Ten Days

by Janet Gilsdorf

  Another father walked into the lounge, a straight-backed man dressed in desert camouflage. The tag on his shirt read EVANS. A military man. If Eddie had to get sick, she supposed she should be grateful that her child’s father was a doctor. He could explain the procedures, the lab results, the medicines to her. He could tell if Eddie’s nurses and doctors were doing the right things, could pry useful information from the staff about Eddie’s status. All Evans could do was fret, helplessly.

  These other fathers might be teachers, bankers, mechanics, cooks. They might even have been home when their children first became ill. Maybe these fathers took their child’s temperature, called the pediatrician, measured out the Tylenol. Each had probably believed his wife when she told him their child was sick.

  Time was so slow. It seemed a decade ago that she was the mother of a healthy six-month-old boy. Way back then, in her naiveté and innocence, she had hardly noticed the miracles of Eddie’s normalcy, his bounciness, the way he turned his head toward Chris’s voice while nursing, stretching her breast into a long, narrow cone; the way her milk drizzled out of his mouth when he smiled up at her, his eyes bright and glistening.

  He was a contented baby, satisfied to lie on a blanket on the carpet while he followed her with his eyes as she dusted the bookshelves, or tolerated incessant tickling from his overeager brother. When he giggled—which was often—his eyes sparkled like jewels as his arms waved and his legs kicked. Her favorite picture of him was while he giggled. Jake had snapped the photo at the best possible instant and had caught the pure essence of Eddie.

  She wished she had paid more attention to his sweet baby-ness. He would be little for such a short time and then the baby part of him would be gone forever. Maybe that’s why she was in the waiting room and he was imprisoned in the ICU . . . because she hadn’t noticed everything about him that a good mother would see.

  Her breasts, heavy with milk, throbbed against the inside of her bra. As it had been programmed to do for the past six months, her body was prepared to feed him. It didn’t understand that Eddie couldn’t nurse right now. A moist stain blossomed on the front of the clean blouse Jake had brought.

  She stared at the growing shadow of the stain. Since they arrived at the hospital, she had been kneading her breasts, emptying them into the nearest bathroom sinks. At first she thought she should try to find baby bottles to fill. But, that was senseless—a flashback to her old way of thinking. The reality was, he couldn’t swallow with that tube jammed down his throat.

  Maybe she should stop expressing. If she did, the pressure from the milk that backed up in her breasts would shut down its production and she’d quit leaking. But then she wouldn’t have any milk for him when he was better.

  She closed her eyes. Would he get better? Would that breathing tube go away so he could nurse again? So he could cry?

  When she opened her eyes, Jake was threading his way through the crowd that hovered around the waiting room door. She was glad to see someone who belonged to her, weary of being alone in a room full of anxious, chatty strangers.

  She gauged how her son was doing by reading her husband’s face. When Jake’s eyes sagged with sadness or grew wide with desperation, when his head bowed and his shoulders stooped, when he avoided her glance, Eddie wasn’t doing well. When he flashed that whimsical smile of his, parting his lips to show his upper-left front tooth that overlapped slightly the one beside it, she knew Eddie was making headway. Now his face was quiet, a blank page she couldn’t read.

  He sat in the chair beside hers.

  “Were you in there?” she asked, tipping her head toward the patient area.

  He nodded and picked up a dog-eared copy of Better Homes and Gardens.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “Nothing new. Vince Farley showed me the CT scan they did this morning. It was the same as the earlier one.” He paused, and then added, “He probably explained that to you already.”

  “Yes.” Dr. Farley had shown her the scan. She had no idea what the pictures meant.

  She laid her left hand on Jake’s knee. The warmth of his body seeped through his thin, cotton scrub pants. He set his hand on top of hers. With the tip of his finger, he flicked the diamond in her engagement ring, twisting it first to the left and then to the right. Over and over, flick to the left, flick to the right. Since shortly after giving it to her, whenever he held her left hand, he absentmindedly flicked her ring. She hadn’t completely understood the meaning of his restless twirling of the diamond. Now she saw it as a nervous tic—flick to the left, flick to the right—that echoed the cadence of his impatience.

  She didn’t want him picking at the stone in her ring. Rather, she wanted him to be gentle with her, to take care of her, to make the badness go away. If only he would erase her worry, her irritability, her cold, her fatigue, her leaky, achy breasts, just as he had replaced the torn screen in the back door last month. But, he couldn’t mend any of the things that bothered her now. She stared into his face, into his faraway eyes. He might be able to fix other people’s broken bones and wrenched backs and smashed hands, but he couldn’t fix her and he couldn’t fix Eddie.

  “Is he breathing on his own at all?” She was searching for something positive, a tiny piece of good news that could grow into a bigger piece of good news.

  “I don’t think they’ve tried him off the vent yet.” With a pensive shrug, he began paging through the magazine, from back to front.

  “Are they going to?” As she spoke, she pulled the front edges of her sweater together and fastened the middle three buttons to hide the expanding milk stain. “They won’t know if he can breathe on his own unless they unhook him every once in a while.”

  He stared silently at her as she buttoned the sweater. Then he shut the magazine and set it in his lap. “Looks like you’ll need another clean shirt. And under wear.”

  She stretched the front of the sweater away from her damp blouse, letting in the warm, germy air to dry the milk spot. The stain was embarrassing. She hoped no one else noticed. Breast milk was like urine or vomit—too personal for public viewing.

  “Better yet”—his voice was quiet but hopeful—“why don’t you go home and change? And get a decent night’s sleep.”

  “No, Jake. I can’t.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket, blew her nose, and watched as he opened the magazine again and leafed through it, flipping past the ads on the back page and then forward to the buying guide and recipes for chili and lobster rolls. His right calf bounced rhythmically on his left knee.

  “My parents finally booked a flight,” she said. “They arrive tomorrow morning. They’ll rent a car at the airport and be at our house by noon.” She tucked the tissue back into her pocket. “Will you be able to pick Chris up at Rose Marie’s tonight?”

  Jake turned another page and glanced at his watch. “Yeah, I’ll get him. You should come home tonight. Chris wants to see you.”

  Her body stiffened. “No, I’m staying here. I can’t leave when Eddie’s so sick. You or my parents can bring Chris up here.”

  A young doctor, his white coat hanging off his narrow shoulders, his stethoscope dangling from his long neck, leaned through the doorway. The room was instantly silent. Anna froze and stared fearfully, expectantly at him. “Is anyone from the Quam family here?” he asked, surveying each face for a response. His eyes swept past her eyes, past Jake’s eyes. No one answered. “Quam?” he repeated. The silence resounded through the room. “Quam?” He then turned and walked out the lounge door.

  Jake pulled an orange from the basket of fruit beside her chair.

  “May I have one?” He pulled off the peel and separated the sections. “Where’d they come from?”

  “Elizabeth sent them.” She leaned over and ran her fingertips along the plaid yellow bow. “It’s from the linguistic staff at the college.”

  He tossed the orange peel into the bed of burger wrappers in the wastebasket, picked up the Better Homes and Gardens again, and
began turning the pages.

  “Jake, that drives me nuts.”

  He looked over the top of the magazine at her. “What?”

  “Reading from the back to the front.”

  He snickered. “Why do you care how I read?”

  “Because it’s very weird and makes you look illiterate.”

  “That’s a pile of baloney.” He continued to page forward.

  She stared at a bare spot on the wall. Why did he have to be like that? If he cared about her, he wouldn’t do these unappealing things that bothered her so much.

  He laid the magazine on his lap, set his head against the back of his chair, and closed his eyes. He was tired. Of course he was tired. Likely he had had no more sleep than she had. In his profile—the velvety eyelids, the bushy brows, the bumpy nose, his resolute mouth—she saw the man who remembered every joke he ever heard, who left the stove burners on after the food was cooked, who ate dill pickles for breakfast, who sang Mariah Carey songs in the shower. She saw the man she had fallen so hopelessly in love with seven years ago.

  After Jake left, Anna curled in her chair and pulled the gray scratchy blanket over her head to shield her eyes from the lights. Still, the glare of the overhead bulbs seemed to shine through both the blanket and her eyelids. Voices ebbed and flowed around her, like waves that crawl to the shore, spread across the sand, and finally dissolve into nothingness. Someone chuckled. She pulled the blanket tighter and muttered into the wool, “There’s nothing to laugh about here. It’s night. Go to bed.” A phone rang. Something hit the floor with a thud. A book? A purse? A person?

  Fingers gripped her shoulder. She shrugged them away.

  “Anna,” a voice said. The hand grasped her sleeve. “Anna.”

  She opened her eyes. A blurry face hovered six inches from her nose. She blinked several times. The face said, “Anna, you have a phone call.” Now awake, she sat up. It was Charlotte’s face.

  She stumbled into the phone closet beside the visitors’ lounge. On the message board, blue, forehanded script read Quam family: check with your son’s nurse, and in black, backhanded script, 281-555-7499.

  She stooped for the receiver that dangled, at the end of its metal-wrapped cord, six inches from the floor. “Hello?”

  “On my way home . . .” It was Jake. “I thought of something . . . a question I don’t know the answer to.”

  “What?”

  “Did Eddie get the pneumococcal vaccine?”

  “The what?”

  “The pneumococcal vaccine. It’s one of the immunizations infants should get.”

  “God, Jake, I don’t know. You mean his baby shots? I can’t keep them all straight.” She shook her head, trying to clear away the sleep and to connect with Jake’s question. “He’s had everything he was supposed to get.”

  “It’s sometimes called the pneumonia shot.” He paused a moment and added as if he were reading from a textbook, “It’s sometimes called Prevnar. Did he get it?”

  She took a deep breath. He was pressing her, using his patronizing I’m-the-big-smart-doctor voice.

  He continued, “Babies are supposed to get it at two and four and six months and then a booster when they’re about a year old. So, Eddie should have had two or three, depending on whether or not you took him for his six-month visit.”

  She stiffened. His words cut deep. He was questioning whether she had taken Eddie for his shots in a timely manner, whether she had done her job as a mother.

  “I don’t know. Is it important . . . now?”

  “Yes, it is, because those are the shots that should protect him from the kind of infection he has.”

  She gripped her temples with her free hand and squeezed her eyes shut. Now he was accusing her of making Eddie sick, suggesting she had neglected Eddie’s baby shots and that was why he had this terrible infection. How could he think she would do that to her precious son? Jake was the one, after all, who’d assured her Eddie only had a little cold.

  “Do you have his immunization record somewhere?” he asked.

  She paused, then finally spoke. “In the top drawer . . . of the desk . . . in the kitchen.”

  She was sick to her stomach. She might vomit. What if, somehow, she had missed some of his shots? As clear as day, she remembered the routine of setting up the well-baby appointments. The first had been made before she’d left the hospital after Eddie was born. The second was made at the end of the first one, as she leaned against the reception counter at the clinic, Eddie squalling against her shoulder after his shot, the diaper bag banging against her hip, Chris pulling at her jacket. Eddie’s six-month birthday was four days before he got sick. He must have another appointment any day now.

  She could hear Jake pawing through the drawer. “It’s in an envelope—a greeting card kind of envelope,” she said. She wanted to help him find that record—to vindicate herself. “It has ‘Eddie’s immunizations,’ or something like that, written on it.”

  And yet, what if she had forgotten an appointment?

  “Got it.” He sounded triumphant, as if he had won a marathon or a game of checkers. Then he was silent.

  She couldn’t read meaning into his silence. “What does it say?”

  “I can’t hear you. Speak louder.”

  She cleared her throat. “I said, ‘What does it say?’ ”

  “He’s had the first two Prevnar shots and should get the third in about a week.”

  She leaned her forehead against the wall of the phone closet and wiped her tears from her cheeks. At least she hadn’t done that wrong. She couldn’t live with herself if Eddie had gotten sick because she’d missed his shots.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Anna, are you still there?”

  “Yes,” she sobbed.

  “Eddie’s had all the shots he was supposed to have. Listen to me, Anna, it’s okay.”

  “But, you think I didn’t pay attention to Eddie, that it’s my fault he got sick. You think I’m a terrible mother.”

  “No, honey. You did everything right, had him vaccinated, kept the records, got him to the ER. We need to know if he got the shots and still got the infection.”

  “Well, he did. What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure. Dr. Farley will have to sort that all out. It might mean, though, that his immune system doesn’t make antibodies to the vaccine.”

  She shut her eyes, leaned her head against the wall of the phone closet, sobbed. The bad news just kept coming, like a monster lurching, repeatedly, from a muddy lagoon.

  “Honey, I’m coming to bring you home for tonight. Eddie’ll be fine. A nurse is always at his bedside. He needs you to get some rest. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

  “No.” She stood up straight, away from the wall. “I’m all right. Really I am. I need to stay here.”

  Chapter 15

  Rose Marie

  “I’m trying to reach Anna Campbell.” Rose Marie straightened her shoulders and pulled at her lower lip.

  “Hang on a sec while I get her.”

  The person who answered the phone—a woman—spoke with a thorny East Coast accent. Maybe from Boston. Maybe New Jersey. She couldn’t tell; she’d never been east of Ohio.

  Strange noises sputtered over the phone line—voices echoing in the distance, furniture scratching across a tile floor, a cough, something tapping against the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Anna? It’s Rose Marie.”

  “Is Chris okay?” Anna sounded curt, worried.

  “Yeah. He’s here at the table with the other kids.” She smiled at Chris, at the sunglasses he insisted on wearing today, even in the house. “Actually, that’s why I called. I really hate to bother you, but I think he would like to talk to his mom. Is that okay?”

  “Please put him on the phone.” Anna sounded as if she was weeping.

  Rose Marie handed the receiver to Chris. “Honey, your mom wants to talk with you.”

 
; His eyes grew large and he clapped the phone to his ear. At first he didn’t say anything. Then he nodded. Then he was quiet again. “When are you coming?” he asked.

  Rose Marie couldn’t hear what Anna was saying. Chris nodded again. “Come today.” He started whimpering and handed the phone to Rose Marie.

  Anna was sobbing. “He wants me to take him home. I can’t leave Eddie.”

  “Oh, dear,” Rose Marie said. “I didn’t mean to upset both of you. Chris’ll be fine, Anna. I’ll let him spend extra time on my lap this afternoon.”

  “Thanks,” Anna said. “I’m glad you called and let me talk with him.” Her voice was thin, tired.

  “The kids are sewing together pages for their photo albums,” Rose Marie said. “Chris’s back at the table with them. I think he’ll be fine now.” She wedged the receiver between her ear and her shoulder and then retied a knot in the shoelace Davey was stringing through the punch holes.

  “I’m also wondering about Eddie. How’s his appetite?” She wanted to be pleasant, to let Anna know she’d been thinking about him. “He’s such a great little eater.”

  “He’s unconscious, Rose Marie.” Anna had stopped weeping. “He doesn’t eat right now. Or cry. Or open his eyes.”

  Unconscious? Can’t cry? Can’t open his eyes? She couldn’t imagine what he was like. “Is he in a coma, then?”

  “Yes, a kind of coma.”

  She didn’t dare ask the next question—when will he wake up? Or the question after that—ever? She’d never heard of a baby that sick. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Thanks. Watching Chris is a big help.” Someone laughed in the background, a raucous guffaw that buried Anna’s last syllable. “My parents are flying in today. They should get to our house early afternoon. My dad will probably pick Chris up at your house after that. I assume Jake told you they’d stay home with Chris tomorrow.”