by John Coston
After the meal, Ellen decided to drop her mother off and take the children downtown to see the Christmas decorations in the department store windows. It was a Norman Rockwell kind of night. Children pressed up against the plate glass to see the brightly lit Yuletide displays. Ellen had to carry David because he soon grew tired. She also had to lift him above the heads of the other children, so he would be able to get a good look at the windows.
On the ride home, little David fell asleep. It wasn’t a long drive, but it was approaching nine o’clock. As was the dread of all parents, though, it proved to be only a nap, just enough to provide him with a burst of new energy. By the time everyone was back inside Apartment 501, he was wide-awake again.
Ellen turned on the TV and tuned in to the beginning of Knots Landing. Stacy and Stephen were dispatched to bed, and they went. In no time they were asleep.
Two-year-old David, however, didn’t want to go to bed. Ellen tried a couple of times, but he wouldn’t stay down. This was not unusual for the child, who was active and often uncontrollable. Tonight, he wanted to stay up and watch some of the show. Ellen was planning to do some ironing while watching TV, and so David settled on the floor, lying on his right side, eyes open.
At some point Ellen’s attention strayed from the screen to the floor, where David lay quietly at her feet. The frustration of Thanksgiving without her husband weighed heavily on her. And now the damned brat wouldn’t go to bed.
There was a way to solve at least one of her problems. She took one of the pillows from the sofa and got down on her knees behind David. He didn’t stir. Then, in a quick move, she put the pillow over his head.
A Little Boy’s Fight
Sandy Nelson was Ellen’s oldest friend. The two had first met when as teenagers, when they both had frequented roller derby games at the Marquette Pool. Sandy had stayed in St. Louis, just like Ellen. In fact, Sandy lived on the same street where Ellen’s mother had moved after Ellen had lost the house.
“Hi, how ya doin?”
“Oh, you know.”
“How was your Thanksgiving?” Sandy asked.
“I got a turkey spread from the National,” Ellen said, looking down at David on the floor. Then after a pause, she added in a tone of relief, “All I had to do was heat it in the oven.”
“Great.”
“Yeah, we went downtown after I dropped Mom off. We saw the windows, you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
As Ellen made small talk over the phone, she continued to eye her son’s still body on the floor.
“Yeah, Steve and Stacy are in bed. David was wide-awake. He slept on the car ride home, but he wouldn’t go to bed. I tried to put him to bed a couple of times.”
Sandy completely understood Ellen’s mood. It was the end of the day. The two of them often lingered like this at night.
“He’s lying on the floor here watching TV.”
Ellen continued to talk, mentioning that David had not been feeling good. The little boy had a touch of a cold, and earlier in the day she had bought him some cough medicine at Walgreens. She also speculated that maybe the turkey dinner wasn’t agreeing with him. The conversation drifted on aimlessly, the way calls often do, and continued for nearly a quarter of an hour before Ellen abruptly interrupted.
“Something’s wrong with David. I have to let you go. I gotta go.”
“Okay, sure, talk to you later.”
Ellen hung up, but Sandy wasn’t taken aback. Sandy had been on the phone many times when Ellen would abruptly cut it off because of something involving the children that needed immediate attention.
What Ellen didn’t tell Sandy was that David’s lips were turning blue. His skin color was turning pale white.
Ellen called 911. Then she woke up Steven and Stacy and told them that they were going to the hospital.
“David stopped breathing. You’re going to the hospital with me.”
Then Ellen left the apartment, telling the children she was going for help. She told them to get dressed.
Out in the living room, little David’s skin was becoming moist as his temperature started to drop. The TV blared—Knots Landing was still on—and the minutes ticked by. Where was their mother?
“Ambulance!” came the call from outside the door. Ken Bise, a paramedic assigned to Medic Unit No. 1 with the city’s Emergency Medical Services, knocked again on the door when there was no answer. He looked at his partner, Steven Koehne, and shrugged.
Again he knocked, checking the dispatch sheet to make sure he had the right place. Yes, 4720 South Broadway, Apartment 501. Still there was no answer.
He hit the door harder, calling out louder and louder.
After several attempts, he heard the door latch being turned. As the door to Apartment 501 swung open, he saw the face of a little girl who looked quite frightened.
Stacy directed the two men to the living room, where they saw a pale and moist David lying on the floor. Upon initial examination, he appeared to be in cardiac arrest. As Stacy and Steven looked on from a safe distance, Bise began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while his partner prepared to move David down to the ambulance.
Bise and Koehn asked Stacy several times about her mother. Where she had gone? When would she be back?
“She’s downstairs.” That’s all Stacy knew.
By the time they had prepared the boy for transport, almost ten minutes had passed.
Ellen suddenly appeared. “He’s been sick. That’s all,” is what she said. To the paramedics, Ellen didn’t seem to appear to be disturbed by the grave condition her son was in. In fact, to them she was surprisingly not upset at all.
Bise and Koehne asked Ellen if she would be accompanying them to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital. No, she said, she would be along behind them as soon as she got someone to watch her children, and as soon as David was taken away, Ellen called Sandy Nelson back.
“Sandy, can you watch the kids? The ambulance took David to the hospital.”
“Of course. Of course.” Sandy could tell that Ellen was upset. By the time Ellen got to her house with Stacy and Steven, Sandy had arranged for her own mother to watch the children so she could accompany Ellen to Cardinal Glennon.
When Sandy got into Ellen’s car, she could see that Ellen was a bit rattled, but she was in control. When they arrived at the emergency room, the doctors and nurses were working feverishly on David. The immediate diagnosis was cardiopulmonary arrest. The entry log showed that the boy’s mother noted that he had become pale and unresponsive while lying on the living room floor, watching television.
David wouldn’t come around, but he wouldn’t give up. The doctors were unable to revive him, but they kept him alive on machines that supplied his body with oxygen. He was running a fever of 101 degrees. Nurses packed him in ice, trying to bring down his temperature. They told Ellen that they wouldn’t move him from Emergency until the next morning. After a while, Ellen decided to go home. She wanted to get some sleep.
The next morning, at 9:30, David was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit, but there was no real change in his condition. Ellen returned to the hospital, buoyed somewhat by a night’s sleep. Shortly after David was moved into the ICU, Ellen called Deanne, who was at work.
“Oh, my God, Ellen,” Deanne said. She could tell from the tone of Ellen’s voice that this was very serious. “I’ve got to work, but it’s a half day. I’ll come right over. I’m going to go home and change, then I’ll be right over.”
“Okay, yeah, it might be a while.”
“Oh, Ellen, I’m so sorry. I’ll get there soon as I can.”
Deanne hung up. That day after Thanksgiving, she had to catch up on a lot of end-of-the-month paperwork. It was hard to keep her mind on work, though. She was David’s godmother, and now he was in trouble. In fact, trouble didn’t seem to be the word for it.
After work, she raced home and quickly changed clothes, then drove to the hospital. When she found Ellen outside the ICU, she immediately began
to sense a tragedy unfolding. She also sensed that Ellen was fatigued. Poor Ellen, she thought, she’s been here all night.
The two of them hugged, and then they went in to see David. His blond hair was matted against the sheets, and his pallor was shocking. They stood there for a few moments, just looking down at the boy, who was connected to an array of medical equipment that was keeping him alive. When it seemed the right time to say it, Deanne suggested they go downstairs to get something to eat. She could see that Ellen had been through a rough day and night, and when they took the elevator down to the cafeteria, Ellen started to tell her what had happened.
It was the same story she had been telling all along. David had just stopped breathing while they were watching TV. She noticed that he was turning blue. She called 911. They came here.
“Oh, Ellen,” was about all Deanne could think to say. When they returned to the ward floor, Ellen said she wanted to go to the lounge. She wanted to sleep, she said.
“Of course,” Deanne said, embracing her and walking along with her, as if to provide a shield from anything more for this dear friend of hers. “I’ll go in and see him, Ellen. You take it easy.” In a flash, Deanne wondered if Ellen had called her mother.
“No, not yet. I suppose …”
“You want me to, hon? I’ll be glad to.”
“Yeah, sure, would you?”
“Of course. I’ll call her.”
Deanne was a bit surprised, actually, that Ellen had been here all night and through most of the day but still hadn’t called her mother, but she wrote it off as the result of being in shock.
Deanne didn’t say anything, but she was trying to imagine how Ellen was even still going. When Deanne donned a hospital gown, preparing to go into the unit to be with David, she girded herself to stay in there as long as it took, so Ellen could get some much needed rest.
When Deanne and Ellen had first gone in together, the doctors had told them that it would be good to try to talk to David, that he might be able to hear them. This time a nurse told Deanne that the boy could sense their presence, and there was something pointed about the way she said it.
“Someone should talk to him and touch him,” she had said.
So when Deanne stood there alone by her godson, she talked to him, trying her best to reach the pale, little boy who lay there so still. She also rubbed his legs, because she could feel that they were cold to the touch. His circulation was slowing. Then she would rub his hands. They seemed cold, too. She wanted to pick him up and cuddle him in her arms, but the life-support apparatus made it impossible.
Deanne thought about Ellen from time to time, imagining that this is what she had been doing all night long, and she was glad that she could be here now so that poor Ellen could be relieved. That’s how it was from late afternoon until almost 11:30 P.M., when a doctor came in.
“I’m going to have to ask you to step out for a while,” the young doctor said. “We’re going to run some tests.”
“Oh, sure,” Deanne said, immediately backing away.
“It’ll take a while, maybe forty-five minutes or an hour,” he said.
“What are you going to do?” Deanne wanted to know, still hoping for a miracle.
“We’re looking for brain activity. It’s a brain scan.”
Deanne didn’t respond, except to withdraw from the bedside and out the door. But she felt her legs weaken as she walked. There were no words to describe her confusion and grief. She felt a blankness, but she was also filled with a sorrow deeper than she had ever known. In the lounge, Ellen was fast asleep, and Deanne hoped that her friend was somehow temporarily immune from the horrible probability of David’s fate. As Deanne sat there, in the middle of the night, waiting and waiting for the doctor to come back, she felt a weight pressing in on her. She fought back the urge to remember all the devilish little things David had done.
It was close to 12:30 when the doctor, with a nurse at his side, approached. Ellen was still knocked out in a chair.
“We didn’t find much activity,” the doctor told her. “Why don’t you both go home and get some sleep and come back in the morning? We’ll call you if there’s anything.”
Deanne nodded. Though she was stunned by the report, she didn’t betray it to the nurse.
“There’s really no activity,” the nurse said, full of sympathy, “and they won’t be able to do another scan for another twelve hours.”
Deanne began to break down.
Then she knew she had to rouse Ellen and give her the news.
“Hon, hon,” she whispered, nudging Ellen’s shoulder.
Ellen shifted her head, and her eyes popped open.
The doctor leaned over a little to address her. “You know,” he began, “we’ve done everything we can for him.”
There was a pause. Ellen looked straight ahead.
Deanne broke the silence, turning to Ellen. “We should go home for a while. They said, they’ll call us.”
Ellen started to get up.
“Okay, Deanne,” she whispered hoarsely.
Deanne was overwhelmed again as they looked in for a brief glance at David before leaving the hospital. Many times before they had driven late at night, but those were high times. Now Deanne was driving Ellen home to her apartment in Collinsville in the middle of the night, and they would try to get some sleep so they would be ready for the next day, whatever that was likely to bring.
It was a cold night, and as they crossed the river, Deanne made a remark about how exhausted Ellen must be, staying up all night like that.
“Oh, I went home last night.”
Deanne fell abruptly silent. The moon was bright, and it cast a glow across the Mississippi. She was rattled by what Ellen had just said, but she was also exhausted herself, and it took a moment to sink in.
“I wanted to make sure I got a good night’s sleep,” Ellen added.
Deanne still didn’t know what to say. All this time she had been thinking something entirely different. Now she said to herself, If my niece or nephew was in the hospital, it would take an Act of Congress, and God would have to help, to get me out of that hospital! I wouldn’t move from that room. Who in their right mind would leave the hospital if their child was there?
All Deanne could think was that Ellen had been in shock.
When they arrived at Deanne’s place, neither of them wanted to fall asleep right away, but they tried to just the same. Deanne dragged some pillows and blankets into the living room, expecting they could fall asleep out there, but Ellen wanted to watch wrestling tapes. So Deanne pulled out the tapes and they fired up the TV.
At about four o’clock, Deanne finally fell fast asleep. Ellen nodded off after her, being not quite as tired after her six-hour catnap in the hospital. When morning came, Ellen asked Deanne to call the hospital, and she did. The nurse suggested that they come back. There wasn’t any change.
Ellen and Deanne threw on their clothes and drove back across the river. When they arrived in David’s room, Ellen walked to the side of her son’s bed. To Deanne’s amazement, the first thing Ellen did was to lift one of his eyelids. They could both see that his pupil was fully dilated. Ellen looked up, and Deanne knew then that it was over. The profound knowledge that was conveyed in Ellen’s look was greater than the oddity of her raising the boy’s eyelid. But she couldn’t help thinking, What a strange thing to do.
The doctors performed another brain scan with the same result, and by early afternoon Ellen sat down again for a conference with the doctor. She asked Deanne to join her.
There was no change in David’s condition.
“He’s just surviving on our machines, and there’s just nothing else that we can do for him,” the doctor said. “What would you like us to do?”
Deanne felt a closing of her throat. It felt as though time had just been stopped.
“What are you saying?” Ellen asked.
“Well, I think we need to take him off the machine, because he’s suffering. David
is brain dead. He’ll never be right.”
Deanne was barely holding together.
Then Ellen turned to Deanne and said, “Well, what would you do?”
Deanne was taken aback.
“Oh, Ellen, this is not my child. I couldn’t make that kind of a decision.”
“Oh, I know,” Ellen said. “I know it’s mine.”
The matter-of-fact tone in her voice made Deanne uncomfortable.
“Well, what would you do?” Ellen pressed on.
“Well, I know that if I were the one in the bed, I don’t ever want to be kept alive by life-support systems.”
Ellen then looked at the doctor. “Turn it off.”
Deanne was again stunned. She thought Oh, my gosh.
The doctor started to explain gently what would happen next. He said it would take about forty-five minutes to an hour for David’s heart to stop.
Deanne was falling apart inside, but Ellen appeared to be holding together well. As the two of them sat there after the doctor and nurse went out, Deanne started to cry.
“Ellen,” she said awkwardly, blowing her nose, “we’ve been through a lot together. This is the roughest thing we’ve ever been through. Let’s not do this again, okay?”
Ellen looked back at her and gave a smile that chilled Deanne to the bone. Until the day she died, she would never forget the queer smile Ellen gave her.
Deanne kept telling herself that Ellen must be in shock. It was hard enough for her to accept, and she was only the child’s godmother. When the doctor returned after disconnecting David from the machines, Deanne asked him to explain what had happened.
“What killed him?” she wanted to know.
“We can find nothing,” the doctor told her. “We consider it a crib death.”
“He’s twenty-eight-months old. Isn’t that a little old?”
Then the nurse spoke up, saying this was the fourth case they’d had that year.
“It’s so hard to believe,” Deanne said.
David was no longer an infant. If anything, he was a major troublemaker. If he wasn’t watched, he could disassemble half the house in five minutes. He was a very active, bright little boy. She and Ellen’s other friends knew that he was impossible to control.
