The curtain had been thrown open, and I could see the little girl, slack, on her mom’s lap. It was hard to tell if she was breathing. The baby brother was passed hand to hand, out of the room. The little girl had, at some point, coughed up blood; it was across the mother’s shirt. The doctors huddled, trying to stabilize the little girl.
The baby boy, who’d ended up in the arms of the art therapist, was flapping and struggling. I asked if I could take him. She gave him to me, and I walked with him up and down the hall, reading quotes from The Little Prince posters. He escaped, read one, with the aid of wild, migrating birds. I pointed at the flock of purple songbirds, trailing strings, lifting the compact, golden prince off his compact, golden planet. Chatting as I would chat with Gabriel. After a few minutes the baby quieted. I strained to hear what was happening in his sister’s room.
Eventually, the dad came to look for his son. He thanked me, took him back, and said, “Our girl gave us a bad scare, but she’s stable now.” In their room the shallow arc of the little girl’s ribcage rose and fell beneath a thin white blanket in time with her breath. Tiny sail of a boat on its side, capturing and losing the wind, over and over again.
The mom was talking with the doctors, frowning and listening, nodding her head. I imagined some part of her must be shaking, the way an animal who has escaped a predator continues to shake long beyond the immediate threat. I was about to excuse myself when the dad said, “We lost a son before we came here. We cannot lose another child.”
I said nothing, just waited.
“He was a toddler, our son. It was sudden, from pneumonia, mishandled. Should have admitted him to hospital, and they didn’t. A few months after he died our little girl is diagnosed with leukemia. Incurable, they say. ‘Sorry, nothing more we can do.’ Which was bullshit. Bullshit socialized medicine. They just wouldn’t spend the money to send her here, where they can do more. We were in the papers; we raised over a million dollars. All of Ireland sent this girl to America to get her transplant. And it worked. She’s cured. The leukemia’s gone. But her lungs aren’t quite right. Her breathing gives her a bit of trouble. She holds on to fluid; I think her kidneys need a wee squeeze. Then she’ll be right again.”
Though all this he’d been holding his boy, who continued to look around the room, calm and curious. I thought Gabe was operating with a handicap, but this sweet little guy …
I was terrified I might begin to cry, to usurp the father’s grief.
“I am so sorry,” I said.
“Every family goes through something, doesn’t it?” he said, and thanked me for watching out for his boy. He told me all this in the hall, under the Little Prince lifting away from his planet.
This little girl. She’d ridden up on the elevator with us, and then, a couple of hours later, she’d almost died. The blood on her mother’s shirt. The blaring of the alarm. She’d had a brother once, whom she barely knew. Pneumonia. Fucking socialized medicine.
This was how we told each other our stories, in the margins, in the kitchen, over Styrofoam cups, while washing our hands at the decontamination trough, at the snack machine, without ceremony. Without self-dramatization. Without even the faintest nod to the horror of what was described because the assumption was everyone had horror.
The teller’s job was to get the facts right, to preserve every detail, especially the little ones: How the ambulance driver had smelled of clove cigarettes, as if he’d taken his time. How the blood on the mom’s shirt was shaped like a bird in upside-down flight. How their son, before he died, had greeted his parents each morning by saying, “Give me an eyelash kiss.”
The listener’s job was to hear the story. To record the use of particular phrases, exact adjectives, adverbs, unusual clauses, idioms, or truncated turns of phrase. To note the time of day, the weather, what the teller was wearing. To learn the story, as it poured into the room, as if it were a religious text, which it was.
Both teller and listener have one duty: to believe. No matter how bad. Believe. Believe and remember; remember and believe. Because remembering and believing were all we had to give.
People often said, “I don’t know how you do it.” As if we’d been given a choice.
When I returned to our room after talking with the father, Gracie was distraught. “Where were you?”
“I was holding a baby.”
“We needed you,” she said. “Gabey cried for you.” Gabey looked happy enough; he had Luna Bar all over his face and hands.
“Here I am now,” I said.
“We’re done,” Brian said. “Gracie got unhooked.” The slight breeze of recrimination. I looked at her IV and realized it was capped and detached; they’d been waiting a long time.
“I’m sorry, it was important.”
Brian gave me a questioning look.
“I can tell you everything later,” I said.
“Only if you want to.”
Brian had heeded the no-friends advice. He would elect to not be heartbroken at the exact point in time when his daughter needed him most. Gracie was the sole recipient of his caring, and that made perfect sense. But I was lonely; I wanted to tell him about the Irish family. How far they’d come, how much they’d lost. How they could not lose any more.
On the way home I sat in the back between the kids. I held one of their feet in each of my hands; I could feel a faint pulse at the ankles. The saphenous vein, that big wide conveyor of blood that had let us “get in” to Gracie many times as an infant. We were passing through a densely wooded area with tossing branches overhead.
“Trees don’t yike me,” Gabe said. This was his new refrain; he’d endowed the natural world with an amorphous antagonism.
“Those are trees growing, Gabe, not bad guys,” Gracie said.
I wavered between wanting to assure Gabe that the trees adored him, would do him no harm, and agreeing. The trees don’t yike me either, I wanted to say, the trees scare me too.
37
“Paradoxical reaction to the sedatives,” the nurse said. “Try to keep her quiet till it wears off.”
We were in a waiting room; Gracie had gone feral.
A few days before, Dr. K had scheduled an MRI to determine if Gracie’s liver was finally strong enough for her to proceed to transplant. Looking at the machine, Gracie had said, “Can we tell them I don’t want to go into the box?”
Nobody does, darling girl.
To calm her, they had given her a sedative, and she’d lain quiet, in a twilight state, as the metal tube whirled and clanged around her, peering into her liver. As soon as it was over, she sat up stiff, rigid; as if a switch had been thrown, as if she was possessed. She slid off the table and cross-stepped, a spooked horse dancing in erratic patterns, toward the waiting room. I ran after. But when I tried to pick her up, she writhed and kicked, twisted out of my arms. I managed to trap her body between my knees.
“What is happening?” I’d shouted at the closest nurse.
Gracie pulled free and dove forward onto polished concrete. Dove into concrete. A huge goose egg, bluish at the center, began to form. Most terrifying yet: she didn’t cry.
I looked at my mom, who’d flown out to be with us for Christmas.