by Cronk, LN
We went to celebrate at McDonalds.
After we’d eaten our lunch Dorito tore into the ball pit. What his fascination was with that place I’d never know.
“Hey, Dorito,” I said after a few minutes, ignoring the glare from the only other adult who was in the play yard. Apparently Laci had been right . . . not everyone appreciated a good nickname.
He popped up and looked at me.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said. “You stay right here in the ball pit. Don’t go anywhere else . . . okay?”
He nodded and sank back down into the balls. I knew I probably shouldn’t be leaving him alone, but it was such a pain to put his shoes back on when I was only going to be gone for a few seconds. I looked at the lady who’d glared at me. I thought about gesturing to her – asking her to keep an eye on him for me – but she still had a disapproving look on her face.
A white man with a little Hispanic kid . . . calling him Dorito?
Laci was right about something else too – I needed to learn Spanish.
I set off for the bathroom . . . I’d only be gone for a few seconds.
I took the time to wash my hands, but not to dry them, and I was still shaking them off and wiping them on my shirt when I got back to the play yard. I looked into the ball pit.
It was empty.
I walked over to the black netting of the ball pit and looked in, watching the balls for movement, thinking he was hiding underneath them.
“Dorito?”
Nothing.
“Dorito?” I called more loudly.
I knew he wasn’t in the ball pit. Even if he’d been trying to hide from me he never would have been able to stop himself from giggling for that long and I would have seen the balls moving by now.
“Dorito?” I called, walking around to the side of the colorful maze of tubes and tunnels. I looked up, but couldn’t see anything.
“Dorito!” I hollered up into the maze, trying to sound angry and not scared. “You come out here right now!”
A little girl, about seven, popped out of the end of the tornado slide.
“Did you see a little boy up there?” I asked her. “The one who was playing in the ball pit?”
She looked at me like I was from Mars.
Spanish.
I glanced around the play yard. It was surrounded by a high, wrought iron fence . . . designed to keep the kids safe from the traffic that was zooming by on the other side. The only gate was secured with a chain and padlock. If he wasn’t in the play yard (which I was pretty sure by now he wasn’t) he must have left by the door that went into the restaurant.
Or someone had taken him through it.
I started to panic . . . really panic. I raced over to the fence and pressed my face to it, trying to see into the parking lot. I was thinking that if someone had him, maybe they were still putting him into their car and I could get a license plate number . . .
“DORITO?” I hollered. “DORITO?”
I ran to the other side of the play yard and did the same thing because the parking lot was on both sides of the building. I couldn’t see him anywhere.
I glanced up again, hoping desperately to catch a glimpse of his face peering at me through the Plexiglas window of the plastic helicopter that was on top of the maze. My pulse was pounding in my ears.
I’d only been this scared one time before . . . when Kyle had brought a gun to our school and we’d gone on lockdown. For hours I’d huddled in the cafeteria kitchen with a mass of other students, praying to God . . . begging Him to take care of Greg and his dad.
I started begging God now to please help me find Dorito . . . for him to suddenly appear at the end of the tornado slide.
Surprise!
At the same time, however, my mind was racing . . .
I’m never going to get to teach him to play soccer . . . I’m never going to teach him to swim . . . I’m never going to find him . . . I’ll never know what’s happened to him . . . I’ll never find out . . . I’m going to spend the rest of my life wondering where he is . . .
A lady (the same one who had been glaring at me earlier) walked over to me. She started speaking to me in Spanish.
“Está adentro,” she said. “Te siguió a los baños.”
I didn’t know what she was saying, but she was pointing into the restaurant and I knew she’d seen where he’d gone.
“Where is he? What happened to him?”
“Ven aquí,” she said, gesturing for me to follow her. We went inside and she started pointing toward the bathrooms.
I ran back to the bathroom I had just come from and pushed open the door. It was empty and the stall doors were open so I didn’t even need to lean down to make sure he wasn’t there. He wasn’t. I raced back out.
The woman had reached the little hallway that led to the bathrooms.
“He’s not in there!” I said, shaking my head at her, my voice quavering.
“No, no,” she said, smiling. “Está en ese.”
She pointed at the door to the Women’s bathroom.
I’m pretty sure she was about to go in there and get Dorito for me, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly by this point and I pushed the door open and dashed inside. A middle-aged woman was standing at the hand drier and I got yet another glare of disapproval. Dorito was pressed against the sink, trying to reach the faucet.
“Dorito!” I said, dropping down onto my knees next to him. I wrapped my arms tight around his little body and held him against me. I felt absolutely sick to my stomach.
“I can’t wash my hands,” he said. The lady at the hand drier left.
“You were supposed to stay in the ball pit,” I said, still holding him, my voice trembling.
“I had to go to the bathroom . . .”
“I told you to stay in the ball pit . . .”
“Will you help me wash my hands?”
I kept hugging him for a minute and then finally I stood up, keeping one hand on his shoulder. I reached for the faucet and turned the water on for him. He wet his hands and then stuck them under the soap dispenser, waiting for me to pump soap into them. I pushed the button two times.
“Why are you shaking?” he asked me.
“I’m not,” I said.
“Yes you are . . .”
“It’s cold in here, Dorito. It must be about fifty degrees.”
“Oh.”
“Did you know that this is the ladies’ bathroom?” I asked him as he scrubbed his hands.
“It is?”
“Uh-huh.”
He smiled up at me, rinsing the soap from his hands.
“I’m not a lady!”
“I know you’re not . . .” I said, shutting off the water.
“I’m a man . . . right?” he asked, wiping his hands off on his shirt.
“Right.”
“Can I play in the ball pit some more?”
“Five more minutes,” I said, catching the back of his shirt because he was trying to tear out the door in front of me.
I picked him up.
“I wanna walk!” he protested.
“You should have thought about that before you ran in here without your shoes on.”
~ ~ ~
DORITO COULD MAKE most of his letters all by himself in the fall. That’s when Laci got pregnant for the fourth and final time.
It was November when she lost that baby.
Neither one of us was surprised. We probably would have been more surprised if she hadn’t lost it. We found out at her first check-up when Dr. Santos couldn’t find a heartbeat on the sonogram. Laci wasn’t spotting or bleeding, so they scheduled a D&C, in which they would remove the baby. It was just like an abortion, except that the baby was already dead before they started.
Two weeks after the D&C I went with Laci to one of her follow-up appointments. I sat, quietly staring out the window and not really listening, as she and Dr. Santos talked back and forth in Spanish. Suddenly the tone of Laci’s voice changed and I tuned in, wa
tching as the concern grew on her face.
“What?” I asked.
She looked at me hesitantly.
“What?” I demanded.
“Um . . .” she began. “This pregnancy was what they call a molar pregnancy.”
“A molar pregnancy,” I repeated and she nodded. “So what’s that mean?”
“Usually nothing,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t say anything to you earlier . . .”
“Usually nothing?”
She nodded.
“But . . . ?”
“But there’s some hormone level that’s supposed to go down after the D&C and mine’s been going up and . . . that’s an indication that . . .”
“What, Laci?”
She hesitated.
“Tell me,” I insisted. “What?”
“Apparently they can sometimes be cancerous . . .”
“Cancerous . . .”
She nodded at me.
“Are you telling me that this one was?”
She nodded again.
You have got to be kidding me.
Okay . . . to be honest, kidding may not have been the word that was in my mind.
“It’s not a big deal,” she said, reaching for my hand. I drew it away from her.
“NOT A BIG DEAL?” I shouted. “Are you crazy, Laci? You’re sitting here telling me . . . what? That you’ve got cancer? And that’s not a big deal?!”
Dr. Santos started talking; Laci listened intently.
“He says it’s usually not a problem. They’ll do some chemo and I’ll be fine. They do it right across the street at the hospital in the outpatient clinic.”
“No way, Laci!” I yelled. “We’re going HOME! We’re not staying here and letting them play around with you and then find out later that they didn’t know what they were doing!”
“They aren’t ‘playing around’!” Laci yelled back, looking offended that I would even suggest such a thing. “They know what they’re doing. I’ll be fine!”
I looked at Dr. Santos and tried to control my voice.
“I want her records sent to Dr. Sedevick,” I said, reaching for my wallet. He looked at me blankly. I pulled out Dr. Sedevick’s card and slapped it down on his desk in front of him.
“Send–her–records–here,” I said to him, very slowly and loudly, tapping my finger on the card.
“Talking to him like he’s an idiot isn’t going to make him understand English,” Laci said.
“Tell him then, Laci,” I said, glaring at her. “Tell him to send your records home.”
“NO!” she said. “This is home! I want to stay here. They can do everything I need right here and I can keep on working . . .”
“You do it NOW, Laci!” I yelled. “I mean it. We’re going home and he needs to send all of your records to Dr. Sedevick . . . RIGHT NOW! You tell him . . . NOW!”
I had never yelled at her like that before . . . ever. She looked hurt and scared. In a quiet voice she spoke to Dr. Santos and pointed at the card with a shaky finger.
In the parking lot I pulled out my phone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked.
“Your mom,” I said. “I’m telling her what’s going on and that we’re coming home.”
“I don’t want to go,” she said again in a quiet voice.
“Tough,” I answered as I unlocked the car. Her mom didn’t answer and I didn’t leave a message.
We rode in silence until we got home. I turned off the car.
“What if I refuse to go?” she asked.
“Where are you going to live?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m selling the house,” I said.
“You can’t do that!” she cried. “This is our home!”
“I can do it!” I told her. I was feeling more angry than I’d ever felt in my entire life and I was about to take it all out on her.
“It’s my house . . . I pay for it and it’s in my name. Get in there and pack up what you want. NOW!”
I opened my car door and stepped out, leaning back in to look at her.
“We’re going HOME!” I shouted before I slammed the door and stormed into the house.
Two days later we were at the airport with our one-way tickets back to the United States. I had given Aaron the keys to the house and told him that they could keep using it for a while. I hadn’t had any time to put it on the market anyway and I was going to have to hire someone to get in there and pack up all of the stuff that wasn’t already in our suitcases. I showed him which key was the one to my office in case I needed him to send me something that I hadn’t packed. I locked the office door and asked him to please keep all the kids out of it.
Laci and I had barely spoken since I’d yelled at her in the driveway. We got on the plane in silence and she wouldn’t even let me help her put her carry-on luggage in the overhead rack. We sat quietly, waiting for the plane to take off. I pretended to be engrossed in the magazine someone had left stowed in the seat in front of me and I ignored the tears that I knew were streaming down her face.
It wasn’t until we were taxiing down the runway that I realized I hadn’t even said goodbye to Dorito.
~ ~ ~
WE STAYED IN Jessica and Chris’s basement again. My plan was that we’d stay with them for about two months until Laci’s chemo was over . . . then we’d start looking for a place of our own.
On our first night there we both slept restlessly and Laci got up before I did the next morning. Dr. Sedevick wasn’t going to be able to see us until the next day, so Jessica was going to take Laci shopping to get the apartment set back up.
I heard them upstairs, getting C.J. and Cassidy ready for preschool, and then I heard the garage door open and close as they left. When I was sure they were gone, I went upstairs.
It was cold outside – a high of twenty-eight degrees was forecast for the day, but the wind was not blowing so it wasn’t too bad. I should have been downstairs setting up my office, but I felt trapped in the house and found myself drawn outside into the cold, fresh air that I hadn’t felt for so long.
I was sitting in a lawn chair on the back deck, idly lining up sunflower seeds from the birdfeeder and flicking them toward a pine tree in the back lawn. That’s when Mike suddenly appeared from the side yard.
He was supposed to be in medical school in Rochester, Minnesota . . . four hours away. The first words out of a normal friend’s mouth would have been:
Wow . . . Mike! I’m really surprised to see you!
Or . . . What are you doing here?
Or . . . I’m so glad to see you, but you really didn’t need to come all this way . . .
Instead, I just shook my head at him and then looked away.
“This cannot be happening, Mike,” I finally said.
He climbed up the steps and sat down next to me. He didn’t say anything.
“I can’t lose her . . .” I said quietly, still staring into the backyard.
“You aren’t going to lose her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “I can almost guarantee it.”
I glanced at him, then away again.
“Listen,” he said. “This thing’s got almost a one hundred percent cure rate if it hasn’t spread.”
I didn’t look back at him, but I nodded. I’d already been online and found out everything I could about molar pregnancies.
Another thing I’d learned was that Laci’s particular type of pregnancy had developed only from paternal cells.
Paternal . . .
The father . . .
Me.
“Even if it has spread,” he was saying, “you’re still looking at a ninety to ninety-five percent chance that she’s going to completely beat this thing.”
I knew that too, but it felt really good to hear it coming out of his mouth. I finally looked back at him and was surprised to see concern etched in his face.
“If everything’s gonna turn out so great,”
I asked him, “how come you look so worried?”
“I’m not worried about her . . .” he said, smiling slightly.
“Oh.”
I hadn’t handled Greg’s death very well. I think everyone who loved me had spent the first year after Greg and his dad had died just waiting to find my body next to a suicide note.
“You think I’m going to have a psychotic breakdown or something?” I asked.
“Are you?”
I thought I’d dealt with Gabby’s death and the miscarriages pretty well so I said, “I don’t think so.”
I was thinking, however, that at the rate things were going I was quickly becoming an expert at handling tragedies.
We sat quietly for a few moments.
“Has God ever talked to you?” Mike finally asked. “I mean, like clearly talked to you?”
That question shook me.
“Just one time,” I finally answered. I paused for a moment. “You wanna know when?”
“When?”
“A few weeks after we’d lost Gabby. I was sitting right in there,” I said, jabbing my finger toward the house, “I was looking at a paper, and I saw this ad in there for Adoption Alternatives. Have you ever heard of them?”
He nodded.
“I really wasn’t even paying that much attention to it and all of a sudden God told me to call them. It was just . . . I don’t know, it was just overwhelming. I’d never had Him speak to me like that before. It was amazing and I couldn’t wait to tell Laci, but . . .”
“But, what?” Mike asked when I hesitated and shook my head.
“I didn’t tell her right and she thought I was all excited about adopting and she didn’t want to adopt and she got so upset with me that I just shut up and . . .”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“You never told her that God told you to call them?”
I shook my head and I didn’t say anything else. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if I’d obeyed God and called the adoption agency that we would have adopted. Laci wouldn’t have had two miscarriages and then a molar pregnancy. She wouldn’t be facing weeks of chemo. No sense in discussing the fact that none of this would’ve happened if it weren’t for me.
