A Song for Issy Bradley (7 page)

When the girl passes the milkshake through the window he places it between his knees because the drink holder is full of scribbled-on bits of paper, empty candy wrappers, and several of Issy’s barrettes. He turns the CD back up and skips to his favorite song. There may be just enough time to listen to it.

He isn’t far from home when thoughts of Brother Rimmer and his homemade handcart roll back into his head. He hasn’t visited Brother Rimmer for a week or two and the Tabernacle Choir’s soft rendering of the fourth verse of “Come, Come, Ye Saints” reminds him of poor Sister Rimmer’s death.

Someone should visit Brother Rimmer; perhaps the Spirit is prompting
him
to do it, right now. He is never as certain as he would like to be about these things, he doesn’t hear the distinct voice that some people report. When the Spirit speaks to him it’s more of an impression, a prompting and, as it’s always best to err on the side of caution, he takes a right turn at the roundabout and drives in the direction of Brother Rimmer’s house, singing the final line of the hymn in a forceful crescendo.

Claire knows. She knows the instant she steps into the bedroom and gauges the panting, shallow breaths. Knows when she pulls the blankets back and Issy is already diminished, half-emptied.

She kneels down as her urgent words slide off Issy’s forehead and onto the floor, and when she hears herself shouting it’s as if the sound is coming from someone else.

– quickly, bring a glass,
now

– a
glass
, Alma, I said a
glass
—what am I supposed to do with a plastic cup?

She knows as she rolls the glass across Issy’s thigh, as she presses harder, pushing up and down in an effort to excise the red floret-spatters. She reaches for the telephone with thick, clumsy fingers.

– all floppy and I can’t wake her up

– stop asking questions and
do
something

– yes, a red rash

Her words ring, as if she is hearing them on a microphone, and she knows.

She knows when the stocky paramedic
call-me-Dave
doesn’t bother with a stretcher and just carries Issy down the stairs, her limbs wilting over the frame of his tattooed arms. It’s goodbye hallway, goodbye house. The front door is suddenly an exit to much more than the driveway, the street, the park, and Claire fights the urge to push ahead of
call-me-Dave
and slam the door shut; the urge to shout, “Wait! Stop! You can’t take her, I’m not ready!”

She knows as she pauses in the doorway and watches the children crowd the bottom stair in a solemn huddle.

– don’t be upset

– nothing to worry about

– keep trying to get hold of Dad

Jacob breaks away from the older two and dashes to the door. “When can I open my presents?”

Zipporah follows him. “Shut up,” she scolds, wrapping her arm around his shoulder to soften the rebuke. “Don’t worry, Mum. We’ll all say a prayer, won’t we, Alma?”

Poor Jacob. Poor Zipporah. And poor Alma, standing alone on the bottom stair—Claire knows he’s got no intentions of praying. There isn’t time to hug the three of them, before they know too, before everything changes.

I
T
’
S BRIGHT INSIDE
the ambulance; the blue overhead cupboards, yellow ceiling straps, and red and green bags of medical supplies are incongruously cheerful, like Jacob’s Lego emergency vehicles.

Dave points to a blue chair beside a tinted window.

“Sit down.”

Issy is marooned on the stretcher, limp and raggish, like something the tide has washed up. Dave fastens straps around her chest and legs while he talks about intramuscular injections and antibiotics. Claire picks out the word “penicillin,” but she is finding it hard to hear; her ears are still ringing and her skin is tight with prickling dread. She can see the other paramedic, the woman, pacing outside the ambulance talking on a cell phone.

“We’ll be off soon,” Dave says. “She’s just calling ahead. To let them know we’re coming. So they’ll be ready.”

The other paramedic jumps into the driver’s seat, starts the engine, and pulls away.

“We’ll go as quickly as we can,” Dave says. Then the sirens start, and Claire stares out the back windows as cars signal and
brake and edge up curbs. Their urgency, their kindness makes her feel like crying, she wants to shout,
“Thank you, thank you!”
and she knows in the future, whenever she hears sirens, she will be transported back here.

“How long has she been unwell?”

“She was fine yesterday. She went to school—she’s just started—she came home, we had spaghetti for dinner. I think she went to bed at the usual time, we had a babysitter because we had to go to a meeting at our church, there was—”

“When did you notice she was unwell?”

“She didn’t get up this morning,” she says. “I thought she was tired. I had to go shopping, it’s my younger son’s birthday, I thought she’d be up when I got back, but she wasn’t. I checked on her. I
did
check on her.” Her voice rises, quivers—she is protesting too much, Dave won’t believe her, but she can’t help it. “I gave her some Tylenol I thought it was a cold or one of those twenty-four-hour bugs they get when they start school and they seem desperately ill but they’re better after a couple of hours. And then it was the party. I thought she’d sleep it off. I left her for two hours.” She pauses and says it again, appalled,
“Two hours
. She’s really ill, isn’t she?”

Dave nods.

“She’s going to die, isn’t she?”

“She’s very ill,” he says.

W
HEN THE AMBULANCE
stops outside the emergency room, a group of staffers are waiting by the automatic doors in bottle-green, purple, and blue scrubs.

“We’ll get her off first,” Dave says. “Just wait there a minute.”

The ambulance doors open and there’s a draft of noise and a burst of shouted questions. Anxious, waiting arms receive the stretcher, then it disappears through the automatic doors. Claire follows, past a reception area and down a corridor to a long room lined with empty beds. The ceiling is crisscrossed by curtain tracks,
but no one touches the curtains. They lift Issy off the stretcher and onto a bed, and while Dave talks to someone in bottle-green scrubs the other paramedic pushes the empty stretcher away.

Claire catches wisps of words, tiny sentence strings.

“Has she had the IM?”

“She’s collapsed, we’re not going to be able to do an IV.”

“A central line, then?”

“I want a lumbar puncture.”

“Can you intubate? We’re going to need dexamethasone.”

“Will someone get the mother out of here?”

A woman in blue scrubs leaves Issy’s bedside and drapes an arm over Claire’s shoulder. “It’s all right, love,” she says. “We’re just going to stabilize her and then we’ll move her to a ward. Why don’t you go and get yourself a cup of tea?”

“I’m OK, thanks.”

“You don’t want to be here for this.”

“Why? What are you doing?”

“Can you wait outside, please?”

“It’s OK, I want to stay.”

“Come on, that’s right, love.”

The nurse maneuvers Claire out of the room and back to Reception. The waiting area is almost empty. There’s a teenager next to his mother, nothing visibly wrong, and a man sitting beside a little girl with a cut head, muttering about bloody ambulances and waiting around all pissing afternoon for a couple of stitches. Claire gets a drink and sits as far away from him as possible. She tries to sip the hot chocolate but her hands are shaking and in the end she just holds the cup.

W
HEN THE NURSE
comes back, the chocolate is cold. Claire leaves it on a table and follows her out to a corridor that slopes gently and appears to run the length of the hospital. They walk past murals painted straight onto the corridor walls: dolphins and sea lions and enormous, smiling blue whales. The nurse asks her what she does
for a living.
Nothing
. Does she live near the hospital?
Not really
. How many children does she have?
Four
.

They pass fairy-tale paintings bordered by pink stencils: Little Bo Peep, a falling Humpty Dumpty, soldiers with glassy, hemisphere eyes, and Sleeping Beauty’s castle. They pass leopards, foxes, a giant panda, and a colossal gorilla with blind circles where its glass eyes used to be. “It’s a long way, isn’t it?” the nurse says and they carry on past a bejeweled mine cart from
Snow White
and a sign for the ICU.

The floor is blue now, the walls are quieter and the lights lower. The corridor feels like a tunnel and Claire experiences a buildup of pressure in her head that reminds her of swimming underwater. The nurse stops to call an elevator and they stand side by side as they ascend. When the doors open, the nurse turns down the passageway marked “ICU” and Claire is flooded with the horror of knowing again.

The heavy doors at the end of the passageway are locked shut. “You’ll need to press this button,” the nurse says. “Just tell them who you are and they’ll let you in.”

The door opens to reveal a woman sitting at a desk.

“Come on, lovey,” she says. “Follow me.”

They pass a wall decorated with donation plaques and photographs of smiling children. Claire wonders how many of them are still alive. The nurse presses another keypad and opens a door labeled “Parents’ Lounge.”

“I thought I was going to … When can I see her?”

“They’re just settling her in. Someone will come and get you when everything’s ready. You can make yourself a drink while you wait.”

It’s cold in the Parents’ Lounge. Two fans attached to the far wall drive freezing air around the room. She sits beside a fan and the cold creeps into her ears like it does when she walks on the beach. She gets up and wanders around, examining the posters on the walls and the pamphlets stuffed into various holders: Carbon Monoxide
Poisoning, Baby Bottle Decay, Pregnancy and Flu, Measles. She chooses an upright chair away from the blast of the fans and sits down again. The clock on the wall has barely moved. Time is gluey and thick. She stares and stares at the clock. Eventually, she realizes it’s wrong—stopped. She chews the insides of her cheeks and spins her wedding ring round and round. Where is Ian? Somehow it will be for everyone’s good that he disappeared with Brother Anderson, that he went to the missionary meeting and vanished afterward on a worthy errand. She grabs the impulse to blame him and chokes it. But she’ll revive it later; she’s no saint.

W
HEN THE DOOR
opens her stomach pitches. She gets to her feet and leans against the chair, startled by the slackness of her knees.

“Hiya, I’m Julie. I’m Isabel’s nurse. You can see her now.” More following, more corridors—she is lost in the maze of a sickening dream. Finally, Julie opens a door to a pristine room, brimming with beeps. Issy, at last. Lying on her back, dark hair spread over the pillow, eyes shut, a tube snaking out of her mouth and threading into a disc where more tubes grow, some clear, others blue. No nightie, just a diaper—
I’m a big girl, I don’t need a diaper
—legs and trunk freckled by purple spatters, toes and fingers dark. Worse, the rash is
worse
. She is so small in the hospital bed, its sides up like a giant cot.

A woman in bottle-green scrubs waits beside the bed.

“Hello,” she says. “I’m Dr. Sabzwari. Pop your bag down and give your hands a wash.”

Claire steps to the sink. She washes her hands, rubs them with sanitizer, and waits for Dr. Sabzwari to speak.

“I know it’s upsetting to see Isabel like this, but I’m going to explain what we’re doing and I hope that’ll make it less frightening. I’m sure you thought of meningitis when you saw the rash, and that’s what we’re looking at—it’s our working diagnosis. We’ve done a lumbar puncture and we’ll get the results soon.”

Dr. Sabzwari pauses and nods her head several times. When Claire finally nods back, she continues.

“Isabel was in shock when she arrived, her veins had collapsed, so we had to put a central line in—we made a cut near her collarbone and threaded a line into a big vein near her heart so she can get fluids. We’re also giving her an intravenous steroid and we’re taking lots of measurements. See all the numbers on the screen? We’re monitoring her heart and pulse rate, her blood pressure, her central venous pressure—that’s the pressure in her veins—her temperature, and the amount of oxygen in her blood. I know it’s noisy and there might be occasional alarms, but don’t worry.

“Isabel’s intubated, which means we’ve put a tube down her throat, and she’s ventilated—this machine here is breathing for her by blowing gas into her lungs—and although the medication we’re giving her is making her drowsy, you can talk to her; she may well be able to hear you and recognize your voice. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”