He leaned farther out of her arms and poked a finger into his brother’s belly. Eddie’s abdomen twisted, his left leg bent at the knee.
“Oh, honey, don’t hurt him.”
“I’m not.” He jerked his hand back as if he’d touched a hot burner and stuffed his fingers into the pocket of his jeans.
She pulled his hand from the pocket and set it on Eddie’s leg. “Touch him here. I think he’s glad you came.”
Now she looked at Eddie through her own eyes rather than Chris’s. The nurses had wiped away the tape marks from Eddie’s cheeks. Even the tubing that had run from inside his diaper to the urine bag on the crib rail was gone. He looked like a human again; his lips were moist and slightly parted, his head lay at a normal angle. Her eyes flooded.
“What’s that?” Chris asked, pointing to the IVAC.
“It’s the machine that helps him get his medicines.”
Again the questions kept coming. “What’s that?” He pointed to Eddie’s IV line, to the telemetry monitor, to the leads taped to Eddie’s chest. She tried to answer the questions accurately, simply.
“Where’re his toys?”
“They’re still at home. He’s too sick to play here.”
“Does that thing hurt him?” He pointed to the oxygen saturation monitor taped to Eddie’s finger.
“No. It’s like a Band-Aid. It doesn’t hurt.”
“Mommy, can he see me?”
She shifted Chris on her lap. Where did that question come from? She looked at Eddie. His eyes were partially open, but the upper lids hung low, hiding his pupils. She didn’t know if her baby could see. She also didn’t know if he could hear, or think, or remember.
Chris leaned toward his brother again. “Hi, Eddie,” he called. Eddie didn’t respond. “When can he come home?”
“Soon, I hope,” she said. “Maybe in about a week.” Chris wouldn’t know when the week was up. He hadn’t learned yet how to gauge the passing of that amount of time.
She had no idea when he could go home. Since that first morning of his illness, she hadn’t thought more than four minutes into the future. But now that the breathing tube and the bladder catheter were out, his leaving the hospital was becoming a larger possibility.
Chris stroked Eddie’s leg until he squirmed, one of those baby wiggles; his thigh turned right and his chest turned left.
Outside the ICU window, the newly opened leaves of an oak tree stirred in the breeze and fluffy clouds in the west rolled eastward. She thought about Eddie going home. She would carry him through their front door, would sit on the couch in the family room with him snuggled in her arms. He would sleep in his own crib. It would be like before he got sick.
Maybe he would learn to sit again, maybe to walk. Maybe he could go fishing with Jake and Chris, could learn to read and to drive. Maybe he would go to the prom, would marry, and become a father. Eddie’s eyes were closed, now. If they were open, could he see?
Chapter 32
Jake
H
e finally had learned about the real Monica, the vagrant Monica. What about the real Anna? Where had she gone? Was the image before him in the waiting room—the disheveled, beleaguered, terrified woman who was a captive of that chair—the new real Anna? Her hair hung over her face, the skin of her cheeks was sallow. There was a sense of innocence about her, a childlike softness he found alluring, and heartbreaking. Attached? Yes, unlike Monica, Anna was attached. Certainly, she clung to Eddie with the furor of a rabid animal. And Chris? She faced the Devil’s choice between her two children. Maybe it was her attachment to Chris that made this ordeal even more difficult than otherwise. She was attached, and, because of it, had been torn apart. How about her attachment to him, her husband? Where did that stand?
She had no idea of her husband’s dalliance. Jake knew she had many worries but was unaware of that one. Their little boy snuggled at Anna’s side. He, too, was an innocent in the subterranean deceit that Jake now bore. What does a three-and-a-half-year-old know of infidelity? Or, near infidelity. Where was the line, anyway? Did his visit to Monica’s hotel room count as infidelity? In his mind, it did, because it was deceitful, something he wouldn’t share with Anna. In spite of everything Chris had been through, he still lived in that cocoon of trust. At least, Jake hoped that remained true.
Except for her visits to the ICU, Anna held watch on that throne in the waiting room, claimed it as her own, stored her pillow in the seat and her magazines and snacks on the table at its side. How could she stand it, he wondered, holed up in this windowless, miserable, dank place? Somehow she must believe that Eddie’s survival depended on her being there every second of every day. He took a deep breath and headed toward her.
“Hi,” he said, bussing his wife’s cheek. It was a perfunctory gesture; he didn’t feel terribly loving. He wasn’t sure how he felt, other than contaminated. “Howdy, Chris. Did you see Eddie?”
“Yeah, he’s fine,” Chris muttered, squirming against his mother.
“He
is
fine,” she said, a thin smile turning on her pale lips. “At least finer than before. They tried him off the ventilator and he tolerated it so they took out the tube.”
“Wow.” He sank into the chair next to Anna’s. He shook his head to clear the jumbled thoughts that hung like spiderwebs on his brain. “That’s terrific.” He was genuinely ecstatic with the news, genuinely puzzled with himself. Getting off the ventilator was a major step forward. For the desperately ill son of a louse.
“And the fever is from a urinary tract infection,” Anna added.
“Oh, well. No big deal. They probably added another antibiotic, right?”
She nodded. “Genta . . . gento . . . something like that.”
She pulled herself from the chair and pointed at Chris. “Stay put for a minute.”
“Where’re you going?” he whined, his face sharp with fear.
“To tell Daddy a secret.”
“Tell me, too.”
“It’s about Eddie and you already know because you saw him.”
Chris returned to drawing squares around words on the newsprint, the ones that contained
c
for Chris.
Anna led Jake across the room by the hand. Her fingers were warm, her grip as familiar as a well-worn glove.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I don’t want Chris to hear.” She sounded tired. “He asked if Eddie can see.”
She squeezed his hand and then let it slip away from her damp palm. “Can he see?” Her voice trembled. She grabbed his hand again and stared into his face with desperate eyes. “How will we know?”
Her question seemed to fly out of nowhere; it made several twirly laps around the room and slammed into him as if he’d been hit with a log. Was Eddie blind? It was a complication of meningitis, one of the myriad sterile facts he had learned as a medical student. Now, it was no longer sterile. His son blind? A swell of light-headedness billowed across his eyes, over his forehead, into his throat.
“They’ll test Eddie for that,” he said. He sat in the chair nearest to Anna. “It’s something they routinely do.” He wanted to sound confident, hoped what he said was true. Store the blindness notion in the mental file labeled “tomorrow,” he told himself. Bury it deep. Make it vanish.
He shuddered and stood up. “I’ll say hello to Eddie and then take Chris home. Come with us, Anna. Eddie’s doing well. You can leave him for a night.”
Her eyes became dull, her lips pursed. Slowly, silently, she shook her head.
In the ICU, Vince Farley strolled toward him and smacked him lightly on the back. “Things are sure looking good in here. As you can see, the tube is O-U-T.”
“Yeah, I see. Terrific.”
“Dr. Farley . . .” someone called from the nurses’ station.
“Coming.” He sauntered away.
Jake leaned over the crib rail and ran his fingers across his son’s chest. Without the ventilator shoving air into his lungs in a preset rhythm, Eddie seemed at peace. His breathing was quiet, the rolling, in-and-out ripple of a calm sea. He looked natural, like a real baby.
He stood up straight. True, the tube was gone, but what about the rest of it? He wanted to embrace Farley’s enthusiasm, but what if his son was blind? Deaf? Severely retarded? Life would be hell—hardly worth living—for a blind, deaf, severely retarded boy. And for his family.
He could examine his son’s eyes himself. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
He stepped toward the door of the ICU but then returned to Eddie’s bedside. He couldn’t leave without knowing.
The baby’s eyes were closed. Gently he pried apart the lids of Eddie’s right eye, and stared at the globe inside. The pupil looked fine, not too dilated, not too constricted. He pulled the penlight from his breast pocket and waved the beam slowly from right to left across his baby’s corneas. The irises constricted but the eyes didn’t move. He did it again. They didn’t follow the light.
“Vince,” he called, trying to steady his voice. “Come over here.”
Farley glanced over his shoulder, turned away from the computer at the nurses’ station, and walked to Eddie’s bedside.
“Look at this.” Jake waved the light beam over his son’s eye again. Again, they didn’t track. “Look.” He could hear his own voice—loud and wavering. He swallowed hard.
“Jake,” Farley began in a soothing voice, “as you know, visual loss is one of the complications of bacterial meningitis. Now that he’s extubated, we can do formal vision testing—visual-evoked responses would be appropriate, considering his age. What you just saw is hard to evaluate.” Farley rubbed his chin. “Ahh, you and I both have to acknowledge, however, that Eddie had a very serious infection and we shouldn’t be too surprised if he suffers sequelae.”
“Yeah.” His voice was a whisper. He knew what Farley had just said. It was code for “Yes, he most likely is blind.”
“Does Eddie have one hundred percent chance of being blind?” Dr. Farley asked. “Zero percent? It’s somewhere in between. As unsatisfying as it is, that’s the most we can say right now. We’ll give him a chance to recover a bit more and then we’ll do comprehensive vision testing.”
“Why can’t we do it today?” He was almost yelling. Why did Farley have to be so unmoved by this? Why couldn’t they just do the test and find out? Now.
“Because the results might not be accurate. Let his brain heal a bit longer. I wish this weren’t so difficult, but you have to give Eddie a chance to recover. He’s had a major insult.”
He bit his lips, leaned over the crib, and stroked his son’s head. Such a tiny fellow. Such a precious baby. So much trouble. “You’ve traveled a long way, little buddy,” he murmured. “Keep it up for the rest of the journey.”
“Anna, at least walk us out to the car,” he said. “Fresh air would be good for you.”
She strolled ahead, toward the parking lot, hand in hand with Chris. The rain had stopped and the sun was trying to poke its face from behind a mud-colored cloud. This was the Campbell family as he saw it: Anna and Chris together in the lead, himself in the rear, and Eddie not with them.
Chapter 33
Anna
I
n her dream, the room was noisy and filled with the smell of coffee. It was rich and heavy, maybe Sumatra, possibly French roast. Moments before, the sun had fallen behind the mountain and, in the last glow of day, they sat around a square table, she and her friends, in a bar or a restaurant in a foreign country, someplace like Morocco or Turkey or Budapest. Haunting music thrummed at her back and everything around her seemed draped in orange and yellow cloth.
“Anna.”
Someone was calling her name. The voice came from far away, from beyond the other side of the square table. “Anna.” The coffee smell was much stronger.
“Anna, I brought you a cuppa joe. It’s fresh.”
The friends, the square table, the yellow-orange room faded but the smell of coffee remained. Her arm stuck to the plastic fabric of the chair; the blanket slid from her body and puddled on the floor. The pillow, damp and indented, smelled spicy—the tangy odor of perspiration.
Now the foreign country—the friends, the music, the curry colors—had completely vanished. She sat in the stifling waiting room where she couldn’t see the sun. Charlotte stood before her with the coffee that had filled her dream.
“It’s real, not that instant junk.” Charlotte held out the foam cup. “I thought you’d want to get up because Dr. Farley was here a minute ago looking for you. When he saw you sleeping, he said he’d catch you later. If it was me, I’d want to know what was on his mind—right now.”
“Thanks, Charlotte.” She sat upright, pulled the blanket back over her legs, and stretched her arms to shake off the sleepiness. A part of her wanted to go back to the foreign country and to the square table with her friends. She tried to sip the coffee but backed away when her lip touched the steaming liquid. She blew into the cup, sending brown ripples across the coffee’s surface.
She tried to remember Charlotte’s words. Something about Dr. Farley. Something about knowing what was on his mind.
She jerked upright, knocked her pillow to the floor. Something was wrong with Eddie. She straightened her knees, tried to climb out of the chair. A splash of hot coffee spilled into her lap.
“When was he here? What’d he say? Is something wrong?” Her breath came out in little gasps and her heart thumped against the inside of her shirt. She ignored the hot coffee on her pants.
“Here.” Charlotte tossed her a towel.
“What’d he say?” She was irritated at the towel. She didn’t understand why it had landed across her legs.
“You spilled your coffee. Doesn’t it hurt? It was scalding.” Charlotte dabbed the stain with the corner of the towel.
Why was Charlotte being so evasive? She needed to know if something was wrong with Eddie.
She untangled the blanket from her ankles and was scrambling to her feet when Dr. Farley appeared in the doorway.
“What happened?” she shouted.
He seemed relaxed and smiled when he saw her. Above the impish grin, his eyes twinkled like cobalt-tinted sequins. “Nothing happened, except we’re throwing you and Eddie out of here.”
She shook her head. What was he saying? What was going on?
Dr. Farley chuckled. “I guess you’re a bit confused. Maybe still half asleep. Eddie’s fine. In fact, he’s so fine he doesn’t need to be in the intensive care unit any longer. We’re transferring him to the ward.”
She sank back into the chair, spilling the coffee again.
“For Christ’s sake. Look at you.” Charlotte clucked and, again, dabbed at the stained pants with the towel.
The first thing she noticed about the pediatric ward was its smell. It was different, less antiseptic than the ICU, more like a blend of milk, eggs, and toast along with cleaning solution and antibiotic, the same bubblegum flavor as the pink amoxicillin she had coaxed into Chris with his ear infection.
She stood in the hallway outside Eddie’s new room and waited for the nurses to complete the transfer. Everything about the ward was more vibrant. The walls, rather than the color of aged plaster, were varying shades of pale pink and faint yellow, and the corners, where the colors blended, looked like peaches. High up, near the ceiling, strips of wallpaper with dancing animals and colored flowers—red, blue, purple, orange, and green—edged each wall. Huge, brightly painted panels—circuses, parades, zoos, baseball diamonds, ballet classes—flanked each doorway.
The cacophony of colors and shapes and textures twirled around her, flashing here, darting there. In the room across the hall, a teenager, his leg wrapped in gauze, licked a purple Popsicle. His mother sat on the couch, knitting. No ventilators. No telemetry machines. The IV stand beside the boy’s bed had only one IVAC attached to it. She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall, against the picture of a rainbow planted in a pot of gold. This was all so new.
“Watch out,” yelled a young voice. She opened her eyes in time to see a boy the size of an eight-year-old zigzagging toward her in a wheelchair. Just as he was about to ram into her, he skidded to the side and, laughing, maneuvered the chair around her. Farther down the hall, a tired-looking man pushed an IV pole that carried a skinny little girl—probably his daughter, dressed in a salmon-colored, frothy princess gown—on its wheeled platform.
“All set, Mrs. Campbell.” A nurse scurried out of Eddie’s room.
She crept to the crib. Eddie lay on his back. His hair was combed and the sheet was neatly folded under his chin. He looked fresh, peaceful. One IV ran into his left arm but no other lines or wires.
He’s free, she thought. Free of the electronic stuff, free of the badness.
As she stared into his face, she had an overwhelming urge to hold him. He had been intubated, catheterized, IV’d, and monitored since his admission. She hadn’t been able to gather him into her arms since that horrid morning she drove him to the emergency room. She stroked his head and whispered his name, over and over. The words came out like a song. “Eddie. Eddie.” Slowly she pulled down the sheet, lifted up his hospital gown, examined his pale body. His chest moved easily with each breath—no more machine pumping air into him. She touched her fingertips to his mouth. His lips twitched with a sucking motion. It was faint, but still a suck.
“Eddie,” she whispered again. “You made it.” She lifted him from the crib and lowered herself into the rocking chair. The IV tubing looped over her shoulder; she curled it in her lap so it wouldn’t pull from his arm.
This was not unlike the very first time she held him. The uncertainty, the caution, the apprehension were the same. Then his tiny face, now pale and waxy, was red and wrinkled. “You’re a new little person, with the big, wide world ahead of you,” she had said to her newborn son. Now he had traveled a very bumpy road and was, once again, a new person. She had wondered back then what kind of child he would become, what secrets—and interests, and talents, and habits—would unfurl from him and bloom as he grew up. Would he be lively? Sedate? An artist? A scientist? Adaptable? Committed to routine? Curious? Dull? No, not dull. She knew she wouldn’t have a dull child.
Now, looking into his quiet face, she wondered the same things. What would he be like after all this?
He seemed lighter than she remembered, as buoyant as a hollow-boned lark. He lay still on her lap, his head nestled into the crook of her left elbow. He didn’t squirm against her as he used to, didn’t nuzzle into her breast, now dry from not nursing him for more than a week. Should she start nursing him again? She closed her eyes and shook her head. So many things to figure out.
“Hi. Anna?” The voice sounded tentative.
She opened her eyes and looked into the massive garden of cut flowers that filled the doorway of Eddie’s room. “Yes?”
“Are you awake? I don’t want to bother you if you’re sleeping,” said the voice. The flowers moved through the doorway, followed by Elizabeth.
“Where’d you get those?” Anna asked. “They’re huge . . . and beautiful.”
“Gilroy’s. Since they wouldn’t let you have flowers in the ICU, I decided to make up for it now. Aren’t they lovely?”
Anna agreed. White and maroon oriental lilies. Dusty yellow mums. Sprays of laurel leaves and plum-colored rosebuds just beginning to open. Three branches of contorted hazel twisted like corkscrews from the top of the vase.
“Where do you want them?” Elizabeth turned 180 degrees as she surveyed the room. “How about on this thing here?” She set them on the tray table.
“They’re amazing. Are little animals hidden in there?”
“I hope not,” Elizabeth said.
She felt Elizabeth’s arm slide around her shoulders.
Elizabeth kept talking. “It’s good to see you make a joke. What’s that loveable bundle in your arms?”
She felt her face relax into a smile. “That’s my son, Edward. He just graduated from the ICU.”
“Congratulations, Sir Edward.” Elizabeth spoke in her most formal voice. She reached for Eddie’s right hand and gave it a gentle shake.
Eddie’s new room had a real bed. At least a better bed than the lounge chair in the ICU waiting room. She stretched out on the narrow mattress and stared at the ceiling, at nothing in particular. The room also had a phone. No more standing in the telephone closet where everyone in the waiting room could overhear the conversation. It was like playing house. A place of her own.
Elizabeth had told her about her class, about how much the students missed her, how worried they were about her and Eddie. Elizabeth had brought a stack of letters written by her students—in English.
Mis Campbell. I hop youre son gets better real soon. Sinserly, Ming.
Dear Mrs. Campbell; We miss you a lot. Please come back now.
I hope your baby will come home from the hospital.
Love, Consuella.
The letters had been a moment from her real life, a step through the clouds of the past week. It felt as if she might be moving back to the real Anna, afloat on a raft edging toward the shore, toward the safety and comfort and familiarity of a dock whose posts were solidly sunk in the lake bottom.
A doctor walked into the room and introduced herself. “Hello, Mrs. Campbell. I’m Ruby Sherman, one of the third-year residents.”
She had seen her before. Was it in the ER? In the ICU? She couldn’t remember but she recognized the scar. Harelip. Bilateral. She listened carefully to the doctor’s speech, heard the minimal nasality. It was a good cosmetic repair with excellent palatal function.
“I’ve been reviewing Eddie’s hospital records and trying to sort out what’s next,” the doctor said.
“Yes, what
is
next?” Anna asked.
“We generally treat
Strep pneumo
meningitis for ten days and Eddie’s ten days are up tonight. That means we need to start thinking about discharge.”
She caught her breath. Discharge. Going home. With Eddie. So soon. Too soon?
“Before he leaves, we’ll need to test his hearing and be sure he feeds well. As you know, he’s had a serious infection and we can’t predict exactly how things will go for him.”
“How about testing his vision?” She felt herself begging. “Do you think he can see?” This doctor had had a cleft-lip repair, had been a patient herself as a little girl. She would make sure Eddie could see. And hear. And be normal in every way.
“Yes, we’ll do both VERs and BAERs—um, that’s the vision and hearing testing we do with babies. And he needs to stay on an antibiotic a little longer to complete treatment of his urinary tract infection. We’ll use cipro. We can give it by mouth as soon as he can swallow. Are you planning to return to nursing him? Have you maintained your milk? Has he tried nursing since he’s been extubated?”
The doctor slipped on a latex glove and stuck a rubber finger into Eddie’s mouth. He didn’t move. She pulled out her finger and touched each corner of his lips. “Well, he’s not sucking very well yet. You can try to breast feed him if you’d like, but we’ll have the nurses give him tube feedings for a while.”
“He sucked for me.” Anna scrambled to the crib. “Really, he did. Here, watch.”
She stuck her finger between Eddie’s lips. His tongue brushed against the tip of her finger, but he didn’t suck. She moved her finger inside his mouth. Still no sucking.
“Well, maybe he’s tired. Honestly, he sucked on my finger a few minutes ago.”
Her shriveled breasts were limp inside the cups of her bra. He couldn’t suck? Couldn’t nurse? He was only six months old. He needed her milk for a while longer. She remembered weaning Chris, remembered the day she gave him the sippy cup. At first he waved it around his head and then flung it to the floor, watching in fascination as it rolled across the linoleum, a trail of milk in its wake. Eventually he came to understand it was fun to drink from the cup. After that, he nursed less and less, sometimes picking up the pace of nursing again when he was sick or hurt. Then he stopped. Just quit—refused to put her nipple in his mouth ever again. It would be different with Eddie. She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater. Eddie would be different.