by Andy Mozina
The receptionist nods at me and says, “Doctor will be right out.”
And after a few minutes, a short woman with small wire-rimmed glasses does come out. A plastic koala bear clutches the stethoscope around her neck. She regards us soberly.
“Mr. and Mrs. Grzbc?” She pronounces the “z” because she can’t know.
“We’re Audrey’s parents,” Milena says, and sniffs.
“Okay, I’m Dr. Donahue. Let’s step in here.”
She leads us down a hallway into a small room with a sofa and a lamp and a table with a too-conspicuous box of tissues standing on it.
“Let me tell you what we know, and then we’ll see her,” Dr. Donahue says, very businesslike and calm. “She did vomit in the ambulance, which is good. She also went into mild shock, which is not good. But she responded well to fluids, and her blood pressure has been improving. We’re waiting for the blood test, but just given how long the Tylenol’s been in her system, it’s likely she’ll need to be on an IV with an antidote that’s very reliable for this type of poisoning. It’ll take about twenty hours for those treatments. Okay?” We nod. “Children do much better with this than adults,” she continues, “and I think we got her in time. She’s not out of the woods yet, obviously, but the most likely outcome—not guaranteed, but most likely—is a full recovery. Any questions?”
Hearing “full recovery,” I look at Milena, ready to embrace relief, but she doesn’t look back at me.
“Is she awake?” I ask.
“She’s groggy. The IV will help, but this is very exhausting. Don’t worry if she’s asleep when you see her.”
“I want to see her,” Milena says, as if that’s the only point. She swipes a tissue under each eye.
“Okay, last thing?” Dr. Donahue says. “When a child takes this many pills, the Department of Children and Family Services is automatically notified and their protocol is to talk to the parents. I expect someone will meet with you later today or tomorrow.”
Then we’re out and down another hallway to a large room partitioned with curtains.
“Hi, Audrey, look who’s here!” Dr. Donahue says, sliding aside a curtain.
Audrey lies in a big hospital bed, looking small, her pale green eyes blurred with fear, all tomboy haircut and skinny shoulders, surrounded by plastic and metal equipment. There’s a cuff on her left arm with a lead to a machine. A wire is taped to her forefinger and more wires come out of different parts of her gown and connect to a screen up on the wall that is beeping in a reasonable rhythm and showing wobbling lines. An IV sends a clear fluid into her arm. Her mouth opens, but no sound comes out. A warm fizzing gathers behind my eyes, and a few tears leak out. Her eyes track Milena, who rushes over and kisses her face and head. I stand behind Milena, by a metal folding chair, waiting my turn.
—
As if to punish me for breaking vigil for fifteen minutes to get some food in the cafeteria, Steve now sits in the chair on the other side of the bed in intensive care, holding the hand of a sleeping Audrey. He wears a white shirt and tie, radiating cologne, his face covered in a perfect five o’clock shadow, looking like a father, while I, in my button-down and khakis, look like a high school kid dressed for Grandma’s birthday party. He lets go of Audrey’s hand when I enter, nods my way.
I give Milena the pink smoothie and say, “In case you change your mind.”
She takes the sweating drink from me and places it on the floor.
To avoid standing there awkwardly, I lean against the windowsill. It seems as if Steve has just arrived, because he goes back to asking questions about what happened and what’s going on. I let Milena answer most of them.
“She’s doing good,” I say.
“She’s going to make it,” Milena says, correcting me.
“I can’t believe the school let this happen,” Steve says.
“They didn’t know what was going on. She probably got the pills from my apartment,” I say.
He glances at Milena, then focuses on Audrey, rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand.
During the second IV infusion of the antidote, the intensive care doctor comes in. He is young and at least six and a half feet tall. Audrey’s liver function test results are approaching normal values. Her blood pressure is up and her heart rate is down, which means the symptoms of shock are fading as well.
“She’s a trouper, this one,” he says, smiling at Audrey. “She’s making my all-star team, which is impressive since she’s only been in the building for five hours.”
Audrey smiles at him with gleaming eyes—the first real smile I’ve seen from her since Saturday night.
—
The next morning Audrey is almost back to her old self, awake most of the time, so around lunch time I go home for an hour to eat, clean up and make some phone calls: to my mother, to the hospice, to my students—informing, rearranging, canceling. I note that the bottle of Tylenol is gone from the windowsill. When I come back to the hospital, Audrey has been transferred out of intensive care and into a regular room. Milena finally heads home for a bit in the late afternoon, and while I’m there at the hospital, I get my visit from the DCFS investigator, who takes me to one of the small consultation rooms on the floor.
Karen Grier is a middle-aged woman squeezed into a large black and red suit. The brown skin of her cheeks is dotted with small dark moles or freckles. She comes bearing the Tylenol bottle in a Ziploc bag. Though it is one of millions of look-alike bottles, I recognize it instantly as the very bottle from my windowsill; I would know this damn bottle anywhere.
She tells me she is here primarily to protect the best interests of Audrey and to ensure that she is in a safe home environment. It turns out Ms. Grier has already been to the Montessori school—and has spoken as well with Milena and Audrey herself. She appears to be as serious as hell and my heart beats fast.
She starts with a series of questions that establish what I’ve already admitted: I left the Tylenol on the windowsill in the living room and Audrey took it.
“Does Audrey routinely go in that room?”
“Yeah, her bed’s in the living room, actually.”
Her expression is not questioning but it seems to invite me to say more.
“I can’t afford a two-bedroom apartment right now.”
“Can you say why the medicine was on the windowsill this particular day?”
“I’m a musician and I sometimes get soreness in my shoulder if I play a lot. My instrument is in the living room, too, and I don’t like to get up when I’m practicing, so I keep the bottle there.”
“You don’t like to go to a medicine cabinet if you’ve got some soreness?”
“I’m afraid that I’ll let myself get distracted and won’t sit back down.”
“I see,” she says in a way that suggests she does not see.
“It’s super important that I focus during the time I’ve set aside for practicing,” I add. I hear how this sounds in this context and wish I hadn’t said it, but I did.
She goes on to ask me if I had known that Tylenol can be toxic (“No”), was the safety cap on (“Always”).
“A friend of hers at school helped her get the bottle open,” Ms. Grier says. She folds her hands on her legal pad, takes a deep breath and resumes: “Now, Mr. Grzbc, what is your sense of Audrey’s emotional state before this all happened?”
She says my name right, which reminds me she’s been talking to other people about this, and I resolve to be as truthful as possible, no matter how it sounds. I say general things about the effect of the divorce and Audrey’s ambient anxiety level. I cop to the sleepwalking episode and Audrey’s writing on the bedsheet. On a roll, I also describe the hiccup crisis and note the possibility that Audrey saw us having sex. Ms. Grier frowns at me for an instant, and I realize, too late, that I’ve gone too far. In our brief time together I’ve given her some good reasons to question my aptitude as a parent. She writes in a big, flowing, constant hand, like a river meandering across her
legal pad, and she seems to have completely detached her penmanship from her eye contact, which generally stays fixed on me, making her seem equal parts polygraph machine and human being.
When I stop talking, she continues writing for another half a minute, then folds her hands, glances up at the ceiling, then back down to look into my face.
“Audrey told me she was trying to make herself feel better by taking the pills,” she says. “Do you know where she got that idea?”
“She was trying to feel better?”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Okay, but where she got what idea? What are you asking?”
“I’m asking if you know where she might have gotten the idea that taking some Tylenol capsules was a thing to do if she wasn’t feeling right.”
“Well, I guess she saw me taking a few one day,” I say, “and she asked me why and I must have said something like they help me to feel better.”
“Was this recently?”
“Maybe a month ago, six weeks ago, I don’t know.”
“Any idea why she would think so many were necessary?”
I almost say she was just being thorough, like her old man. “I don’t know,” I say instead. “Honestly, that worries me a lot.”
“How many would you take?”
“Two. Just two.”
“She said she didn’t feel anything different after she took the first one,” Ms. Grier says. “So she kept taking them.”
Well, why didn’t you say so! I want to yell. Apparently, her questioning strategy is designed to sniff out lies and withholdings.
“I mean, we give her liquid medicine when she’s sick,” I say, “so maybe she was trying to take a little cupful of pills to match the amount of liquid in the cup?”
“Everybody’s thinking all the time, isn’t that right?” she says, suppressing a smirk.
“Sure,” I say.
“Did you have liquid cold medicine or liquid pain relievers in your apartment?”
“Probably. They’d be in the medicine cabinet. Pretty high. She’d have to climb up there.”
She asks me how often I see Audrey. Am I in a new relationship? Does my new companion spend the night when Audrey is present? And so on. Five minutes later, with the interview winding down, she tells me she’d like to visit my apartment on Friday to make sure it’s a safe environment for Audrey. Then there will be a report that will say whether neglect is “indicated” or “unfounded.” Pending her report, which she expects to complete by the middle of next week, she is suspending Audrey’s custody days with me, leaving Audrey in the care of her mother on those days. Apparently, she is an officer of the State of Illinois with significant discretionary powers.
“If our investigation concludes that neglect is indicated, this will go to juvenile court. If neglect is unfounded, you’ll go back on your normal custody schedule. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I say. Before I know I’m doing it, I put both hands on my head, like a criminal being arrested.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Grzbc.”
What I would like to do is grab Ms. Grier by her red and black lapels and scream, Can’t you see it was a fucking oversight that anyone might make! How dare you take my child from me!
Instead I say, “Thank you,” with actual sincerity. “Thank you for what you do.”
“Medicines in the medicine cabinet,” she says, closing her legal pad holder with a sigh. “That’s what I do.”
“Of course.”
“Glad to hear Audrey’s doing well.” She gets up with effort. “Good afternoon.”
Once my surface embarrassment burns off and I can bracket the whole “being suspected of child neglect” thing, which, it turns out, is not easy, I’m left cautiously embracing a new and relatively joyous possibility: Audrey was not trying to hurt herself; she was trying to help herself.
If this is true, I can deal with everything else.
—
A moment alone with Audrey to confirm her motivations for taking the pills does not come until the third and final day of her hospital stay, after many thousands of hours of Cartoon Network and stupefying awkwardness as Milena, Steve, Audrey, and I share the same space. Steve is polite, alternately ignoring me and questioning me as if I am a long-lost uncle of Audrey’s with an intriguing musical hobby. Milena mostly acts as if both of us are not there, focusing on Audrey or going down to the family lounge to make phone calls. At last, Steve and Milena go for lunch in the cafeteria.
While we’re watching a SpongeBob episode, I turn to Audrey and say, “You’ve been a great kid during all of this. Very brave.”
“I’m sorry I took your medicine,” she says. Her voice quavers slightly.
“No, that’s my fault, babe. I’m sorry I left it out. I didn’t explain about it like I should have.”
She nods.
“But now we know, right?”
“Now we know!” she says with some happy excitement. She leans forward into a sitting position.
And I’m tempted to stop here, because maybe just having her squared away for the future can be enough. But I hear myself press on: “Why so many, sweetie?”
She falls back on the bed and looks at me. It’s a painful look to confront, filled with sadness and confusion and a need for simple approval and love.
“I don’t know,” she says. She starts to cry, though she’s trying not to.
I move toward her and she moves toward me and we hug. She seems to put what strength she has into hugging me.
“Good kid,” I say. “Good kid. You can cry as much as you want. It’s okay.”
I wait until she breaks the hug and I sit back. But I can’t live with “I don’t know.”
“Ms. Grier—the lady from Family Services—she said it’s because you didn’t feel better at first.”
“Yeah,” she says, looking at the TV, wiping her eye with the back of her hand. It would have been good to turn off the TV before starting this conversation.
“So is that why?”
“Pretty sure.” She nods as if to confirm this to herself.
“Okay, I know this is hard to talk about, but please look at me: did you want to hurt yourself? It’s okay, if you did. I mean, it’s okay if you tell me. Then we know, right?”
She looks toward me but not exactly at me. “Yeah.”
“Yeah to what?”
“Alyssa was just being my doctor.”
Alyssa must be the friend Ms. Grier mentioned, but it occurs to me that if I interrogate Audrey further she will want to hurt herself.
“Okay, please, sweetie,” I say. “Never hurt yourself, okay? You can always tell me or Mom if you’re feeling sad, okay? You’re a good, smart kid. Always know that, okay?”
She considers this for beat after beat after beat.
“I want to go home,” she says. “I want to go back to school.”
“Okay, sweetie,” I say. “I’m super glad to hear that. But let us know. It’s very important.”
“Okay,” she says, and her eyes fall back, irretrievably for now, into the world of SpongeBob, which is probably not a bad thing.
I watch the TV as well, but I can’t help but worry. Of all the art forms, music is the one most open to and defined by prodigies, from Mozart composing his first works at age five to Yo-Yo Ma performing for President Kennedy at seven. This fact stabs my thirty-eight-year-old soul daily. And now here’s a twist of the knife: my daughter is an anxiety prodigy, on her way to her first therapist at the age of six.
17
LATE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Audrey is discharged into Milena’s care. I make it home in time for a big evening practice session, and as soon as I stop playing, T.R. comes down for an Audrey update.
“I’ll tell Charles,” he says after I explain the good news. “He was concerned.”
I mention the impending visit from the DCFS.
“All right, no bondage equipment on the front porch,” he says wryly.
On Thursday, I pra
ctice intensely all morning. Then, after paying make-up hospice visits to Richard and Michael, I’m asked to play for a sweet Alzheimer’s patient who communicates entirely in honks and lip smacks. I squeeze in a late-afternoon lesson with a student, and in the evening return a ton of phone messages from people who are concerned about Audrey. I had given my mother the all-clear as soon as I knew it, expecting she would then get the word out with the family. But detailed updates are required, it becomes clear.
My oldest sister, Mary Ellen, has two daughters, eighteen and twenty-one, both basketball players, and she’s dealt with everything from torn knee ligaments and a broken jaw to an alcohol-related car accident that battered her younger daughter, Irene. The chief of staff for my mother during the mad years of intensive child-rearing, she cultivates a hard-bitten, changed-one-diaper-too-many persona, but under that she’s a support warrior.
She doesn’t like the sound of what Audrey has done. I pace from my living room to the kitchen and back, spilling my guts about everything that could be weighing on Audrey, except having sex in front of her. I tell her a social worker is involved and that I’ve temporarily lost my custody rights.
“Oh, that’s terrible,” she says, “but that’s not going to hold up. You’ll get custody back. You’re not using heroin, are you?”
“Uh, no.”
“I’ve heard all the great musicians do,” she adds. “Something to think about.”
I laugh and look out my front window at the empty nighttime street. There’s actually a dealer on our block who offers “rocks and blows,” cocaine and heroin—“blows” for heroin because people around here snort it.
“We’ll probably have to take her to a therapist,” I say. “We should take her to a therapist.”
“Well, yes, there’s that.”
“Listen,” I say, shifting gears, “do you mind if I ask you something about Dad?”
“Depends what it is.”
“Well, I know we tend not to talk about this kind of thing, but George told me about some of the mental health stuff Dad went through, you know, back in the day, and I’m kind of wondering what you remember about that.”
“Uh, boy,” she says.
