by Zee Monodee
Good question. “I’ll manage. I can’t leave them like this.”
Her father nodded, before he drew her in a hug. “I always knew we did a good job while bringing you up.”
Her throat closed, and tears filled her eyes. Somehow, having her father’s approval made all the difference in her life. “Thanks, Daddy.”
He loosened his grip around her.
“I have to go now. The flight for Paris leaves in four hours, and your mother and I need to be at the airport two hours prior.” He chuckled softly. “Don’t worry. Do your thing. Your mother won’t be here for the next ten days to bother you.”
She smiled, and as she led him to the front door, she placed a hand on his arm. “Don’t tell Mum any of this, please. You know her, she’ll imagine the worst.”
“Like how improper it is?” he added, eyebrows raised in a mock-stern expression.
“Yeah. She’ll probably imagine I’m having a wild affair with Trent,” she said with a laugh.
“Are you?”
Surprise made her stop in her tracks. “Daddy!”
“Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me. Just be careful, okay?” He winked. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Bye, sweetie.”
“Bye.”
Diya closed the door and stood in the hall, lost in her thoughts.
What had he meant by her secret? Was he reading something in the situation? Knowing her father, she wouldn’t be surprised. He and her mother both imagined wacky scenarios about their daughters’ lives. But unlike her mother, he had a laid-back attitude to everything, as long as his girls weren’t doing any harm and knew what they were getting into.
“Diya, I’m hungry,” a little voice said.
The kids.
Pulling out of her thoughts, she took a deep breath as she faced the situation ahead of her. Dusk had fallen, sending looming shadows across the dark flat. She went around switching the lights on then browsed through the cupboards and the fridge in the kitchen.
Her inventory revealed a carton of milk, a few cereal boxes, sliced bread, some eggs, and a few cans of soup. The freezer held a packet of frozen vegetables.
As she thought of dinner, weariness descended on her. “Anyone want pizza?”
Silence answered her question. She’d fed them pizza for the past three days, when Trent hadn’t reached home by dinnertime. If they didn’t want pizza, she didn’t know what she’d feed them. They were very picky eaters, and she hadn’t really been hard on them where food was concerned. As a temping nanny, she hadn’t deemed it necessary to instil good eating habits in them.
But things were about to change. She would man the house for as long as their father was sick, so she might as well arrange to have her way around the issues.
“Okay, guys, round up. Daddy’s sick, we know this. He won’t be okay for a few days, and in the meantime, I’ll be in charge. Okay ’til now?”
Both boys nodded.
“We’ll have some rules around. First, we eat at the table, not on the couch. Second, bedtime is at eight-thirty, tops. And we don’t make noise since Daddy needs to rest, okay?”
“Okay,” Matthew replied.
“Good.”
“Diya?” Josh asked.
“Yes, sweetie?”
“I’m hungry.”
Dinner. She needed to make dinner. What could she cook up with the supplies that would come out appetizing, colourful, and disguising vegetables, so the kids would eat it?
She had short crust pastry in her freezer. She could whip up a quiche and have the food on the table in twenty minutes. She doubted the kids had even tasted horseradish in their lives, so the fiery and spicy curries in her freezer would not work. At least, not yet—she’d have to ease them into eating Indian food.
“Come on, guys. I’ll put another movie on for you while I make dinner.”
Diya groaned. She was in for some work.
Chapter Eight
Diya shifted, trying to move from the cramped position in which she’d gotten stuck. Noise droned in the background, very similar to the TV. Had she fallen asleep with the TV on?
A sharp pain stabbed through her neck, making her sit up with a jerk. In her haste, she toppled over, her face hitting the cool and smooth surface of the brocade covering the settee she laid on. A cramp pulled along her calf, her legs still curled under her in this awkward position.
“Shoot!”
As she regained a semblance of a normal posture, a heavy mass clung to the nape of her neck, making her sweat, all hot and bothered. Goodness gracious, her hair had stuck to her skin. When had she fallen asleep? It seemed only like minutes ago that she’d settled on the settee.
Picking up once again on the droning sound, she blinked a few times to accommodate the darkness of the room, a bedroom like hers, but which, at the same time, didn’t look alike. Her place wasn’t as Spartan as this one with its few pieces of furniture and no curtains. Slivers of moonlight filtered through the strips of the white vertical blinds and fell onto the wide bed propped against the far wall, on which a large, dark mound lay.
Trent. She was in Trent’s room.
His body writhed, as if in restless pain, the crisp beige sheets crumpling under his weight and tangling around him like a cocoon. He thrashed around, arms jerking with odd movements, as if trying to work the twisted sheet off.
In a flash, she reached his side, acting with quick fumbles to pry the fabric loose from his body. As soon as she’d freed him, he fell back on the bed, the springs of the mattress giving a muffled creak.
Close call. What if he’d fallen and hurt himself on the hard marble floor? She didn’t need him to have a concussion on top of his flu.
She breathed out in relief, but maybe she shouldn’t have. His lips were moving, uttering incomprehensible words. His ramblings sounded much like a drunken slur. Wait a minute—it was Trent’s voice she’d mistaken for the sound of the TV. The fever had returned. She groaned.
As she placed her hand on his forehead, dread filled her at the heat under her palm. The clock on the wall indicated eleven o’clock. Night was well under way, and the effect of the first dose of medicine from the afternoon had worn off. She’d have to give him more.
What if he got scrambled in the sheet again and really fell and hurt himself if she left him alone? How long could she leave him unattended to get the medicine? Shoot. Playing Florence Nightingale was a tough act to pull through. She picked the sheet and pulled it off him. At least this way, if he didn’t get tangled in anything, no harm would come to him.
Diya dashed into the kitchen and dissolved two paracetamol tablets in a small glass of water. Back in the bedroom, she climbed on the bed and settled on her knees next to him.
“Trent, wake up. Time for your medicine,” she said softly.
He tossed around, and the jerky movement of his arm closest to her nearly toppled the glass from her hand.
“Come on, Trent. Shh. Calm down. It’s Diya.”
The soothing rhythm of her voice appeared to have worked, since he relaxed, his body falling limply on the dark, coffee-toned fitted sheet covering the hard mattress.
“Can you sit up?”
She shook her head when he didn’t reply. What did she expect? The man was sick. Of course he wouldn’t be able to get up. She slithered her left hand between his neck and the pillow and lifted his head a little. Her wrist started hurting. Could a man’s head be so heavy? What did he have in there? Lead?
She brought the glass to his mouth and tilted it slightly to let the medicine run through his cracked, parted lips.
He swallowed at first, but then, some of the liquid refluxed and ran down his chin and neck, ending up in a dark wet stain on the mattress.
Still, she should be satisfied he’d at least taken some of the medicine in. She’d used less water on purpose in the glass to make the dose a concentrated one, so the little he’d taken should do its job.
After setting the glass on the bedside table behind her, she gently lo
wered his head onto the soft pillow. A small chuckle escaped her. Either that, or let his head fall with a heavy plop, because her wrist was killing her. Easing off the bed, she grabbed a small towel from the bathroom and came back to wipe the liquid that had dripped on him.
The medicine would take about a half hour to kick in, and she wanted to be sure if it’d been effective or not. To kill the time, she went to check on the children. Both boys were sound asleep. She tucked their lightweight, colourful quilts around them and checked on the mosquito-repellent mat in the electric burner. Nothing could disrupt sleep as easily as a blood-sucking mosquito buzzing in one’s ear. Disgusting sound. She shuddered.
Sitting by Josh’s bedside, she recalled the wild ride it’d been to feed them dinner and get them to bed. Taking care of them had turned out to be as hard as she’d expected looking after kids would be … only dozens of times worse. And she still hadn’t reached the end of her tether with them.
Diya however stiffened her slouching back in resignation. She couldn’t let them down, not when they needed her and she was all they had.
Back in the main bedroom, she bent by Trent’s side. His forehead burned hot, though less than when she’d checked on him earlier. However, he still rambled on in feverish delirium. She could make out only one word. Crystal. When even that name started to sound slurry, she reckoned the fever was gaining ground. The little he’d taken in wouldn’t do more for him, and the time had come for alternative methods.
In the kitchen, she filled a bowl with lukewarm water and found a small hand towel in the laundry cabinet.
Back at Trent’s bedside, she pulled up a chair and placed the bowl on the sturdy night table. She then soaked the towel, wrung most of the water out, and placed the cool cloth on his forehead.
She repeated the process until his forehead cooled and he’d stopped his ramblings. A jubilant euphoria grabbed her, for she’d managed to keep the fever from reaching a point of no return.
Weariness however crashed her high spirits seconds later. Though elated at having handled the whole episode rather well, she shivered as she thought of the other option that would’ve been left to her. A shot for the fever; she’d hate if it had to come to such a point.
Diya hated needles, another reason she’d steered away from the medical profession. Her experience as volunteer nurse at the Red Cross had taught her all the rudiments of the job, but the on-the-job experience hadn’t given her the guts to go through with a career in the medical world. She thought back to the many summers she and her sisters had been pushed into volunteering for the non-governmental organization, their father’s idea of a summer job, a way to learn about the bigger meaning of life and what it was like to be in the real world. In the end, they’d all been very taken with the project, and Neha had even travelled with them once to an AIDS clinic in rural South Africa.
The sound of Trent’s even breathing brought her back to the present. He seemed to have fallen asleep, his body limp and relaxed. After brushing a hand on his cool forehead, she stepped away from his side. His temperature was back to manageable level, so the worst of this flare up was over.
In another few hours, she’d face another story.
But she’d deal with that in due course. For the moment, all she craved was some rest.
***
The alarm on her cell phone chimed. Six-thirty already?
Diya opened weary eyes and winced at the pain shooting in her neck when she tried to move. She wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but she couldn’t. She had to get the children ready for school and make breakfast.
Breakfast was an alien concept to her. By the time she woke up on most days, brunch seemed more convenient, not to mention speedy. She’d then plough into work, catching another bite when her stomach growled with hunger.
Sitting up, she yawned and tried to shrug the fatigue out of her body. The only thing she stretched was a muscle in her back, and she grimaced from the tugging pull.
Rubbing the stiff knots at the nape of her neck, she drifted her way into the bathroom. She’d remembered to bring her toothbrush and a change of clothes from her place the previous night. She brushed her teeth and splashed cold water on her face in an effort to wake up properly. When feeling close to human again, she went into the kitchen to see what she could do for breakfast.
What did children normally eat? Cereal? She found a box of Frosties in the cupboard. The milk in the carton in the refrigerator door was still fresh. With the packed sliced bread, she could make toast to go along with the butter and marmalade she found in a little freshness nook in the large, double-door chrome fridge.
It should do. No coffee, though, she discovered as she rummaged through the rather bare pinewood cupboards. How could she survive without coffee? Continuing with her search, however, she found a box of teabags. Earl Grey. How British, but it would work.
Seven o’clock clicked on the dark blue, kettle-shaped clock on one of the cupboard doors. She needed to wake the children. At least, they didn’t wear school uniforms that would need ironing. She usually burned everything with an iron. What a relief to know she could tuck whatever was at hand onto them and send them off.
No, drop them off. Big difference. She’d have to drive them to school, in this crumpled pair of jeans and baggy, shapeless T-shirt. She wouldn’t have time to arrange some semblance of order in her dishevelled locks, let alone conceal the extra luggage she carried under her eyes.
Ha! That’s why mothers ended up looking like the before image in an advert for anti-ageing beauty products—the tired, droopy eyelids, sagging chin and jaw lines, and blotched face with uneven complexion came with the Mummy job description.
And goodness gracious, she was well on her way to ending up like that.
Taking a deep breath, she steadied her jittery nerves. She wouldn’t turn that way, because firstly, the kids weren’t her own. Second, the gig would only be temporary, assuming the damage wasn’t irreversible, and third—
“Diya? I cannot take my bath alone.”
She jumped in the air with surprise. Was she hearing voices? She however peered down, from where the sound had come from, and found Josh at her feet.
“Sweetie, you scared me. Don’t ever do this again, you hear me?”
“Diya? Bath?” he asked in a little voice. However, his expression was one of utter disbelief, as if asking if she was crazy.
No, baby, I’m not crazy. Not yet, anyway.
“How do you take your bath usually?”
“Daddy helpth me.”
Great. She’d have to help him, too. She’d never given a bath to anyone but to herself. “Will it help if I let you try to be a big boy and attempt to bathe on your own?”
“Okie,” he replied, a few very long seconds later.
One crisis situation defused.
“Diya! Josh’s blocking the door to the bathroom!”
Oh, shoot. Matthew banged on the door with both fists. When his pounding didn’t bring any result, he started to kick the wood with foot lunges worthy of a Beckham free kick or a Cristiano Ronaldo penalty shoot. Thank goodness the panel was in solid pine.
“Matthew, stop it. I’ll talk to Josh. In the meantime, go pick what you wanna wear to school today.”
The boy shot a glance full of venom onto the closed entrance before he spun around and stalked to his room.
“God help me,” she said under her breath as discouragement seeped into every fibre of her being. No other way around it. If she wanted peace, she’d have to give Josh his bath.
The process proved itself messy, wet, and complicated. Josh seemed to find it funny, though, since he squealed with laughter every time she tripped on the slippery, frothy water he sloshed out of the tub and caught herself in the nick of time. By some miracle, she got out of the whole ordeal in one piece, sending thanks to God when she finished dressing the little boy.
Though she had to admit the smell of baby powder and kid’s shampoo tickled tenderness from her, and eve
ry now and then, she wanted to hug Josh just to smell his hair and the clean-baby scent of him.
Was she going insane?
Coming out of their room, Matthew brushed past her on the way to the bathroom.
“You can manage alone?” she asked.
He turned to her and rolled his eyes. “Of course I can. I’m not a baby.”
He shook his head, before he disappeared behind the closed door of the bathroom.
Fifteen minutes later, both boys sat down at the kitchen table. She presented the menu—toasts and jam, or Frosties—and both stared at her with a bored expression on their faces.
“Okay,” she said as impatience got the better of her. “Take it or leave it, guys.”
Josh spoke up first. “Can I have toatht and jam?”
“May I,” she corrected.
Cripes, she’d just sounded like her mother. What, ever, was wrong with her?
“Sure,” she added quickly, trying to shake off the disconcerting notion. She picked a slice of bread and opened the jar of marmalade.
“Nooo!” Josh screamed, nearly making her drop the jar. “I wanna put it on mythelf.”
She handed him the jar along with a spoon. “Go ahead.”
“I want cereal,” Matthew said as he reached for the blue cardboard box. He poured some in his bowl and put the box back. Then, he dipped his hand into the dry flakes and started eating one flake by one.
She frowned. “Don’t you take milk?’
“No,” he replied between two munches.
She debated whether to prompt him to take milk with his cereal, when she noticed what Josh was up to. In his attempt to spread jam on his toast, he’d smeared the sticky matter all over the table, with only a dime-sized dollop on the white expanse of bread.
“Sweetie, you really want to eat jam with your toast?”
“No.”
“But you said—” Hadn’t he asked for marmalade?
Josh didn’t pause from his task, but nevertheless replied. “I like to eat only the jam, but Daddy thaysth I gotta eat it with toatht.”
