I thought: A little high? Oh, please. It's going to be interplanetary.
A week later, I got a letter that said my blood work was indeed normal and my cholesterol was indeed high--though, actually, it wasn't as high as I'd feared. That week without bear claws might really have helped.
Overall verdict? Healthy.
Perhaps as a consequence, for a week or two my cold symptoms seemed less severe, and my throat felt less raw. I rarely felt woozy or light-headed; I slept through most nights. I told myself I was on the mend.
Eventually, however, it grew clear to me that I wasn't. The cold was still inside me somewhere; I still felt out of sync.
Some days, I'd wonder if I was a hypochondriac. Maybe that's it, I'd tell myself. You're a wimp. It's your head that's screwed up, not your body.
Of course I'd take some pleasure in this possibility. Not only did it suggest that my body was doing, more or less, what it was supposed to, it meant I was still growing as a person: Thirty-five years old, and I was still gaining new insights into what it meant to be Leland Fowler, even if Leland's nose happened to be running like a snow-swollen river in March.
Yet it was difficult to see a bright side to all this in the middle of the night. In the middle of the night, I woke up really and truly frightened. When I'd been sick and Elizabeth had been alive, there was always her reassuring presence at three in the morning. Often, her nearness alone would remind me that there was more to my world than my cold or my flu or my twenty-four-hour bug.
I hope I'm not keeping her awake, I would think, as I tossed and turned. I hope I'm not so restless she, too, is losing sleep.
I began to wonder if I had allowed Abby to stay so long in my room because I had needed someone else there. I thought I'd been doing it for my little girl, but perhaps I'd been doing it for myself instead. Perhaps I'd needed a focus away from my own sadness and grief and fear.
Now alone in my bed in the night, I could only look inward and speculate: Just what did that occasional dizziness mean when I'd bend over to pick up a dime or a pen or a section of the newspaper? What about those headaches? They were always in the same spot. And sometimes, it seemed, it had gotten hard to swallow. My throat would grow sore for days at a time, and I'd wonder if I was becoming addicted to Halls Mentho-Lyptus.
Had Elizabeth been alive, she would have stopped me from going quite so squirrelly. She would have reminded me that I was being ridiculous, she would have told me--either at breakfast or, for all I know, at three A.M.--that it was highly unlikely I was dying.
But I didn't have her. And the pictures of her by the bed didn't speak.
By day, of course, things seemed better. In the morning, I'd see how silly I'd been. Still: Those nights alone were scary and long.
When almost another whole season had gone by, marked more in my mind by Halloween and Abby's macabre desire that the two of us trick-or-treat together as skeletons ("You be the daddy skeleton and I'll be the little girl skeleton, and we'll make everyone so scared they'll give us their candy!") than by the fact that my baby was suddenly in preschool four days a week, I finally decided it was time for the heavy artillery. The big guns.
And so on my way home from the courthouse one evening, before turning onto the street of houses in the village in which my daughter was waiting for me with Henrietta Cousino, I stopped by the health-food store and bought a little bottle of echinacea. The tincture was dark, the bottle as well as the fluid, and it came with an eyedropper. I bought it upon the advice of a woman in sandals with fantastic toes--just the tiniest sickle-moon of white on each nail. She probably knew what was good for you, I decided: It was almost mid-November, for God's sake, and she looked healthy and fit. Even her feet looked good, and I had never been into feet. She must have been ten years older than I was, maybe fifteen, but her skin was smooth, her eyes were bright--as bright as the blue on the Actifed box--and I loved the metal shine to her swirls and swirls of gray hair.
"What exactly is echinacea?" I asked.
"An herb," she said, and the word herb had never sounded so sexy. From this woman it sounded like a purr; it was a gentle, cooing, polysyllabic moan: heeerrrrrrrrrbb. "That's all. An herbal extract, to be precise. Do you know what coneflowers look like?"
"My wife grew them."
"Well, the roots of that beautiful plant are the source. The tincture you have in your hands also has burdock in it. And gentian. Wood betony. And goldenseal. We also carry an echinacea without goldenseal, but from what you tell me, I'd recommend your trying some with it."
"Is goldenseal also an...herb?" I asked, hoping I, too, could make the word sound like foreplay. (I couldn't. From my lips, a drawn-out herb sounded more like a stutter than a verbal aphrodisiac.)
"It is. It's an antibacterial. Sometimes it helps clear the sinuses."
"I am pretty sniffly, aren't I?"
"Oh, no. Not at all."
"How much should I take?"
"A couple eyedroppers a day."
"In water?"
"You can. I prefer it in herbal tea."
"I'll bet I would, too," I told her, knowing how much I despised herbal tea. I told myself I was lying to make this woman feel good about her suggestion, and therefore about herself. I appalled myself by looking at her left hand to see if there was a ring.
"Do you need any?"
"Any..."
"Tea?"
"Tea. Yes, sure." And I bought a box of caffeine-free, wild-cherry blackberry tea, exactly the one she recommended. There was a vaguely Nordic, vaguely Grimm-like painting on the top of the box of two little children in lederhosen gathering berries the size of footballs. They were surrounded by birch trees.
That night I tried both the echinacea (an abomination that was acidic and bitter at once) and the tea (less abominable, but only because it was boring and watery instead of acidic and bitter). The next morning, I dropped the precious echinacea into my orange juice, and I discovered that a big glass could mask the taste. At lunch I buried the stuff in my coffee, aware on some level that the coffee was probably neutralizing the benefits of the miracle herb extract, and at dinner I simply swilled it as fast as I could in a glass of tap water.
"What's that?" Abby asked, looking skeptically at the tumbler with swirls of brown. Marsh water, I thought: I'm drinking marsh water.
"I think it's ground-up flowers," I said.