*
One night, walking home from bubbles, we ran into baby Varun, recently discharged from the ward. His eyes were full of curiosity and energy, but his body was calm. He had the deeply relaxed affect of a baby whose every need has been fully met, continuously, since the moment of birth. No need to fuss, to fidget. During his first year, Ramya had probably not been away from him for two waking hours, total. And Deepak radiated happiness, like the man from my poster emitting pastels, when he spoke of his son.
Ramya, Deepak, and I stood and chatted while Varun pounded his chubby fists on the plastic tray of his stroller, pleased and proud of his sounds. We exchanged drug levels and lab results and info about other transplant families. I told them about the bubble spot. “Go there tomorrow,” I said. “It’s nice. We just hang out.”
“We will come then,” Ramya said.
The kids were restless. “Let’s gooooooooo,” Gracie said. “The bugs sound scary.”
The woods that surrounded the complex on three sides teemed with uproarious insect life, a chorus of chirps and buzzing that scared and thrilled the kids. There was the sense that, just past the edge of the asphalt, was a wild, unruly place where anything might happen. The kids wanted to go into the woods. And also, they didn’t. We walked on toward home.
When the kids were in bed, Brian and I sat out on the porch. He turned to me. “Your point about her working out her fears through her play,” he said, “is taken. Her poor dolls are the most beleaguered, plague-riddled people I know.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I take your points, too.”
“Which points?”
“Just, you know, the genial-uncle-denied-pie thing.”
He laughed. “Go on,” he said. “Say more about this underappreciated uncle.”
You could never vaguely apologize to Brian. You had to be specific, be real, bring your A game. Which was infuriating. And wonderful.
*
A week or so later, on another evening walk around the complex, we ran into Ramya and Varun again. Varun was dozing, his enormous dark eyes closed. “He has a low fever,” Ramya said. “I am going to take him in as soon as Deepak arrives home.”
Later Ramya called. “They have admitted us again.” And the next day there was a message, “We’re in the PICU.”
I dreaded going to visit the PICU. Its waiting room was the most unloved zone in the hospital and the most hard used. Parents were not allowed to sleep at their children’s bedside in the PICU, so they would stumble out for an hour or two of rest in the waiting room. There were stains on the backs of the recliners from fretting heads tossing left, tossing right. Chairs were pushed together to form sleepless beds. There was always at least one chair askew, angled toward the door, as though someone had leapt out of it, into a sprint.
The first day I went to visit, Ramya came out to meet me in the waiting room. We chatted, she told me how Varun was doing. It was very up and down. His lungs were in trouble, the ventilator settings were high. They were praying they’d be able to reduce the settings soon. I asked if I could see him. Ramya said, “Please, let’s wait until next time.”
I could understand, or thought I could. If my child were on a ventilator, I would want to protect their image in other people’s minds. I wouldn’t want anyone to see them unrecognizable. And so I held on to the image of Varun from our last visit, chubby fists pounding his stroller tray, brown eyes sweeping Ramya’s face; glancing at Gracie, glancing at Gabe, but returning, always, to Ramya, his lodestar.
The next time I visited, Ramya invited me into the room. Varun’s body was obscured by the machines, the tubes. He was a small form beneath the sheet, softly vibrating with the pulse of the vent. His eyes were closed, but the lids moved every so often.
Deepak was also there. I watched them move around the room, brush against each other, lean over Varun to kiss him or smooth his cheek with their fingers. Deepak laid his palm on Ramya’s back, a casual touch, but conscious. A transmission of support, of tenderness. I was amazed he had the inner resources to give anything to his wife while giving everything to his son. Mother and father in hell, but in hell together. When Deepak put his hand on Ramya’s back, she looked up at him with a recognition of their pain, not feral blame, but understanding. If the gravitational pull of their love was this strong, it would hold Varun in place. It can be done like this, I told myself.
When, days later, Varun came off the vent, it felt miraculous. We’d yet to witness a child who’d come off the vent. He was sent down from the PICU back to the transplant ward. He was healing. He was free of the horrible, oscillating machine. He smiled and spoke gibberish to his parents. He was still in the hospital, not out of danger, but better.
49
We were always at clinic, checking one drug level or another, having Gracie examined, stern to stem. One afternoon, Sue, the nurse practitioner, leaned down to listen to Gracie’s lungs. We’d come to clinic worried; Gracie had a cough. Sue wrinkled her brow, dipped the sides of her mouth, and held up one finger to quiet Gabe, who was pretending my scarf was a parachute, complete with sound effects.
“Stop that,” I said, pulling the scarf too forcefully out of his hands. And to Sue, “What do you hear?”
“Just a few crackles. On the left side.”
Sue ran an RSB test; it came back positive for a common respiratory virus. OK, I thought, this is how it begins, with a few crackles on the left side. A common cold, with uncommon powers. Gracie’s body, unassisted, could not fight off a cold. The one thing all our frantic cleaning and germ avoidance had been designed to protect her from, and she had it.
Every post-transplant parent worries about the lungs. Anything but the lungs. I called Brian. “She has crackles in one lung.”
“Which one?” he said.
“The left.”
“What are they doing?”
“An immunity-booster infusion, and Sue said they’d watch it closely.”
“OK, will they keep you or send you home?”
“They’re not sure yet.”
Brian met us at the clinic to take Gabe home. Leaving, Brian gave Gracie a kiss on her head, “Make sure to ask Mom to buy you some treats from the machines.” He and Gabe left for the night. I wanted to go with them—home to dinner, bath, bed, plus red wine, dark chocolate, and mindless television—but Gracie’s med still had another couple of hours to go.
Gracie was relaxed and placid, watching TV. Every so often she’d emit a sharp bark of a cough. I kept thinking of the family we met on one of our first visits to the clinic, before the transplant. The little girl from Ireland who’d coughed up blood onto her mother’s shirt, whose baby brother I’d held while the doctors and nurses huddled around her. I must have given Gracie a dark look in response to a cough, because she said, “Mama, are you mad?”