Ten Days

by Janet Gilsdorf

He didn’t need to explain it any further to his wife. She held Eddie against her chest and wept into the space between his little neck and shoulder. Obviously she understood everything Ruby had just said.

  That evening, as his in-laws were packing and Anna scrubbed a noodle-coated saucepan, he heard her scream. He dropped the book he was reading to Chris and bolted out of his son’s bedroom and down the steps.

  “Mommy . . . Mommy . . .” He heard Chris’s terrified words fade away as he neared the kitchen.

  “What happened?” he yelled.

  She stood, frozen, beside the sink, her face pale as a pearl. Eddie lay where he had last seen him, on a bed pillow on the kitchen table.

  “What’s wrong?” he yelled again.

  “Is he breathing? He was choking.”

  He studied Eddie, watched his son’s chest move up and down, saw the rose tint in his cheeks, a dab of mucus on his lips. He lifted Eddie from the pillow.

  “Honey, he’s fine. Did he cough a little? There’s some crud on his mouth that he might have spit up.”

  He held Anna’s elbow as he steered her to a chair beside the table. He laid Eddie in her lap. “See, honey, he’s fine.” Eddie turned his shoulder against her shirt and uttered a soft snort.

  “Is that what you heard?”

  She nodded.

  “He’s fine, honey. That was a little Eddie honk.”

  “Mommy.” Chris stood in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas and bare feet.

  “Come here, lovey,” Anna said to Chris and then wrapped her free arm around his shoulders. “I guess I was a little frightened.”

  Chris turned toward him, a puzzled look on his face.

  “False alarm, buddy. All is well here. Let’s go finish that book.”

  Chris’s chin was smeared with taco sauce, and shredded lettuce dotted the front of his shirt. “Good,” he murmured as he stuffed the last bite into his mouth.

  Jake had driven his in-laws to the airport the evening before and now they were alone, just the four of them, at dinner. He had finished eating and pushed his chair back a bit. Almost normal, he thought, surveying his family as they ended their meal.

  Eddie lay on the pillow on the kitchen table, between Chris and Anna. His eyes were closed. He seemed to be sleeping, even though he snorted with every fourth or fifth breath.

  Anna patted the baby’s cheek, said, “Sweet Eddie,” and turned his head to the side to stifle the snorts. He opened his eyes and blinked as if to shoo away the ceiling light. His pupils, tiny black dots amid the green-blue of his irises, seemed to catch her face.

  Maybe he could see, after all. He seemed to be tracking. His eyes moved as her face moved. Jake leaped to his feet and waved his teaspoon in front of Eddie. Light from overhead bounced off the spoon. Jake moved it slowly to the left. And then to the right. He couldn’t tell. He knew his exam wasn’t perfect. He wanted so much for his son to see that he couldn’t be sure what Eddie’s movements meant. They had to wait for the formal testing. Still, he seemed to avoid the light. That must mean the light triggered some kind of response in his retinas. Did that mean vision?

  Anna straightened the front of Eddie’s shirt. She was such a good mom . . . a very, very good mom. Things were working their way back to normal, to a new normal.

  Chris reached over his plate and tickled his brother’s foot. Eddie’s left knee jerked upward, drawing his foot away.

  “Put him in his high chair,” Chris said. “Pillows don’t belong on the table.” This was his officious voice, an echo of Anna when she clarified the rules.

  “Eddie can’t sit up in his high chair.” Jake wished Chris hadn’t issued that command. Wished he didn’t have to explain Eddie’s limitations to his older son.

  “Make him.” Chris took a sip of his milk.

  “It isn’t that easy, buddy.”

  His smart-mouthed son was right, in a way. Eddie couldn’t spend the rest of his life on a pillow on the kitchen table. Yet, he needed to be with them at dinner. Ideas began to bounce through his head. High chair. Car seat. Cushion. Oak.

  “How about we—you and I—build a new high chair for Eddie? One he can kind of lie in.”

  Chris nodded, his eyes sparkled.

  “And Mommy can paint something nice on it,” he added. “Maybe balloons or something.”

  “Tigers,” Chris yelled. “Paint tigers and make them growl.”

  Anna’s eyes lifted from her lap. First she looked at Chris and then at him and then at Eddie on the pillow and shook her head gently from side to side. “Not tigers.”

  “Then snakes,” Chris said.

  “How about a cat? And daisies,” Anna said.

  “Yeah,” Chris yelled. “Make him look like Bullet. And make him growl.”

  “Speaking of Bullet, where is he?” Anna asked. She glanced toward the heat register, then at the cat food bowl on the floor beside the fridge.

  “He’s around here somewhere,” Jake said. “I let him in when I came back from Taco Town. He’s probably hiding from you-know-who.” He nodded toward Chris.

  Anna giggled. It was good to hear her giggle; it sounded like water trickling over pebbles in a creek bed. Not long ago, he had thought his wife might never giggle, or laugh, or even smile again.

  Chapter 35

  Anna

  The sun was not quite above the backyard fence when she discovered they were out of both milk and breakfast cereal.

  “I want Kix,” Chris called. He leaned against the kitchen doorway, clutching the crotch of his pajama bottoms. His hair was tangled and only three of the six buttons on his pajama top were fastened.

  She parted his hair with her fingers.

  “Do you have to go potty?”

  “No. I want Kix.”

  Besides no milk and no cereal, there were no eggs. She couldn’t make omelets or pancakes or even French toast.

  “Go potty and get dressed while I figure out something to eat.”

  She’d have to make a trip to the grocery store. Day after day, she’d put it off, but now the food situation was a crisis.

  Eddie, awake but silent, lay in his new recliner, Jake’s invention that looked like a car seat on high-chair legs. The paint had finally dried and just last night she had finished the gingham covers for the cushion that lined the wooden frame. She had made three covers, assuring a clean one when the others were in the laundry. Jake had built it with room to grow, so that Eddie’s legs could get longer and his trunk could get taller, and he would still fit in his new seat. When, or if, he had the strength to sit up alone, he could go back to the regular high chair. In the meanwhile, this worked well. They all agreed Eddie needed to be at the kitchen table when they ate.

  She thought about the tasks ahead and shook her head at the enormity of it all. She needed to arrange for Rose Marie to take the boys again so she could get back to work. She could feed Eddie immediately before dropping the boys at day care and immediately after picking him up four hours later. That way Rose Marie wouldn’t have to deal with the feeding tube. Monday was the target, so she had three more days to iron out the details.

  She hadn’t driven the car since that horrible trip to the emergency room three weeks ago. She and the kids would go to the store after they finished eating. There must be something in the house to eat for breakfast.

  Inside the freezer she found a carton of vanilla ice cream; in the fridge, a wilted head of lettuce, three green onions, and an assortment of half-filled jars—ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, dill pickles, olives, and BBQ sauce. Nothing of substance.

  “Can I have a cookie?” Chris called from his bedroom.

  “We don’t have any,” she called back. “Besides, we’re working on breakfast.”

  “Grandma made some. I want one of Grandma’s cookies.”

  She opened the door to the corner cupboard. Tang. That was a start. Next to the bag of brown sugar stood a plastic container she’d never seen before. Inside were cookies; they smelled like oatmeal and the little brown
things looked like raisins.

  Her grandmother’s words tracked through her head: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” That resourceful woman would have been able to cobble together something for breakfast.

  She stirred two tablespoons of Tang into a glass of water and set a bowl of ice cream on the table beside a cookie. Ice cream was, after all, made of cream, which was close to milk, and the cookie was close to oat cereal. The raisins were fruit.

  Then she called to Chris, “Breakfast’s ready.”

  He wandered to the table and looked at the bowl of ice cream. Then he looked at her. She couldn’t read the expression on his face.

  Before Eddie’s illness, he never would have found a breakfast like this. They would have had plenty of cereal and milk. There were lots of differences since Eddie’s illness.

  “You found Grandma’s cookies,” he finally said.

  “I did, and figured we could try them out for breakfast.”

  He smiled and blew a mouthful of air into his brother’s face. Eddie squirmed and sputtered.

  Chris climbed on his stool at the table. The rays of the morning sun, which had cleared the top of the backyard fence by now and streamed through the kitchen window, lit up his face.

  “Ow, too bright.” He clamped his eyes shut.

  She drew the curtain across the window, shutting out the harsh rays, letting in the filtered ones.

  Chris was already strapped into his car seat when she carried Eddie out the back door and into the garage.

  She laid Eddie in the infant seat, but his body didn’t mold to the padding the way it used to—now his legs were stiff and his spine, rather than bending at the waist, arched backward. She leaned into the rear car door and tried to push him into place. She kneaded his belly to make it bend, tried to fold his knees toward his chest, but his rigid body wouldn’t slide into the seat. She took a step backward and bumped against the snow shovel, knocking it off the wall. It landed in an oil puddle on the garage floor. She let out a sigh of frustration.

  Chris kicked against the upholstery. “Let’s go,” he said, a perfect imitation of an impatient Jake.

  She couldn’t remember how Jake had gotten Eddie into the car for the ride home from the hospital. He hadn’t had any trouble that she could recall. But then, she hadn’t given that part of going home much attention.

  “Chris, settle down,” she called. “Quit kicking.” She stood beside the open car door and rubbed her sore back.

  “Mommy.” Chris’s call was sharp as an ice pick. “Let’s go.”

  She tried once more to prop Eddie into his car seat. This time a gentle push seemed to coax his body into the right position—his bottom settled into the seat padding, his spine leaned easily against the back. Something had changed in him, something had loosened him up.

  “In a minute, Chris.” She fastened the straps of Eddie’s car seat.

  “I wanna get out, Mommy.” Chris was clawing at his seat belt.

  “Stay there. We’ll get going to the store in a minute. Count to thirty.”

  She fished the snow shovel from the oily puddle and hooked it on the nail in the wall.

  “Twenty-one,” Chris droned. “Twenty-two.”

  As she turned back to the car, she caught the smell.

  “Twenty-nine. THIRTY,” Chris yelled, victorious. Then his voice dropped. “Eddie pooped. It stinks.”

  She wiped her face with her hands, ran her fingertips over her forehead. How could a trip to the grocery store be so difficult? It wasn’t like this before. She reached into the car and unbuckled Chris from his car seat. He clung to her as if stitched to her body, his arms so tight around her neck she could hardly breathe. She rubbed his legs, patted his back, and stroked his hair while she swayed side to side in the damp, earthy morning air that, like her, was trapped inside the garage.

  She had no idea how Eddie’s illness, the hospitalization, her long absence had affected Chris. In spite of his sometimes cocky talk, he was still a little boy, a child who needed his mother to take care of him, to protect him. The past three weeks must have felt like a hurricane, followed by a tornado, followed by a blizzard for him. Like hell to the third power.

  When Chris finally let go of her neck, she set him on the floor and picked Eddie out of his seat. “We’ll clean him up and then go to the store.” With Chris hanging like moss from the waistband of her slacks and Eddie cradled in her arms, she hobbled back to the kitchen door.

  She laid Eddie on the sofa to change his diaper. He had always been a placid baby but now, was more so—no crying, no cooing. His hips splayed apart, his knees were tightly bent and the soles of his feet rubbed against each other. He didn’t pull against her, didn’t kick at the air, didn’t try to flip over while she slid the new Pamper under his little butt. She ripped the backing off the sticky tabs, smoothed the plastic edge against his belly, and remembered the old days—back when she took for granted that Eddie was a healthy baby, back when she took everything for granted. A month ago, she found his rolling around irritating. “Lie still, would you?” she had said, half playfully as she grabbed his leg to keep him on his back. Right now, more than anything, she wished he would flip over while she changed his diaper.

  She washed her hands, gave Chris another cookie, and paged Jake.

  “Where are you?” she asked when he called back.

  “In the clinic.”

  She explained what had just happened, about the junk food for breakfast, about the snow shovel, about the impossibility of getting to the grocery store. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. She remembered how, when she was a little girl, her father kissed her scraped knee, made monkey faces, danced around her like a clown. How her tears had turned to smiles when her father had whispered, “After the rain comes the sunshine, Anna-danna-my-dear-bobanna,” and everything was good again. But that was long ago.

  “It’s okay.” Jake’s voice was smooth as brandy. “Ice cream and cookies won’t hurt him. Actually, it’s a pretty clever solution to the no-breakfast problem. I can stop for milk and cereal on the way home. What else do we need in the line of groceries?”

  “No, we’ll go. Hopefully later this afternoon. I just wanted to tell someone how difficult this seems.”

  “You’re doing great, honey.”

  His voice was comforting. His reassuring words seemed honest. She had to believe they were. She wished he were there, but he would be home later that evening and would help with the children. He had even begun to do some of the cooking. He and Chris. “The Campbell guy chefs,” Jake called them.

  “Can I do that?” Chris asked as he watched her prepare the feeding tube.

  “No, sweetheart. I have to do this.” She attached the formula-filled syringe to the hub of the tube and slowly pushed the plunger.

  “Does he like that?” Chris asked.

  “Do you mean does he like the tube? Or does he like the formula?”

  Chris shrugged, staring solemnly at his baby brother.

  “Well, he can’t taste the formula because it doesn’t go into his mouth. I think he likes to eat by the tube, because he feels full when we’re done.”

  When she finished feeding Eddie, she laid him in his crib. “Chris,” she called. “Nap time.” How could she manage to return to work? She doubted she would ever get into a routine. At best, it would be a new routine, not like before.

  Chris argued with her about the nap, whined that he wanted to sleep standing up. “Don’t be silly,” she said and led him into his room. She lifted him into his bed, handed him Alphie the stuffed alligator, shut the blinds, kissed him, and left.

  With both boys asleep, she decided to take a bath. She used to relax in the tub, back when it had been possible to relax. In the past, the warm water that lapped against her skin while she swirled her arms through the soapy liquid had softened tight muscles, quelled hurt feelings, sweetened sour moods.

  Naked, she sat on the toilet lid. Goose bumps sprouted on her bare belly as she waited for t
he hot water to wash through the pipes. She studied her bare feet, the pink of her toes against the brown floor tiles. Toes were funny things, she thought, a row of swollen, fleshy fringe hanging off the end of each foot. It was hard to believe such ridiculous tags of bone and skin belonged to her. Inching her feet apart slightly, she squared her toes with the grout lines. It was satisfying, the sight of her bare feet against the tile grid—evidence that predictability and order still existed in the world.

  As she stared at her two baby toes that curled inward, at her bruised right ankle, at the way her second toes were longer than her great toes, she wondered if she was really sitting there. She wiggled her feet, watched them rise and fall against the brown tiles.

  “Am I dreaming this,” she muttered out loud. “Is this real?”

  Six weeks ago she had taken a bath; six weeks from now she would take a bath. As she wondered about former, present, and future baths, time seemed very fluid; days had sloshed into weeks, which would slosh into months. The baths themselves were routine, almost boring in their sameness. It was the surrounding circumstances that distinguished one from the next. Maybe she could magically transform this one into a previous bath—the last one before Eddie’s illness—and redo the events that had followed.

  Suddenly, the reality of Eddie swept over her—a crushing, suffocating, blinding, inky green truth. She wanted to run, to get away from it, to race to where it wasn’t. The room darkened. Her stomach twisted. She shut her eyes, moaned, and grabbed at the side of the sink, trying to escape the inescapable knowing that overwhelmed her—Eddie would never be normal, would never run up a flight of stairs, never blow a chewing gum bubble, never count from one hundred backward by sevens just for the fun of it. He’d probably never count at all. Maybe he’d never talk, never tell anyone he loved her, never tell her of his victories, his worries, his sorrows. Would he be able to hear her voice? To see a beautiful sunset? Maybe he’d just lie like a blob of dough and grow old.

  For a while at the hospital, she had thought Eddie would die. At other times she had convinced herself he would snap out of it—that the magic of modern medicine would erase his infection and return him to a healthy baby. None of that was real. Absolutely none of it. What was real about Eddie was that he would never, never, never be normal.