Authors: Sarah Bilston
“Well, that is strange,” she conceded at last, sounding unusually unsure of her ground; “quite peculiar!” And then (I could hear self-confidence flooding back into her voice): “in that case, Q, are you sure there’s nothing
wrong
with him?”
I spluttered wrathfully in response to this; I did not tell her, of course, that only the night before we took Samuel to the hospital, that Tom and I had been worrying for days, weeks now, that something was really wrong with our son. “Alison, don’t be so ridiculous,” I said instead, as forcefully as I could. “Something wrong—just because a baby cries! Hahahaha! Which one of us is the first-timer here, hmm?”
I won that battle, I suppose, but I put the phone down sweating and disgusted with myself. I didn’t mind snapping at Alison’s heels over clothes, money, Mum, Jeanie—the usual territory of sisterhood, in other words, but I didn’t want to drag maternity into the mix. There was something particularly horrible about using children as soccer balls, bouncing them backward and forward from one side to the other. Still, Alison brought out the worst side of me; she always had.
It was at nine o’clock the previous night that we heard the first yell from the bedroom. At half past midnight, Tom strapped Samuel into the car and drove him around winding lanes while Jeanie and I collapsed in the kitchen with a bottle of wine, feeling hellish. At one forty-five a.m. Tom arrived back with—we heard the yells before the car door even opened—a child in a truly frantic state. His face was covered with a sheen of saliva and snot, and he seemed to have developed some sort of rash around his eyes. His legs were drawn tightly up to his chest, and his yell was a horrible monotone.
Tom handed Samuel to me with a gray face. “We must take him
to the emergency room, Q,” he said, and his voice was clipped, the tones of a man on the edge. “It’s been five hours now; he cried the
whole
time we were away. I stopped and cuddled him, I put music on, I drove with the windows open, I took him to listen to the sea, I hummed in his ear like a giant frigging bumblebee, nothing helped. We have to take him up to the hospital, Q; this
can’t
be normal. Let me just change my shirt (he threw up all over this one. Twice).”
I sent Jeanie to bed and stepped out into the cool night air with our poor suffering child. The thought of setting foot in a hospital with Samuel was horrific…tests, needles, wires, and IVs…but on the other hand, maybe someone could
help…
We strapped him back into the car seat and drove to the nearest hospital, a brick box building fifteen miles away, humming with low-level night-light. The entrance to the emergency room yawned like a giant neon mouth atop a dark circular driveway. Tom parked while I ran in and delivered our details to the strained-looking triage nurse through a cacophony of yells (“He won’t stop crying.” “I can see that.”). The bunch of drunks in the waiting area took one look at us, then moved as a man to the other side of the room.
I stood in the blue-carpeted sea of the waiting room, swaying slowly backward and forward, rocking Samuel in my arms—my beautiful, perfect child. The only time I’d ever been in an emergency room before was when I was thirteen and smashed my finger playing netball at school. I was torn then between the novelty of the experience (an X-ray! Maybe I’d even get a cast!) and the fact that my finger hurt like hell. Plus until my mother arrived I was attended by Mrs. Gilbert, the games teacher, who wouldn’t stop grousing about the fact that Priscilla, her shaggy golden retriever mix, needed to be let out for a pee.
“What did you do?”
I heard a whisper behind me, and turned to see Tom, clad in a fresh T-shirt, Samuel’s diaper bag slung over his shoulder, staring at me open-mouthed. Following Tom’s gaze, I looked down to dis
cover Samuel sleeping quietly at my breast. The hospital’s harsh white light showed every blotch on his pale, tired skin, but already we could see that the dark red clouds around his eyes were passing.
“How in God’s name did you do that?”
Samuel muttered slightly, stretched, and snuggled more closely into my breast. I blinked dry eyes. “I’ve no idea!”
Tom drew me carefully to the hard metal chairs, and we sat together, staring in profound silence at our sleeping son. “Should we wait to see a doctor or—go home?” I whispered, eventually, while Tom shook his head slowly from side to side. He was shaking.
“I truly thought he’d
never
stop,” he intoned. “Never, ever, ever. Never.” (The woman next to us glanced at him, drew her jacket fractionally away, and muttered something distastefully about “getting all types in here.” Since she was garlanded in green toilet paper, I thought this not entirely fair.)
Both of us were utterly beyond the point of decision-making. We sat for another half hour, staring at Samuel, making half-hearted efforts to stand up, failing, stumbling back down—at which point we were called, fortunately enough, to see a sympathetic young doctor perched on a trolley in the corridor. “No fever, heart rate’s good, blood oxygen is good,” he told us briefly, “and Samuel’s not crying now. Colic. Bound to be. But check with your own doctor if you need reassurance.” He waved at us cheerfully before rushing off to deal with a woman who had half a wine glass sticking out of her face.
“Q, gotta do it, gotta call th’doctor in the morning,” Tom pointed out numbly, as we dragged ourselves into bed at long, long last, an hour later. “Describe it all, what’s been happening. Appointment. Arrange appointment for when we go back to the city. Checkup.”
“Tom,” I said, pausing with one leg on the bed, one on the floor,
“are
we going back to the city after next week? For good, I mean?”
Silence. And then: “Whaddya saying?”
“Just what I said. Are we really going back?”
“What else?”
“Stay here.”
“Stay here?”
“Yes.” There, I’d said it.
“Christ. For—how long?”
“I don’t know.”
This time, a very long silence. “Q—” chewing his lip—“We both know I
can’t
take more time off. No one takes a three-week vacation, not at Crimpson. Not even for a honeymoon. They’ll fire me.”
“So let them.”
“And then?”
I didn’t reply as I levered myself into bed, just contented myself with a vague “I don’t know” as Tom, in the middle of a thought, collapsed into exhausted, unsettled unconsciousness. All I knew was, I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t do it; I couldn’t go back to the office, couldn’t reenter that world of hysterical, overhyped boredom. But if I didn’t, and if Tom didn’t, what on earth were we going to do?
Of course I said nothing of this to Alison, when she called; nothing about the storms of crying, the hospital, or our strange, lengthening holiday. Alison is one of those people who glide through life unaffected by trauma or crisis, someone who never seemed called upon to wrestle big decisions. She couldn’t possibly help me; she didn’t need to know.
Jeanie
I
can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear about that volunteer work you’ll be doing,” Paul said on the Monday night, just as he was heading out of the door. Tom and Q were clustered behind him, thanking him for his hospitality, his house, etc., etc., when he paused and turned to me. “In the retirement home on Quiet Lanes. It’s so great to think that you’ll be giving something to this community.” Tom’s mouth had fallen open; Q looked bewildered.
“Didn’t you know?” he asked, with apparent surprise. “Jeanie’s going to be helping out with our senior citizens at Quiet Lanes. It’s a great place. She has a wonderful idea for a research project, don’t you, Jeanie? Well, good-bye then,” he finished, flashing me a smile as big and sparkling as the Koh-i-Noor as he put out his hand (I felt the hard gold of his signet ring against my little finger). “It was so nice to meet you! Good luck on the comparative study. And I hope your boyfriend has a wonderful visit.”
Tom stared at the door as it closed behind him. “What the—?”
“What
are you going to do, Jeanie?” Q asked in bafflement, and of course I was stuck, wasn’t I, with having to agree with the preposterous story.
“I—er—yes, well, nothing’s definite, but I’ve given them a ring, they’ve suggested I go for an initial visit, so—maybe—”
My incoherent wafflings were cut off by Q, who turned to me with an unexpectedly positive face. “I think that’s a
fantastic
idea,” she said firmly. “You can’t spend all day listening to Samuel wail, it’s too much for anyone. You need a break from it. And since you haven’t got a work visa, volunteer work is a great way to get out of the house.” She smiled kindly. “I’m so glad, Jeanie. Plus it will be a wonderful opportunity for you to get more experience of caring and welfare, and it’ll look good on your CV when you get back.”
“And I don’t feel so guilty about keeping you in Connecticut, now you have this job,” she added in the morning, when she outlined a new plan to keep us all up in Sussex for a further week at least (she was going to try to persuade both her firm and Tom’s that they needed more time off on medical grounds—in other words, because of Samuel). “If it wasn’t for the job I would feel terrible, but it’s wonderful to think you’re making a place for yourself here. It’s bound to impress future employers in the UK.”
“Bedpans here I come,” I muttered ruefully to myself, when the door closed behind her.
Then I began sketching out some questions to be addressed in a comparative study of Cumbria and Connecticut, just
in case
Paul ever appeared in Connecticut again:
Right, time to start digging about on the Web, I thought to myself; I could even go to the library, that way if Paul came to stay—just to be on the safe side—I would have concrete facts to draw upon airily in conversation. “Yes,” I could say brightly, “I have discovered that only point-four-percent (factoring in the cost of living, taking the rate of inflation into consideration) of geriatric care is administered locally, demographically speaking.” And maybe, I pondered, I could call that lady who ran Quiet Lanes and ask her; maybe she’d fill in a questionnaire!
Alison was very impressed when I phoned her to tell her all about it, although we ended up spending rather a lot of time talking about Samuel and Q. She was really worried when I told her all about the hospital trip, and made me describe in achingly minute detail exactly what the doctor said and how Tom was behaving (“Do you think their marriage will survive?”). But she thought I was doing a marvelous job finding a way to set myself apart from other candidates at the interview stage, and even suggested her husband might be able to pull a few strings for me in the government. She could be a very handy sister sometimes.
Q
P
aul set up a meeting for us with Kenton Tyler, the friend of his father’s from law school, the day he left. Tom authorized the call, but Paul saw immediately he wasn’t entirely happy about it. “Look, you’re not making any kind of a commitment by going,” he reminded us, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “It’ll just give you a sense of how small-town law compares to big-firm life. You can weigh up the benefits and see how the job meshes with your new priorities. And if it’s not something that interests you—if you don’t think the firm has good enough prospects—there’s no harm done.”
We gathered the strangest collection of oddments, baffling fragments, about the old lawyer over the next few days. “Old man Tyler?” Marie, the fisherman’s wife, said, when we bumped into each other at the farm stand. “He’s—let’s just say he’s a character. A particular-
type
—of character.” The lady in the general store gave us a searching look as soon as I mentioned his name, and muttered something about Jose Cuervo. The girl who pumped our gas at the local station giggled, told us her mother knew him, then blushed ferociously. The state trooper’s face tightened into blankness (we got talking to him at the pizza truck). “Kenton Tyler is connected with half the people in the state,
one
way or
another,”
he said severely, before stalking off, jumbo slice in hand, down the street.
In spite of some misgivings, and my exhaustion, dressing for
the meeting was oddly fun. I stripped off my stained T-shirt and Gap shorts and kicked off my gray sneakers. Then I slipped into an outfit I purchased, optimistically, the week after the baby’s birth—a pressed linen skirt and a white cotton shirt, two sizes bigger than my normal size but not—blessedly, not!—maternity wear. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked bigger than normal but, well, not too bad (I sucked in my stomach). After a good deal of thought, I also donned a pair of heels. Then I brushed my hair, pulling out the worst of the tangles, and twisting what remained into a plausible chignon. I rubbed my cheeks with foundation, brightened my eyes with mascara, and—from the depths of my makeup bag—produced some lipstick to give my gray face some color. Then I added a pair of earrings, a purse—instead of a diaper bag…Tom looked me up and down as I entered the kitchen, feeling intensely self-conscious. He smiled, but didn’t say a word.
Samuel was restless and distressed before we left. I was sure he could sense something unusual was happening. “Shut up and don’t worry,” Jeanie admonished me severely, as she wrestled my wailing son out of my arms. “Of
course
you can leave him with me. I’m sure he’s just a bit windy. Now get out before he throws up all over that shirt!”