Dale Loves Sophie to Death (21 page)

“Why do we have to leave?” David said. “I want to finish my maze.
He
heard what we said!”

“Out! Go on! I mean it!” And they left. Toby was still crying silently, and she thought that it must be excitement. She just handed him the phone and made a show of going to the sink to rinse the dishes, so that he would feel free to say whatever he wished.

“Dad…” he said, and Dinah could hear sounds of encouragement coming from the other end; Martin was trying to coax Toby out of his discomfort, whatever it was, and Dinah hoped that it would work. Martin and Toby had always understood each other so well. Toby made an effort. “Dad, are you going to come out here?” He glanced around at Dinah, who had stopped moving so that she could hear what he said. She rattled a plate and began to rinse it just before he caught her being so still. She couldn’t hear any sounds from the phone now.

Toby turned his shoulder to her, wrapping himself in the cord, and pressed his mouth so closely against the phone that the furtive words were muffled past Martin’s understanding. “Dad, I think I might be dying. I think I’m going to die.” Dinah understood every syllable, and she gave up any pretense of being busy.

“I said that I’m going to die.” Toby’s face was entirely wet, though he made no sound of crying. “I’m so sick. I want you to come out here.” Dinah turned openly to look at Toby. His face was so tear-covered that it glistened in a grimace of humiliation and fear when he saw that she was staring at him. The pain she felt at his mistrust of her was too vast and too complicated to register entirely just now. For a moment she couldn’t act, and they stood there looking at each other with mutual uncertainty. Then she moved over to him and stooped down with her arms around him and the phone. She could hear the alarm in Martin’s voice, but not the words. She took the receiver and put it to her own ear. “Don’t go anywhere, Martin. I’ll call you back in a little while.” All she could do now was hang up and embrace Toby entirely, with her arms bent at his waist, so that she could reach up behind him to gather his shoulders to her, and she felt his body go limp against her in a total forfeit of reserve. He was willing to give up his dignity to accept her comfort. She said soothing things and stayed as she was, holding him carefully in the empty kitchen.

S
he stayed in the kitchen with Toby for a little while and calmed him; then she arranged him on a chair and went to find a thermometer, because, indeed—Buddy had been right—he was very hot. When she returned, she found that he was sitting limply in the chair and that he had vomited everything that could possibly have been in his stomach, and was retching still, with involuntary, shuddering dry heaves of his thin shoulders, so that beneath his shirt she could see all the frail vertebrae down his back as his body arched spasmodically. She picked him up and carried him to the study to put him on the couch. He had become so heavy since she last carried him, and he gagged with such a helpless muscular determination that she was thrown off-balance and bumped her shoulder and his head against the door-jamb.

David and Sarah had come to the door of the living room, but they lagged back with reserved expressions. They had no doubt about what was going on; they respected this illness because it was so apparent, but they were also curious to see what they should do. Dinah called out to them from the study as she settled Toby, “You two go out and play! Toby has a flu or something. You go on out now!” She looked down at Toby where she had put him on the couch, and tried to judge what to do. She couldn’t tell what was most the matter with him, but his eyelids were hooded and puffy in that semi-oblivion of children in a fever. She slipped one of his arms out of the sleeve of his shirt and took his temperature under that arm, because it would disturb him least and be reasonably accurate. The thermometer read 104, which she thought was supposed to equal 105 degrees orally, but maybe she had the ratio reversed. This seemed to her, all at once, a real emergency, and the only person she thought to call on for help—to call on without hesitation—was Pam. None of her own family came to mind. Dinah knew instinctively that Pam could handle any sort of encumbrance. Dinah trusted Pam’s perception of responsibility, and it was Pam’s counsel she would follow, because Dinah was awfully frightened suddenly. She was convinced that a great deal hung in the balance, and she could do no more right now than choose the right advisers. When she left the study to phone Pam, she saw that David and Sarah were still standing about in the hall, and their laggard hesitance annoyed her hugely. “Well, go
on
! Don’t hang around in here. Go on outside!”

Sarah just looked at her doubtfully. “It’s raining,” David said. “We’ll go watch television upstairs.” So Dinah went to the kitchen to phone Pam, while David and Sarah docilely made their way up the stairs to be out of the way.

“I think you’d better try to give him aspirin,” Pam said. “No. No, give him some liquid Tylenol. He’s more likely to keep it down. I’m going to try and find Dr. Van Helder and be sure he’ll see you. Lawrence will be over in a minute, all right? He can drive you over.”

Toby vomited the Tylenol rather matter-of-factly, without complaint or comment. Dinah took it upon herself to get in touch with Isobel. “Come down and stay with David and Sarah,” she said, not intending to be brusque, but no one else’s pleasure was on her mind. “And call Dad. Rearrange the party.” Isobel agreed to do all those things and told Dinah, of course, not to worry.

T
hey wouldn’t allow Dinah to go into X ray with Toby, so she could only sit now and wait, and the waiting gave her time to fortify her suspicions of everyone in this foreign place. Dinah sat in an alcove which seemed once to have been a large closet but which now did service as a waiting room. It was entirely yellow, with the exception of a brown flecked rug, because someone had believed that a concentration of yellow would be cheering, she supposed; but the effect was to make the underground, windowless space all the more dismal. She had looked around the small room for distractions, but there was nothing to be found but a stack of magazines she didn’t want to read and a frosted sliding partition in the wall that she watched for a little while with the dim expectation that it would open. But, in fact, it never did, and there was nothing to divert her attention. She sat there alone, forced into various considerations and forced, for the time being, to remain more sinning than sinned against.

When Dr. Van Helder had first looked at Toby in the emergency room, he had turned such a masked expression on Dinah that she felt sure she was being harshly judged. “How long has he been limping?” he said to her when Toby moved across the room, with a nurse’s help, from the examination table to a wheelchair.

“But that’s not why he’s here,” she said with irritated desperation. Immediately she became more alarmed when she recognized the air of solemnity that was suddenly communicated from the doctor to the nurse. There was a marked lack of the usual bantering joviality going on in the grimly fitted-out room. “It’s a flu,” Dinah had said. “It started all at once this morning. I thought he was just excited because we were having a party for him, but when he kept vomiting…well. He can’t even drink water!” But when she saw the look of resigned impatience cross Dr. Van Helder’s face, she said with great care, “I would say he’s been limping for about three weeks…oh, about that. But you see,” she went on in low-voiced and studious deliberation, “he’s only copying his grandfather, whom he adores. My father has had a limp for years…” She came to a forlorn stop. She gave it up entirely, because Dr. Van Helder was only looking back at her with patient but stony toleration. Toby appeared to be too miserable even to have heard what was said.

When she had followed the nurse and Toby through the corridors to the X-ray department, she felt an overwhelming panic at having to relinquish any one of her children to someone else’s expert judgment. When the nurse motioned her to a chair in the waiting room and she saw Toby wheeled through the heavy, wide sliding doors, built to facilitate the transport of people who could not transport themselves, she wondered frantically how she could get him out if she decided this was all a mistake. How could she even find him in the warrenlike passages of the hospital?

The longer she waited, and the more she thought about his conversation with Martin, the clearer it became to her that, in fact, Toby knew what was happening to him. She respected her children; she trusted that they knew what they said they knew. She understood that she should accept Toby’s assessment of his own condition. He must have achieved that unusual familiarity with his body that she herself had experienced each time she was pregnant. She had always known long before she missed a period. She firmly believed that, now and then, the body and mind forgo their constant, surreptitious collusion and render up to one’s sensibilities some bits of pertinent information regarding the mysterious necessities of the physical being. Sometimes a signal drifted into one’s consciousness. She had no doubt that that had happened to Toby now, and she sat there floundering in her own emotions for something with which she could gird herself against the despair that would soon overtake her. She was filled with the bitterest self-loathing and reproach at what she now saw as sentimental facetiousness: the stupid and smug notion that her own perceptiveness in recognizing any possible disaster would ward it off. She rested her elbows on her knees and lowered her head into her hands. For years she had indulged in an absurd kind of emotional self-flagellation. She had believed she would never feel the shock of a misery that she already expected. Maybe part of her constant underlying melancholy was the idea—confirmed now—that there are some things for which one cannot be adequately prepared.

The nurse wheeled Toby back through the sliding doors, and Dinah got up to follow them. They made their way along the same corridors through which they had just come, and Toby was reinstalled on the table in the emergency room. Dinah moved over to him and held his hand, which only hung in her own. He still had the swollen, uncommunicative look of fever, and he lay on the table with a heaviness peculiar to sick children; healthy children are so seldom without animation. The nurse leaned up against the wall with an equally uncommunicative but vacant expression. She tapped her foot abstractedly to a tune in her head. People in hospitals are very good at not being asked questions. All at once she straightened up and left the room as if she had heard her name being called; she just turned briefly to tell Dinah that Dr. Van Helder would be back in a minute, and in fact, he came into the room almost the moment the nurse was gone from sight. He was brisk. He didn’t say anything or even acknowledge Dinah, so she stood there looking on silently. The doctor was a fairly short, stocky man with closely cut reddish hair, and Dinah watched him as he bent over Toby, who seemed dark and delicate and refined by contrast. She was filled with a sorrowful and unidentifiable longing that became a metallic taste in her mouth and a long ache and tightness down her throat. The feeling resembled homesickness. It was a need for events to resume a familiar shape.

Toby didn’t say anything, but he looked over to be sure his mother was standing there when Dr. Van Helder picked up the clipboard at the end of the bed and consulted it. He began to probe Toby’s abdomen with his square fingers while he gazed at the wall in concentration.

“I’m going to set up an IV,” he said to Dinah. “I’ll be back in a little while.” And he, too, left the room. Toby turned his head on the pillow to look at Dinah and see what this meant, although he was too tired to ask and even too tired, it seemed, to be very much afraid. She boosted herself up beside him on the high padded table, and she explained to him what an IV was and that it would only hurt as much as a shot, no more, but all the time she talked about it, the idea of Toby attached to an IV was dawning on her. The picture was forming in her head of how that would be, and she was beginning to think with one part of her mind that the sight would be unendurable. She was finding it dreadful to have been invested with the power of adulthood and now find it had been stripped away. Her authority here was impotent.

She moved away from the table when the doctor and three nurses came back into the room, one nurse wheeling the IV mechanism ahead of her, beaming at Toby as though he were in for a treat. Dinah was frustrated almost to the point of tears at all the stupidity that was rampant in the world. She could scarcely bear it that they would patronize him so. She stood in the doorway watching while they worked over the bed and searched for a vein in his pale limp hand. The nurse took his arm and began slapping it lightly to bring the blood there so it would delineate the elusive network of blood vessels. Dinah even assumed an air of reassurance when Toby turned to look at her in injured inquiry, but she felt such a fury that she was almost dizzy with it. She leaned in as casual an attitude as possible against the wall for support. Never before in her life had she felt a more commanding inclination toward violence. She seethed with the need to do injury to that nurse, to stop her, to hurt her. At the same time, she knew that the nurse was no more than a rather insensitive woman getting on with her job, and Dinah leaned against the cold plaster wall breathless with the drag of civilization on her animal instincts.

“It’s all right, Toby,” she said, when no one else spoke to him, “they’re just trying to find the vein. That nurse is
hitting
you that way,” she said with impeccable clarity, “so that it will bring the blood to your arm.” She phrased it just like that because she wanted the woman to apologize to Toby—and to her—but the nurse didn’t even look up. The doctor looked over at her, though, because he seemed not to have known that she was still in the room; then he bent over Toby again.

“Is your name Toby?” he said, but Toby wisely made no answer, because the doctor didn’t care; he was only speaking to distract Toby. “Well, Toby,” he said in a slow and meditative voice, mostly to himself, “we’re having a lot of trouble with this. Your veins roll. Did you know that?” He and a nurse bent again over Toby to try and insert the IV needle. “This is all your mother’s fault,” he said by way of conversation, and in the doorway Dinah tightened with astonishment. Of course, she
knew
it must all be her fault, but she still didn’t know why or what had happened. When had it started to be her fault? It made her furious that this doctor would reveal her culpability so casually before she even had a chance to assemble her defenses.