“My mother thinks things will get better when Tia’s done with middle school,” Capri told the guidance counselor. This was not her mother’s opinion but her own. She based it on the fact that for herself, at the end of middle school something had changed. She began to babysit almost every day, and she experienced not so much a lessening of her feeling that things could not be made right, and that she would never really be alive, as a suspicion that this did not matter as much as it had seemed to. It was probably how at least some other people, adults, felt as well. Still, Tia’s behavior did not seem to have its root in either of those feelings. Tia had no doubt she was alive and no memory much before Lin; she did not even remember the loud little girl she had been or the screaming when the glass stabbed her heel, or the apartments, or their father. With Capri’s help she searched her memory. “He wasn’t tall,” Capri prompted. Tia screwed up her face. “Nope, nothin’,” she said.
Elizabeth was shivering. Capri knew that bundling up a chilling child was not good. You had to cover just enough to stop the shivering but not enough to heat the body more. It was an art, Mrs. Inigo said, that they would be glad to know when they had their own children, if not before that in their babysitting careers, knock on wood. They laughed at the thought. They were twelve. Having children. Having them.
“There have been some terrible babysitters,” Mrs. Inigo had told them the first day. “Ignorant. Kids who put rubber bands around little boys’ penises”—there was only one boy in the class but the whole class stirred—“to keep them from wetting. Kids who opened up a can of beer and let toddlers wander into the street. But those things are not peculiar to babysitters. Parents have done those things. So, for the stereotype, we substitute—you.” Mrs. Inigo pushed up the woven bracelet she wore for some cause, and raised her hands over them. “You are the new kind of babysitter. You are responsible in a new way. When you’ve finished this course there will be things you’ll know more about than the parents do. I guarantee it.”
Capri took the thermometer out. One hundred four point two. That meant one hundred five point two. She didn’t remember hearing a fever that high mentioned in the course.
“Come here,” she said, picking up Elizabeth, who weighed hardly any more than the baby. “Come back to bed.”
The girl was shivering strongly now and at the same time holding herself stiff in Capri’s arms so that it was like carrying a small chair. “Ow,” she said again in a tinny voice. “My neck hurts.”
She sank the hot points of her fingers into Capri’s arms as Capri tried to lower her onto the bed, and whispered, “I can’t, my neck hurts.”
Here goes, Capri thought, but no tears came. “Sit up, sweetie. Here’s your pillow. Just sit here and I’m going to call your mommy and she’ll be right here. Your daddy, I mean.” The girl bared her undersized teeth and began a shallow, toneless sobbing through them, holding still with hands on either side of her on the edge of the mattress, like somebody sitting on a windowsill who might tip down into the street. Capri turned back and pressed her lips to the hot forehead. “That’s a girl.”
Capri called the number on the pad by the guestroom phone. No one answered. On the bed was the bag with her T-shirt and toothbrush in it. She was spending the night because they would not be home until morning. They were at a fund-raiser that was going to end in a champagne breakfast. The clock on the table said 1:15. She called the number again.
Downstairs she looked for the Babysitter’s Friend, the card she taught all her families to make and keep near the phone. Eventually she found it stuck in the yellow pages. There was the pediatrician, Dr. Abrams, who, she knew, would not be at his office number at this hour. He was not, nor did he have an answering service or an emergency number as pediatricians were supposed to. His home number was not in the phone book. Down the list were the two names marked “neighbor.” She took a breath and called the first one. After eight rings she tried the other one. They were not people she sat for, either name. She tried to think who her mother would take her or Tia to if they were sick. They were never sick enough to go to the doctor; their mother was always saying, “Thank God that blew over.”
She carried the phone into the living room and looked out at the dark water, thinking. The moon had moved, the row of lights lay on the water unwavering, now there were stars.
She called her mother’s cell and then she called home. Lin answered. “Lin, is Mom there?”
“No,” said his polite, sleepy voice. “She’s not here—quit it, quit it, it’s Capri—she went over to David’s.” Tia came on the line. “I’m hitting him. He wasn’t supposed to answer. What’s the matter?”
“A kid is sick and I can’t get hold of anybody. I just wanted Mom to come and get us and take us to the ER.”
“Well, she’s not here. She and David went over to his place. Why doesn’t she answer her phone? Hey, don’t tell her Lin stayed. God, Lin’s so dumb. It could have been her on the phone. Are you going to call nine-one-one?”
“I guess I’ll just call a cab.”
“Yeah, that’s good. Well, sorry. Sorry, Capri. Whoa, that’s going to be fun.”
After she called the cab she went up the stairs two at a time and ran water onto a washcloth. Elizabeth’s face was a dull red. She looked asleep but she opened her eyes and gave Capri a tense, unusual glare, eye to eye. “I can’t move my head,” she said angrily. Capri peeled away the other pajama sleeve and smoothed the wet cloth over her forehead and cheeks and then her shoulders and her thin chest with bone just under the skin like a plate under a dishtowel. “Shhh,” she said as the ticking sobs began again. “Shh, honey, it’s OK. We’re going to the doctor. Put your top on. Here, I’ll put it on. It doesn’t matter if it’s a little bit wet. Let’s see, do you have slippers?” No answer. She found them in the closet, and a pink bathrobe. “He-ere’s one arm, he-ere’s the other arm, all done. You come and sit at the top of the stairs while I get Bobby.” The girl didn’t move. Capri picked her up and carried her down the wide hall to the top step.
“Hey, little buddy, come on up here.” Capri gathered up the baby as smoothly as she could, blanket and all. He began smacking his lips and fussing as she looked for his bag. Where was the bag? It must be downstairs. Bottles. She would have to take formula. He was waking up now, rooting in her neck.
“Come on, honey,” she said, pulling Elizabeth gently by the hand.
“No.” The narrow eyes menaced Capri.
Capri got them both into her arms. Downstairs she had to put them on the couch to fill the bottles and write a note. The baby went back to sleep. She saw the restfulness of his curved eyelashes when she picked him up. It would be easy to love this baby. He slept, he received his bottle with joy, he sank against you, he had no questions, no wish that things be different, no longing yet for any specific person. There was a shy ease about him. Not every baby had it, only certain calm, lovable babies. It was simple: if you were lovable, people loved you, guarded you.
In the cab she said, “I can’t find the seat belts.”
“Must be down in behind the seat,” the man said. “Can’t get ’em if they’re down there.”
In the cab the chilling started again, almost as if the child were making lunges to get out of the circle of her arm. She was no cooler but she had stopped crying and despite the jerking of her body she seemed to be asleep.
When they stopped, Capri said, “I only have three dollars.”
“It figures,” he said. “You go on in there, go to the desk, see if they got a cab fund. Tell ’em.”
She got out with the baby and reached in with the other arm to heave Elizabeth up against her side. “Ow,” Elizabeth said, but did not cry, all the way through the automatic doors and up to the desk. The crying seemed to be over.
“This girl has a high fever, one hundred and five,” Capri said. “I need somebody to look at her. Do you have a cab fund?”
“No, we do not.” The woman at the desk came right around from behind the gla
ss and lifted Elizabeth from her. She was a tall woman with glasses on a chain and she looked like a teacher. “That’s quite a load,” she said. “Here, we’ll just let her stretch out.”
Elizabeth didn’t say she couldn’t stretch out but she gave out a high-pitched sound that was both a scream and a whisper.
“Her neck hurts,” Capri said. “She can’t lie down.” The woman set her down carefully on the gray couch. Everything in the room was gray or blue-green, including the pictures of gulls and herons on the walls. There were a few people, not many, scattered around the room. One other baby, in an infant seat on the floor. The mother looked fixedly at Capri and shook her head. An aquarium was bubbling beside her.
“I came in a cab—” Capri began. Now that she was sitting down she found she was breathing too hard to speak.
“You got anybody else with you?”
“I’m the babysitter—”
“Just catch your breath, baby.”
“I can’t get hold of her mom and dad. Not yet.”
“All right, now, all right. We’re going to have trouble treating this little baby girl without the parents. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Well, we’ll see what we can do. Plus don’t you worry, I think your cab just pulled out.”
THE woman at the desk and the nurse were looking for Mr. and Mrs. Yates, along with somebody they had called, a man in a tie. They were going through all the big hotels looking for parties, and waking up lawyers in Mr. Yates’s firm. So far, nobody knew where the Yateses were.
Elizabeth was having a lumbar puncture. “They’re tapping her spine,” the nurse explained to Capri, though Capri knew what it was, as anyone would know who watched TV. “Is she in the operating room?” Capri said. Her arms were almost numb from the baby’s weight. “No, she’s right here, down the hall,” the nurse said. “You can go see her in a minute. Here, let me hold him for a minute. Here’s your chance to go to the bathroom, right down there.”
“Thanks. There’s his bag if he . . . but I’ll be right back.” She wanted to make a phone call but she didn’t want them to listen. Down the hall she found a pay phone; they still had one, and one with a directory. She found the name. “This is Capri Miller,” she said. “I don’t know if you remember me or not but I was in your babysitting class three years ago. I was the one with . . .” She couldn’t think how to describe herself.
Mrs. Inigo’s voice woke right up and sounded as it had in class, challenging. Capri imagined Mr. Inigo lying there, letting his wife answer the phone in the middle of the night because she was a feminist. “I do remember you, Capri,” Mrs. Inigo said.
“I’m sorry to call so late, or early, I don’t know which. I’m at the hospital with the kids I’m babysitting.”
“Tell me what’s happening,” said Mrs. Inigo.
She told her. “Listen,” Mrs. Inigo said at last. “You’ve done well. The trouble they gave you was because of liability.”
“I just . . . I just . . .”
“I think right now you should go and sit down, Capri. It’s in their hands now. If you can find a machine, get yourself a cup of coffee. I really think you should do that. Even if you don’t drink coffee. The thing I’d like to do is come and be with you, but I can’t, because of the baby.” Tia had not told Capri about any baby. Tia had never said Mrs. Inigo was pregnant.
Capri pretended this was not so. “Oh, I’ve had coffee since I was little. Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry to have woken you up. How is the baby?”
“She’s fine. I see your sister in school, Capri,” said Mrs. Inigo. “I hope life is going well for the two of you. I hope you’re not taking any shit.”
When Capri hung up she thought about this. She remembered Mrs. Inigo herself saying in class that Spanish-speaking men did not think well of women who used bad language. She wondered if Mrs. Inigo tried to please her husband in any way. She wondered if Mrs. Inigo knew she could drive him away and be alone.
THE doctor who sits down beside her has those pop eyes that blink and get wider and wider until the next blink. It is as if she has to keep shutting her lids to settle her eyes down or they will go wild. Capri doesn’t think this is a good feature in a doctor. But she has a calm voice. “Elizabeth is very sick,” she says slowly, more or less as if this will have to sink in. “We think she may have encephalitis. That’s an infection in her brain that sometimes comes along after the flu. Very rarely. We don’t know why.”
“She’s going to stay here,” Capri says.
“Oh yes, she is. She is a sick little cookie.”
“Could I go back and explain to her about her dad? I know she’s worried.” Capri keeps talking to the rhythm of the blinking eyes. “It’s the middle of the night, he’s not here, it’s confusing. I think she ought to see me.”
“Well, she’s on her way to the ICU right now. About to be. She’s not worried because she’s not conscious and I wish we could get our hands on the parents.”
Capri shifts the baby and inhales the soft fumes coming from him. Even wet he smells like bread. “You mean she could die.”
The doctor casts her wide eyes up at the long-necked herons in the painting, standing in water. “We certainly hope not,” she says, after a bit. “We’re just going to have to get her turned around, that’s the first thing.” The baby gives a low, rasping growl. “This one’s sure a sleeper,” the doctor says. “Doesn’t know a thing. Doesn’t have the foggiest idea, does he?”
“I was going to change him, but I don’t want to wake him up.”
“Don’t wake a sleeping baby.”
“Oh, this one wouldn’t mind, he’s happy no matter what.”
“That’s the way to be,” says the doctor wearily, closing down her big eyelids. “Want me to take him?” and when Capri shakes her head, “Do you drink coffee? Charlene, is there coffee left?” Charlene brings coffee out of the back in a cup that says OVER 40 AND FEELING FOXY. “I’ll tell Lee to wait a minute on taking baby girl upstairs,” she tells the doctor. Capri likes the way she calls Elizabeth a baby. “This young lady can go see her, and then she can come on back and take it easy. Meanwhile I get my turn with this little guy.” She holds out her arms.
Elizabeth is lying on her side on the gurney with her head on a big snowy pillow so crisp it looks like paper. It is paper. Her legs are drawn up and her arms bent close to her body. Her eyes are open but she pays no attention to Capri. Her pink pajamas are on the counter, and the line of a hanging IV pouch is plugged into the back of her hand, which is taped to a little board. Another tube comes out from under the hospital gown. Coming close Capri says, “It’s OK, Lizzie.” The usual pinched expression has been wiped off the girl’s face by her open mouth and the flush that puffs out her skin. The complaining feeling that always hangs in the air around her is not there. Again Capri whispers her name.
She slides her fingers into the damp hair and lifts it back from the forehead, laces it carefully behind the red rim of the ear, and looks for a long time. The ear, ribbed and glowing, reminds her of the inner leaves in a head of cabbage. How strange, these leaves on the side of the head. How strange the head is, in fact. Objects on it like little vegetables, if you look at them.
And people think faces are beautiful, and think of them, certain faces, all the time, she thinks bitterly. The child’s face comes back together as a face, but there is something unpleasant in it, even so. It looks stretched downward and fierce, as children look straining to go to the bathroom.
“Lizzie,” she says. “They’re going to make you feel better now.” With that, a certainty rushes over her that the things that could make Elizabeth feel better will not happen.
You can’t make anything happen, Capri tells her silently. You can’t make your mom and dad come right now. You think they don’t like you and maybe they don’t for some reason. But now you’re sick. It will be different, when they come. If you died, they’d be different people. Capri can see them. No longer dressed up, full of instructions. No more shining shoes, heels, earrings
. No. Tear-streaked, tired, swatted down. She could almost cry for what Mr. Yates will feel if he remembers his good-bye to his daughter last night, so long ago. He will have to regret it forever. She is visited by a brief joy as fierce as Elizabeth’s clamped face.
She stops. I don’t mean die. I don’t mean that. They can’t help it.
The young man comes into the room to wheel the gurney away. “Now wait a minute, this one ain’t yours, I know that,” he says.
She steps away from his wide smile. Something exercises in her chest, like air in a sticking balloon, a sensation she hopes is not the beginning of tears. He throws his hip against the table and wheels it in a circle, a tray with Elizabeth on it. Capri sees the soles of Elizabeth’s feet, and the jiggling bag of liquid. She sees that Elizabeth has athlete’s foot: peeling toes and cracks in the red skin at their base, and wonders if anyone but herself and the orderly have noticed this about her. It seems her duty for the moment to notice everything, in the absence of anyone else. She is struck by the separateness of each member of the Yates family, including the baby asleep out there, now in Charlene’s arms, giving off his odors like a secret he easily shares. When you breathe on his head it breathes back at you the scent of a sweet roll. No idea who is holding him. No idea, ever, if someone should steal him now, of where he came from. The lack of any use to each other, any protection, that they are, his family. All out in the night at once, scattered. Any one of them could be steered down a hall to an elevator with the wrong person responsible.
She imagines her own father stretched on such a table. He would be lying straight and not in such disorder as Elizabeth. She grabs for the scene as it recedes. At the same time she drops a short way down, into a knowledge that he is somewhere. Not suspended just out of reach of her mind, but existing—sick or well, putting on his clothes, eating, driving with the radio on. If he’s in the same time zone he’s asleep right now. Asleep as if nothing were happening. Groggily her thoughts swerve away.
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