Eddie was finally quiet. Her eyes closed, her sinuses flooded, and her hair matted against the chair’s headrest, she continued to rock and wait for Jake’s call. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth again.
She sang, “Four and twenty blackbirds baked . . .”
The phone was ringing. As she eased herself from the chair, Eddie’s eyes fluttered open. He began to whimper again.
“Hi. What’s up?” Jake asked.
She trapped the receiver between her right ear and shoulder and swayed from side to side in gentle arcs, trying to settle Eddie back to sleep. “Eddie’s real fussy and has a fever. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
Jake sounded distracted. She heard a quiet, repeated peck in the background, the sound of something tapping.
“Are you listening?” she asked. Sometimes he tuned her out, didn’t seem to pay attention when she was speaking.
“Sure.” The pecking stopped.
She described Eddie’s fever, his weak suck, his listlessness. “Can you hear him whimpering? He’s never been like this.”
Jake said, “I bet he has your cold. I’ll take a look at him when I get home tomorrow.” An icy quiet filled the space between them. She didn’t want to wait one more day. She needed Jake to help her tonight. What if Eddie was really sick? What if he had pneumonia?
“It’ll be fine, Anna,” he said. “Remember how you worried about Chris when he was a baby?”
She shifted Eddie in her arms. He had quieted down. Maybe Jake was right about her worry. When Chris was younger, she had fussed over every sniffle, had called the pediatrician each time his temperature went over ninety-nine degrees. She had been sure each cough was tuberculosis, each patch of heat rash was scarlet fever. When he had an ear infection and a swollen lymph node in his neck, she lay awake three nights in a row, convinced he had cancer.
Tonight she hoped Jake would take her worries seriously. The least he could do was say something kind—a few directly sympathetic words such as, “I know this is tough for you,” or, “You’re a good mom and I appreciate your shouldering all the work of a sick child.” But he said nothing like that. He told her to call the pediatrician. Finally, her voice thick with sarcasm, she said, “We’ll be waiting for you to come home.”
After another half hour of rocking and singing, Eddie stopped fidgeting. She sat awhile longer, cuddled him close, brushed her lips across the top of his feverish head.
When she needed to cough, she tried to let the air out in gentle little spurts so it wouldn’t disturb him. Fatigue, raw and insistent, clawed at her shoulders, wringing the last bits of energy from her muscles. Her eyes still throbbed.
When she finally laid Eddie in his crib, he straightened his left arm, kicked his right leg, turned his head toward the wall, and whimpered again.
“Please, please, please, don’t wake up,” she whispered as she stroked his silky hair with her lightest touch.
She lay in bed and stared at the swirls etched in the ceiling plaster, the half circles that bumped against each other—none of them complete, none of them leading anywhere. Should she call the pediatrician? It was late, almost ten thirty. He would say it was just a virus, would tell her to give Eddie another dose of Tylenol and bring him to the office in the morning.
She had had that conversation with Dr. Elliott often and she knew the routine. Chris was only three months old when she went back to work and he had been sick a lot. Runny nose. Diarrhea. Cough, runny nose again. Every virus that drifted through the day care seemed to land on Chris. Even though Rose Marie’s house was immaculate and she ran the plastic toys through the dishwasher every night, Chris still had gotten sick. Often.
She had watched the other children cough and sneeze all over Chris, and reminded herself, glumly, that that’s what kids did when they played. Chris sometimes snatched toys from other children’s spitty hands, sometimes shoved his head against other children’s snotty-nosed faces to get their attention. The kids at Rose Marie’s shared lots of things . . . secrets, cookies, wishes, blocks, hats, and viruses. After Eddie was born, she had waited five months before going back to work. She wanted him to be older before she left him in the cesspool of Rose Marie’s house.
Her achy muscles lay limp against the inside of her nightgown. She had skipped the bath. Fatigue sent her to bed as soon as Eddie fell asleep. She imagined her body going through the motions of calling Dr. Elliott. Throw back the covers, sit up, slide first one leg and then the other over the edge of the mattress, open the drawer, pull out the phone book . . . So much effort merely so he could reassure her that Eddie had a cold. Before turning off the lamp, she rubbed a dollop of Vaseline on the patch of raw skin beneath her nose.
Chapter 5
Jake
T
he clock in the radiology suite hung high on the wall, its round, institutional face skewed ten degrees to the right, its stark, simple hands splayed to forty-five degrees. At first glance, the clock read 10:05. Adjusting for the tilt of its face, he saw it was actually 8:55. The night was still young and anything could yet happen—he might be awake until dawn or he might be able to catch a nap or two. It wasn’t likely he’d sleep straight through to morning. That almost never happened.
He flipped the toggle switch on the alternator. For a moment, the fluorescent bulbs behind the lower view boxes flickered—half on, then off. Half on, then off again. Finally they lit. He was looking for the Durban kid’s knee films, first name Mike. Or Matt. Or maybe Mark. One of those
m
names.
As the toe of his running shoe pushed against the alternator pedal, rows of radiographs, four films abreast, rumbled down over the translucent backlights and disappeared into the lower reaches of the machine. Row thirty-one. Row thirty-two. Row thirty-three. He released his toe, leaned forward, and stared at the films on row thirty-four. They were knees, the left knee on one film and the right knee on another. The two bent joints leered at each other as if frozen in a face-off. The identification plates in the corners of the films read M
ATTHEW
D
URBAN
. “That’s him,” he muttered out loud.
Earlier in the evening, the boy had been admitted to the hospital with a swollen right knee. Questioning his mother, Jake tried to pin down the cause of the swelling.
“Any injuries?”
“Let’s see . . .” She looked as if her mind were scrolling down a list of Matt’s activities over the past few days. She turned to her son, who was perched on the edge of the examining table, tying the hem of his hospital gown into a knot. “Did you fall on that knee? Or bump it?”
“No,” he said.
“Wait,” she called. “You ran up the porch steps yesterday afternoon and stumbled. Remember, honey? You dropped your ice cream cone when you fell.”
The boy had shrugged.
Except for the ghostly glare from the alternator, the room was dark, like night deep inside night. Everything around him—the carpet, his scrubs, the telephone on the alternator shelf, the stack of X-ray jackets beside the phone—was the color of a shadow. That’s the way it was in radiology reading rooms. Black-and-white films, gray everything else. And quiet. Dead quiet now that the day crew had gone home.
Suddenly, a muffled
thunk
bumped into the silence of the reading room. He started at the sound, a minor noise that would have gone unnoticed in the din of the day. The clock’s hour hand had jumped forward, creating the thunk. Jake did the calculations. It looked as if it were 10:10 but was really 9:00
PM
.
Shifting in his chair, he stared at the images on the X-ray films. His gaze traced the smooth edges of the chalky bones. He saw no periosteal elevation. The fat lines around the sore knee were distorted, showed swelling in the soft tissues. He figured there were four possibilities—osteomyelitis, septic arthritis, toxic synovitis, fracture.
When his pager sounded, he was studying the trabeculae of the bones, looking for a disruption in their structure. Without removing his eyes from the images of Matt’s knees, he unclipped the pager from his waistband and held it in front of his face. The message read “5-7512,” the black, dashed numerals stark against the eerie, luminescent blue light of the pager screen. It was the OR.
“Campbell, here,” he muttered when the nurse answered.
“Dr. Campbell, I forgot to tell you to call your wife. She paged you during that last case. Sorry about that.”
Now what? He sighed as he clipped the pager back to his waistband. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to Anna. Rather, he couldn’t do anything about her problem, whatever it was. And the calls were always about problems. She never interrupted him just to chat; she knew he was too busy for that. Last week, the day before they left for the Upper Peninsula, Bullet had climbed the sweet gum tree and Anna had worried he couldn’t get down.
“That cat will come down when he gets hungry,” he had said, shaking his head at the silliness of her concern. The week before that she had locked her keys inside the car.
He dialed and continued to study Matt’s films while the phone rang. Earlier in the evening he had examined the knee. It was red and swollen and obviously sore—the boy had winced and then cried when he tried to straighten it. He couldn’t be sure from his exam whether the boy had a fracture or an infection.
Anna answered the phone.
“What’s up?” He lifted a paper clip from the alternator desk and rotated it between his fingertips. He stared at Matt’s bones. Then he began clicking the paper clip against the metal shelf.
She said Eddie was sick and had a fever.
She told him to stop making the noise. He palmed the paper clip.
“How high’s the fever?” he asked.
“Don’t know. Chris dropped the thermometer yesterday, smashed it to smithereens.”
“Did you give him any Tylenol?” He ran his fingertip along the edge of Matt’s tibia, eying the cortex ahead of his finger to make sure he hadn’t missed a break.
“Yeah. Didn’t help much.” She went on to say he wasn’t nursing well, although he did a little better with the last feeding.
He told her Eddie had the same cold she had. The line was silent. He knew Anna was pissed off, but he couldn’t do anything about it, neither about the baby’s fever nor about her being mad. The paper clip twirled between his fingertips.
“Remember how you worried every time Chris had a runny nose?” he said as he gazed at the metal fastener. He admired the bend of the wire with its satisfying lack of symmetry, its look of a spiral that someone had stepped on. “It’ll be fine, Anna.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Look, honey, if you’re worried about Eddie, call Dr. Elliott.” He pulled the bottom of the film away from the light box to put a different tilt on the image.
Her response was a deep sigh.
His fingers curled around the clip. “Okay. See you tomorrow afternoon. I’ll try to be home by three.”
Her final words were, “We’ll be waiting for you to come home.”
As he set the receiver back on the cradle, he sucked on the narrow end of the paper clip. For Anna, badness lurked behind every corner and blew in with every breeze. Things that were minor disruptions to most people were major dangers to her. “Look at this . . .” she’d say, pointing to a scratch on Chris’s cheek. “Is that okay?” she’d ask, picking at a minuscule scaly patch on his neck. She lived like a cartoon character—a woman with a thundercloud permanently installed above her forehead.
He stared at the Durban kid’s films, searching once again the bony trabeculae of the kid’s knee for a crack line.
He hooked the paper clip to his wedding band and spiraled them against each other until the clip slipped off. Wedding. Bride. Last week. Upper Peninsula. Six years previously. Baltimore. Another bride. Anna’s walk down the aisle at their wedding, her hand resting on her father’s arm.
He hoped this memory would never grow dim. As she strode toward him, her milky satin gown had twisted over her breasts and hips like a whisper, its fabric writhing to the rhythm of the processional. Watching her move nearer, he was incredulous that the most beautiful creature on Earth was about to become his wife. Even now she was beautiful, but in a different way. Less ingenue. More responsible.
She had nervously whispered, “With this ring as a symbol of my love, I pledge to . . .” He couldn’t remember the exact words, even though he had uttered the same phrase as he slid an identical ring onto her trembling finger. Something about being faithful. At the time, they had spent hours weighing every word while they wrote and rewrote their vows. It was as if the ceremony were a cosmic phenomenon that hinged on using absolutely correct language. He remembered that they agreed “obedient” would not be in their nuptial contract. Now, over half a decade, a large mortgage, and two kids later, the exact wording seemed deadeningly unimportant. But, he remained committed to the idea of the whole thing.
He checked the clock on the wall—9:15—and wondered where the intern had gone. He typed a paging message into the computer, “I’m in radar—call 72025. Campbell,” and sat back to wait for the phone to ring.
Thank goodness Chris had a brother. There was something lonely—almost tragic—about only children like Anna. Their singleness deprived them of the tough, but irreplaceable life lessons that siblings could teach each other: how to negotiate for equal treatment from Mom and Dad; how to win and lose a fight; how to share a brownie and a bedroom and a can of orange Crush and the limited territory in the backseat of Dad’s Chevy. Not only did she have no siblings, Anna had only one cousin, Jennifer.
His family was different, full of kids, full of fun. As children, he and his two brothers and whichever boy cousins happened to be around would swipe jugs of 7Up from Uncle Allen’s basement, empty them as fast as possible in huge, slurpy gulps, and then hold burping contests. On cool misty afternoons, they drank creek water from their cupped hands and wiped their chins with the tails of their plaid flannel shirts. When they helped their grandfather feed the sheep, their stiff Carhartts—miniature versions of the overalls their dads wore—kept out the muck and the frigid winter wind.
And now, an echo through the generations, his son imitated him. He found it cute that Chris fished pickled pigs’ feet from the jar with his fingers and ate them sandwiched between Ritz Crackers; that he insisted on wearing the bill of his Detroit Tigers baseball cap—its plastic clasp was cinched as tight as it could go—low on his forehead; the way he drummed his fingers on the kitchen table in a syncopated, tappity-tap cadence while waiting for breakfast. Once Chris had patted Anna on the fanny as she walked past. She spun around and yelled at him to never do that again. But then yesterday, when Chris spilled a glass of orange juice and shouted, “Goddammit,” Anna had smothered a laugh and said, “Honey, that sounds just like you.”
Unlike Anna, he knew all about children. As a boy, he had been recruited to walk his younger cousins in the stroller, to push them on the swing in the park, to play horsey. He had learned how to change a diaper and mop up baby vomit before he was six.
He’d been impatient with Anna when Chris was a baby. She’d been terrified she would make a horrible mistake and wreck her child forever. She seemed to turn what could be very easy into something very, very hard—often. She worried about food allergies and buying the right toys, about Chris eating from Bullet’s bowl or falling headfirst into the toilet or tripping down the step between the kitchen and the family room. He, on the other hand, had always viewed kids as resilient and knew the important things about them: that eating cat food doesn’t hurt anybody; that kids are close to the ground—with bones as forgiving as Slinkies—and tumbles rarely produce serious damage; that the best toys for three-year-olds were cardboard cartons, tablets of plain paper, and boxes of crayons.
Yet, Anna was a good mother. Her worry was grounded in the deepest, most profound love for her children. Who could fault her for that?
In the silence of the reading room, he pushed aside his thoughts of Anna and tried to concentrate on Matthew Durban’s knees. He tapped the paper clip on the metal shelf of the alternator, creating a noise to perturb the quiet, to spring him back to the real world.
His pager sounded again. “ADMISSION—6N. NURSING HOME HIP FRACTURE,” read the message. He sighed. First, he’d do an arthrocentesis on Matt’s knee. Most likely the boy had a septic joint. Then he’d go see the old person with the broken hip. He twirled the paper clip between his fingers twice and slipped it into his pants pocket.