Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  She stared at me in the flickering light. Her gaze, somewhat vacant and dry, gave me pause.

  “Don’t be scared,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Don’t be scared. That makes it worse.”

  “It feels like—someone is—tying—”

  “Tying—”

  “—tyingmythroatupwithstring.”

  “Oh, Meadow, I wouldn’t let anyone do that. OK? Don’t let yourself imagine that.” I sat upright. “I know just what’ll help.”

  I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower spigots, calling out toward the bedroom, “I used to have trouble breathing when I was a boy, too. Did I ever tell you that? This was back in East Germany. We didn’t have very advanced medicine back then. We didn’t have inhalers. Things got bad enough, they’d take you to the hospital and intubate you.” I came out of the bathroom, peeled back the bedspread, and gently scooped her up. “So of course, my mother tried to find home remedies. Eucalyptus. Prayers to the Moon God, what have you. But the only thing that seemed to help”—I placed Meadow on the cold tiles of the bathroom—“was a nice hot steam shower.”

  She was an absurdly colored bird in the steam. I helped her off with her little jacket, and then she stepped out of the collapsed dress. She stood trembling in her underpants, not even bothering to cover her chest. I could see the strain of her ribs under her skin.

  “If this doesn’t help, I’ll take you straight to the hospital.”

  She inhaled. “Idon’twanttogotothehospital.”

  “Boy oh boy. Let me tell you, neither do I. So let’s stay positive. Upsie-daisy.”

  I lifted her into the bathtub and she stood in the basin with her hands drawn up under her chin. Her eyeglasses instantly fogged. I reached in to remove them from her face, and as I did so, I grew slightly dizzy myself, remembering those distant treatments.

  “You inhale the steam,” I said, “and I’ll just sit right here on the toilet. Very dignified.”

  She said nothing. I closed the plastic curtain and sat beside the bathtub on the cold toilet lid. The shower curtain billowed out of the basin. From its tattered hem water was pouring brokenly. A dirty tributary pushed across the tiles toward the door. I could hear the sound of water upon my daughter’s skull.

  We’d done everything the doctor said. She had a couple minor attacks, so we bought a HEPA filter and gave away the mouse and didn’t feed her gluten, and then we got divorced. I could still remember those and other emergencies as clearly as if they had just occurred: a bad burn once when she tried to fry some Play-Doh, the time she ingested a Christmas rose at her grandmother’s and we wept all the way to the hospital, several horrible fevers, in which we experienced ghoulish waking visions throughout the night vigil as if we had, according to our prayers, changed places with her. In a bygone era, we would have lost her ten times over. And yet we never did. We never did. Whatever force took her to that edge always brought her back to us.

  “Butterscotch?”

  “Yes?”

  “Does the steam seem to be helping?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  “But—”

  “But what.”

  “I feel spinnish.”

  “You want a chair in there? Something to sit on?”

  “Yeah.”

  Spinnish, I thought, stepping out into the room. This cannot be good. I had come to rely—I see this now—on that bracing shot of the inhaler, and had forgotten—had I ever truly learned it—the true nature of her illness, what was physically happening to her, what should be done about it. I believed—I remembered—that steam showers had helped me when I was sick as a child, but sick with what? Pertussis? I had grown out of my case. Dorchester had cured me of it, whatever it was. I had grown out of it, or it had been bullied out of me, and so I kept expecting her to grow out of it, but look, she hadn’t, and the truth is I really didn’t know what the hell to do.

  That’s when I heard the thud in the bathroom.

  The rings screamed against the rod as I pushed the curtain aside. She was on her belly in the basin, under the deluge of water, her hair slicked down over her back and face and darkened by water. She turned her head to me slowly, dawningly, her under-eyes bruised.

  “All righty,” I said. “Off we go.”

  “Where?”

  “For help.”

  “No,” she rasped.

  “We’re going,” I said, taking hold of her slippery arm.

  “No!”

  “We are going! We are going! Stand up.”

  “No!” She yanked her arm back.

  “Stand up, God damn you!”

  I turned off the spigot, wrapped her in a towel to get a grip on her, and took her back into the bedroom. She struggled meekly, nakedly, her underwear soaked through.

  “Stop it!” I cried. “Stop kicking me!”

  I tugged on her purple pants and the sweatshirt from the Swanton Walmart. Her sodden underwear soaked through immediately. I attempted to towel-dry her hair, but she covered her head with her hands, as if she was being gratuitously attacked. We were enemies now. And there, cold and wet on the bed she wanted to cling to, the grave injustice of her position became evident to her, which was that not only could she not have her bed, but neither could she have the comfort she wanted most in the world. Raising her chin to the ceiling, bringing her knees to her chest, she gave a long, chilling cry for it.

  “MOMMY!”

  “Shhh, Meadow. Shhhhhh.”

  “MOMMY!” she hollered again. “MOMMY! MOMMY!”

  She kicked her legs out straight, her nostrils as wide as marbles. She stayed stiff like that, back arched in apoplexy, her eyes open and staring. I heard the literal rattle of her spent breath. She fell silent.

  Out the door, the dead thud of the bolt behind me, down the stairs, two flights only, where the drowsy concierge turned his face from the television, a solicitous smile lingering upon it even after he saw my daughter limp in my arms, uncomprehending. Meadow’s wet head staining my shirtfront. Her eyes were open but vacant. “Talk to me!” I said. She wouldn’t talk to me.

  “Where’s the nearest hospital?”

  The man stood, a sandwich falling from his lap.

  “Close,” he said. “Mass General. You need a taxi?”

  “Please. Please. Help me.”

  No taxis waited outside. The Best Western fronted the wharf between the expressway and the Charlestown Bridge. A million cars passing above us on concrete stanchions on either side, but not a single one on our deserted street right below.

  “Call an ambulance,” I said. “Call a taxi. Anything.”

  “Right away. But—”

  “But what?”

  “You could run. Might be faster. Look.”

  I looked toward the illuminated tip of the building toward which he pointed. The building seemed very close, but even as I began to run, I understood that it looked far closer than it really was.

  I ran out of the isolated underpass and onto another street with little traffic, all of it slick with midnight moisture, upon which the traffic lights slid and blurred my depth perception. I stumbled. A horn blared. Meadow was passive in my arms. Her weight felt neutral, inanimate. It was as if she did not care if we fell, or if we were hit, and she did not care if we made it to the hospital or not. It was as if she did not really believe in the hospital anyway. And I wondered—in that split frame with which a man lucidly witnesses his own downfall—if it was possible that she did not believe in me anymore either. She suspected but could not yet confirm some future in which I was gone, banished. Discredited. Locked away. And she—adult Meadow—living in a garden apartment, years hence, unmarried perhaps, childless, would say to herself, and I gave years of my life over to him? To reckoning with him? Or, aging herself, she might even laugh with the sudden realization that a certain amount of time had indeed been shaved off the back end of her life—a year or two, maybe more—years she had donated to her father when she was a
child, by dint of her love for him and her inexhaustible mercy, in order to sustain him, before she fully understood the terms of the transfer. This form of self-cannibalizing that children do, well, it’s one reason I ran. I mean, ran from Dorchester.

  The headlights were blinding. The squad car had already passed us and made a U-turn and was driving back toward us so damningly I could barely walk forward anymore. With Meadow in my arms I could not shield my eyes. Meadow pressed her face against my chest. A door opened and a figure was coming toward us brandishing a smaller light.

  “You two all right?” the policeman asked, sweeping my face.

  “We’ll be fine. Please. I can’t see.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “We need to get to the hospital.”

  He peered into Meadow’s face with his flashlight. “Is she conscious?”

  “Yes. We’re just—” I tried to step past him, toward the glowing building, which seemed to flare, to signal to us. “Please! Let us go.”

  The man looked surprised. Why wouldn’t he let us go? Didn’t I understand he was here to help? The clean-shaven skin over his ears jumped with his pulse.

  “I’ll do you one better,” he said. “Get on in. I’ll drive you.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Come on now. You’d better, sir. She doesn’t look good.”

  “It’s her asthma. It’s just asthma. But it won’t stop.”

  We sat in the backseat. Meadow seemed momentarily revived by the police car, curling her fingers around the black grate.

  “Heading southbound on Staniford,” the cop intoned to his CB radio. “Heading to Mass General with a female minor, seven or eight years of age—”

  “We don’t have her inhaler with us,” I said. “She can’t breathe.”

  “Subject might need oxygenation.”

  Abruptly, Meadow lay down in my lap. The action terrified me, it was so final. She murmured something.

  I bent down to hear. “What’d you say, baby? What’d you say?”

  “You’re my home,” she said, distinctly.

  “Oh. Oh my sweetheart. What do you mean?”

  “You’re where I live, you and Mommy.”

  “Oh. All right. Don’t try to talk.”

  She started to cry. A high, weak scratch of a cry, no air in it.

  “Am I going to die?”

  “Please, Meadow. I’m sorry!”

  “Am I going to, Daddy?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  Her eyes closed.

  “Her eyes closed,” I said to the policeman.

  “Almost there,” he said.

  “She’s going to die! Drive faster!”

  “We’re almost there, sir.” He swiped his CB radio off the dash. “Twenty-two to dispatch. Arriving to Blossom Street entrance of Mass General. That’s Blossom Street…”

  They had to pry my hands from her shoulders. I was shaking her too hard. She was moving along very quickly now in the hallway on her back. They tried to lose me. I wouldn’t let them, though. They didn’t understand. There was no way I was going to let her die. I had ahold of the corner of the gurney. I was trying to help them push but I was also falling down, falling into nothingness. The policeman was jogging along beside me. Everybody was running.

  “No way am I going to let her out of my sight,” I said to the policeman, who now seemed, since he’d signed on for the next chapter, like someone I could talk to.

  “Nobody’s going to take her from you, sir,” he said.

  “They’ll have to kill me first.”

  “Nobody’s going to do anything but help her. Relax.”

  “Come this way,” one of the nurses said, the one holding the mask over Meadow’s face, as she tacked sharply into a bright room, and my child was rolled into the astonishing light.

  PEDIATRICS

  A hospital never grows dark. Never completely. The clock hands move; night settles in. Trays are brought and cleared through the not-dark, and the not-silence prevails—the blips, the squeaks, the billows of assisted breathing. In pediatrics, the rituals of bedtime follow snack time. A child pauses outside the door in footed pajamas, thoughtfully brushing his teeth and staring… Shuddering, I lowered my head into my hands. If I stayed quiet, if I stayed very still… We were sharing a room with a boy whom no one had yet visited. He slept under his tucked sheet, his dark, perfected face framed by the pillow as if by frilled wax paper. He seemed so totally alone. But I couldn’t watch over him. If some sylph were to come floating to the door, I would have said, Take him. Take him!

  Other times we’d sat like this, by the bed all night, gagged with worry, measuring that inconceivable interval between the call to the pediatrician and the waiting. Those infant fevers. How hot she used to get. We were sure she’d be a pile of ashes by morning. I remember the drowsy doctor, himself due to the breakfast table within an hour or two, telling us over the telephone to be ready to take her to the hospital if her condition worsened. Throughout the stubborn night we would wait for things to worsen, a night-light for our vigil. And stalking the corners of our quiet sickbed conversations were all the little children who’d tiptoed past their parents on nights like these, centuries ago, all the little invisible souls, running away, laughing. And yet we never lost her.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  I looked up to see a petite, Slavic-looking woman. We shook hands. Her bones seemed as hollow as a bird’s.

  “Doctor,” I said, standing woozily, upsetting the empty coffee cup I’d left on Meadow’s swivel tray. “Come in, come in. I’m so glad to see you. Thank you so much. Thank God for you and your hospital.”

  The doctor’s face assumed a troubled look. “I’m really glad you made it to us. But we’re not in the clear.”

  The doctor frowned at her chart, and then we sat, the doctor on one side of sleeping Meadow and myself on the other. For a moment we both examined her placid face, my eyes flickering between her face and the doctor’s.

  “We had to give your daughter some heavy stuff to get her breathing again,” the doctor said. “Not just the intravenous drug—the magnesium sulfate—also, we gave her ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic. We couldn’t hesitate. These drugs prevent respiratory arrest, but they are brutal drugs. Hard on a two-hundred-pound adult. As in everything, Dad, there’s a corollary. In pediatrics, you can’t push too hard. But you have to push hard enough.”

  “I understand,” I said. “God, you look so young for a doctor.”

  The doctor smiled, again with the woeful look. “OK,” she said. “I need to know why you didn’t come in earlier.”

  I paused. “Earlier?”

  “You said—you told us when you first came in—that she has suffered previous asthmatic attacks. You know—I’m sure you know—how serious her illness is? That thousands of children die every year from asthmatic suffocation?”

  “You won’t believe this,” I said. “But we lost her inhaler in the Common. In the lagoon. Today.”

  “You mean yesterday.”

  “Yesterday. Slipped out of her backpack. Into the lagoon.”

  “Goodness.”

  “To be honest, she hasn’t had an attack that severe since—since never. At least, I’ve never seen it like that.”

  “Well, that’s because of her inhaler. Because it saves her life when you use it. And sure, it’s no crime to lose it. But you cannot wait to get her help. You have to get help immediately.”

  “I hear you.” I nodded. “I failed her.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “But I did fail her. I’m saying that.”

  “Listen. I have kids, too. I’ve made mistakes. I hold no one to an impossible standard. But you and me are lucky because we get another chance. Some kids don’t get better. Intervention can fail.”

  My eyes drifted toward the sleeping boy who shared our room.

  “So. She’ll be all right?”

  “Yes, she will. Bu
t she needs to stabilize.”

  Just then, Meadow yawned.

  “Look.” I laughed. “We’re boring her.”

  “Ha,” the doctor said. “That’s a great sign. She’s still sleeping, but more lightly.”

  “So we’ll be able to leave soon? I personally get really antsy in hospitals. And her mother would really love to have her back home as soon as possible.”

  “We’ll see. Get some sleep, Dad. This place really hops in the morning.”

  As I watched Meadow stir and her sleep get lighter and I saw what I thought was the end in sight, I said to myself, I will never sleep I will never fall asleep again, and yet somehow I fell asleep. I dreamed explicitly. I was walking away. Right up Storrow Drive and into the woods. I gave up on all this. I slipped my shape. I was made new. No one ever saw me again.

  The squeegee of officious shoes awakened me. Someone had entered the room while I was dozing. I lifted the tonnage of my skull and prepared a smile. Who was it but my friend the policeman. I could see him better now, in the light of day, his close-shaven face shining. I saw that he was about my age. As he offered a few unpoetic comments, I heard in his voice that familiar Dorchester twang, which I’d pinpoint at somewhere around, say, the corner of Dorchester and Victoria, and I wondered if we knew each other when we were kids. I wondered if he was someone with whom I sat beside some Madonna statuette eating salted pips. Someone who shared his freestanding basketball hoop with me when no one else was around. Someone with whom I traded racial insults (Mick! Nazi!). Now he was saying how he was glad everything came out OK. And I was thanking him for saving my daughter’s life. And meaning it. Because I was thinking, yes, I do get another chance, it is not too late, and today—today—I will visit that old house on Savin Hill Road and I will climb those well-worn stairs, and see my father, and show him his granddaughter, and something will be put right, something will be finished…

  “Can we step out into the hall?” the cop asked.

  “Sure,” I said, not moving. “Everything all right?”

  “I just need to write up a report. I’ve got to account for my time.”