She pointed at the tubes and said to Brian, “Daddy, you need to call the doctor. She made a big mistake.” She began to cry. If screaming was bad, crying was worse. Her screams possessed an overtone of fight. The tears were defeat.
Brian calmed Gracie down by telling her a story about a clan of anarchist ants. I hoped the sound of his voice could carry her away from the glare, the noise, the pain of the recovery room, and deep into the velvet pocket of her own imagination. I knew she would relish diminutive creatures toppling a king. In Brian’s version, the ants began to eat away at the palace, brick by golden brick. By the end of the story Gracie was adding her own twist to the king’s comeuppance, in a voice still hoarse from the breathing tube: “… and then they ate his feast food. And his hair. And his shoes. And then he was a bald, hungry, barefoot king, and nobody would be his friend.”
In her worldview, to be friendless was the worst possible fate.
After a few hours, they let us go home.
The next morning she came into bed with us and held up her shirt to reveal the tubes.
“This hurting keeps moving around on me.”
Gabe stared. “Gracie’s tubies,” he said.
Brian went to fetch her some pain medication.
“Gabe, you can touch them,” Gracie said. But he did not want to touch. He didn’t even want to look. Me either. I hoped she couldn’t sense Gabe’s revulsion. Or, pray God, mine.
Brian said, “Can I touch them, Gracie?”
“Sure, Daddy,” she said. She handed him one tube. “Let’s be puppets.”
“Puppets?”
“Puppets!” and she began to make her tube speak to Brian’s tube.
And like that, the tubes were part of the family. Tiny, animated presences enlivened by the life force of the girl who wore them.
We’d been instructed to examine the entry site daily for signs of infection. I’d call Gracie over, and she would happily lift her shirt. “Nothing is wrong with my tubies,” she’d say. My tubies. Hers. Gracie would stand and wait for our worry to pass. She was patient, patting Brian on the head. “Good dog, Daddy,” she’d say. The tubes entered her body under a clear patch of Tegaderm. We’d been warned that if they were ever pulled out, she would bleed profusely, and so we were incredibly careful with them. But she didn’t fuss over them.
It was astonishing how willing she was to overlook the pain they’d caused, the ongoing annoyance, and the betrayal, on our part, that they represented. She accepted them: two white, soft, rubber straws, tucked beneath a mesh vest, pressed against her torso. They ran straight into the center of her chest and disappeared inside her.
The trope of kids’ resilience was almost grotesquely true in Gracie’s case. It felt as though, given enough time, she could adjust to, accommodate, stake imaginative ownership over anything. I worried that if we attached, say, the front end of an old Chevy to her midriff, she’d be driving herself around the living room within a week, shouting, “Look at me, I’m car girl!” I wanted her to complain, protect, resist. To assert her right to be a kid, without amendments to her person. But that wasn’t her way. Her way was to make peace with the invading army, to claim it as her own.
34
Gracie got into the habit of running into our bedroom every morning to ask, “Is this another hospital day?” Typically, we’d say yes; so far, all we’d seen of North Carolina was the inside of pediatric hospital treatment rooms. Finally, after two weeks, we took a surprise day off.
“No hospital today!” Brian said.
Gracie was giddy with disbelief. “Really not?” she kept asking, as we got dressed, as we sat down to breakfast, as we got in the car. “Really not?”
“Not,” we said. “Really not.”
“Can we go swimming?” she asked. Then a second later, “Can we go to a forest?” And then as we’d begun to drive toward the park, “Wait, can we find ponies?” The pleasure of granting her small wishes was immense. We knew of a ranch nearby.
“We can find ponies and cows. Maybe even sheep or llamas,” Brian answered.
“Can you ride llamas?” Gracie said.
“If anyone can ride a llama, Gracie, it would be you,” Brian said, and she burst into squeaky laughter. We looked at each other, soak it up.
At the ranch Gracie went mute with excitement. We kept asking her, “Is this fun, do you like it?” but she wouldn’t answer. She just looked from right to left, left to right, with her mouth slightly open.
“Horses!” she finally shouted as we walked between two pastures. On either side of us were sleek thoroughbreds, haughty fashion models tossing their glossy manes. Lustrous with good health, grazing their way through untroubled lives. I felt a bizarre surge of envy, even resentment. I wanted what they had, for Gracie.
We found the stable manager, who let Gracie pick between a high-spirited roan and a docile, sway-backed Palomino named Whispers. Gracie made the sympathy choice. She reminded me of my mom, who always took home the misshapen, orphan Christmas tree. The last tree on the lot.
“Do you want to feed Whispers before your ride?” the stable girl asked, and handed her an apple. I wished for some transfer of energy or identity to pass between them in that casual, exchange. I hoped the girl would confer on Gracie whatever it was that made her own ponytail so thick it could barely be contained by a rubber band. Be a girl like this someday, I willed. Be sixteen, be a barn rat. Be a girl with a crush on a horse and muscular shoulders and seven guys in love with you. Or just be sixteen, in any condition.
The girl fit a hard hat onto Gracie’s head and patiently helped her up.
“Bye, Whispers,” Brian said. “Have fun with Gracie. Don’t ride her too hard.”
Gabriel let us swing him up onto a very old, barely breathing brown mare. But the moment his butt touched the saddle he cried out, “Down. I off!” I walked him over to the arena’s edge. Every time Gracie passed our spot, it was a celebrity sighting, “Sissy rides! Sissy! Sissy!” he shouted out for acknowledgment, a wave, anything.
As we watched Gracie, a cat came up to Gabe, sniffed him, then settled down in the grass at his feet. Gabriel, having discovered the pleasure of retroactive commands, said to the cat, “Fall down!” Then he offered his hand to the cat. “Help?” he said. This was a favorite game he had with Brian; he’d push Brian down and then help him up. He seemed baffled when the cat ignored his offer. “Kitty don’t yike me,” he said.
“Did the kitty say why?” Brian asked.
Gabe ignored the question and pointed to the grass, saying, “Down, Daddy!” Brian obliged. Anytime Gabe found one of us at his level, he would scramble onto our backs. He pushed now at Brian’s shoulders. “Be a pony, Tiger!” Brian moved mildly across the grass. “Be a tiger, Pony!”
On the drive home Gabe fell into a deep sleep, but Gracie was too excited to nap. “I rode Whispers for a long time,” she said. “And she was a good one.”