“Mommy, why’s Eddie so crabby?” asked Chris. His question echoed her question, earlier in the afternoon, of him. “Why are you so crabby today?” she had asked. His words often reflected hers, reverberated back her observations, her wonderings, her impatience. Chris’s legs stretched into a wide V on the family room floor and his back rested against the toy box, against the field of violets she had painted on that pine chest when he was a baby. At this moment, he was sanguine, easygoing, focused on play. One after another, he fitted LEGO pieces together. He was building a fire station.
“I don’t know,” she said. Sometimes she answered his questions that way, just to stop the constant inquiry. He could go on forever, asking her to explain a seemingly endless, and random, litany of things. What’s a breeze? Why doesn’t that bird fall down from the sky? Where does hair come from? Do snakes poop? Does it hurt when he’s dead? he asked after Gordy, his pet gerbil, had died.
But this time she really didn’t know the answer to his question. Eddie was an ordinarily happy baby, smiley and bubbly and quick to charm everyone who met him. When he was hungry, he’d fuss for a moment and then, as she nursed him, he’d settle down immediately, nuzzling at her breast like a satisfied puppy. She’d rate his contentedness a 9.5, while, some days, Chris barely made a 7.
But tonight Eddie was whiny and restless. Earlier, when she laid him in his crib, he cried until she picked him up again. She’d fed him, then changed his diaper. He’d never been like this. Maybe he was getting sick, too. He hadn’t been ill at all, not even a cold, in the six months since he was born.
“Time to put the toys away and head to bed,” she announced.
“I want a story.” Chris stared at her through commanding, hazel eyes identical in color to her own. A high-energy child who demanded action, he liked to sing very loud, to play miniature golf using three balls, to blow soap bubbles at his baby brother’s face.
“Not tonight. We can read two stories tomorrow night.” She wanted both boys to go to sleep so she could take a bath and go to bed herself. She would lounge in the tub, her head propped against a folded towel—a good end to this long, unpleasant day. The warm water would lick her weary skin and soothe her achy muscles, and the steamy bathroom air would clear her congested sinuses. As a treat, she would even dump in a handful of her new aromatherapy salts—her cousin Jennifer’s gift to the wedding guests. Thinking of the bath, she could almost smell the pungent lavender-scented vapor and feel the silky water.
“Please?” Chris whined. “Read Melanie’s Walk.”
In so many ways, he was like Jake—persistent, emphatic, self-assured, with a take-charge demeanor. No matter what Chris did in his adult life, she could already tell he would be a leader. Last week, when she picked up the boys from Rose Marie’s, Chris had organized a parade, had appointed himself as the grand marshal. His best friend Davey was assigned to pull the wagon filled with stuffed animals. Sawyer rode the trike, with Beefeater, Rose Marie’s old dog, tethered to the handlebars by a dirty piece of rope. Meghan, and then Amanda, brought up the rear, one waving a pennant that said, GO BLUE, and the other banging pot lids like cymbals.
She sighed and considered Chris’s request for a story. “Okay. Just one.” She was too tired to talk him out of it. “Sit here while I feed Eddie.”
Chris’s fluid body wiggled and molded itself into the narrow space between her hip and the arm of the easy chair. His dewy skin felt like chamois against her elbow. She took a deep breath and, in spite of her clogged nose, could smell his scent—earthy, dense, fresh like ripe pears.
Sometimes Chris could be loveable, in his sweet, determined way, as he was right now. And yet, earlier, at dinner, he had begged for chocolate milk rather than 2 percent. She refused. He begged. She refused again. He begged again.
Finally, she spun around, grabbed his elbow, and yelled, “I said no. Quit begging. I can’t stand a beggar.”
His eyes had flashed fear. He glared at her, drove a look of hurt and loathing into her heart. Tears flooded his lashes. She held firm and poured white milk into his glass, with a promise they would have chocolate pudding for dessert.
She unsnapped the left flap of her nursing bra and coaxed Eddie to her breast. He was slow to take it, but after she brushed the nipple against the corner of his lips, he finally latched on. Usually he ate with relentless vigor, the skin over his temples pulsing as he worked his sucking muscles. Tonight, he dabbled at her breast and swallowed very little. What was wrong?
She opened Chris’s book to page one and began coughing.
“Read,” Chris yelled.
“Soon as I quit coughing,” she gasped. She took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly. Then she began to read.
The rhyme and rhythm of her voice seemed to hold Chris in a trance. He had already learned the letters that spelled “Chris,” “mom,” and “dad,” and before long, he would be able to read the words in his books himself.
Usually she treasured their evening routine of snuggling and reading, knowing that years hence she would ache to have him young and dependent and near her again. Since the moment of his birth, he seemed hell-bent to leave, seemed fearless of the road ahead. He yearned to understand everything about the world and to race away, toward its farthest reaches. She longed to keep him close for as long as possible, but right now, she wanted to skip the story.
The throbbing behind her eyes felt as if her face would fall off. She flipped two pages at once.
“Hey,” Chris yelled. “You forgot the part where Melanie gives the apple to the horse.”
“Okay. Okay.” She sighed and turned back a page.
After another story, a glass of water, and two trips to the bathroom, Chris was finally asleep. Eddie began to whimper again. His weak, wrenlike sounds rattled in the back of his throat. He must have caught her cold. Why else would he be like this? She held him against her shoulder and lowered herself into the rocking chair. Back and forth, over and over, they rode the rocker. Still Eddie whimpered. Worry crept over her. Was he sicker than just a cold?
Most days she saw utter purity and unending beauty in Eddie’s face. It was angelic in its innocence: tiny, puckery, perfect lips and lively, glistening eyes. But now, his face was twisted and grotesque. She rocked and hummed and wished her lovely, good-natured baby would return. Or at least wished the crying would stop so she could take her bath and go to bed. She needed to sleep, wanted this day to end. As bad as today had been, or maybe because it was so bad, she was sure tomorrow would be better—her headache would be gone, Eddie wouldn’t be so fussy anymore, and she could enjoy Chris again.
The worry had grown to deep concern. What if Eddie was really sick? Should she take him to the ER?
At times like this she wished her husband had a different job. Usually she could handle the long evenings with only children for company. She enjoyed the quiet time after they went to sleep, when she could read and tidy up the house and listen to Mendelssohn or Brahms and gather her wits. This night, though, she felt terrible and needed relief. Jake would help her if he were home. But he was at work. If he were an insurance salesman or an accountant or a biology teacher, he would be here and she would be in bed. Instead, he was taking care of other people’s sick wives and children.
It was four hours since the last dose. She carried Eddie into the kitchen and, balancing him against her hip, swallowed two Tylenol caplets and a glassful of water. Then she squirted a half dropper of Tylenol drops into the corner of Eddie’s mouth. He sputtered for a moment and smacked his lips. She held her breath, hoped the medicine would stay in. Then he swallowed with a gulp. He seemed looser than usual. Almost limp.
She glanced at the oven clock—7:45. She’d call Jake. He’d know what to do with a sick baby. She dialed the hospital paging service.
As she waited for Jake to answer, she leaned against the sink and stared out the window into their backyard. Her heart was racing. What could be wrong with Eddie? Chris had never acted like this. Even when he’d
had roseola. Maybe that was it. Maybe Eddie would break out in a rash tomorrow and the fever would go away. Or, maybe not.
The remaining daylight, faint orange along the horizon, glowed behind the slats of the patio railing. The swing set was barely visible, its ropes and wooden scaffold a shadowy skeleton intertwined with the bony branches of the sweet gum tree. She tipped her head to view the swing set and gum tree from a different angle. She bent forward and muffled a cough in the terry cloth that covered Eddie’s warm, damp belly.
After what seemed an eternity, a female voice spoke quickly, mechanically. “Answering for Dr. Campbell. He’s scrubbed.”
She felt the twitch in the left corner of her mouth. It was her irritation twitch. She knew Jake couldn’t do anything to help her while he was at work, but she didn’t want to be alone with a sick baby. If she had to be miserable—had to make decisions about an ill child—he was going to help. They were his kids, too.
“Please have him call home when the case is over,” she told the nurse.
She returned to the rocking chair. Eddie was quiet for the moment. She needed to think about something else. What did Jake have for dinner? Anything? Sometimes when he was on call he forgot to eat. He’d lost weight over the past year—gone from size thirty-six to thirty-four pants. Definitely he didn’t get enough sleep. Often, on the nights he was home, he was so tired that both he and Chris would drift off during their reading time. She would pluck the book from Jake’s lap and carry Chris to bed. Later, Jake would jerk awake in the easy chair, announce with a yawn that he was “going to hit the sack,” and stumble up the stairs to their bedroom.
Eddie curled his legs against his tummy and whimpered again. She rocked and waited. What was taking Jake so long to answer her call?
It was only twenty-four hours ago that Jake had sat in the easy chair with Chris sprawled across his lap, reading Mister Mulvaney. He had used a different voice for each character—gruff for Mulvaney, dreamy for his wife, falsetto for the little boy, and whispery for the old lady. When he read about the dog, he made barking noises, and when the boy found the cow, he interrupted the falsetto voice with a deep-throated, “Moooo, moooo.” Chris had bounced against Jake’s thighs to the rhythm of the words. Even Eddie, who had been nursing, seemed to listen to the story. Whenever Jake’s voice hit the high tones, Eddie let go of the nipple and a thin stream of milk drooled from his mouth and trickled down his neck.
But now, Eddie continued to whimper, and his body radiated heat through the nap of his sleeper as if he were on fire. It had been over a half hour since she gave him the Tylenol. She couldn’t remember how long until it was supposed to work. Twenty minutes? Thirty? Forty? Pumping the rocking chair back and forth, she began to chant, “Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full . . .” When she reached the end, she repeated it. And then repeated it again. Each time she varied the tune and the rhythm—sometimes 4/4 time, sometimes 3/4, sometimes syncopated, sometimes waltzy. What was Jake doing? Had the nurse forgotten to give him her message? She’d wait another fifteen minutes and then page him again.
Eddie was finally quiet. Her eyes closed, her sinuses flooded, and her hair matted against the chair’s headrest, she continued to rock and wait for Jake’s call. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth again.
She sang, “Four and twenty blackbirds baked . . .”
The phone was ringing. As she eased herself from the chair, Eddie’s eyes fluttered open. He began to whimper again.
“Hi. What’s up?” Jake asked.
She trapped the receiver between her right ear and shoulder and swayed from side to side in gentle arcs, trying to settle Eddie back to sleep. “Eddie’s real fussy and has a fever. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
Jake sounded distracted. She heard a quiet, repeated peck in the background, the sound of something tapping.
“Are you listening?” she asked. Sometimes he tuned her out, didn’t seem to pay attention when she was speaking.
“Sure.” The pecking stopped.
She described Eddie’s fever, his weak suck, his listlessness. “Can you hear him whimpering? He’s never been like this.”
Jake said, “I bet he has your cold. I’ll take a look at him when I get home tomorrow.” An icy quiet filled the space between them. She didn’t want to wait one more day. She needed Jake to help her tonight. What if Eddie was really sick? What if he had pneumonia?
“It’ll be fine, Anna,” he said. “Remember how you worried about Chris when he was a baby?”
She shifted Eddie in her arms. He had quieted down. Maybe Jake was right about her worry. When Chris was younger, she had fussed over every sniffle, had called the pediatrician each time his temperature went over ninety-nine degrees. She had been sure each cough was tuberculosis, each patch of heat rash was scarlet fever. When he had an ear infection and a swollen lymph node in his neck, she lay awake three nights in a row, convinced he had cancer.
Tonight she hoped Jake would take her worries seriously. The least he could do was say something kind—a few directly sympathetic words such as, “I know this is tough for you,” or, “You’re a good mom and I appreciate your shouldering all the work of a sick child.” But he said nothing like that. He told her to call the pediatrician. Finally, her voice thick with sarcasm, she said, “We’ll be waiting for you to come home.”
After another half hour of rocking and singing, Eddie stopped fidgeting. She sat awhile longer, cuddled him close, brushed her lips across the top of his feverish head.
When she needed to cough, she tried to let the air out in gentle little spurts so it wouldn’t disturb him. Fatigue, raw and insistent, clawed at her shoulders, wringing the last bits of energy from her muscles. Her eyes still throbbed.
When she finally laid Eddie in his crib, he straightened his left arm, kicked his right leg, turned his head toward the wall, and whimpered again.
“Please, please, please, don’t wake up,” she whispered as she stroked his silky hair with her lightest touch.
She lay in bed and stared at the swirls etched in the ceiling plaster, the half circles that bumped against each other—none of them complete, none of them leading anywhere. Should she call the pediatrician? It was late, almost ten thirty. He would say it was just a virus, would tell her to give Eddie another dose of Tylenol and bring him to the office in the morning.
She had had that conversation with Dr. Elliott often and she knew the routine. Chris was only three months old when she went back to work and he had been sick a lot. Runny nose. Diarrhea. Cough, runny nose again. Every virus that drifted through the day care seemed to land on Chris. Even though Rose Marie’s house was immaculate and she ran the plastic toys through the dishwasher every night, Chris still had gotten sick. Often.
She had watched the other children cough and sneeze all over Chris, and reminded herself, glumly, that that’s what kids did when they played. Chris sometimes snatched toys from other children’s spitty hands, sometimes shoved his head against other children’s snotty-nosed faces to get their attention. The kids at Rose Marie’s shared lots of things . . . secrets, cookies, wishes, blocks, hats, and viruses. After Eddie was born, she had waited five months before going back to work. She wanted him to be older before she left him in the cesspool of Rose Marie’s house.
Her achy muscles lay limp against the inside of her nightgown. She had skipped the bath. Fatigue sent her to bed as soon as Eddie fell asleep. She imagined her body going through the motions of calling Dr. Elliott. Throw back the covers, sit up, slide first one leg and then the other over the edge of the mattress, open the drawer, pull out the phone book . . . So much effort merely so he could reassure her that Eddie had a cold. Before turning off the lamp, she rubbed a dollop of Vaseline on the patch of raw skin beneath her nose.
Chapter 5
Jake
The clock in the radiology suite hung high on the wall, its round, institutional face skewed ten degrees to the right, its stark, simple hands splayed to forty-five degrees.
At first glance, the clock read 10:05. Adjusting for the tilt of its face, he saw it was actually 8:55. The night was still young and anything could yet happen—he might be awake until dawn or he might be able to catch a nap or two. It wasn’t likely he’d sleep straight through to morning. That almost never happened.
He flipped the toggle switch on the alternator. For a moment, the fluorescent bulbs behind the lower view boxes flickered—half on, then off. Half on, then off again. Finally they lit. He was looking for the Durban kid’s knee films, first name Mike. Or Matt. Or maybe Mark. One of those m names.
As the toe of his running shoe pushed against the alternator pedal, rows of radiographs, four films abreast, rumbled down over the translucent backlights and disappeared into the lower reaches of the machine. Row thirty-one. Row thirty-two. Row thirty-three. He released his toe, leaned forward, and stared at the films on row thirty-four. They were knees, the left knee on one film and the right knee on another. The two bent joints leered at each other as if frozen in a face-off. The identification plates in the corners of the films read MATTHEW DURBAN. “That’s him,” he muttered out loud.
Earlier in the evening, the boy had been admitted to the hospital with a swollen right knee. Questioning his mother, Jake tried to pin down the cause of the swelling.
“Any injuries?”
“Let’s see . . .” She looked as if her mind were scrolling down a list of Matt’s activities over the past few days. She turned to her son, who was perched on the edge of the examining table, tying the hem of his hospital gown into a knot. “Did you fall on that knee? Or bump it?”
“No,” he said.
“Wait,” she called. “You ran up the porch steps yesterday afternoon and stumbled. Remember, honey? You dropped your ice cream cone when you fell.”
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