Brian and I looked at each other, triumphant; we’d made her happy. We could still do that. Her toes were dusty. She’d ridden an animal bigger than herself. She’d had joy. For that matter, so had Gabe. So had we.
Later that night, at dinner, we told Gracie that in a few weeks she’d go live in the hospital for a while. She looked at us.
“I guess Eden doesn’t have to go to the hospital. My friends never get blood. I guess they are going to get big.” We leapt to remind her she would get big too, and that most people spend time in the hospital at some point. At the same time, we wanted to acknowledge what she suddenly seemed to know—that she was an outlier.
After dinner we all climbed into bed to watch Shrek. The kids were not particular fans, but Brian and I loved Eddie Murphy’s donkey. (“That’s right, fool! Now I’m a flying talking donkey!”) Lying in the king-size bed in Durham was a luxury after years of squeezing into beds too small for the four of us. We could sprawl out. Gabe got as close as possible to all in his proximity; Gracie was happy with an elbow touching one parent, a toe touching another. I felt the swell of well-being that comes from being in physical contact with everyone you love most.
“Today was good,” Brian said. “We did good.”
“We did do good,” I said. And we both knew good encompassed more than the ranch.
This day was not a last-meal indulgence, I told myself. It was a happiness to store away—for when things got bad. Or went from bad to worse or from worse to unbearable. As we’d been promised they would.
A happiness to pull her forward, back to the small pleasures of life. I’ll remind her of Whispers. Add it to the list of things she loved: ice cream, the geese in our backyard, the plum tree she tried to climb in Brooklyn, the Thanksgiving kite. Remember, I’ll tell her, how you loved the red diamond in the blue sky, remember how, when it fell and landed in the snow, such unlikely North Carolina snow, you ran to it like it was a lost or injured friend.
35
On a night not long after the tubies went in, Gracie was playing with a pair of My Little Ponies in the kitchen. She interrupted her play to splay across the floor, eyes closed, silent and still. A pony dropped onto its side, near her head, unmoving.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m being died,” she said. “Can you hear me talk?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
She looked up at me. “Was I talking before when I be died?”
“You didn’t be died, lovey.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Do you mean when you took the medicine that made you go to sleep when we put your tubes in?”
“When I be died, could you hear me talking?”
“You didn’t be died,” I said again, too sharp. Accusatory.
She gave me a look—what’s your problem?—and took her ponies elsewhere.
Having sensed my discomfort with the concept, the kids spent the evening playing a resurrection game by commanding various objects “to be died” and springing them back to life. They practiced on each other. “You die,” Gabe said to Gracie, matter-of-fact. She fell over. He chanted his magic phrase, “Flubby buzzy, flubby buzz!” Up she sat, reanimated. Oh, what fun.
That night at dinner, aiming for a little civilization, I put a flickering votive candle in the center of the table. Gabe was enthralled; he loved nothing more than to blow things out. I kept moving it away from him, and he kept blowing.
“Just put it away,” Brian said.
“No,” I said, “I like the light, it’s pretty, and he can learn to leave it alone.”
Gabe blew and blew until, from the other end of the table, he extinguished the flame. As it sputtered out he shouted, victorious, “It died!”
36
At the clinic, every morning, the kids ran straight toward the fish tank. Brian stopped at the gift shop for the Times. I ordered a latte from the old-timey pushcart vendor. Before going up to the fourth floor, we’d watch the kids run in circles around the open lobby or play the piano they were not supposed to touch. Any kind of life, if you live it long enough, becomes routine.
One day, in our second or third week into this regime, a girl about Gracie’s age got onto the elevator with us, also headed to the fourth floor. She had delicate bones beneath puffed skin, post-transplant. Her parents stood very still, with their girl between them. When she coughed, a sharp, deep bark, I looked at her with what I hoped was more concern than fear. Her mother gathered her closer and turned the girl’s head into her own leg to cough again. It was a startling sound, deep and incongruous from her small form.
As we swooshed upward, the kids watched the feather mobiles on the ceiling twist and spin. Gracie asked Brian, “How does it move if no one is touching it?”
“Magic,” said Brian.
Gracie looked at him, a little disappointed, a little censorious. “Dad, there is no magic.”
Oh no, I thought, oh no no no.
We settled into the waiting area. The blond girl was on her father’s lap, breathing with visible effort. The mom sat beside them with a baby boy over her shoulder, maybe fourteen months old. I hadn’t noticed the baby in the elevator; I’d only seen the girl, the way her mother gathered her in. The baby, for all his adorableness, was an extra on set.
The mom was short and sinewy, with red-gold hair. The father was her match in the physical lottery, fit, handsome. When he stood up and carried the girl to the nurses’ station, he moved with a fluid urgency, an athlete determined to make something happen.
When the mom spoke, she had a brogue. “Irish?” I asked a nurse. “I think so,” she answered. Maybe Irish mom. I wanted to ask her questions; know their story. But the etiquette was simply to appear friendly and wait. I gave a little wave—a mom-with-a-sick-daughter-and-a-boy-on-my-hip wave. And she, mom-with-a-sick-daughter-and-a-boy-on-her-hip, gave a wave back.
The nurse quickly showed them back to a room and a while later came back for us. I noticed their curtain was pulled. They wanted privacy.
We waited. That was the majority of what you did in the clinic: wait. When Dr. K arrived, Gracie was watching the tail end of Spirit, in which the Mustang and his mate run through tall grasses. Dr. K said something about how strong they were, and did Gracie like—She stopped midsentence. An alarm had sounded. She looked up and took off in the direction of the Irish family’s room. Nurses and doctors from all corners of the clinic streamed toward their room.