“Lock the car,” my father said, tossing me the keys and ducking through the undersize doorframe.
The waiting room gave off the impression of having once been a different kind of room hastily decorated to look like a doctor’s office. The carpet was stained; the plastic upholstery of the chairs was hard and cracked. It smelled of antiseptic and rotting fruit. Still, it was more official-looking than the living room–turned-clinic we’d been to in Slovenia, and there was comfort in this formality. But Rahela was shaking with fever now, and a nurse took her from my mother and into an exam room. Dr. Carson, with her insufferably white teeth and a matching lab coat, appeared from the back soon after and ushered us inside.
“Good to see you again,” she said. No one replied.
By the time we reached her room, Rahela was already strapped down to the infant-size examination table, one flex of plastic tubing in her nose and another in her foot. Her chest and mouth moved as if she were crying, but produced only the faintest trace of what appeared to be a full-blown wail. I tore a corner off the exam table paper and scrunched it into a ball.
“Okay let’s flip her,” the nurse said.
“What’s going on?” said my mother.
The nurse rolled Rahela onto her stomach, then refastened the straps restraining her arms and legs.
“We have to do a lumbar puncture to check for bacterial infection,” Dr. Carson said in sterile but much improved Croatian. She snapped on her latex gloves; a long needle gleamed on the tray beside her.
“Lumbar?” said my mother. “You’re going to put that in her spine?” She lunged toward Rahela, but my father caught her by the elbow and pressed her firmly against the wall, whispering things I couldn’t hear.
My mother began to scream. Somehow it was easier to watch the needle. I uncrumpled the paper and shredded it, the scraps falling to the floor.
My father forced my mother down into the room’s single chair. The doctors turned Rahela back over, shot her with pain medication, gave her a pacifier. She looked comfortable for the first time in months.
“All right then,” said Dr. Carson, placing a hand on my mother’s shoulder. For a moment I saw what looked like sadness flicker across the doctor’s face, but it was gone quickly. “Here are the forms for Rahela’s transport to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. They have some of the best pediatric specialists for renal failure in the world. We’ll have her on the plane as soon as she’s stable.” Dr. Carson gestured to the second of two piles of paperwork on the counter. “And here are the foster family consent forms.” My father looked up and my mother lowered her eyes.
“Foster family?” my father said. “Dijana, what is she talking about?”
Dr. Carson jiggled some change in the pocket of her lab coat. “Your wife informed me that your visas were denied?” she said, pausing for my father to affirm this statement. He didn’t. “Rahela will be admitted to the hospital upon her arrival, where she’ll be housed in the intensive care unit.” Dr. Carson was gaining speed now, employing the most professional of the range of tones in which we’d heard her speak. “However, after emergent care is completed, there is an outpatient treatment portion, for weekly dialysis and examinations.”
“Outpatient?”
“Rahela will stay with a volunteer emergency foster family until her program at the hospital is complete. Rest assured that all foster families are screened for safety by MediMission—”
“I thought you people were just going to fix her! Fix her and send her home!” The vein in my father’s neck, the one that usually signaled that I’d done something wrong and was going to get a whack with a belt, had bulged out precariously far, banging along with the rhythm of his heart. I shied away instinctively, but all the anger and frustration instead compacted into a single tear that passed over his cheek. It was the only time I’d ever seen him cry. “I can’t even take care of my own children,” he said.
Dr. Carson tried for a reassuring smile, but it came off lopsided. “You are taking care of her. This is the only way Rahela will get better.”
“Fuck off,” said my father.
“I’ll wait outside so you can say goodbye.”
I stared at my sister. For once she was quiet. Her eyes were glassy and she looked deep in thought or far away, as if she had already crossed the ocean. I wished I knew more about her and less about the patterns of her sickness. She was so small, so busy surviving that we hadn’t gotten the chance to be like other sisters, but her hands still fit well in mine. I hoped her foster family in America would be kind, would tell her stories and take her to the park and sing to her.
“We’ll see you soon, baby,” my mother was saying over and over. My father put his hand on Rahela’s head, ran his fingers through the black hair that was beginning to curl, and said nothing.