“I love you,” I whispered in her ear before leaving. “Try to be easy today.”
Shortly after my midmorning consultation, my phone vibrated with a text from Hannah:
I’m downstairs.
What are you talking about? Did you send this to me by mistake?
No. I’m downstairs.
In the hospital?
Yes.
What are you doing here?
I’m in the ER.
Are the kids ok?
I texted as I sprinted down the hallway. I skipped the elevator and went straight to the stairs because they were quicker.
Kids are fine. I’m getting stitches.
WTF?
She didn’t respond. I tapped out a text to Dan, letting him know where I was in case he needed me. I found her in bed 7A. Bags of ice lay across her bare chest. I rushed over to her bedside. “What happened?” I asked.
“Janie bit me.”
Anxiety twisted my guts. “Janie bit you? Where? How?”
“How do you think?” she snapped. She shot me a murderous glare.
I threw my hands in the air. I still wasn’t getting it. It wasn’t registering.
“This morning before I nursed Cole, I asked if she still wanted to try it, and she said yes. She was so excited. I explained to her it was just like sucking on a bottle. I mean, what else was I supposed to say?” Her face was contorted in anger. I’d never seen her so mad. “At first, she latched on like it was nothing. It was pretty amazing. I got a letdown just like I get with Cole. I hadn’t expected that. She drank for a few minutes, but then you know what she did?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “She looked up at me. Right at me. And then she bit me. And not just a little nibble. She chomped down on it.” She pulled off the bag of ice on her left breast. “See what she did to me?”
Her entire breast was swollen, bruised all around the nipple. Stitches lined the underside.
She pointed. “Six stitches. It took six stitches. She almost ripped it off.”
“Oh my God.” I didn’t know what else to say. My head felt woozy. The room spun. “I have to sit down.”
I sank into the chair next to her bed. I put my head in my hands, trying to make sense of what she’d just told me, what I’d just seen. What was wrong with Janie? I’d read about kids with reactive attachment disorder. I hadn’t read anything like this. Nothing.
“Where are the kids?” I asked.
“Allison is at the house with them. I told her I was bleeding again and needed to go to the hospital.” She shook her finger at me. “Don’t you dare tell her what really happened.”
I cocked my head to the side, shocked. “What?”
“I mean it. I don’t want her to know she did this to me. I’d be mortified.”
She didn’t need to be embarrassed. She hadn’t done anything wrong. I wanted to tell her that, but she was easy to set off these days, and I wasn’t taking the chance of getting her more upset, since most of the time it was something I said or did. I couldn’t do anything right by her. Nobody had told me having a newborn would be like this.
My phone vibrated again. This time it was Dan. He needed me upstairs. “It’s Dan.”
She motioned toward the door. “You can go. I’m fine. There’s nothing else they can do. They already stitched me up. I’m just waiting on my discharge papers.”
“Are you sure? I feel bad leaving you here.”
“I’m sure. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get home, though. I don’t want to even see her face.” Anger radiated off her.
“I’ll talk to Janie when I get home.” I kissed the top of her head. “I’ll call Dr. Chandler on the way back upstairs.”
She turned away from me. “Go ahead. I don’t want to talk to either of them.”
My head spun as I drove home from the hospital. Hannah had texted me when she’d gotten home, but I hadn’t heard anything else from her the rest of the day. I’d become a surgeon because I liked to fix people and picked orthopedics because it was an easy fix. Bones were like pieces of glass. When they broke, you put them back together again. That was what I was good at—fixing things. But I didn’t know how to fix this. Things grew worse instead of better every day, and I’d never felt more powerless.
Janie bounced to the door and greeted me like she did whenever I got home—happy, smiling, full of energy and life. I just stared at her, wondering how someone who looked so sweet could do something so awful. It was one of the hallmarks of kids with reactive attachment disorder, but it didn’t make it any less creepy.
“Hi, Daddy. I missed you. Did you have a good day at the hospital?” she said like it was just another day.
“It’s been a hard day,” I said. I’d worry about her later. “Where’s your mom?”
She pointed to the family room. “She’s in there.”
I walked into the family room. Hannah sat in the recliner, holding Cole while he slept. Her face was contorted in pain.
“How are you feeling?” I asked out of habit.
“It’s pretty awful,” she said, fighting back tears. “I can only feed him out of one breast, and it feels like knives are coming out when I do.”
“I’m so sorry.” I wished I could do something to make her feel better. “Do you want anything? Can I—”
Janie interrupted. “Daddy, play with me. I wanna play.”
“Not right now. I’m talking to your mom.”
She tugged on my arm. “But Daddy!”
I jerked it away. “Let go.” My voice was louder than I had intended.
She stumbled back as if I’d hit her, eyes wide.
Hannah motioned to her. “Talk to her first. We can talk later.”
“Let’s go to your room, Janie,” I said.
I shot Hannah a knowing look over my shoulder as we headed into Janie’s room. I didn’t close the door behind us so she could hear our conversation. I took a seat on Janie’s bed. “Janie, come sit next to me. We need to talk.”
“I don’t wanna talk. I wanna play.” She crossed her arms on her chest.
“No. We’re going to talk first, and then we can play.”
She begrudgingly took a seat next to me.
“You bit Mommy today, and it really hurt her. That was a bad thing to do.” I wore my most serious face. “I am very upset with you.”
“Sorry, Daddy.” She grabbed my hand and kissed the top of it. “Can we play now?”
I shook my head. “I want to know why you did that. Why would you do something like that?”
She shrugged, searching my face for an answer.
“Please, I’m trying to understand. How could you hurt your mommy?”
She crawled up on my lap and whispered in her sweet voice, “I like hurting people. Do you?”
CASE #5243
INTERVIEW:
PIPER GOLDSTEIN
Ron stopped me midsentence. “How did Hannah seem to you during those early days?”
This time there was nothing I could do to keep the red from burning my cheeks. I shrugged.
He leaned forward. “How was Hannah after the baby was born?”
I cleared my throat. “I told you before—I didn’t see much of them during that time period.”
“No, you made it sound like you were around when the abuse happened, but that’s not true, is it?” Luke peered at me from across the table.
I looked away; his gaze was too intense.
Ron rubbed his chin. “It’s true, isn’t it? You hadn’t seen them in months until you got called to investigate at the hospital.”
“I—”
He cut me off. “You weren’t there for months. You have no idea what happened in that house, do you?”
“I didn’t have to be in the house to know what happened. I knew them.”
“Answer the question. You don’t know what went on in that house for three months after Cole was born, do you?”
I didn’t want to say the words, but I had no choice. “I didn’t have any c
ontact during that time period.” I hung my head.
“And anything could’ve happened. Anything.” Ron pounded the table. “You didn’t know anything was even wrong until you got the call to go to the hospital, did you?”
“I didn’t know there were any problems in the home.”
“And by then it was too late, wasn’t it, Ms. Goldstein?”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I burst into tears.
FORTY
HANNAH BAUER
I could only feed Cole with my right breast because my left one was in stitches. He was a voracious eater, and one breast didn’t suffice. I still got a letdown in my left breast, which meant it was constantly engorged and I had to find a way to express it. I couldn’t use the breast pump because of how it pulled on my stitches, so I had to sit and do it by hand.
It only took two days before blood and pus oozed from my nipples, and it felt like fire coming out of me whenever Cole latched. I gritted my teeth and held back the urge to scream each time. He cried when he was finished because he was still hungry. I refused to quit, though, because breast milk was too important for development. I rushed to see my doctor, hoping she could fix me.
“It’s probably time for you to stop breastfeeding,” she said after her examination. “You have a horrible infection in your left breast.”
I’d expected as much. “I’m not ready to stop. Can’t you just prescribe an antibiotic? I know there are ones that are safe for nursing.”
“I can, but it will only be a temporary fix. I’m fairly certain the infection will come back.”
“I want to at least give it a try.” I wasn’t willing to give up that easily. Not on something that was so important.
She looked irritated, but she wrote me a prescription anyway. “I highly doubt these will work, but give them a try.”
The pain grew worse every hour, so bad it kept me up all night. My left breast was swollen and engorged. The right one was supposed to be healthy, but by morning, it’d grown hard, painful lumps and was just as red as my left. I couldn’t touch them; even the skin brushing against my shirt sent white-hot pain searing through my body until I was nauseous. I sobbed as I filled Cole his first bottle of formula later that evening.
“I feel like such a failure as a mom,” I said through my tears.
“Just give it a few days,” Christopher said, rubbing my back in wide circles. “It will probably clear up soon, and you can go back to breastfeeding. Formula isn’t going to hurt him, and I promise, he’s not going to forget how to do it.”
I glared at him. He didn’t understand what I was going through. Breastfeeding was the one thing making Cole’s crying bearable. I loved lying with him as he coiled his body around mine and staring at his tiny clasped fingers. In those moments, it didn’t matter that he cried all night long, and it made my utter exhaustion worthwhile. Feeding him a bottle wasn’t going to be the same experience. It just wasn’t. I didn’t care what anyone said.
“Here, why don’t you give him to me?” Christopher scooped him from me and took the bottle with his other hand. “And you go to sleep. You’ve been up for almost forty-eight hours. You’ve got to be exhausted.”
I stumbled back into our bedroom, my eyes burning with exhaustion. I curled underneath our comforter but couldn’t get warm. My entire body ached. I alternated between feeling like I was freezing to being so hot I felt sunburned.
“Christopher.” It hurt to speak. “Christopher.”
He rushed into the room, bouncing Cole on his chest in one of the baby wraps we’d gotten from our shower.
“I feel really awful. Can you take my temperature?”
He looked back and forth between the baby and me. “What do I do with him?”
“Take him with you.”
“I can’t take him with me and get the thermometer.” He looked overwhelmed at the task.
“Are you serious? Give him to me, then.”
The handoff startled Cole, and he started shrieking. His screams pierced my brain. Christopher just stood there, not knowing what to do.
I motioned toward the door. “Go!”
I was too weak to get out of bed and in too much pain to hold Cole. I laid him on his back next to me. He screamed and writhed like he was being tortured. I could tell by how worked up he was already that it was going to be a bad crying episode and last for hours. I covered my ears and sobbed.
Christopher returned with the thermometer and stuck it under my tongue. He picked up Cole, but it didn’t make any difference. Sometimes he cried even harder when Christopher picked him up. He said it didn’t bother him, but it did. The thermometer beeped, and I looked down.
103.4. I hadn’t had a fever that high since I was a child. No wonder I felt so terrible.
“You need to go to urgent care.” Worry lined his forehead. “Your fever shouldn’t be that high. Not on antibiotics and Tylenol.” His voice sounded like he was speaking at the end of a tunnel. “You’re not driving yourself either, so don’t even think about it.”
I couldn’t think. It hurt too much. I just wanted to go to sleep.
It wasn’t long before Allison shook me awake.
“Come on, hon. I’m taking you to urgent care,” she said, leaning down by the side of the bed, her face in front of mine.
I nodded. She slowly peeled the covers off and helped me to my feet. I sat on the side of the bed while she rummaged through my closet for a pair of shoes I could slip on easily. Cole’s screams reverberated from down the hallway.
“Why doesn’t he ever stop crying?” The room spun. I gripped the side of the bed.
“He will. Sometimes it just takes time for them to get used to being born.” She came out holding a pair of old tennis shoes and plopped them on the floor for me. We hobbled into the hallway.
“Chris!” she called out.
“Yeah?”
“I’m taking Hannah now. I’ll text you when I know anything.”
“All right. Love you, Hannah.”
I didn’t have the energy to respond. Allison helped me to the car, and I fell back to sleep as soon as I sat down. I nodded in and out while we waited to see a doctor. Finally, it was our turn, and we shuffled down the hallway. Allison helped me into the room and went to shut the door.
“I’m okay,” I said.
She looked at me, baffled.
“Just wait for me in the waiting room. I’m okay from here,” I said again, desperately trying to keep it together. She edged her way out and shut the door behind her. I gasped and stumbled to the table. I couldn’t let her see what Janie had done. I slid out of my shirt and into the gown and lay back on the table, suddenly feeling nauseous. Putting my hands on my stomach, I took deep breaths.
I didn’t have to wait long for the doctor. His name tag swerved in front of me: Dr. Flynn. He tried to touch my right breast, and I yelped as soon as his finger made contact. “I’m sorry—it just hurts so bad,” I cried.
He looked at both of them. “You have a nasty infection surrounding your wound, and it also looks like you have mastitis in both breasts.”
“It’s so painful; I don’t know what to do.”
“I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to stop breastfeeding. I’ve got to put you on a strong dose of antibiotics, and they’re not safe for the baby. I’m afraid if we don’t aggressively treat this, you’re going to become septic.”
I cried the entire way back to the house.
“Don’t let me forget to call Greg and let him know I’m staying over to take care of you tonight,” Allison said as she helped me out of the car.
I shook my head. She looked surprised. Any other time, I would’ve gladly accepted her help, but the doctor had instructed me to shower in order to massage the milk out. She’d insist on helping me, and I couldn’t let her see my breasts. Not that I was embarrassed for her to see them—she’d helped me fit my first bra—but she couldn’t see what Janie had done to me. I hadn’t told her. I hadn’t told anyone. I was too ashamed.<
br />
“What’s going on, Hannah?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’m fine,” I said just as Christopher opened the front door to greet us. He wore Cole in the same sling as earlier.
“Hi, Auntie Allison!” Janie waved from behind him.
Anger burned my insides like it did whenever I looked at her. All of this was her fault. She’d never said anything about biting me. She’d never apologized. Never asked me how I was doing or how I felt.
“Come here and give me a hug, sweetie pie,” Allison said. She opened her arms, and Janie ran into them. “Do you want to come home with me?”
Janie jumped up and down. “Yes! Yes!”
Allison looked up at me. “Why don’t I just keep her overnight? That way Christopher can focus on taking care of you and Cole without having to worry about her. It’s one less thing to worry about.”
“Sounds great to me,” I said.
Christopher didn’t look so sure. “I don’t know. She’s never stayed overnight anywhere before.”
“She’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it,” Allison said. “It’ll be good for her.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Christopher, just let her go,” I said, moving past him into the house. I needed to lie down.
I wasn’t ready for Janie to come back from Allison’s. Things were worse, not better. Both breasts were filled with knotty lumps. I tried to massage the milk out in the shower like my doctor had instructed, but the water felt like knives on my swollen skin. Percocet barely touched the pain. I couldn’t keep anything down. I lay in bed with a bucket next to me. It was devastating not being able to nurse Cole. Every time he cried, my breasts instinctively filled with milk. Not being able to go to him broke my heart again and again.
Allison had kept Janie for four days, and it wasn’t fair to make her keep her longer when she already had so much on her plate, even if I wanted her to. She looked frazzled when she brought Janie home later that afternoon. Janie threw her stuff on the floor and took off for her bedroom without speaking to me or Cole.
“How are you feeling?” Allison asked. She fluffed the pillows behind my head. I’d been camped out on the couch since Janie had left. We didn’t have a TV in our bedroom, and I needed the distraction.
The Perfect Child Page 20
