Missing Chldren

by Gerald Lynch

  Her mother, in a too-tight white pantsuit, had a face as round as a child’s drawing of a happy moon. She said cheerily, “Lu-Ping better night now,” and seemed to believe herself.

  Lu-Ping smiled and smiled and squeezed more tightly. She didn’t try to speak again.

  The bronze-faced father said, “We pray for better or peace. Now we go.” He was always gruff in his minimal speech. On his way to the door he flared at me: “You learn.”

  What?

  The mother came forward to kiss Lu-Ping goodnight and I saw it then, the stark terror in Mom’s liquid eyes, the downturn of tiny mouth. This was a goodbye kiss. She believed nothing. If she believed anything, it was that a great big nothing was coming to live with them in place of their beautiful daughter. She followed her husband out.

  Lu-Ping exhaled as if giving up in some held-breath game, then grimaced and squeezed so hard that I felt pain. She turned her face to the darkening windows and cried as she’d never cried. In fact, she’d never cried.

  I sat on the bed, still holding her hand tightly. Eventually her breathing regularized. She moaned more asleep than she ever had awake. It was time for Demerol, maybe morphine already, as she’d clearly been deceiving me. Why would a child conceal pain from her doctor? Why would anybody?

  Yes, that very worst part of the day, the passage between light and dark. Most accidents happen at this time, they say. Suicides too, I would imagine. Darkness doesn’t fall, darkness is everywhere, always. The sun doesn’t set and the sun doesn’t rise. Evening is a shunning, a wilful turning away from the pathetic sun. As the darkness had deepened in the room, it felt like black air.

  And that is my job mostly. I mean, for the benefit of those who would get me wrong and hastily judge this character that enables me to do it well. This bwana me, the great white doctor, the patriarchal prick, whatever. If I mention Tamara’s shiny blackness, I’m racist and probably misogynist to boot. If I prefer medical science to Art Foster’s placebo voodoo, I’m an unfeeling machine, a shill for pharmaceutical companies dispensing drugs instead of providing spiritual care.

  Now my beautiful daughter was missing. That one black hole of a thought was tearing apart my spinning mind and sucking it in with the rest of my world.

  Unlike at my last visit to Lu-Ping’s room, this time its big windows gave on nothing but washed-out, palest blue sky. The bed’s dark privacy curtain was bunched to the wall, the bedside table was clear, and the bed… Even my breathing seemed to echo in the antiseptic emptiness.

  Shit, piss, puke, and ammonia. Sterility. Death on a well-made hospital bed. Only the far side-rail was up. There is no worse sight than a freshly made hospital bed whose recent child occupant had not been discharged home. They might claim to have it worse in neonatal intensive care. Newborns die freighted with everybody’s dreams and for the parents it’s a waking nightmare. But neonates have negligible personality. They don’t leave the consuming absence of a grown child who has died. They cannot command such defeat. It’s like suicide, it kills everything.

  I brushed the cool whiteness of the sheets with the back of my hand, then flattened both palms and rested there with chin on chest.

  Why had Lu-Ping been hiding the severity of her suffering? The untreated pain would have been draining her depleted recuperative resources. Why would a child do that? Why would anybody hide pain from a doctor!

  I sat on the bed. I swivelled and lay flat on my back. The rising chill seeped through my lab coat. I can’t say how long I lay there. I was so weary, I dozed…

  “Don’t blame yourself, Lorne.”

  I was standing before I knew it. I kept my face averted.

  “I don’t blame myself, Dr. Foster. Why would you even think such a thing?”

  “Sure, a more holistic approach to treatment might have kept…the girl —”

  “Lu-Ping.”

  “Huh?”

  “Her name: Lu-Ping.”

  “Whatever.” He snorted lightly.

  Is there anything else worth knowing about Dr. Art Foster?

  “My point is that although a more holistic approach to treatment would likely have kept the girl alive longer, to what purpose? Don’t do the guilt spiral, Lorne. I’ve read the charts, and it was too late for your looping girl the day her retarded parents finally brought her in.”

  “Lu-Ping, for fuck’s sake! You make less sense every day, Foster! And it’s never too late.” I didn’t like the subject of dead and missing children under my care, so I channelled my anger to the deal I’d made with him earlier in lending him my vintage car in exchange for his making an elusive contact for me. “You’d better be taking care of my Caddy, Foster.”

  “Easy, little man.” He danced his eyebrows lasciviously: “Tomorrow’s the big night. Sorry for the delay.”

  I reached for my vibrating cell and again turned my back on Foster.

  “Yes, dear?… Right away.”

  On my way out I gave Foster a wide berth. I hurried along the sweetly acrid hall.

  He shouted after, “I’m here to listen, Lorne… I told you so!”

  I said to Tamara in passing, “Emergency. Triage and try to reschedule everything, please, give whatever you can to Dr. Foster on my orders, and thank you, you’re the best, Tamara.”

  She called across her counter, “What’s up, Doc?”

  I pushed Veronica’s little Golf and was soon back in Troutstream, slowing on our treed crescents. The continual run of dog-walkers paraded past — those decent suburbanites on retractable leashes — carrying tied-off plastic bags of dog shit, like some subspecies of human genetically designed to link a rich man’s dog to its colostomy sack… That’s right: the man at the museum had displayed no plastic bag, so was probably not the real dog owner. I must tell Detective Beldon that too.

  As I rounded the bottom of our crescent, Piscator Drive, I had to slow further for a long parade of kiddies toting backpacks, like midget paratroopers marching off to war games at the playground. And as I bellied for the turn into my driveway, our aging East-Indian-looking neighbour came loping along the sidewalk and I had to wait for him to pass. He was an unsteady jogger who always had a white rag tied to his left knee and looked ready to pitch onto his face with each surrendering step. Unmindful of race distinctions, I’d christened him “the Tanzanian Marathoner.” There goes the Tanzanian Marathoner! Shawn would call from the front window, with no idea of the reference to John Stephen Akhwari’s incredible spectacle of plodding persistence at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Injured earlier in the race, he’d finished dead last after the sun had set and the sated spectators were long gone. But would she ever call so again?

  Stupidly, I waited to see if Veronica would come to the front door to greet me. Owen was probably still lying on his bed wearing earplugs. I regularly had to order him to turn off his music and come to a meal. Music? It’s more rhythmic assault under a ground cover of woofer, the rhymed abuse of inner-city American blacks who rap as though they’d like nothing better than to use Owen’s white suburban ass for target practice. But of course it’s all really just “let’s pretend.” No real violence from those “gangstas,” other than to melody-lovers’ ears. Oh, once in a while someone named Fat Daddy will stick a fork in Big Mofo’s ass and that will establish “cred” and satisfy violent cravings for another year. But mostly these hammock-crotched, genital-obsessed rich kids are capable of nothing more than a drive-by sneering.

  Does saying that make me sound racist and old? As for the first, I’ve always thought racism the most dangerous form of false generalizing. And I was just old enough to remember peeling cellophane off the gift of Abbey Road and hearing Paul McCartney sing “Oh! Darling” for the first time. Top that, Sonny Jim, with your Bullwinkle rhymes of fantasy sex…and vio…lence …

  Ah, I thought, sitting there in my driveway, so this is what it’s like for a parent waiting for the diagnosis, the pro
gnosis: frenetic, diverting thoughts, avoidance.

  As if on cue, one of our big Troutstream crows cawed its mocking caw…caw.

  I paused again inside the front door. My own house felt like a stranger’s. It was too bright along the entrance hallway leading to the kitchen, glowing like the beginnings of a migraine. Could one… Okay, could two Valium do that?

  They were in the living room to the left, Veronica on the couch with her hands twisting in her lap. She looked at me with a blankness I’d never seen, as if she didn’t know me. She didn’t come to me. I suddenly felt the breakfast I’d missed, on a stomach sloshing only with coffee and other chemicals.

  Detective Beldon stood at the front bay window with his back to the room. He smiled a weak greeting over his shoulder and then, most oddly, turned back to the street, one hand holding the other wrist behind. His redheaded brush cut seemed almost to brush the stippled ceiling. He wore a shiny grey suit whose pants weren’t quite long enough, and the shoes looked faux Oxfords. I’d not taken to him at the museum and the dislike continued. To him, I was just another missing-kid case, which his indifferent back was confirming for me.

  I went and placed a hand on Veronica’s shoulder and she briefly held my wrist. I cupped the crown of her head, kissed it and stepped back.

  “Owen okay?”

  “Hmm.”

  Detective Beldon turned. “Could we sit in your lovely family room back there?” He nodded through the archway to the adjoining room. “I for one would feel more comfortable.”

  He hadn’t smiled. I liked that.

  When we were seated — Veronica and I on the love seat, he in my green recliner — he said with a small grin, “Dr. Thorpe, your wife, Veronica, as she’s asked me to call her —”

  “Please call me Lorne. Yes, Detective?”

  “Kevin, then. Veronica has answered my questions about the recent poisoning case at the hospital that got you all the publicity. But I’d like you to begin at the beginning and tell me the whole story, if you will please.”

  “What? The arsenic-poisoning case? What’s that got to do with Shawn’s kidnapping?”

  Without changing expression he spoke directly: “Just tell the story, Doc — Lorne. Leave nothing out. Let me decide what’s important. Okay?”

  Puzzled, I glanced at Veronica, but her gaze had drifted to the French doors opening onto the patio and, beyond, the tall cedar hedge.

  I took a deep breath, felt lightheaded as I exhaled slowly. “Sure, whatever you say.”

  But first I told him Otto Fyshe’s story of the boy who went missing overnight. During the telling, Veronica swung towards me with a hand flat on her chest. Then my observation that the man at the museum had carried no plastic bag, so clearly was not a real —

  He cut me short and prompted, “The poisoning case, it was a female child, right? A couple of weeks ago.”

  “Actually it began exactly two weeks ago Friday. A very sick five-year-old girl named Marie LeBlanc presented at emergency in a rapidly deteriorating condition, with severe symptoms bizarrely combined — respiration, renal, liver — what looked, in fact, like imminent total systems failure. She was drifting in and out of consciousness. Aggressive treatment was called for, but for what? Preliminary tests proved indeterminate and waiting for lab results would have been only to confirm the cause of death.”

  “Dr. Lorne Thorpe pulls emergency duty?”

  “I was called in to consult because Dr. Art Foster suspected some variation of lymphoblastic leukemia. Foster, a heart-and-lungs man, acts on hunches a lot, though here he did have some symptoms support. Following my own examination of the girl, I was pursuing a different line of questioning with the parents — when Foster interrupted me.

  “I intercepted a nurse and asked her to escort the parents to a privacy room. Over the past year we had decorated our privacy rooms in the iconography of the major religions, leaving some nondenominational. We also had accessorized our nurses to appear child-friendly, so that Nurse Louise’s uniform, especially the top, looked like an advertisement for a carnival.”

  Detective Beldon interrupted: “Lorne, I know I said everything, but try to stick to the main story line, okay?” His face pinched: “Have you been drinking?”

  I feared I was getting a buzz off the Valium, so I concentrated on the story.

  “No. Dr. Foster looked at the father. ‘Catholic?’ ‘Oui, certainement.’ The nurse said, ‘We have a comfy Catholic room right this way, Mom and Dad.’ The parents were confused. They looked to me with abandoned eyes, then followed the nurse.

  “Foster and I remained in the wide smelly hall. Foster tented his hands on his breastbone and looked across my head. Tall Foster does that a lot, to signal you’re only half-worthy of his lofty attention.”

  “Lorne,” Beldon said flatly.

  Veronica stood. “I’ll make some coffee.”

  I watched her walk to the kitchen where, instead of preparing coffee, she first sat at the kitchen table and stared out its patio doors. I turned to Detective Beldon: “Foster smacked his lips and said, ‘How do you explain it then?’

  “‘Explain what, Dr. Foster? I’m not telepathic.’ ‘Come on, Lorne?’ Like I’d missed the symptoms of full-blown leprosy. ‘The blisters on the girl’s palms?’ Art Foster was always over-dramatizing, and now he was gesticulating with his own indecently padded palms.

  “I smirked: ‘I don’t explain what I don’t know, Dr. Foster. An accident at the stove? Abuse? Stigmata? You explain. What do blisters have to do with any leukemia?’

  “He leaned down and whispered, ‘For the good of the patient, Lorne, we must work as a team on this. We’re losing that little girl.’ He jabbed his forefinger down the hall, as if she were standing there waiting.

  “I sipped air and said, ‘You should not have questioned my method in front of the parents, Dr. Foster. You ever pull that stunt with me again, I’ll break your bleached teeth.’

  “‘Lorne,’ he pleaded, ‘this anger! All I said was we’d be monitoring their little girl closely and running tests. Surely you concede that the symptoms could point to a leukemia. I mean, the anemia and all.’ He again pointed down the hall. ‘That little girl’s lymphocyte count is in the cellar! I didn’t know where you were going with your interview. You never consul…share. I was concerned we were confusing the parents further, and we both know where that leads — the malpractice team. Now, why don’t you go see if we can stabilize the child while I talk further with Mom and Dad?’

  “‘Why don’t you see to your patient, Dr. Foster? She is definitely not suffering from any leukemia. I’ll continue my interview of the mother and father.’

  “‘Lorne, if I’ve overstepped my authority in any manner whatsoever — ’

  “‘Fuck off, Foster.’ That felt good. It even sounded good.”

  “Lorne,” said Veronica as she drifted back to join us. I salivated at the smell of coffee dripping.

  “Please,” said Beldon. “Time in these cases is always critical. I don’t want us to lose sight of your little girl. Just the essential story, please, Lorne.”

  Veronica inhaled sharply and returned her gaze to the backyard.

  I sped up the telling. “Okay, then. Ten minutes later I was still sitting with the father on a small blue couch beneath the colourful full-wall mural of Jesus with some children. Both parents were stupefied at the thought of not seeing their child alive again. I’d experienced it many times in my work, of course, the bereft, stunned silence. At best, a catatonic formality. Getting used to missing their child.”

  Veronica made a kicked-dog noise.

  “I’d been patiently questioning the father, a broken-English-speaking French-speaker from Gatineau, when Foster barged in to announce that he’d stabilized ‘their little girl’ with a mild sedative — bad move — ordered blood and platelet transfusion and begun a course of antibiotics —
‘prednisone,’ he said to me out the side of his mouth like a gangster — all of which had produced an immediate favourable response, he claimed.

  “The silent mother, shaped like a dark four-foot pillow with a perfectly round head, had to rock herself twice before she could lunge from her corner chair; she cupped Foster’s right hand in both her own. She was so short she appeared to be kneeling and kissing the great healer’s hand. And Foster permitted this display to continue!”

  “Dear,” said Veronica to the yard, “I’m sure Kevin means …”

  But I saw that I held Beldon’s attention, so I hurried on.

  “I heaved to and, stretching, went eyeball-to-eyeball with Foster. ‘I’m going to examine the patient again. Dr. Foster will wait with you till I return.’

  “The five-year-old looked even smaller in the white hospital bed and glare of examination lighting. The covering sheet had been kicked off. Her dark hair was pasted to the side of her head, and closer I could see the sweat sliding from her temples and forming into beads alongside her ear. Her eyes were closed but her lips were moving, like the beak of an immature chick whose egg had fallen from the nest. Perhaps she was praying or silently protesting. I —”

  “Doctor,” Beldon said.

  I expect I blushed. But I couldn’t very well claim it was the Valium talking.

  “I had to get closer to sniff her breath. Her lids flicked up and we too went eyeball-to-eyeball. She whispered, ‘Suis-je dans le ciel?’

  “What? The sky? No, heaven. No heaven. ‘Pas le ciel, chère, pas ciel.’ I cupped her chin in my palm and it was as hot as a doorknob to a burning room. Her eyes closed and her face relaxed. ‘Merci…papa…’

  “The latest ICU report confirmed my suspicion — very low BP, muscle spasms, tender abdomen, sheets they couldn’t keep dry from sweat, those mysteriously seared palms. And the clinchers, which my closer examination had revealed — inflammation of the nasal and oral mucus membranes, garlicky breath.