Dale Loves Sophie to Death

by Robb Forman Dew

  They wouldn’t allow Dinah to go into X ray with Toby, so she could only sit now and wait, and the waiting gave her time to fortify her suspicions of everyone in this foreign place. Dinah sat in an alcove which seemed once to have been a large closet but which now did service as a waiting room. It was entirely yellow, with the exception of a brown flecked rug, because someone had believed that a concentration of yellow would be cheering, she supposed; but the effect was to make the underground, windowless space all the more dismal. She had looked around the small room for distractions, but there was nothing to be found but a stack of magazines she didn’t want to read and a frosted sliding partition in the wall that she watched for a little while with the dim expectation that it would open. But, in fact, it never did, and there was nothing to divert her attention. She sat there alone, forced into various considerations and forced, for the time being, to remain more sinning than sinned against.

  When Dr. Van Helder had first looked at Toby in the emergency room, he had turned such a masked expression on Dinah that she felt sure she was being harshly judged. “How long has he been limping?” he said to her when Toby moved across the room, with a nurse’s help, from the examination table to a wheelchair.

  “But that’s not why he’s here,” she said with irritated desperation. Immediately she became more alarmed when she recognized the air of solemnity that was suddenly communicated from the doctor to the nurse. There was a marked lack of the usual bantering joviality going on in the grimly fitted-out room. “It’s a flu,” Dinah had said. “It started all at once this morning. I thought he was just excited because we were having a party for him, but when he kept vomiting…well. He can’t even drink water!” But when she saw the look of resigned impatience cross Dr. Van Helder’s face, she said with great care, “I would say he’s been limping for about three weeks…oh, about that. But you see,” she went on in low-voiced and studious deliberation, “he’s only copying his grandfather, whom he adores. My father has had a limp for years…” She came to a forlorn stop. She gave it up entirely, because Dr. Van Helder was only looking back at her with patient but stony toleration. Toby appeared to be too miserable even to have heard what was said.

  When she had followed the nurse and Toby through the corridors to the X-ray department, she felt an overwhelming panic at having to relinquish any one of her children to someone else’s expert judgment. When the nurse motioned her to a chair in the waiting room and she saw Toby wheeled through the heavy, wide sliding doors, built to facilitate the transport of people who could not transport themselves, she wondered frantically how she could get him out if she decided this was all a mistake. How could she even find him in the warrenlike passages of the hospital?

  The longer she waited, and the more she thought about his conversation with Martin, the clearer it became to her that, in fact, Toby knew what was happening to him. She respected her children; she trusted that they knew what they said they knew. She understood that she should accept Toby’s assessment of his own condition. He must have achieved that unusual familiarity with his body that she herself had experienced each time she was pregnant. She had always known long before she missed a period. She firmly believed that, now and then, the body and mind forgo their constant, surreptitious collusion and render up to one’s sensibilities some bits of pertinent information regarding the mysterious necessities of the physical being. Sometimes a signal drifted into one’s consciousness. She had no doubt that that had happened to Toby now, and she sat there floundering in her own emotions for something with which she could gird herself against the despair that would soon overtake her. She was filled with the bitterest self-loathing and reproach at what she now saw as sentimental facetiousness: the stupid and smug notion that her own perceptiveness in recognizing any possible disaster would ward it off. She rested her elbows on her knees and lowered her head into her hands. For years she had indulged in an absurd kind of emotional self-flagellation. She had believed she would never feel the shock of a misery that she already expected. Maybe part of her constant underlying melancholy was the idea—confirmed now—that there are some things for which one cannot be adequately prepared.

  The nurse wheeled Toby back through the sliding doors, and Dinah got up to follow them. They made their way along the same corridors through which they had just come, and Toby was reinstalled on the table in the emergency room. Dinah moved over to him and held his hand, which only hung in her own. He still had the swollen, uncommunicative look of fever, and he lay on the table with a heaviness peculiar to sick children; healthy children are so seldom without animation. The nurse leaned up against the wall with an equally uncommunicative but vacant expression. She tapped her foot abstractedly to a tune in her head. People in hospitals are very good at not being asked questions. All at once she straightened up and left the room as if she had heard her name being called; she just turned briefly to tell Dinah that Dr. Van Helder would be back in a minute, and in fact, he came into the room almost the moment the nurse was gone from sight. He was brisk. He didn’t say anything or even acknowledge Dinah, so she stood there looking on silently. The doctor was a fairly short, stocky man with closely cut reddish hair, and Dinah watched him as he bent over Toby, who seemed dark and delicate and refined by contrast. She was filled with a sorrowful and unidentifiable longing that became a metallic taste in her mouth and a long ache and tightness down her throat. The feeling resembled homesickness. It was a need for events to resume a familiar shape.

  Toby didn’t say anything, but he looked over to be sure his mother was standing there when Dr. Van Helder picked up the clipboard at the end of the bed and consulted it. He began to probe Toby’s abdomen with his square fingers while he gazed at the wall in concentration.

  “I’m going to set up an IV,” he said to Dinah. “I’ll be back in a little while.” And he, too, left the room. Toby turned his head on the pillow to look at Dinah and see what this meant, although he was too tired to ask and even too tired, it seemed, to be very much afraid. She boosted herself up beside him on the high padded table, and she explained to him what an IV was and that it would only hurt as much as a shot, no more, but all the time she talked about it, the idea of Toby attached to an IV was dawning on her. The picture was forming in her head of how that would be, and she was beginning to think with one part of her mind that the sight would be unendurable. She was finding it dreadful to have been invested with the power of adulthood and now find it had been stripped away. Her authority here was impotent.

  She moved away from the table when the doctor and three nurses came back into the room, one nurse wheeling the IV mechanism ahead of her, beaming at Toby as though he were in for a treat. Dinah was frustrated almost to the point of tears at all the stupidity that was rampant in the world. She could scarcely bear it that they would patronize him so. She stood in the doorway watching while they worked over the bed and searched for a vein in his pale limp hand. The nurse took his arm and began slapping it lightly to bring the blood there so it would delineate the elusive network of blood vessels. Dinah even assumed an air of reassurance when Toby turned to look at her in injured inquiry, but she felt such a fury that she was almost dizzy with it. She leaned in as casual an attitude as possible against the wall for support. Never before in her life had she felt a more commanding inclination toward violence. She seethed with the need to do injury to that nurse, to stop her, to hurt her. At the same time, she knew that the nurse was no more than a rather insensitive woman getting on with her job, and Dinah leaned against the cold plaster wall breathless with the drag of civilization on her animal instincts.

  “It’s all right, Toby,” she said, when no one else spoke to him, “they’re just trying to find the vein. That nurse is hitting you that way,” she said with impeccable clarity, “so that it will bring the blood to your arm.” She phrased it just like that because she wanted the woman to apologize to Toby—and to her—but the nurse didn’t even look up. The doctor looked over at her, though, because he seemed not
to have known that she was still in the room; then he bent over Toby again.

  “Is your name Toby?” he said, but Toby wisely made no answer, because the doctor didn’t care; he was only speaking to distract Toby. “Well, Toby,” he said in a slow and meditative voice, mostly to himself, “we’re having a lot of trouble with this. Your veins roll. Did you know that?” He and a nurse bent again over Toby to try and insert the IV needle. “This is all your mother’s fault,” he said by way of conversation, and in the doorway Dinah tightened with astonishment. Of course, she knew it must all be her fault, but she still didn’t know why or what had happened. When had it started to be her fault? It made her furious that this doctor would reveal her culpability so casually before she even had a chance to assemble her defenses.

  “So! You’re a Freudian,” she said from the doorway, in a weak attempt to appear blasé and in control of some slight humor. She would have to make light of this until she could think of what to say. The doctor looked up blankly at her; then he turned back to his labor over Toby. The nurses fell silent, and there was no conversation at all for a moment.

  “You’ve inherited your mother’s fair skin, Toby,” Dr. Van Helder said. “That’s why it’s so hard to find your vein.”

  While they finished their work and constructed a protective casing around the needle so that it wouldn’t be jarred loose, Dinah stood there looking on. She didn’t care about trying to explain anything; she knew she couldn’t have made herself clear. Besides, she still wanted to know if there was a chance that it was—Toby’s entire illness, whatever it might be—all her own fault. Dinah’s quiet panic took up so much of her mind that the only other feelings she could accommodate right now were sorrow and responsibility.

  Dr. Van Helder went with them while Toby was wheeled on his bed through various corridors and up the invalid’s elevator to be installed in the pediatric ward. “He’s dehydrated,” the doctor said as they walked along. “This will build up his fluid level.”

  The IV apparatus was guided after them by a nurse’s aide. As the bed was wheeled along and maneuvered around corners, Toby began to shudder with dry retching again. Dinah looked down at him as if he were very far away, and then stretched out her cool hand and brushed his forehead to reassure him. The doctor glanced at him but didn’t show special alarm or make any comment. The deeper into the hospital their procession progressed, the clearer it became to Dinah that Toby’s welfare was beyond her influence. She wondered if he even knew that she had meant to communicate comfort with her brief, fugitive touch. The air was brittle with detachment; she felt that she might be prevented from making such an overt contact with her own son. In this atmosphere the need to hold on to the fragile gestures of humanity seemed excessively sentimental.

  “I’ll be back in a little while when I get the X rays,” Dr. Van Helder said to her before he left the room. In fact, Dinah was in no hurry for him to return. She would gladly have prolonged her ignorance and forfeited the future; it would be better to remain with Toby in this immediate instant than to get on with the truth.

  The room had four beds, but Toby was its only occupant, so she switched the remote-control television through all its channels without hesitation. The sound wouldn’t disturb anyone, and she hoped the novelty of the machine would interest Toby, but he gazed at the flashing face of the television with apathy, and he didn’t want to make conversation either. Finally, she pulled up another chair and put her legs on it, and she curled at an angle, with her cheek against the back of her own chair, so that she could watch Toby and rest, too. But her eye drifted away from Toby and the needle in his hand. Without intending to, she turned her mind to a game show on Toby’s television in which two families competed against each other for prizes. She attached her entire consideration to it unwittingly, and when she realized next that time had passed without her awareness of it, she came back to attention with a jolt. The light that summoned the nurse was blinking off and on above Toby’s bed, and Dinah fought through a kind of self-induced haze to orient herself. She looked at Toby and realized that he himself had pushed the call button.

  “Toby! You aren’t playing with that, are you? Sweetie, you should only push that button if there’s something you really need!” Even as she said this to him, she saw that she was betraying him once more. She was intimidated by hospitals. She said more easily, “Is there something you need? Are you thirsty or anything?”

  Toby looked over at her. “It’s leaking,” he said, “but no one’s come yet.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “The tube there.” And with his free arm he gestured across his body to the tube running from the suspended bottle of liquid to the hollow needle that fed into the back of his hand. All along the flexible piping were little droplets of fluid, and with horror Dinah looked down to see a substantial pool of liquid on the floor by the bed. She had no idea what was being slowly dripped into Toby’s veins—whether or not it was crucial. What would happen if an air bubble made its way through that snaking tube? She had an odd sensation as she leaned over the shiny pool, transfixed; she felt herself blanch. The anger she felt was so absolute and unequivocal, and its summer-long impetus was so great, that its solidification sapped her of any energy directed otherwise. This was someone’s fault! She moved from her chair to the corridor with no thought put to the motion; suddenly she was just there, in the hall, looking for someone who could do something. Two nurses were standing outside their glassed-in station, chatting in good humor, and Dinah was very nearly frozen in place by her fury. But in the next moment she walked rapidly down the hall toward them and circled around the nurse whose back was to her, so that she was standing between the two women.

  “Don’t you see that?” she said in a voice that even surprised her, it was so deep with an absolute and vibrating anger. She was pointing over the nurse’s shoulder to Toby’s light. “Now you just turn around if you’re not too busy and see if you can see that!” But the nurse was already moving off toward Toby’s door as Dinah spoke to her.

  Dinah followed her back to Toby’s room and stood by the bed while the nurse found the mechanism that controlled the call button and switched it off. Dinah kept her voice carefully level. “You can see it’s leaking, there. I don’t know how long it’s been like that.”

  The nurse adjusted the clamp on the tube and ran her hands over its length, trying to find the point from which the fluid was escaping. “It’s this piggyback bottle that’s giving us all this trouble,” she murmured. A look of clinical indifference was firmly settled on her face, and Dinah was suddenly tired from her anger; how was she to know where responsibility should lie?

  “There! That’s all taken care of, Toby,” the nurse said with repellent heartiness as she finished fiddling with the tubing and the clamp. “Dr. Van Helder will be on the floor in a little while. He’ll be in to talk to you.” She imparted this information with absolute matter-of-factness, and then she left the room. There was very little injured righteousness for Dinah to muster, anyway, because she had been sitting inattentively right beside Toby when he needed help.

  She considered Toby, who was now lying in his bed more alert than before, feeling a little better, it seemed. What she thought was that he had become a masculine presence all at once. He had taken charge without question. When she had been growing up, that had been something that boys did but not girls. Dinah struggled with it still: she still fought her inclination to avoid responsibility—to ask first: Is this all right? Is this allowed?

  She looked at Toby with cautious admiration. She had a son who was not a son; he was his own person entirely. By now her emotions had caught up with events, and she was inescapably trapped in the alarming reality. Toby believed he was dying, and he was a competent judge. How would it be? She wasn’t trying to gauge the depth of her own sorrow; she knew that she couldn’t accurately anticipate that. But how could it happen that the world would not have Toby in it beyond a certain point? What would the world be without
Toby in it as an adult? They sat together quietly in the room, and Dinah looked out the window to the parking lot below, where the rain fell steadily, just to keep her bearings. She needed to keep abreast of the fact that time was progressing.

  When Dr. Van Helder came in, he paused at the foot of the bed to look over Toby’s chart once again, but Dinah knew there wouldn’t be any new information on it. She knew that the nurse wouldn’t have recorded the incident of the IV, but she would have been happy to have him read the chart forever. She wanted, just for a moment, to become senseless; her body had an impulse to flee, because she didn’t even want to suspect it, or to see what manner he would have of imparting the news to make it least uncomfortable to himself. She didn’t know this doctor; she wasn’t willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Dinah had straightened herself when she saw him come in, and now he sat down in the chair where she had been resting her legs, so that he and she were almost knee to knee.

  Dr. Van Helder crossed his legs and settled back in the chair before he said anything, and it seemed to Dinah that this elaborate arranging of himself took several dreamlike hours. “Well, I think Toby does have a bad flu,” he said, conversationally. “But that shouldn’t last more than a day or so. He’s dehydrated. I’d like to get his fluid level up, as I told you.” He paused and looked down at his own crossed knees. Dinah sat very still, because it was clear he had more to say, and she wanted to be able to sit in her chair with composure when she heard what it was. “But I’m worried about that leg,” he said in the very deliberate voice doctors cultivate in order to make themselves perfectly clear and yet not cause panic. “Well…in fact, it’s not his leg at all, really. It’s his hip joint. I’m pretty sure he has what’s called toxic synivitus. But I don’t understand why it’s lasted so long. You say almost three weeks?” She nodded. “Well,” he went on, “it could be that the muscles around that joint have spasmed in a sympathetic reaction. That’s probably why he’s still limping.” He raised his hands from his lap in an unconscious gesture of calming the waters. “I think it’s been aggravated by having gone on for so long.” He looked up at Dinah with his face kept blank, and she knew he expected her to explain. But she knew she couldn’t have explained to his satisfaction, so she kept quiet. “It’s a virus,” he said. “No one’s ever done much research on it, because, as I say, it usually goes away within a week or so. I think I’d like to keep him in here for a day or two and give that leg a rest and let him get over this flu.”