Read Ten Days Online

Authors: Janet Gilsdorf

Ten Days (27 page)

 
Just as the nurse pulled the plastic tube out of its paper sheath, Jake walked into Eddie’s room.
“Dr. Campbell,” the nurse said. “We’re having a lesson here. Mrs. Campbell’s learning how to insert the feeding tube.”
“They want to send him home,” Anna said.
“Great,” Jake said.
“Eddie’s a little lazy with sucking, so we’re going to continue the tube feeds until his suck gets stronger. Mrs. Campbell is learning how to insert it, so at home she can do it herself. I demonstrated what to do and now it’s her turn.”
“I don’t think I can do that. I can’t stick a tube into my baby’s nose.”
“Sure you can, honey. The nurse will teach you how.”
She held the tube while the nurse positioned Eddie’s head. She set the tube’s tip inside his left nostril. It fell back out again. “See, I can’t do it.”
“Here, let me help you.” Jake held her hand while she tried to insert the tube again.
His fingers gripped hers. His sense of confidence steadied her hand, made her less afraid. She glanced at his face. His even, kind eyes told her he wanted to make this as easy for her as possible.
“Hold it steady . . .” he said. “Make it a fluid motion . . . Flex your wrist and let the tube slide into his nose. Remember, his nasal cavity is shaped like a comma so the tube will follow the arc of the comma.”
The tube did what he said it would do, slid into his nose easily. It worked well with Jake’s help. She wasn’t at all sure she could do it without him.
He moved her hand forward while the tube went deeper inside Eddie’s nose. Eddie shook his head against the nurse’s hand and sneezed. “There, you’ve got the gist of it. Try it yourself.”
She did it again. By herself this time. Again the tube slid easily into Eddie’s nose.
“Good. Keep threading it,” he said. “There, that’s far enough. To the blue mark on the tube.” He showed her how to pull back on the syringe, how to push air into Eddie’s stomach, how to listen for the air gurgles.
When they finished, Jake hugged her. “Nice job. That was great.”
She leaned into him, felt his warmth through her blouse. Would she get through the rest of this?
Chapter 34
Jake
 
 
 
 
 
E
ddie was about to be discharged from the hospital. That meant Anna’s parents would return to Baltimore, and the four of them—Anna, himself, Chris, Eddie—would be together again at home. He and Chris would play horse and rider or read kid books, as before. Chris would build LEGO towns, would learn to put his right cowboy boot on his right foot and the left on the left. Eddie would be a baby, whatever kind of baby he was now destined to be.
He sipped his coffee, room temperature and scum coated after sitting near his elbow for a half hour. Anna had paged him. He downed the last swallow and dialed the number to Eddie’s room.
Anna’s words quivered as she explained that Ruby had written Eddie’s discharge orders. “I don’t think he’s ready to go home.”
“Ruby knows what she’s doing. She’s a great pediatrician.” What worried Anna now? “Maybe
you’re
not ready for him to go, but Eddie’s ready.” She should be thrilled their baby was well enough to leave the hospital. It was her pathologic worry rearing its nervous head, again. He could understand her fears while their baby was so terribly sick, but now Eddie was stable and ready to leave.
He was irritated by Anna’s sigh, a long, quiet inhalation followed by a louder, exasperated exhalation that blew like a blast of anxious wind through the phone. She would have struck her dug-in posture; if he were in Eddie’s room right now, he would see her lips pressed into a line across the bottom of her face, would see her rigid back and straight shoulders, her elevated chin.
“Look, Anna, it’s great that Eddie’s being discharged. I’ll arrange someone to cover for me so I can drive you home. Start packing. It’ll take about an hour for the discharge paperwork to run through the system.”
“He’s not ready to go home.”
“Sure he is. You’ll see.”
With that, he said good-bye and set the receiver on the phone console. Eddie’s discharge meant they could return to their old way of living. Except, of course, it wouldn’t be as it had been. It would never be as it had been.
Outside, the noontime sun was tucked behind the clouds; fingers of light struggled to shine through but, in the end, failed as they drowned in the mist. Beneath the blurry sun, buds on the maple tree swayed in the breeze. As he watched, one branch stuttered as it moved. A squirrel? A bird? No . . . Something was odd about the way those twigs flitted. He blinked. Maybe a fleck of dust had blurred his vision. He blinked again. No change. He closed one eye and then closed the other. Still no change. He looked closer at the jerky branch and then spotted it—a warble in the glass, a defect in its surface.
“That’s it,” he said.
Betsy Bloom looked up from across the table. Those were her Monica eyes, slate blue with yellow dots sprinkled over the irises as if dusted with powdered gold. “That’s what?” she asked.
He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “A warble in the glass.”
“Huh?” she asked.
Now he understood. Eddie being sick, Anna being nuts, Betsy being Monica. Through it all, he had stood outside and looked in at the world through the rippled glass of a disfigured window.
He still hadn’t mentioned the Monica visit to Anna, still thought she didn’t need to know. She might not want to know. Monica was over. And nothing of significance had happened.
 
Eddie’s hospital room seemed like a party—bouquets of flowers covered every horizontal surface, fuchsia and violet blooms sagged from potted plants, stuffed monkeys and fuzzy bears peeked from behind the foliage, helium balloons bobbed in the air currents.
He stood in the doorway, incredulous. “Anna,” he said. “You aren’t packed.”
She was slumped in a chair, her back toward him. He couldn’t see her face.
“Are you going to leave all this stuff here? We need to hit the road.” He set one foot into the room. “I’ve arranged for Martin to cover for me while I drive you and Eddie home.”
Slowly, she turned. First her hips, then her shoulders, and finally her face moved toward him. Her cheeks were blotchy, her eyes pink and puffy. Her lips quivered like raspberry Jell-O.
“We can’t go home,” she sobbed, her voice a whisper.
He crossed the room and hugged her. “Why not?” Maybe his touch would hurry her along.
“I can’t take care of him at home. He gurgles and chokes when he breathes. He’s going to gag and stop breathing and we don’t have the suction machine to clear it out.” She was breathless, as if, in listing her worries, she was running a race she could never win. “We can’t put the breathing tube back in him at home. We don’t have a ventilator.”
What’s wrong with her? he wondered. He didn’t have time for all this. Martin could cover for only two hours.
“Anna, we have to get going.”
He watched her shoulders tremble as she turned back toward Eddie. While she sobbed, he could see, through her thin, white T-shirt, the outline of her bra. It was dark—black or navy blue. A fold of her skin bulged along the top of its elastic edges. Before, she would never have worn dark underwear beneath a see-through shirt. He liked her as she had been—coordinated, unjarring, easy on the eye. Would the capable, organized, well-put-together wife he used to have return?
Now she seemed utterly helpless. And yet . . . He stared at the woman he thought he knew so well and thought of his patients, those with bone cancer or multiple fractures or new amputations. Sometimes they needed a buffer against the storm that roared around them, and they needed it from him. At least for a little while. Then, usually, they would rally and find the strength to do whatever had seemed totally overwhelming and impossible. Maybe she, too, needed some kind of protection. Maybe she, too, would rally.
“Honey, you’ll do fine. Eddie will do fine. He’s a tough little guy who has come through a lot. We need to let him show us how well he will do at home.”
She slouched in her chair like a lost kitten, weary and exhausted. He kneeled at her side. “I know you’re scared.” He took a deep breath. “Honey, I’m scared, too. We don’t know what’s ahead and that’s scary. But, we have to let Eddie prove himself. I know you can do it. And, I’m here to help you. We’ll get through the rest of this together, just as we got through the past ten days.”
He stroked her hair and ran his fingers across her tear-stained cheek. “Do you want to keep these plants and things? If so, I’ll get a box from the trash bin.”
She nodded and uttered a muffled sob. Then the room was quiet and she said, “That stuff is Eddie’s. He’ll probably want it at home.”
 
He was loading the plants and flowers and plushy toy animals into a Pampers carton when Ruby walked into Eddie’s room.
“Looks like you’re about to leave. Everything’s set.” She handed Anna a stack of papers. “Here’re your discharge instructions—if Eddie develops a fever or, God forbid, a seizure . . .” Her voice trailed off. Surely the young doctor saw the fear that darkened his wife’s eyes. “Basically, if you’re worried about anything, give us a call or talk to your regular pediatrician. Here’s the prescription for the cipro Eddie will take at home. It’s to finish treatment for his urinary tract infection. You can get it filled at your neighborhood drug store if you’d like—the pharmacy here takes hours to fill a script.
“And this . . .” Ruby hesitated and then sat in a chair, her eyes level with Anna’s. “This’s another appointment for the vision and hearing assessments. The tests we did yesterday were inconclusive, so we want to repeat them in about a month.” She looked uneasy, avoided Anna’s stare. “You don’t want to delay that too long, because if, ultimately, they’re abnormal, we’ll want to get Eddie into a special educational program soon. The sooner the better.”
Okay, he thought, Eddie didn’t pass either of them. Most likely he’s deaf and blind and they’ll need to confirm those results. He tapped his fingers against his breastbone, felt as if all the juices had been squeezed out of him.
“Ruby,” he said. He glanced at Anna; her eyes were focused on the floor. “You can be honest with us. Eddie can’t hear and can’t see, right?”
“Well,” Ruby began. Her upper lip, bearing the scars from her cleft repair, twitched as she spoke. “It’s not as simple as that. The testing couldn’t confirm that Eddie can hear or see. It really needs to be repeated. Definitely, children may have hearing deficits after meningitis that improve over time. That’s not as likely to happen with visual deficits.” She stopped, took a deep breath, and continued. “Look, Jake, I understand that waiting for the final results is tough. Real tough. But we simply can’t be absolutely sure yet.” She paused, then continued. “In the meanwhile, take him home and love him and talk to him and play with him, and we’ll continue our assessment over the next couple months.”
He didn’t need to explain it any further to his wife. She held Eddie against her chest and wept into the space between his little neck and shoulder. Obviously she understood everything Ruby had just said.
 
That evening, as his in-laws were packing and Anna scrubbed a noodle-coated saucepan, he heard her scream. He dropped the book he was reading to Chris and bolted out of his son’s bedroom and down the steps.
“Mommy . . . Mommy . . .” He heard Chris’s terrified words fade away as he neared the kitchen.
“What happened?” he yelled.
She stood, frozen, beside the sink, her face pale as a pearl. Eddie lay where he had last seen him, on a bed pillow on the kitchen table.
“What’s wrong?” he yelled again.
“Is he breathing? He was choking.”
He studied Eddie, watched his son’s chest move up and down, saw the rose tint in his cheeks, a dab of mucus on his lips. He lifted Eddie from the pillow.
“Honey, he’s fine. Did he cough a little? There’s some crud on his mouth that he might have spit up.”
He held Anna’s elbow as he steered her to a chair beside the table. He laid Eddie in her lap. “See, honey, he’s fine.” Eddie turned his shoulder against her shirt and uttered a soft snort.
“Is that what you heard?”
She nodded.
“He’s fine, honey. That was a little Eddie honk.”
“Mommy.” Chris stood in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas and bare feet.
“Come here, lovey,” Anna said to Chris and then wrapped her free arm around his shoulders. “I guess I was a little frightened.”
Chris turned toward him, a puzzled look on his face.
“False alarm, buddy. All is well here. Let’s go finish that book.”
Chris’s chin was smeared with taco sauce, and shredded lettuce dotted the front of his shirt. “Good,” he murmured as he stuffed the last bite into his mouth.
Jake had driven his in-laws to the airport the evening before and now they were alone, just the four of them, at dinner. He had finished eating and pushed his chair back a bit. Almost normal, he thought, surveying his family as they ended their meal.
Eddie lay on the pillow on the kitchen table, between Chris and Anna. His eyes were closed. He seemed to be sleeping, even though he snorted with every fourth or fifth breath.
Anna patted the baby’s cheek, said, “Sweet Eddie,” and turned his head to the side to stifle the snorts. He opened his eyes and blinked as if to shoo away the ceiling light. His pupils, tiny black dots amid the green-blue of his irises, seemed to catch her face.
Maybe he could see, after all. He seemed to be tracking. His eyes moved as her face moved. Jake leaped to his feet and waved his teaspoon in front of Eddie. Light from overhead bounced off the spoon. Jake moved it slowly to the left. And then to the right. He couldn’t tell. He knew his exam wasn’t perfect. He wanted so much for his son to see that he couldn’t be sure what Eddie’s movements meant. They had to wait for the formal testing. Still, he seemed to avoid the light. That must mean the light triggered some kind of response in his retinas. Did that mean vision?
Anna straightened the front of Eddie’s shirt. She was such a good mom . . . a very, very good mom. Things were working their way back to normal, to a new normal.

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