How old were her other children? Was she feeling overwhelmed? Did she need help? The hospital had social workers on staff.
No, no, Erica assured him. She paced about the small parcel of linoleum allotted her, never averting her gaze from the life-giving tube inserted into Sophia’s artery. She was wearing cutoffs and the bathing suit she’d bought in Ocean City, stiff with salt water and smelling of seaweed and coffee. She tapped her fingers on the sides of her thighs, sweaty and sticky from the car, clumps of sand still stuck to the sides of her knee. She’d stumbled into a nightmare and prayed for release.
The spinal tap came in negative. No meningitis. The chest X-ray came in negative too. No pneumonia. Blood tests indicated Sophia’s liver was stressed but not beyond easy repair.
Slowly, Erica watched Sophia return to herself. She opened her eyes. Her breathing became regular. Her cheeks filled out; her body grew more substantive, more settled. She kicked her legs, unballed her fists. She drank a bottle of apple juice. “Mama, mama,” she murmured. A hesitant smile revealed her two new teeth. One of the nurses pranced an elephant puppet in front of her face. “Doggie,” she gurgled weakly, her smile radiating and encompassing the world.
“It appears she was basically suffering from severe dehydration,” said the doctor. “Maybe complicated by sunstroke.” The fever might have burned the enamel off her baby teeth. Whatever respiratory infection that had originally caused the problem was almost gone. She needed more juice, more formula, a few quiet days. They could keep her overnight for observation, but given her quick recovery with the IV fluids, they were willing to send her home.
“The upshot is that she’s going to be okay,” said the doctor.
Darkness closed in on Erica, and she crumpled to the floor. She came to on the same bed where Sophia had lain. The nurse with the elephant puppet, now cradling Sophia, offered her water.
Erica sipped the water. She was soaked in sweat. Her body felt trembly and light, almost airborne. “I’d rather take her home,” she said.
“Are you sure?” said the nurse.
“Yes,” said Erica. “I feel fine now.”
“We have a parenting class on Thursday nights,” noted the nurse, as she accompanied them unnecessarily to the checkout desk to fill out dismissal papers, handing Sophia back to Erica only at the last, unavoidable instant.
“I used to be a nurse, you know,” Erica told her, as ambulance sirens shrieked, the doors to the emergency room burst open, and paramedics rushed in bearing an unconscious man on a stretcher. Attentions turned to saving another life. Erica and Sophia walked out into the New York morning and drove home.
Erica’s house enclosed her in its warm and stuffy embrace: the shiny white mica cabinets spilling over with board games and plastic figurines; the refrigerator stuffed with cheese sticks, rotting cherries, and an economy jug of lemonade; the mail scattered all over the hallway tile; the blinking answering machine. The beauty of it all staggered her. It may have been a mess, but to her it looked washed clean.
She bathed Sophia. She seemed subdued but still chuckled with delight, pushing her plastic duckies around. Erica changed her into a fresh diaper, reveling in the overflowing pile of them, and the giant box of wipes and new canister of powder. She dressed her in a seersucker stretchie painted with lilac flowers. After putting Sophia into her crib, where she chortled and shook her legs to the musical mobile, Erica luxuriated in a long, hot shower, pulling brambles and sand out of her hair, washing out geological layers of filth. She put on fresh underwear and one of Ethan’s favorite T-shirts, one with a picture of Albert Einstein in a police cap saying, “E = MC squared—that’s the law.” It was the middle of the day, Jesse and Jake due home soon, but Erica did not think to check the clock. She was beyond time. She took Sophia out of her crib. She lay down on her bed, offering her daughter her breast. She craved the pressure of Sophia’s soft sweet skin against hers. She would never, ever have enough of it. Sophia accepted her nipple as if she’d never been on the bottle, sucking madly. After a couple of minutes, Erica felt the familiar tingle, the ripe fullness. She gave into her absolute exhaustion and fell asleep like that, Ethan’s shirt tucked up around her shoulders, Sophia sucking at her breast. Back in the trap, in the salivating mouth of the beast, she held her daughter, returned to her from the depths of terror. She sank into the comforts of her home and allowed herself to believe it was a refuge.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Sophia whimpered and rooted against her breast, and Erica woke in a haze, conscious but not fully present. She’d dreamed in vivid colors: oceanic blues, velvet purples, and an orange-yellow rich as an egg yolk. She’d been cruising down a river with Ethan, Debbie, Ron, and her cousin Amelia, somewhere steamy hot filled with the loud chatter of parrots. She’d spilled her wine, and it had streamed, deep burgundy, all over her napkin and her low-cut dress where her breasts swelled out of the lacy top, engorged with milk, until the captain came out and officiously informed her she must leave the ship.
Lines of white light crisscrossed the crumpled sheets, silky and patterned with yellow tulips. She hoisted herself onto her elbows and, lifting Sophia onto her lap, swung her legs over the side of the bed. She felt as if she were floating over the bed in a balloon, like the time she’d floated over date palms with Ethan on one of his business trips. She closed her eyes momentarily, breathed deeply, and clutching Sophia tightly, rose to standing. In contrast to the fog in her brain, her leg muscles tensed, all the way down to the arch of her foot, like they were about to pop out of her skin. The scratches on her legs throbbed, pink and hot.
She wandered through her house, replete with every toy she’d ever wanted, from the embroidered summer quilt to the hand-cut tile to Sophia’s dresses hanging in pink and lacy rows. All these lovely possessions shone bright and crystalline in captured light. She rooted around the refrigerator for food, rolling cool and creamy spoonfuls of raspberry yogurt around her mouth as she fed Sophia strained peaches. She tore off the chocolate wafers from a box of Oreos, saving the sugary insides for last. The throbbing at the base of her neck shattered into sparkles of pain.
She turned her head to see her message machine blinking its customary angry red. The lovely light slipped from her grasp. She breathed hard, deep, ragged breaths that hurt her lungs, her heart racing, her stomach jumping, stinky sweat soaking her panties and Ethan’s T-shirt. Faint again, she put her head between her knees, reaching and stretching her arms down her calves. The ER doctor had told her that he’d saved Sophia’s life. It was only a matter of hours, he’d emphasized; a tiny infant body runs out of water very quickly. Sophia had been burning up, drying out, fading away while she’d raced up one road and down another, while she’d lain on the beach soaking up the sun, while she tried to save someone who was not her child. The last few days were a blur, but at the fringes of her consciousness, she still saw Jared, standing on the beach, eyes moist, biting his lip. She should have hugged him good-bye.
“Mama?” asked Sophia from her high chair.
Erica called Anders to ask if she could meet him that day.
“I’m busy,” he said. Anders was not one for explication. “See you tomorrow morning at ten.”
Call waiting beeped.
“It’s Lisa, hon,” said the voice at the other end. “I kept calling you, but you didn’t answer. You didn’t answer my messages either. Can I return your little boys? I have a tennis game at the club. I hope you don’t mind—we stopped for dinner already.”
Dinner? Erica looked for the first time at the clock; it was almost seven. “I just got in,” she said. “How did everything go?”
“Oh, fine,” Lisa said. “They’re darlings, though I think they got a little homesick at the end.”
In the hallway mirror, she caught a glimpse of herself, tan and scraggly, sun-bleached auburn hair with raggedy split ends, limbs studded with scratches and mosquito bites. At least she’
d changed into a cute flowered sundress. The light was more forgiving than in the changing room in Ocean City, and she couldn’t decide whether she looked good or bad. Jesse and Jake ran in, dragging their tote bags and the remnants of Happy Meals.
“I hope you don’t mind the fast food, but I’m beat,” Lisa said, shaking her streaked-blond head. “I don’t know how you do it with four kids.”
“Thanks again,” said Erica. “I’m sorry I didn’t get your calls. Would you like a cold drink or something?”
“Oh no, I’m in a rush.” Lisa put her hand on her hip. “Don’t get me wrong—the weekend was a blast. So, tell me, how was yours? You’re looking tan and model thin, my friend.”
“Great,” Erica said. “The beach was gorgeous. We ate lobster.”
“Did you party with Christie Brinkley or anything?”
“No, no. Just Ethan’s friends.” Erica hoped Lisa wouldn’t press her for any more details she lacked the wherewithal to invent.
“Well, my court time is in five minutes. You fill me in later on all the beautiful people, okay?” With a squeaky turn of her tennis sneaker Lisa bounced down the steps to her Saab.
Back in the family room, Sophia was pulling records out of their jackets. Now that they’d bought a CD player, Ethan’s once top-of-the-line prize stereo was gathering dust, but their shelves of LPs still lined the wall. Erica watched the quick flick of Sophia’s wrists as she grasped the end of each disc and pushed it along the rug. Inspired, the twins pulled down the crates of Legos from their shelf and overturned them, dropping ketchup-smudged potatoes in their wake.
Her back hurt from all those hours driving. Her head was hurting so much it made her dizzy and nauseous. Maybe she had a brain tumor. She rolled back onto the carpet, kicking her legs up in the air and then over into a plough position. Maybe being upside down would send needed blood to her brain, though in reality her arteries felt on overdrive, all that blood rushing about under her skin. Maybe there was something amiss with her heart rhythm. Tachycardia, that was the term, right. Yep. Tachycardia. Rapid heartbeat. She didn’t want to think about hearts or blood. The air was stale and warm; she hadn’t opened the windows since the weekend. The limp french fries under her fingertips reminded her of hazy mornings at Nick’s house.
“We took Penny for a walk.” Jake stuck his head between her legs and belly. “We took a walk with a lot of other dogs just like her. The dogs are in a club. A spaniel club.”
“That’s nice,” Erica said, uncurling from the plough and stretching her legs out long and wide, stretching her upper body over her right knee, laying her forehead down on its rough surface.
“I missed you, Mommy,” said Jesse, sprawling over her exposed left leg.
“I love you, Mommy,” said Jake. They all snuggled together on the rug.
The phone rang: Dylan, making his weekly call from camp. In his sweet voice, he filled her in on a swim meet and the homemade strawberry ice cream they’d made after dinner and reminded her he was playing a wizard in the Parents’ Day play.
The phone rang again.
“Hello, stranger,” said Ethan.
“You sound tired,” said Erica.
“So do you,” he said. “How was your weekend?”
“My weekend?” she asked, thrown off balance for a moment.
“Weren’t you going to the Hamptons or something? I didn’t call last night because I figured you’d be stuck in traffic until late.”
“Oh yeah, it was great. The beach was beautiful. We ate lobster,” she said.
“How are the kids?” he asked.
“Good.”
“I’ll be home Wednesday.” Ethan sighed. “Everything is such a disaster.”
“No,” Erica massaged a raw tender spot at the base of her neck.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Erica’s index finger touched a crusty scab oozing a slick fluid. She pulled it off and rolled it between her thumb and finger. Once Sophia fell asleep, she’d take a nice long bath, with lavender bubbles, soak herself clean again. She heard a faint beeping.
“I think it’s my call waiting but I can ignore it,” she said.
“Go ahead and answer it,” Ethan said. “I don’t want to talk about this whole disaster on the phone anyway. I’m exhausted. I think I’m going to take a shower and watch a little TV.”
Erica could wait on Ethan’s bad news. She could wait on all bad news. She thought of soap bubbles. She thought of Ethan washing his body with the orange-scented hotel soap and the way she used to wash every inch of his body in the communal showers of his MIT dorm, when he was her new possession, all hers to explore. They’d used a scented soap that smelled like apples, though it was no doubt something cheap and synthetic. She visualized Ethan’s skin, shimmering iridescently under the bubbles, as she heard Debbie’s irate and panicked voice.
“You never pick up your messages, do you, Rikki? Or maybe you do, but you don’t concern yourself enough to call?”
“I told you I was going to the Hamptons for the weekend.” Erica pictured bubbles, shimmering like prisms, bursting. “I was just about to call you. How was your weekend in Albany?”
“Jared’s run away from the Pritima Center! We got home from upstate, all exhausted from the drive, to find this news waiting for us.”
“Oh my,” Erica managed, her voice thin and flat. The weekend felt like such a disconnected dream that she could almost convince herself Debbie was relating fresh news. “That’s terrible,” she said.
“Is that all you have to say?” snapped Debbie. “You don’t sound overly concerned. Are you too busy hanging out with your new rich friends at the beach?”
Erica watched as Sophia crawled up on a low shelf, reaching for more records, and slipped, falling to the carpet, screaming. Erica dropped the phone and grabbed her, investigating every inch of her body. No cuts. No blood. No bruises. No trips to the emergency room.
“Rikki, are you still there?” Debbie asked.
Erica almost gave into to an impulse to tell Debbie about Sophia’s illness. Of all the people she knew, Debbie would most understand the helpless sensation of watching your child lying in a hospital bed. She’d remember how the whole big wide world ceased to matter and your world shrunk to that tiny space, with its horrible noisy machines and artificial, overly bright light. When Jared had been in the ICU, all Erica did was listen to Debbie babble; she did not possess the breadth of understanding to know what to say in return. Now she understood, but they could no longer talk. Sophia nuzzled her teary face into Erica’s neck as she picked up the phone again.
“Sorry,” she said. “Sophia fell.”
“Speaking of babies,” Debbie said, “about an hour before Jared ran away, some woman came into the center claiming she was a relative of his. They didn’t allow her to visit him, of course—that’s not protocol. But then this same woman joined his work pod, claiming she was from the agriculture department. Then he walks off the grounds with this mysterious woman.”
“How strange.”
Sophia, recovered, rooted around Erica’s shirt for milk.
“The woman was carrying a baby girl,” Debbie said, sounding eerily calmer now, “and the description they gave me sounded a lot like you.”
“How could it possibly be me?” Erica squealed. “I was in the Hamptons. How could I be in South Carolina at the same time?”
“Of course it wasn’t you,” Debbie continued, deliberately drawing out the length of each word, calm, yes, but, Erica thought, artificially so: the calm tone you might use if someone was pointing a gun at your back. “I said the description sounded a lot like you. How did you know Jared was in South Carolina, anyway? The center’s location is confidential.”
Erica placed Sophia, down to residual tears, in her high chair with the box of animal crackers. She’d lost weight over the weekend, all the chubby folds in
her thighs flattened out.
“Of course,” said Debbie. “Your good buddy Nick must have told you. That man sure had me fooled. “
“What makes you think he’s my good buddy?” asked Erica.
“Oh, Mom told me you guys had become friends. Like you knew each other in school but never really liked each other, but lately she’d seen you chatting in the neighborhood. You’ve got odd taste in friends. You know how he got out on bail? Ron thinks he made some sort of deal.”
“What would Ron know about a deal?” Erica asked. Jesse wandered into the kitchen, intertwining his fingers with Erica’s, smelling of french fries and chlorine. Golden dog hairs stuck to his shirt.
“Oh, you know Ron,” said Debbie. “He’s friends with everybody. He’s got buddies down at the police station—they know him from the military or from his Paul Anka fan club or something.”
Jesse pulled at her fingers insistently. Sophia tossed a lion cookie onto the kitchen floor. In the family room, Jake rammed a toy truck into a Lego tower.
She’d run off and left Jared standing in the sand, clutching a few hundred-dollar bills. Where was he sleeping? Had Ashley left him for one of the boys on the beach, one who hadn’t fathered the baby she never truly wanted, one who wasn’t scared of rough water—maybe Alvin? Had Jared found a job? Was he serving fried fish? Frozen custard? Begging on the streets? He’d run out of inhalers at the Pritima Center. He missed his mother.
“Hell is breaking loose here,” she said. “I better give the boys a bath.”
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