Strange Fits of Passion (24 page)

So, like I said, probably this is neither here nor there. I just thought you ought to have all the facts, that's all.

That night I woke up to the sound of Caroline crying. The cries were high-pitched and insistent, and when I reached her room, she was on all fours in the crib, trying to pull herself up the bars. Her face was scrunched and reddened with pain. I reached for her, and I could feel at once that she was feverish. I put my hand on her forehead. She twisted away from me. I'd never felt such hot skin before.

Immediately, I went into the kitchen and crushed a tablet of baby aspirin. It dissolved imperfectly in the apple juice, and when I tried to give the juice to Caroline, she flung her head back and screamed, refusing the bottle. Not knowing what else to do, I walked with her around the familiar path, but the walking was useless. I tried to hold her close to my chest to comfort her. When I did so, however, she kept twisting her head away and then flopping her face from side to side against me. I wanted to stay calm, to think clearly, but this flopping alarmed me.

Jack came just before daybreak, as was his custom. I had Caroline on the orange mat in the bathroom. I had stripped her of her pajamas and diaper and was trying to give her a sponge bath with cool washcloths to bring the fever down. The touch of the washcloths must have been searing on her skin, however, for she shrieked even louder when I did this.

Jack stood at the door. He had his slicker on and his high boots.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"She's hot, feverish. I can't make out what's wrong."

He crouched down to touch her face.

"Jesus," he said. "She's burning up."

I had been trying to convince myself that her fever wasn't all that serious, but when he said
Jesus,
I knew it was. "I was going to wait for the clinic in Machias to open," I said in a rush. "But I don't know. What do you think?"

He looked at his watch. "It's five-thirty now," he said. "There won't be anyone there till nine."

He stood up, unfolding his long body. His boots and slicker crinkled.

"I'll go up to LeBlanc's," he said. "Call the doctor on duty."

"You can't do that," I said, looking up at him. I was thinking that his going up to the blue Cape on my behalf would give him away, be too risky for him.

"I'll say I was on my way out to the boat when you came to the door and called to me and asked for help."

"They won't believe you," I said.

"I don't know," he said, "but I don't think you can afford to worry about that right now."

When he returned I was in the bathtub with Caroline. The water was dreary and cold and felt miserable even to me, but I couldn't think of anything else to do. Bringing the fever down was all that seemed to matter.

"Let's go," he said from the doorway. "The doctor's going to meet us there."

I looked at him questioningly. His eyes, his gray eyes, were focused and alert.

"Should you...?" I started to ask.

He shook his head, as if to toss away my question. "I'm taking you. Get dressed."

I stood up and handed Caroline to him. He wrapped her in an orange towel. He held her while I went upstairs and dressed myself. Then I came downstairs and dressed the baby. Through all of this, she continued to scream, twisting her head from side to side, alarming even Jack, who I had thought was unflappable. Once, when I had her on her back and was trying to get her foot into the leg of her sleeping suit, she began to bat at the side of her face. I looked at him, but he wouldn't return my gaze. I abandoned the thought of dressing her then, simply wrapped her in a woolen blanket.

Jack held her as I climbed up into the cab of his truck. The sky was violet, and on the western horizon I could still see stars. There was no traffic on the road to speak of, but in the houses there were lights on in the bedrooms. The town of Machias was still and silent when we drove though it, as if it had been abandoned.

The doctor was at the clinic. He had turned on the light by the door. He came around a corner as we entered the waiting room, and I was surprised to see how young he was. He couldn't have been more than thirty, and he didn't look like a doctor. He wore blue jeans and a wrinkled blue work shirt, as if he had stepped into the clothes that had been lying on the floor by his bed. He ushered us into an examining room and asked me to unwrap the baby. As I did so, I told him of how she'd been shrieking and twisting her head, of how she'd batted at the side of her face.

He didn't take her temperature. He seemed not to need to do that. He examined her throat, then looked into each of her ears.

He stood up. He felt her forehead then. "Ear infections," he pronounced matter-of-factly. "Thought it might be that. She's got a couple of lulus."

He reached into a cabinet for a small bottle and put a drop of liquid into each ear. "This'll stop the pain for a bit," he said. "But we'll have to put her on antibiotic straightaway. Actually I'd like to give her an injection right now, if that's all right with you, and then you can get a prescription when the pharmacy opens up. Quite frankly, I don't really like this fever, and I think we probably want to get that down as soon as possible." He felt her forehead. "I'll take her temp, but my guess is the fever's close to a hundred and five." His voice was calm, but I understood that the fever worried him.

The room went hollow then, airless, like the inside of a bell jar. The floor sank perceptibly. I put my hand out for the edge of the leather gurney. I tried to think, to remember. But what I needed to remember was just beyond my grasp, like a mystifying calculus problem that will not yield up its secrets.

"Oh, no," I said quietly, almost inaudibly.

The doctor heard me, but he misunderstood me. Jack looked puzzled too. Ear infections were good news, weren't they? Compared to what it might have been?

"She'll be all right," the doctor said quickly to reassure me. And perhaps there was a note of false heartiness in his voice. He removed a rectal thermometer from a glass jar filled with liquid and held Caroline's legs while he inserted it. She twisted and wriggled in protest, but his grasp was firm. "I wish I had a nickel for all the ear infections I see in a season, believe me," he said. "If I give her an injection now, the fever will probably break before the day is out. By tomorrow, she'll be her old self, though you'll have to continue the antibiotic for ten days."

I shook my head.

"What's wrong?" It was Jack. He was looking at me oddly. In the harsh light of the examining room, his roughened skin and the two deep grooves at the sides of his mouth were pronounced. I thought that my bruises, though nearly healed, must be prominent too. I wondered if Jack had been here before, if he had stood as he was standing now, with his wife where I was, with his own child on the gurney.

"She's allergic to one of the antibiotics," I said as calmly as I could, "and I don't know which one."

"Well, there's no difficulty there," the doctor said, extricating the thermometer. "Yup," he said. "One-oh-five on the nose. Don't want to fool around with this. I'll give her something for the fever too. Who treated her? I'll make a call. It must be on her chart."

Jack understood then. He shifted his weight, looked at me again.

"She was three months old," I said, more to myself than to the doctor or to Jack. "She had a fever, but her pediatrician couldn't figure out what was causing it. He gave her something, and I don't know what it was, but it made her break out in hives and swell up. So they gave her something else, but I don't know what that was, either. I'd say it was penicillin, but I'm not positive. They also gave her a sulfa drug, I think, and I just can't remember which was which."

There was a silence in the room.

"I'm sorry I can't remember," I said. "I wasn't very—"

"Well," the doctor said, interrupting me. He sounded impatient with my inability to grasp the ease of the solution. "It
is
important. An allergic reaction like that can be fatal the second time around. But it's not a problem we can't solve. As I said, if you can give me the name of where she was treated, I can call up her chart."

Jack's face was impassive. "Is there any drug you can give the baby that wouldn't be either of the ones Mary mentioned and that might be safe?" he asked.

The doctor looked at Jack, then at me. You could see on his face that he was beginning to understand.

"I'll make the call," I said quickly.

The doctor shook his head. "No," he said. "I think I have to. They probably wouldn't give you the information, and you might not understand it, anyway. And I don't think we want to lose any time."

I started to speak, then hesitated.

"There's a problem here, isn't there?" the doctor asked.

Caroline, whose pain was temporarily gone but who was wrung out from her fever, looked up at me from the gurney.

"No," I said quickly, and perhaps too loudly for such a small examining room. "No, there's no problem here."

I gave the name and address of Caroline's pediatrician in New York City. I even knew the phone number.

We left the clinic and walked to the black pickup truck parked out front. Jack carried Caroline. He said to me that it was a long shot, that my husband wouldn't have thought of the pediatrician, that the odds were a million to one against it. I, in turn, to reassure him, said that I agreed with him, the odds were a million to one.

But I didn't agree with him. I didn't at all.

Jack drove me back to the cottage with the baby. Dawn was breaking as we bumped and jostled down the lane, and already the ocean was turning a bluish mauve. The air was clean and crisp, as though washed through, and cold. It had been clear and frigid for three days, and I sensed that the thaw was over, that we would not have any more fog or moderate temperatures for some time now. Jack had said the day before that he would soon be hauling his boat.

He left me off at the cottage and drove back into Machias to wait for the drugstore to open so that he could fill the prescription for me. This would mean that he would be delayed going out onto the water and that he might be seen by the men in the fish house coming to my cottage with the medicine. I had said to him that I would go into town to get the prescription, but he wouldn't hear of it. I should be inside with Caroline, he said. He would go.

As it happened, the red pickup truck was at the fish house when Jack returned. He came to the door and gave me the package. He asked me how Caroline was. I told him that she seemed better, was sleeping now. I willed him to come in, and I sensed that he, too, wanted to step over the threshold, to close the door to the point behind him, for he held the door open with his shoulder and hunched forward as though poised on the brink of a decision.

"Come in," I said, knowing even as I said it that he would have to refuse. It was full daylight now, and I sensed that Willis was peering at us from the salted windows of the fish house. I expected him to emerge at any minute from the door.

"I can't," Jack said.

I reached my hand forward and tucked it inside the collar of his flannel shirt and his sweater. It was a gesture that could not be seen from the fish house. His skin was warm there. I was trembling from the cold and from pure longing. I saw on his face the same need I had. Beyond us the gulls twirled and looped in an early-morning feeding frenzy.

Time had become compressed—perhaps even more so since the events of the morning. I knew that Jack felt now as I did, that minutes together could not be wasted. When he hauled his boat in a few days, he would not be able to come to me any longer in the early mornings—not until the season began again in the spring. He couldn't come to me while he was working on his gear at the fish house; the others would see. And he couldn't leave his bed at four in the morning. He would have no boat to go to, which his wife would know. Did we have three mornings left or four?

"I have to go now," he said.

I withdrew my hand.

"You'll come tomorrow?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, and turned abruptly to jog down the small hill to the end of the point.

I nursed Caroline through the day and the night, dozing when she slept, just holding her when she was awake. The antibiotic had knocked her out, but she didn't seem to be in much pain, for which I was grateful, and her fever was abating as well. Toward evening, she recovered a bit more of her spirits, and we played together on the braided rug. I lay down on it and she crawled over me, then I'd capture her and whisk her through the air or lay her down beside me and tickle her. She giggled and laughed—deep belly laughs that made me want to squeeze her all the more.

Jack came just before daybreak. I was awake and waiting for him. His footsteps seemed urgent on the stairs. He was already shedding his yellow slicker as he opened the door to my bedroom. I rose in the bed to meet him, and he embraced me before he even had all his clothes off. His need was high-pitched and keen that morning, and we roiled in the bed like a churned-up sea. I felt in him something new—a frustration, the wanting of more than we could reasonably have. Afterwards, he rolled onto his back.

"I want to leave her," he said. "I want to come here and be with you."

I started to speak, but he stopped me.

"I can't leave her," he said. "Yesterday morning, when you gave the doctor the name and the number in that way you did, I thought for a just a minute that if you could risk so much, so could I. And all day I was trying to work it out, trying to figure a way I could leave her without harming her and come to you, but I couldn't. There just isn't any way to do it. Because it isn't a question of my risking anything for myself. I'd be risking her things—her family, her home, what little stability she has. And I can't do that to her. I don't have that right. She's too fragile, and this would just—"

I rolled over onto him and pulled the covers up to our shoulders. I put my hand over his mouth, laid my head on his chest. "Don't think about any of that," I said. "Let's just have this."

He wrapped his arms around me, held me close to his body.