I never said it out loud but I also knew that I wanted to have a second child so that I could have some kind of experience as a parent that did not involve visiting doctors who said, “There’s something wrong with your child but I can’t tell you what.”
THE TECHNICIAN HAD LOWERED the blinds to block the blazing afternoon sun and turned the monitor so I could see it. In this dim room, I watched the screen, where blackness whirled into light and then went back to black. A fuzzy white boundary separated pale dark from something darker.
Zip stood over my shoulder. Together, we studied the blurry shapes popping in and out of focus on the ultrasound monitor, the blob that suddenly had fingers and then receded to a wiggly white line, the pear-shaped rump that zapped into blackness, the soft tender curve of the baby’s skull. The technician took measurements and tiny boxes appeared on the screen and then tiny dots appeared between the boxes.
“There’s your baby,” she said. “Right there.”
I tried to lift myself on my elbows and the technician put her hand on my shoulder to stop me. “I’ll move the monitor,” she said. “Stay right where you are.” She turned and fiddled and turned back to me and said, “Can you see better now?”
“Is the baby okay?” I looked at the gray blurs and the dark shapes and tried to see some defect, some hole, some absence, as if vacancy could ever be visible, as if the thing that made Chase who he was would appear on this screen like a subtitle in a foreign film.
“Your baby has all its fingers and toes,” said the technician. “See?” She rolled the wand over my belly and let the baby’s limbs swim into focus again, its hands, its feet, and then its beating heart, and then its face.
“I think that’s a perfect shot for a portrait. Hang on,” she said.
“But is it okay?” I said.
“Look at that sweet face. Hold on just a sec more. There. I think I’ve got it.”
I watched the screen while the technician pushed a button. Something whirred and the machine rolled out a snapshot. The technician peeled the paper from the face of the print and handed it to me.
“There’s your baby,” she said again. “Perfect in every way.”
I held the picture and saw my daughter, a beautiful girl limned in white against an unknowable dark ground. I knew she was a girl even without being told. “Haley,” I said. I held the photo up so Zip could see. “We should name her Haley,” I said. “She really looks like a Haley to me.”
WHEN SHE WAS BORN, I took advantage of the college’s generous maternity leave policy and had the whole semester off. After my stitches healed, I took the kids for walks, tucking Haley into a fuzzy yellow and white snowsuit against the upstate New York cold. In her carriage, beneath a heavy wool blanket, just her eyes showed under her white knit hat. I bundled Chase in his blue snowpants, his blue snowjacket, his red boots, his red-striped knit cap, and the red knit mittens strung though his sleeves on a doubled piece of yarn. We made our way up Main Street toward the college, past the big old houses that had been built in the nineteenth century, when the town had prospered, some with terraces that looked out over the lake. This was the same walk Zip and I had taken with Chase before Haley was born, up the hill to the vista in front of the college where we could point out boats on the lake or ducks by the shore. Chase would run ahead and we would run after him. I would call “Stop Stop Stop!” but Chase would run and run. I could picture him running into the street or flying from the butte into thin air and then tumbling down to the railroad tracks. And so one day I yelled, “Red light!” And Chase stopped. He stood still and looked back at us, his father and me, who were at that point trying to decide whether or not we would support Chase if he insisted on joining the military at eighteen. This was part of a larger conversation we entered into from time to time, about the extent and reach of the ways in which we would support our children, especially if they chose to do things with which we disagreed. We spoke seriously, ridiculously, about such matters, as if we could control the future. Chase waited for us to come up beside him on the concrete sidewalk and scuffed the tip of his sneaker through some pebbles he’d found, and watched us. When we reached him, I said, “Green light!” He ran and ran until I called, “Red light!”
Now, with Haley in the carriage, I called “Red light” if Chase got too far ahead of us. He liked to stand on the bridge over the highway that cut around town and watch the cars speeding below, but I hated it when he did this, certain that he would slip and fall and plunge to his death. I’d already had a dream about standing on a high roof with Haley in my arms and in the dream I dropped her and watched her bounce down the shingles and roll to the gutter and then turn and look at me with a plain, inquiring expression— How could you let go of me? How could you let me fall? —before she slipped over the edge and fell away and away and away. I woke up with my heart pounding and had to get out of bed and go to her crib and see if she was all right.
Once we got to the college, there was a good view of the lake. They’d set up a couple of benches to honor some alums and you could see clear across to the state park. I cleared the snow off of one of the benches so Chase could scramble up and sit down, and I could sit down next to him. I kept one hand on Haley’s carriage and asked Chase what he could see. There were dogs with bandannas on the snowy slope below us, a black Lab with a red bandanna and a yellow mutt with a blue bandanna and a white face and a tail that curled up like the tail on a husky. Their owners saw us and whistled to the dogs and the dogs galloped through the snow and slid to a stop at their owner’s knees, sat up and sat perfectly still on their hind legs, their tails thumping, their ears perked forward, waiting for fun.
“What do you see, Chase?” I asked again.
“Dogs,” he said. He began to sing to himself and tilted his head from side to side.
“What color dogs?”
“Black.”
“And what else?”
“Brown.”
He kicked his red plastic boot against the bench and kicked it again and again.
“Chase,” I said.
He kept kicking.
“Stop that, Chase.”
He kicked and kicked and kicked.
“If you’re going to kick the bench, we aren’t going to be able to sit on the bench.”
He kicked.
“Do you want to go home right now?”
He kicked again and again and again. I looked at him. His face was blank, unsmiling, and it seemed that he could not hear me. I held my breath and tried to swallow my frustration. I counted to ten. I exhaled. Chase kicked the bench.
The dogs chased a Frisbee and the two men who were walking with them stopped, passing the joint they were smoking back and forth between them and the blue smoke drifted away in the cold air. I could smell it. They climbed up the chalky painted stairs to McStewart House, the very same residence hall where Zip had lived when he was an undergraduate, and whistled to the dogs; they bounded up the stairs after the men and crowded around their legs and then stood on the porch and shook themselves hard.
“Do you want to roll down the hill?” I said. “Chase?”
Haley squirmed in her carriage. She was awake. We couldn’t stay here for long so I stood and said, “Come on, Chase. Let’s go home.”
“I’m going to roll.”
“Okay,” I said, “go ahead and roll.”
He rolled down the hill enough times to fill his boots up with snow and while he rolled, I picked Haley up and held her in my arms, her bobbing head, her face against my shoulder, until Chase had enough of rolling down the snowy hill. I watched the sunlight glint on the rippling blue water and watched three dark figures make their way along the snowy tracks far below.
After we got home, I took Chase’s boots off and peeled his wet socks from his feet and asked him to step out of his pants. When he was in warm, dry clothes and settled down with a cup of Gold-fish in front of his Mickey’s Parrot cartoon, I made peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and told myself that things wer
e getting better. I almost never went out with Chase and Haley without Zip, but we had just gone out and come back and we’d made it okay. We were having a good day.
EVEN BEFORE SHE COULD WALK, Haley followed her brother around in a wheeled walker like she was a satellite and he was the sun. She smiled and smiled and smiled, huge goofy baby grins that stayed and stayed. Chase decided she needed a new name and began to call her Haley-Ball; Zip and I called her Haley-Bird and Zip spent hours flying her like a bird through the air while she laughed and laughed and cried, “Do it again!”
IN THE FALL, when dark fell early, when it wouldn’t be long until snow covered the ground, I sat in the rocking chair in Haley’s room and held her in my arms and held the book so she could see the pictures and said from memory, Goodnight noises everywhere. Her head was under my chin. She touched the pictures as I turned the pages. I felt her muscles go soft and still. We came to the end of the book but I didn’t want to come to the end of this, so I started again. Bedtimes for Haley weren’t always peaceful. Chase liked to get involved. There were things he needed to know: “Can I hold the baby? Can I hold the baby? Can I hold the baby?” And then he’d reach for her and try to pull her out of my arms and I’d stand up and say, “That’s enough, you can hold the baby in the morning, remember?” Eventually Zip would come in and say, “I think Mickey’s Parrot is on,” and sure enough, Chase’s favorite cartoon, the one where Mickey thinks an escaped killer has gotten into his house, would magically appear on TV.
On this night, it was just Haley and me. I could hear Chase laughing in the other room but, after a time, things got quiet. Haley’s new hair was as soft as the fur on a tiny finger-puppet mouse I’d had when I was a child. I rocked her slowly and I felt her weight in my arms, that soft, warm sack of flour weight of a baby who’s about to fall asleep, and I sang to her, a song about pretty horses I pulled from my memory.
When I put her in her crib, she sighed deeply and smiled up at me while I covered her with her blanket.
I was on the phone in the bedroom when Zip came into the room. “I think you’d better come here for a sec,” he said.
“Hang on,” I said to the person on the other end. “I’ll be done in a minute,” I told Zip.
“No,” he said sharply. “You need to get off now.”
Chase was propped on pillows on the sofa, staring fixedly at the ceiling, his pupils huge and black, his lips deep blue and foamy. He beat his chest rhythmically, involuntarily, with his arms. The rest of his body was stiff. He breathed slowly and deeply, slowly and deeply, and then he vomited.
“Call an ambulance,” I said. A plate with a half-eaten hot dog rested on Chase’s lap. Donald Duck was peeling potatoes for the army on TV. I kept saying Chase’s name but he didn’t respond. I could hear Zip on the phone, giving our address, and I could hear Donald spluttering and fussing, and I had Chase on my lap, in my arms, and he was warm and I thought he was breathing, and then the paramedics arrived and the street in front of our house was filled with whirling, spinning light and the neighbors came upstairs and asked if we needed anything, if there was anything they could do. The paramedics unfolded a gurney, dropping its wheels with a clatter, and took Chase from me and covered him with blankets and put an oxygen mask on him. They asked questions while they worked. “How old is the boy? What happened? Did you notice anything unusual? How long do you think he was out? What’s his name? What’s your name, son?” By then he had begun to stir and they told him to lie still, he was going to get to ride in the ambulance, how’s that for being a lucky boy? They carried him down the two flights and out the front door into the cold, sharp night with a million stars over our heads. Inside the ambulance, the vehicle shook as we bounced over bumps and the only light came from the strobing orange light of the emergency spinners. One of the paramedics took Chase’s temperature.
“It’s 103.7,” said the paramedic. “He looks postictal.” He was a young man with bright brown curls and he told me he had a boy himself at home, just about Chase’s age. He blew up a latex glove and tied it off like a balloon. He drew a face on it and danced it through the air in front of Chase, who stared at it from under his plastic mask.
“What is that,” I said. “Post—?”
“Postictal,” said the paramedic. “That’s the state you’re in after you have a seizure. Does he have seizures?”
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“Sometimes kids get them when they run a high temp,” he said. “It’s nothing to worry about.” He looked at Chase. “Want us to turn on the siren?”
He turned his head slowly from side to side, no, no.
Chase slept at the ER, lying in bed between two green drapes in a row of beds divided by curtains. In the considered opinion of the ER doctor, Chase had not had a seizure. We were to take him home and give him fluids and let him rest. He didn’t think anything had really happened but if it had, it was probably a febrile seizure, brought on by whatever was making Chase’s temperature go up. But he had no idea what might be causing that. His thought was that this was something best handled by Chase’s pediatrician. Still, he really wanted to emphasize that this had not been a seizure, not to his way of thinking, anyway, and we had nothing to worry about. Yet to make ourselves feel completely at ease, we should follow up with the pediatrician in the morning. Just in case.
Chase’s pediatrician dispatched us to the EEG lab. We were to show up at the hospital, where Chase would be sedated with chloral hydrate and hooked up to the recorder by electrodes glued to his scalp; they’d get a reading while he was sedated, which would emulate sleep, and then they’d get a reading when the drug started to wear off. The tech talked to him about trains while she fixed a paper-covered tray with a cup with a pill in it and a glass of juice.
“You like orange juice?” she asked Chase. “I got you some orange juice. You just need to take some medicine and then we’ll get started.”
He nodded and swallowed the pill. He’d been taking pills for a while. He knew how.
The tech went to work on Chase’s head. “This’ll be a little cold,” she said but the first time she touched the glue to his scalp, he jerked away. “Ow,” he said.
“Chase,” I said. “Come on. That’s just glue.”
Zip showed up in the doorway. “The car’s parked,” he said. “Hey buddy.”
The tech touched his scalp with the glue and pressed another electrode in place. Chase stood up and tried to pull the electrode off.
“Sit down,” I said. My voice sounded sharp. I took a deep breath and started over. I told him the test wouldn’t take long and when we got home we’d have supper with Haley. Haley was over at Karen’s house right now, waiting for us. All we had to do was finish up here and go see her. We might even get to see the horse named Chicken, who often sauntered down the field and put his head over the fence.
The tech worked faster now, slapping electrodes in place and rapidly arranging the red and blue wires so they wouldn’t hang in Chase’s face. He pulled at the wires and pulled some that were already in place out and then twisted and shrieked and tried to stand up. Zip squatted before him with his hands on Chase’s knees and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
“He’ll be okay once the medicine works,” the tech said, but she sounded doubtful and this was understandable because the medicine didn’t seem to be doing what it was supposed to do. Chase grew more anxious and the more anxious he became, the more he squalled and screamed and shrieked and moaned. He pulled unendingly at the electrodes, pulling them out as fast as the tech could put them on. He tried to roll off of the chair onto the floor. He howled. He kicked. The tech stepped back. Chase jumped up and knocked over the chair. He ran across the big beige room. Zip was right behind him and wrapped his arms around Chase’s waist and then picked him up and carried him, struggling and thrashing, back to the chair. But he wouldn’t sit down. He fell to the floor to avoid his father’s grip and tried to get up and run away. Zip picked him up and sat down
on the chair with Chase bucking like a pony in his lap. They both fell off the chair.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to do this test today,” the tech said. “Not unless you can calm him down.”
But there was no calming Chase down. The more time passed, the more frenzied he became. Zip carried him out to the car and I buckled him into the backseat. A block from the hospital, he un-buckled his seat belt and opened the door. Zip slammed to a stop. I crawled into the backseat and practically sat on Chase to keep him from pitching himself out of the car. He rolled wildly from side to side and screamed and reached for the door. We parked in front of our building and Zip came around to the back of the car and opened the door behind the driver and I snapped, “Not that side. Not into traffic. Come around the other way.” He opened the other door and I lifted Chase up and out into his arms. He beat his heels against his father’s thighs and thrashed and fought and slammed himself against his father, but eventually we got him upstairs.
THE NEXT WEEK, the nurse at Chase’s day-care center called to tell me that Chase had had some difficulty at naptime. He had gotten up and seemed dazed and confused and tried to find his way to the bathroom. They helped him but he kept doing this, maybe five times in the course of an hour.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 12