Sisterland (42 page)

Very quickly, he had unlocked the bars and I’d grabbed her, though she continued to scream, and Jeremy said, not accusingly but with concern, “You scared her.”

“It was my dream!” I said. “The baby bandit!” I was on the verge of hysteria myself.

“Okay,” Jeremy said. “That’s fine. She doesn’t have to sleep in there.”

“But it means I knew this was going to happen!”

“Kate, you have to calm down. Want me to take her?”

I shook my head.

“You didn’t know this would happen,” he said. “Whatever you dreamed of, you couldn’t have prevented it.”

Rosie slept that night in my arms, and I lay on a foldout chair. It was all reminiscent, in a gloomily inverted way, of Rosie’s birth just five months earlier: the three of us together in a hospital room, but instead of feeling like Jeremy and I had pulled off the miracle of making a new person, this time everything just felt sad and scary. It was quieter at night, though there were still frequent visits from nurses and less frequent visits from doctors; the worst part was when they appeared together and tried, with a kind of oversized wooden Q-tip, to pry Rosie’s eye open.

Rosie wouldn’t nurse, and early in the morning on the second day, someone brought me a pump because my breasts were engorged. Around us, we could hear the intermittent cries of other sick children. Jeremy went
home to shower and get us new clothes, though I didn’t bother to change, and he also brought back a sandwich and a box of granola bars, which I didn’t eat. We spent a second night in the hospital, and everything that wasn’t Rosie was still suspended. Her eye remained swollen, she continued to have a temperature when the acetaminophen wore off, and she was uninterested in the little stuffed cat that usually delighted her. Vi called my cellphone, and I didn’t check the message. Jeremy and I had told no one, neither of our families, because what could they do? We were alone in this, I thought. No one loved Rosie as much as we did.

The second night, around eight
P.M.
, when she was asleep on the foldout chair between my body and the wall, I looked down at her—she was wearing miniature hospital scrubs with turtles on them—and as her chest rose and fell, her swollen eye appeared to be a mistake, a thing that needed to be undone, though it also was hard to imagine her without it; it seemed that the prior months of her life had been a period in which we’d been naïve, even careless. We had worried, it turned out, insufficiently. Jeremy was in his own foldout chair, which faced ours, reading, and I said without looking up, “If she doesn’t get better, I think I’ll kill myself.”

“The antibiotics will start working,” he said. “By the morning, I bet.” Then he said, “Look at me, Kate. This wasn’t your fault.”

Had my own mother killed herself? Usually I believed she hadn’t. But in the hospital, I thought the only reason I’d commit suicide was if something happened to my daughter, and what kind of person had my mother been if she’d done it even though she hadn’t had to? The great concerns of her life—they weren’t us.

Jeremy was wrong, and in the morning, Rosie wasn’t better; she was worse, the most lethargic she’d been yet. Dr. Mittra returned and told us in a somber voice that her lack of progress concerned him and he was ordering a CT scan. He left and came back with another doctor, and they speculated about whether Rosie was dehydrated, and instructed a nurse to give her dextrose solution through her IV, and it was perhaps an hour later—forty-eight hours after we’d entered the hospital—that at last she came around; she did, for the first time, start to improve. She wanted to pull my hair, and she wanted to look at the pictures in her book about
jungle animals, and she wanted to nurse. It was hard to say exactly when the swelling went down, but her eye became visible, just a crack and then more, and Dr. Mittra saw her eye move. “This is very good news, Mom,” he said in his serious voice, and he patted my shoulder.

That afternoon,
I took a shower in the bathroom adjacent to Rosie’s room, and when I emerged in clean clothes, with wet hair, Jeremy was holding Rosie and talking to Vi, who sat on my foldout chair. “Hey there, hot stuff,” Vi said. “Sorry about everything.”

“She’s doing much better now.”

“That’s what Jeremy said. You should have called. I knew something was going on.”

“How’d you figure out we were here?” I asked.

“I called him.” Vi gestured at Jeremy.

“If you two want to walk around the block and get some air, Rosie and I will be fine,” Jeremy said.

“That’s okay.” I extended my arms, and he passed Rosie to me.

“That’s some eye,” Vi said. “Will she have any scarring?”

This thought hadn’t occurred to me. “I don’t know why she would,” Jeremy said.

“It’s not contagious, is it?”

“Not unless you have an open cut that you rub against her eye,” I said.

“Maybe I won’t hold her anyway, just to be safe.” Vi gestured to the box of granola bars. “Can I have one?” As Jeremy nodded, Vi said to him, “Was your mom wowed by me?”

“It sounds like she had a great time,” Jeremy said.

“You should come some night.” Vi glanced at me. “It wasn’t nearly as woo-woo as you imagined, right, Daze?”

I didn’t, of course, hold Vi responsible for Rosie’s infection, but I definitely wished I hadn’t attended the session. I said, “That stuff’s not Jeremy’s cup of tea.”

“Wow.” Vi laughed. “Don’t censor yourself.” She pointed at Rosie. “Does Dad know?”

“I haven’t had a chance to call him.”

“We never went to the ER when we were kids, did we?”

What was she implying? “Not that I remember,” I said.

Vi said, “Every time I look at her, you know what I think of? I think of
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
.”

If Rosie hadn’t shown signs of improvement, I wouldn’t have had the courage to fight with my sister; I wouldn’t have wanted to release bad will into the world when I needed the world’s beneficence. So perhaps it was a reflection of my confidence in Rosie’s restored health that I said, “Vi, if you’re under the impression that you’re making things better by being here, you know what? You’re not.”

We stayed in
the hospital one more night, and the strange part was that when they finally discharged us, I felt the return of anxious heart; it had gone away when Dr. Mittra patted my shoulder, but it came back. Having a child in the hospital was, in most ways, awful, and yet I believed in the competence of the nurses and doctors more than I believed in my own; it was like turbulence on an airplane, how it could be both terrifying and out of your hands.

This was the time when, each night at home, I began putting the diaper bag by the front door, making sure that my wallet with my health insurance card was in it, when I’d charge my cellphone in the outlet closest to the diaper bag, and when I switched from sleeping in pajamas with silly patterns of monkeys or gnomes to sleeping in black yoga pants and plain T-shirts. I also kept wearing a nursing bra at night long after I’d stopped leaking milk, and in this way, I always knew that if I had to leave for the ER in the middle of the night, I could do so quickly.

Rosie didn’t return to day care. We’d already paid the month’s tuition, but I kept her home, and I quit my job effective immediately; I went back only to clean out my office. I’d thought my supervisor would be disappointed in me—she was a forty-eight-year-old divorced mother of three named Sue—but when I told her I was leaving the agency, she said without rancor, “It’s hard, isn’t it? I envy you that you have the option of staying home.”

Which I did, but barely. The day Rosie was discharged from the hospital, when I told Jeremy I wanted to quit my job, he said, “I ran the numbers and we’ll be okay on just my salary, but we need to be more careful. For instance, no more ordering Rosie fifty-dollar Norwegian organic pajamas.”

“They’re thirty dollars,” I said. “And Swedish.”

“Her clothes fit her for a month,” he said. “Just buy her stuff at Target.”

In the weeks
and months after Rosie was in the hospital, I worried all the time: When she sneezed, I worried that she was getting a cold that would turn into cellulitis again, or perhaps pneumonia. I worried when I heard reports about resurgences in whooping cough, and when she started eating solids, I worried about her choking, and when I cut her pinkie while trimming her fingernails, I worried that she’d develop a staph infection. One afternoon while Jeremy was teaching, when she threw up five times in an hour for no obvious reason, I was so frantic that I had to make myself breathe in the way recommended by the teacher in the birthing class we’d taken.

It wasn’t that I no longer took pleasure in Rosie’s company; it was just that the joy of, say, watching her lie on her back and kick at the parrot hanging above her play mat was accompanied by a thrumming undercurrent of dread so constant and all-encompassing that it seemed hard to believe I’d lived without it for as long as I had. I had thought that I’d become a parent when Rosie was born, but now it seemed my true initiation had occurred during her return to the hospital.

When panic seized me—as when she threw up or I held a thermometer under her armpit and watched the digital numbers jump—I’d tell myself,
Be calm. It’s completely normal for children to get sick
. But all during that first summer of Rosie’s life, my heart would clench and clench.

I knew my anxiety was hard for Jeremy, too, less for what I said than the jittery waves I emanated, my reluctance to participate in activities without Rosie—to go to a movie, for instance. Even after I agreed to hire Kendra
to babysit one morning a week, instead of leaving the house, I lurked, under the pretense of doing laundry and straightening up.

It was the double aspect of my anxiety, I think, that made it bad: First I worried that terrible things would befall Rosie, then I worried that I was right to worry because I was psychic. Like all new mothers, I’d been told repeatedly, by doctors and nurses and friends and strangers and advice books, to trust my instincts. But my instincts had betrayed me; they’d gone haywire.

The week before Rosie was eight months old, on a warm afternoon in late September while she was napping, I wrote
Having senses
on a piece of paper I’d torn from a notebook we kept by the phone. I folded the paper and dropped it into our clear salad bowl, along with a box of kitchen matches; I tucked Rosie’s monitor under my arm and carried the bowl into the backyard.

I was too embarrassed to speak aloud before I struck a match against the strip on the box, but inside my head, I thought,
Please. Please, please let this work
. Then I lit the paper on fire. I felt ridiculous standing there in the sun as the paper burned; surely this brief rite would not be enough to eliminate a lifetime of premonitions. And in many ways, of course, it wasn’t: I still sometimes dreamed of the future, and I still had hunches about people (the new dental hygienist at the practice Jeremy and I went to—she was being beaten up by her boyfriend, and I knew it the minute she called me back to the exam room). But burning that piece of paper
did
give me something, something that it’s possible no one else had ever aspired to, which was grounds for doubting my own intuition. It gave me, inside the confines of my brain, plausible deniability. When a frightening thought about Rosie lodged itself in my head, I could say,
Maybe. But maybe not
. Perhaps I was still psychic, and perhaps I wasn’t.

And soon there was evidence that both my senses and my anxiety were waning. A week after I burned the paper, I was driving on Delmar between Hanley and 170, Rosie in the back, when a cop pulled up behind me and turned on his lights and siren; once I realized what was under way, I was thrilled, which surely was a reaction the cop hadn’t previously encountered.
He was my age, a white guy who, when he saw Rosie, seemed almost apologetic. Nevertheless, because I’d been going forty-two miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile zone, he proceeded to issue me a speeding ticket.

That same week, when Kendra came, I left the house; I went to the Galleria and bought a new pair of jeans and a macadamia nut cookie. I also signed up to take a music class with Rosie, though surely such a class, with a dozen other babies and toddlers in it, would mean the exchange of many germs.

For a while after Rosie’s eye infection, I thought I’d never have another child, because who would take care of the second one if the first was hospitalized? But over time, I became less preoccupied with this scenario; I almost forgot it. And really, this was the ultimate sign that my anxiety, in its severest form, had passed: that eight months after I burned my senses, I was pregnant with Owen.

On the afternoon of October 15, after Jeremy had left
for the airport, his absence didn’t, at first, feel abnormal; after all, he was always gone on weekdays. I’d calculated that the time between when he departed for Denver and when Vi’s earthquake prediction expired, assuming it expired at midnight, was thirty-three and a half hours.

Rosie and Owen both woke not long after Jeremy left, and following their snacks, I texted Hank:
Park?

Coffee first
, he texted back.

I still felt self-conscious about Rosie’s banged-up lip, but after three days, it looked much better. And getting our coffee from Kaldi’s, hanging out in the park—it was a regular afternoon. Perhaps Jeremy had been right.

Around five, as I was pushing Owen in a bucket swing and the girls were chasing each other, I said to Hank, “Do you guys want to come over for dinner? We could order Chinese.”

“I told a mom at Amelia’s school we’d go to the thing in Forest Park tonight.”

“The earthquake thing?” I’d received an email about this event through a playgroup Rosie and I hadn’t attended in a year, and without fully reading it, I’d managed to absorb that the Science Center was sponsoring an evening for kids called “EducationQuake!” If Vi Shramm weren’t my sister, it was conceivable that we’d have gone.

“I might as well tell you now,” Hank said. “We also got invited to an earthquake party tomorrow night.”