“Daphne, nom de famille, Ea—” I said to the woman at the desk, before Ellie pulled me away.
“We’ve already done that,” Ellie said, walking ahead. “But you need to come back later with our carte Vitale.”
“You can’t just march right in,” I said, as we did.
“You can’t just leave your kids to go out—what were you doing?” Ellie said.
“Ellie.”
“I’m fine being in charge, all right? When things are normal. But what—what was I supposed to do?” said Ellie. “I wasn’t even sure which number to dial—Asif said 112.”
It was confusing: 911 came in different flavors here, people had preferences.
But none of this mattered. Where was Daphne? Did they really want to do a spinal tap? I didn’t know where we were going, but I had started half jogging, which now put me ahead of Ellie, which allowed her to see—
“What are you wearing?” she said.
I pulled the skirt down and waved her on. We rushed down one long turquoise hallway and then a yellow one. The color, the design, everything was turned up way too loud, and felt even more so, given that the hospital was way too quiet otherwise. A scream, or two? A cry? It seemed a bitter thing to wish for, but I did. Because where was everyone? Where was Daphne? We walked faster and faster. Daphne! For a minute, we followed a thick red line painted on the floor, and for another minute, orange paw prints. Ellie had mentioned needing our family’s health card, but I knew that wouldn’t cover the full cost being tallied here. The nonmonetary cost. What do you want, Paris? I thought. Give me Daphne back and I will give you my life. I heard Paris snort. I’ll give up the store. Paris waited. I’ll give up Paris. A massive pair of doors parted and we entered a vast space, teeming with people and lights and sounds. It was like we’d stumbled onto the bridge of a starship. Little podlike spaces sealed behind glass ran around the circumference of the room.
Ellie led me to Daphne’s.
I reached for the handle to her sliding glass door and yanked. Ellie yelled and grabbed me—I shook her off and went for the door again. Ellie yelled again; a nurse arrived. She put a hand on Ellie’s arm and a hand on mine. She looked us each in the eye in turn. Then she closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. Do this, she said, without saying a word. Breathe. Ellie did, I did, and the nurse, whom I would now do anything for, pointed to a sticker on the door. INTERDIT, it said in French. “Forbidden,” this means.
“But I’m her mother,” I said to the nurse, who was now pointing back the way we’d come. And here I’d loved her. I opened my mouth to yell. Ellie stepped between us and, tears in her eyes, apologized a dozen times, a dozen ways, to the nurse. Excusez-nous de vous déranger. The nurse replied to Ellie at length in French, then turned to me, said one word in English, wait, and left.
Ellie turned to me. “We can go in—they don’t want me to go in, at all, but they will let me go in if you’re ‘okay’ with it, which you better be. My cough is gone.” She coughed.
“Fine,” I said. “Ellie, of course, fine. So let’s go in.”
But I couldn’t. Because it took a moment to put the prior hours away. And because if Ellie wanted to go in and see Daphne, or if I did, we learned that we would have to put on hospital masks. And latex gloves. And bouffant caps over our hair. And lightweight fluid- and tear-resistant multi-ply isolation gowns that did not tie in the front like a bathrobe, but in back, where you had to have someone, like your oldest child, tie it for you—which gave her the chance to study once more the clothing I’d originally selected for the night.
“Is this my skirt?” Ellie asked.
I didn’t answer. I was inside. I was looking at Daphne, who looked nothing like my child. This body had my daughter’s features—her dark, swooping eyebrows, her upturned nose, her widow’s peak, her very first pimple appearing on her soft, still chin—but she couldn’t be my Daphne. Her face was waxen, completely false, unrecognizable. Nausea rose in me like a fist. What a fool I’d been to pretend I could pretend for a minute that Robert was dead. Death had nothing to do with pretending. Life, on the other hand, had everything to do with believing. This body was Daphne’s. She was alive and she would only stay alive so long as I stood there and willed it. It wasn’t a bargain, or it was, and the cost was everything.
I felt hours pass, but only minutes did. Blood was drawn. Urine through a catheter. And now a man in a white coat arrived and spoke to us. I just heard sounds. When Ellie was born, I’d had an old-school nurse during the overnight stretch, one who muttered of vast health care conspiracies, but who wanted me to remember especially this: the shorter the coat, the newer the doctor. I’ve had doctors since tell me it’s not true, and I have never believed them.
This man’s coat hit him at his waist, like a waiter. That couldn’t be good, unless things were different in France. But everything was different in France. I looked helplessly at Ellie, who translated for me.
“He wants to know if she’s had a vaccine for—”
She broke off and said something to the man in French, pantomiming a pen. He wrote something down. I find French handwriting no more legible than Cyrillic; 1’s look like 7’s, and 7’s, emoticons for anger. I’ve never been able to read it. I gave the pad to Ellie.
“I don’t know what this is,” she said, and looked up at the man.
“She’s had her MMR,” I said. Ellie tried translating. “Measles-mumps-rubella,” I said. Ellie shared this, too. He shook his head, pointed to the pad, looked at me.
Ellie looked at the pad again. “Pneumonia?” she said, to him and to me.
“She’s never had it,” I said.
The man spoke, a long word that, with some patience and the help of the pad, I translated as pneumococcal meningitis. I could go back to the file folder at home, the file where I kept their birth certificates and passports and immunization records, but I didn’t need to, because I knew. Way back when in Wisconsin, the other moms had said there was something funny with that vaccine—or not that one, but all of them, or getting so many vaccines at once. And so I’d said no, and so Daphne hadn’t gotten it, the pneumococcal meningitis vaccine.
And then I felt like a fool, and so she got it. Just not on schedule. Did that matter? No, Daphne’s pediatrician in Milwaukee had told me.
Isn’t that what the pediatrician had told me?
I tried to explain all this to Ellie.
“Holy crap, Mom,” Ellie said.
“You got yours on time!” I said.
The man spoke to me in rapid French. My language skills were returning, but slowly, not fast enough.
He may have said something about different types of meningitis, how the vaccine worked most of the time, not all the time, not against everything, and who knows how they did things in America, anyway?
And then I heard lumbar and puncture and risk and—this word I definitely heard—behave. I took an extra-deep breath and looked at Ellie.
“Um, he’s telling you to behave, Mom,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“You got the part about giving permission to ‘puncture’ her back?” Ellie said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Mom?” Ellie said.
“If it’s a lumbar puncture,” I said—he nodded—“then yes. But tell him I want a real doctor in here, and now.”
“Mom,” Ellie said.
“His coat is too fucking short,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
But he understood me. Because, it turned out, he understood English.
“The true doctor come now he watch,” he said. “But I make the true poke.”
“I want true doctor poke,” I said, in the fractured English I speak when my fractured French fails.
“I am the doctor,” he said. “I am finishing the training.” He was an intern, then? A resident? I couldn’t ask bec
ause he then turned to Ellie and continued in French: your mother is crazy if she wants to take this sick girl clear across Paris to the American Hospital in Neuilly for a “real” doctor, who, at this time of night, will be a vacationing orthodontist from Texas—I think he meant orthopedist, or maybe he didn’t—covering for the doctors they pretend to have there. I am trained to do this. We do this here. He left the room.
The American Hospital, which I’d not mentioned, is excellent. And 30 minutes away.
“Mom,” Ellie said.
“Honey, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—and I’m so sorry you had to hear that imbécile lecture us,” I said.
“Where were you?” Ellie said.
I looked at Daphne. Ellie looked at me.
“I wasn’t there,” I said. Enough with tallying costs. I’d done it constantly in Paris. And I’d added it up different ways, different times, what Robert had paid for airfare, what we’d paid for the store, how much food cost and school supplies and secret cigarettes and cafés and tickets for the Métro. Thousands, tens of thousands, of dollars, euros. It had cost all that, and now it had cost this. Daphne would not have fallen ill had we stayed in Milwaukee. And we would have never left Milwaukee had Robert stayed. If he really were around now, if Daphne or Ellie really had seen him—now, right now, would be an excellent time for him to appear. I thought this thought until my head hurt. I wondered if Daphne had, too, if this wasn’t meningitis but some kind of stroke, an aneurysm caused by a longing that had tugged too long.
“I know you weren’t there,” Ellie said. “Remember? Because I was.”
We parents worry so much about our children doing, or saying, the wrong things. What we should fear more are those times when they’re right, when we’re found wanting, when all we want to do is apologize—and they’re not yet old enough to know that’s what they want from us, and deserve.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was conscious of people outside the glass. I was conscious of them waiting, like Ellie, for me to do the right thing. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I sometimes haven’t even been there when I’ve been there. I’m sorry I took us to Paris—”
She flicked a hand at me.
“I’m sorry I’ve put so much on you—” I said.
“And Daphne!” Ellie said. “Why do you think she’s sick?”
“That’s not why!” I said, which I didn’t know, but I saw something flicker back into Ellie’s eyes—a sense that here might be an adult after all, someone who could say something and make it so. So I said something else I didn’t know. “And she’s going to be all right.”
Ellie looked at me, at Daphne, around the room, and then fell into me, crying. I put my arms around her. “I’m sorry, El,” I said, and got ready to repeat it a hundred times more, but the second syllable was hardly out before she pulled away.
“And listen,” she said. She blotted her eyes as best she could with the gown. “Stop getting angry with the doctors, okay? We need friends here.” We weren’t even close enough to hug now, but I felt her physically shrugging me off again all the same. She went to Daphne’s left side. I went to her right.
I touched Daphne’s hand, her face. They had said not to. Through the gloves, she felt hot, but not too hot. Her color was that same otherworldly absence of color, and her breathing was rapid. She had an IV in, and a display attached to the pole provided a maze of numbers. I had no idea what was good or bad. Only that Daphne was motionless. I wanted to shake her awake. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to do all these things, but knew if I did any one of them, I’d be thrown out and Ellie would be left alone, in charge, again.
Why wasn’t the doctor here right now? Why wasn’t a nurse with her at all times? I turned around to look at someone to be angry at, and when I turned back, Ellie was easing her way onto the bed beside Daphne.
“Ellie,” I hissed. “You can’t do that.”
“I got the shot,” she said. “You said.” She was lying beside her sister now, on her side, her eyes wide open and staring at Daphne, just inches away.
“Ellie—it’s not—it doesn’t work like—you’re going to get us in such—what if Daphne—”
Ellie said nothing. I looked around, scanning for a doctor or nurse or, one last time, for Robert. Ellie would listen to him.
And he—he did this so well—would listen to her.
And he would lie down.
I found a way to drop the railing, I got a hip on the mattress, a leg, I scooted in, one centimeter, two, right next to her. I was apt to fall out at any moment and upset the whole business—IV pole, display, tubes, curtain—but I didn’t fall. I was finally next to Daphne, who, for her thirteenth birthday, just two months ago, had asked for “one book of my choosing” as well as “something special,” which for her was two croissants. One was standard in our family. Two was unheard of. I’d bought her six and she’d said, “too many,” but she’d smiled. I’d hoarded that smile.
“Daphne,” I whispered. Around us, the quietest hospital in the world clacked and clicked and murmured on.
“Ellie,” I said. All that hair of hers barely fit in the scrub cap; it billowed just beyond the horizon of Daphne’s profile, a great crinkly blue cloud.
“It’s okay,” Ellie said, so softly I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined the words.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?” she said, her voice distant, drifting. This was no place to sleep, but it was so late, she’d been through so much.
I didn’t answer. I remembered our earliest days in bed together, Whisper Theater, how I had never, in all my imagining, imagined us lying like this, here, now. I listened to Daphne breathe her tiny, rapid breaths and her sister try not to breathe at all. So be it. I couldn’t breathe either.
Moments later, the door slid open and the silence fell away as the staff banished Ellie and me beyond the glass, where we watched our very young doctor—now in a coat of decent length—prepare for the procedure while an older doctor, a long white coat barely around his shoulders, a paper mask emblazoned with somersaulting orange welcome dogs, looked on, sleepy and bored. Then the curtain was pulled.
By the time Daphne’s diagnosis was confirmed, the necessary antibiotics had already been added to her IV drip. Her breathing evened and her color returned. And that was so glorious that my phone had to work hard to distract me from the scene, quivering as text after text arrived, so many that I finally turned it off. Ellie and I exchanged a look.
The young doctor briefed us, predicted a full and speedy recovery, and then left, grinning like he’d just invented the stethoscope.
* * *
—
When morning arrived, Ellie didn’t want to leave, but we agreed she’d go home for a spell, change her clothes, charge her phone. Update Madame Brouillard. Find clothes for me. I’ve got some cute new jeans you could try, Ellie jabbed, which is when I knew she’d be okay. She even let me walk her out while Daphne slept. The greater gift: a deep, unembarrassed hug at the exit by the dog.
After Ellie disappeared, I thought I would make the most of being outside and check my phone. I turned it back on and scrolled through everything I missed, starting with some proximity marketing—a feature I’d tried to get Ellie to disable—from a nearby clothing store. “Good news!” was as far as they got with me before I deleted it. It’s not only that I disliked how the store, like too many French shopkeepers, assumed we would communicate in English, but that “news”: a tic of Eleanor’s that I’d adopted was to treat and use that word in e-mails only as a pejorative. (Woe to those who thought e-mails from her subject-lined “department news” sounded innocent.)
What else had the phone handled for me? A call from Declan, a voice mail from same, and then a text from him asking if everything was okay.
A call from George, no voice mail.
An alert from United Airlines, which
I was about to dismiss as more marketing, until I saw it was announcing that someone named ELEANOR was sharing an itinerary with me: arrive Paris (CDG) on . . .
Then George called again, and I decided to answer. I knew he was taking the twins on a spring break. It would be handy, of course, to be free of them now—but I wouldn’t mind the brief, banal distraction of discussing their logistics. Perhaps George had gotten all the way out to De Gaulle and realized he’d forgotten their passports—the twins had been showing off their various visas and stamps to Daphne just the other night. Or he’d forgotten their bedtime books. Or some item of clothing.
Or he’d forgotten to tell me something: I was a terrible mom. Which I was. What Madame couldn’t tell him, I could.
I knew I owed him an apology, and so I issued one immediately, even before I said hello. He paused, and said, Leah? And I listened—there was background noise, but it sounded familiar—it wasn’t an airport, it wasn’t a beach. Was he outside the bookstore? I asked him, apologized again if he’d been counting on me to be there, because—
He snorted and said he was in the hallway—or a hallway, of the hospital. Where was I?
Maroon scarf, deep violet shirt, somehow paired with a pinstripe suit and socks that both did and didn’t match: apart from the welcome dog, George was as colorful a presence as the hospital had seen in some time. He was carrying two Starbucks cups, which made his attempt to hug and exchange kisses with me awkward, but—I realized—awkward only for me. One of the cups arrived smoothly in my hand as we sat on a bench just outside Daphne’s room. Ellie had talked to Madame, Madame had called him, he’d canceled the trip. The twins had insisted. And if they hadn’t, he would have. Daphne! They loved her. How was she?
I explained that we could be on our way home in as little as forty-eight hours if all went well, but until then, isolation rules prevailed.
Paris by the Book Page 19
