Sisterland Page 32

  “You’re right,” Bob said. “I know you’re right.” He and the woman with red braids, whose name I couldn’t remember, were sleeping together, I thought suddenly. Or about to, or hoping to. And I doubted grilled fish would stop it.

  A middle-aged woman whom I guessed to be of East Indian descent talked about her daughter’s divorce (ultimately, it would be for the best, Vi said), and a white woman with short black hair and bushy black eyebrows wanted to know whether she should take a job in Seattle (absolutely, Vi said, though the group would miss her), and the other man, who was maybe forty and balding, said that his wife wanted to put an addition on the back of their house even though they already had plenty of space and never used their living room and also he had begun to wonder if she was a compulsive shopper. Vi was quiet for longer after he spoke than she had been after anyone else’s disclosure. She even shut her eyes, and queasily, I understood that she was communicating with Guardian—that this would represent the first time in the evening she’d acted as a medium rather than relying on some combination of presumptuousness and common sense. When she opened her eyes, she said, “It’s Tiffany, right? That’s your wife’s name?”

  The man nodded.

  “I hate to tell you this, but I’m wondering if Tiffany has a problem with prescription drugs. Is that possible?”

  He grimaced, and in the grimace was recognition. He said, “She’s been having back pain again, so I thought—”

  “I’m sorry, Jay,” Vi said. “We can talk more after if you’d like.”

  Carol wanted to know if she ought to let a case she was working on go to trial. She said, “I can’t go into the specifics, but my co-counsel thinks we’d be making a mistake, whereas I just have this feeling that we’ll win.”

  What I’d been thinking was that surely, the more Carol had listened, the more unimpressive Vi must have seemed to her. I wouldn’t have disputed that this gathering served a purpose for its participants; that it illustrated my sister’s psychic talents would have been a harder proposition for me to defend. And yet Carol seemed as earnest and believing as anyone else present. Was I exceptionally cynical? Well, yes, I thought, compared to the group assembled, because the group had attended voluntarily, whereas I had come along only to prevent my sister from telling my mother-in-law embarrassing secrets about me.

  Vi looked around. “What do I always say?” No one responded, though the room was filled with a communal affability; allowing Vi to answer her own question was, I guessed, part of the ritual.

  “Trust yourself,” Vi said. “Trust yourself, trust yourself, trust yourself. Carol, I can’t emphasize this enough. If you think you should take the case to trial, then I want you to listen to that inner voice. Our intuition is the most powerful tool we have in our kit.”

  The formal part of the session had lasted for close to an hour, and it went on for another fifteen minutes, but I could feel that the emotional high point had occurred with the revelation about Jay’s wife and the segue into Vi’s more general exhortation. When it was clear that the discussion was winding down, Vi said, “Any final concerns?” She was looking at me, and I looked back, widening my eyes, which I intended to mean, There’s no way. She had not, thus far, embarrassed me; she hadn’t even explicitly mentioned Guardian. I had felt squirmy and skeptical, but it hadn’t been nearly as bad as I’d feared. “All right then,” Vi said. “Shall we join hands?”

  On my left, my mother-in-law’s hand was small and cool; on my right, Jay’s was warm and limp, and I felt that Vi was right about his wife and prescription drugs. “May the energies offer us their guidance and wisdom,” Vi said, “and may we take time amid the hustle and bustle to listen to them, and to inhabit the refuge they offer.”

  Three or four people said amen, and then everyone was standing and talking, checking their cellphones, throwing away their plastic cups. While Vi collected money and asked who’d be bringing the wine next time, I went to use the bathroom; unlike Carol, I had no problem accepting a family discount. During the session, I had been away from Rosie, but when I looked in the mirror above the sink, she came back to me. I missed her, and I wanted to get home.

  Vi was waiting for me outside the bathroom door. “It was a little lame tonight,” she whispered, making a face. “It’s usually juicier.”

  “You were good,” I said.

  “You expected me to be wearing a turban and speaking in a Jamaican accent, didn’t you?”

  “Just say thank you,” I said. “I gave you a compliment.”

  On the drive home, Carol was as talkative as she’d been on the way over, eager to discuss the other clients—“Wasn’t that girl with the braids darling?” she said—and I waited for her to remark on how the event had more closely resembled group therapy than legitimate clairvoyance. Instead she said, “What a gift your sister has.”

  Really? I thought. That’s really what you think?

  “But the thing I kept wondering,” Carol added, “is who she’s communing with. If she can access information that the rest of us can’t, who’s telling it to her?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s ghosts in white sheets.” I’d been trying for a joke, but Carol didn’t laugh. I said, “I mean, I guess she’s just attuned to the energy of the world. What’s all around us.” Carol still didn’t respond. We were on Manchester, about to hit the light for Big Bend, and tentatively—it was somehow unsurprising to me that I was about to reveal what Vi herself hadn’t, it made me feel that all along my defeat had been inevitable—I said, “There’s, like, an entity she talks to. Like someone in the spirit world, and she calls him Guardian, and she thinks he first visited her maybe fifteen years ago. He’s the one who tells her things.” Still Carol said nothing—was her silence some lawyerly technique designed to make people blurt out things they hadn’t intended to?—and I continued, “I think, technically, that makes Vi a medium, but sometimes she picks up on stuff in other ways. And not everyone who’s psychic is a medium. You could get information that came to you in a dream, or you could be walking down the street, or sitting in a room, and all of a sudden you have a sense.” It seemed I’d just revealed more about myself to Carol in the last minute than in all the years since I’d met her, that now only by ignoring the most obvious signals could she not know that Vi and I were the same. But she accused me of nothing. “At least I think you could,” I said.

  At home, as soon as Carol had excused herself to go to bed—she had an early flight out in the morning and had insisted on calling a cab—Jeremy said, “I finally got Rosie to sleep again, but she wasn’t a happy camper tonight.”

  I frowned. “You should have called me.”

  “I wanted you to have a night out.” He sighed. “Anyway, she’s asleep now.”

  “How much was she up?”

  “A lot. It sounds like my mom had a ball, though.” We looked at each other, and he said, “Don’t go into Rosie’s room. You’ll wake her up.”

  But around three, it was Rosie who awakened us, and she felt hot. When I took her temperature—it said 101.6—Jeremy and I then held a whispered conference in Rosie’s room about whether or not to give her acetaminophen. She was just five months old, and we hadn’t yet given her medicine of any kind. “Let’s wait and call the doctor in the morning,” Jeremy said. “Her fever’s not that high.”

  But after I’d nursed Rosie, I couldn’t bring myself to put her back in bed. I sat in the glider holding her, and she fussed at first until eventually she settled down and fell asleep.

  It wasn’t yet six when the sun rose, white light showing in around the sides of Rosie’s curtains, and for the first time since I’d put her to bed the night before, I had a clear view of her face. This was when I saw that her left eye was extremely swollen. Both the eyelid and the area beneath the eye were puffy and pink, two discrete half-moons. I ran my fingertip over the pouch below her eye, and she woke and looked at me with an agitated expression. Her left eye opened only about a third as much as usual.

 
Trying to sound calm, I said, “Hi, little pumpkin. How are you?”

  She began to cry, and my heart clenched like a fist; this was the first time I experienced anxious heart, when it came into existence for me. Had a spider bitten her, or had she had an allergic reaction to something that had passed through my milk, or was it connected to her cold from a few days before? I tried to think of what the next sequence of events should be. I hoped Carol had left for the airport but was pretty sure she hadn’t. I stood and carried Rosie into our bedroom and said, “Jeremy, her eye looks horrible. I don’t know why, but it’s almost swollen shut.”

  There was a stern expression on Jeremy’s face as he sat up, reaching for the wire glasses on his nightstand, and then he looked at Rosie and said, “Whoa.” I began to cry, and Rosie, who had stopped crying, did, too. “No, no,” Jeremy said. “Let’s not panic. Let’s figure out what to do. What time is it?”

  “Six.” I sniffed. “I think your mom’s in the shower. Do we take Rosie to the ER now or wait till the doctor’s office opens?”

  “Have you taken her temperature again?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll get the thermometer.” He pushed back the sheet.

  This time, her temperature was 103.2. “Here’s what I think we should do,” Jeremy said. “Give her medicine now, and call the pediatrician the minute the office opens. If we go to the ER, we could end up waiting so long that it wouldn’t be any faster. Have you nursed her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Nurse her,” he said. “I’ll see my mom off.”

  It was good, it was reassuring, to have a plan. After I heard the front door close, Jeremy came back upstairs, checked on us, then showered; I lay in our bed cradling Rosie, wanting to stay on the same floor as Jeremy. When he went downstairs for breakfast, we followed him, though my own stomach was churning and I was afraid to consume anything other than a glass of water. Simultaneously, I was getting used to Rosie’s swollen eye and it still retained its power to shock me. When, I kept wondering, had this happened? And if I hadn’t gone to Vi’s with Carol, would I have noticed it before it got so bad?

  Jeremy called the pediatrician’s office, and when they said someone could see us immediately, I passed him Rosie and raced upstairs to change out of my pajamas. In the car, Jeremy drove and I sat in the back, next to Rosie.

  The nurse who opened the waiting room door to usher us back looked at Rosie and said, “Oh my goodness!” Which I didn’t like, though being at the doctor’s office did decrease my fear slightly.

  It wasn’t our regular pediatrician we saw but another doctor, who kept trying to figure out if Rosie’s eye was moving, but she couldn’t tell because the eye was now open only a sliver. She said that she thought Rosie had cellulitis—a bacterial skin infection—which was probably from having had a cold, and that while normally she’d have given us a prescription for antibiotics and sent us home, because she couldn’t tell if Rosie’s eye was moving, she wanted us to take Rosie to the ER after all.

  Rosie was still on the exam table at this point, with me propping her up, and she was so subdued that I wondered if she was about to fall asleep. When the doctor said we needed to go to the ER, there was a moment of Jeremy and me not making eye contact, of him knowing I was surprised and telling me—he wasn’t speaking, of course—There’s no reason to panic. She’s just being careful.

  So we drove from the pediatrician’s office to Children’s Hospital—this time, on seeing Rosie, the woman we checked in with said, “Yikes!”—and after we’d waited forty-five minutes, we were admitted to a little room, where a nurse took Rosie’s vitals and then a man named Dr. Mittra came in and examined her. Her eye was by this point swollen shut. He, too, said he thought she had cellulitis but that he couldn’t confirm the diagnosis without seeing if the eye was moving—he couldn’t know if the infection was preseptal, which meant in front of the eye’s septum, or orbital, which meant within it.

  “If the infection’s in the eye, then what?” I asked.

  Dr. Mittra was calm but not warm; he was not reassuring. He said, “Because the optic nerve leads to the brain, there are risks of meningitis and cavernous sinus thrombosis.” When I asked what cavernous sinus thrombosis was, he said, “A blood clot.”

  Again, I could feel Jeremy telling me, He’s not saying the infection is orbital. He’s saying he thinks it isn’t.

  After Dr. Mittra was gone, two nurses inserted an IV into Rosie’s hand, and over the hollow needle, they attached a plastic shield, like half a cup, so that Rosie wouldn’t pull the IV out. (Later, a doctor told me that when you asked children what they’d been in the hospital for, those old enough to talk would say it was because they’d hurt their hand.) The nurses started Rosie’s antibiotics immediately, while I sat with her on my lap, and she fell asleep. With the administration of the antibiotics, I thought, her recovery had officially begun; we had reversed directions. Hadn’t we?

  Jeremy said, “How are you doing?”

  I shrugged.

  “This is a really great hospital,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  I wanted him to tell me that Rosie wouldn’t get meningitis or a blood clot in her brain, but I also didn’t want to speak the words meningitis or clot aloud. And really, anxious heart had made the rest of my body into a large, vacant, silent house; my limbs, even my head, were rooms that had been closed off for the winter.

  After a minute, Jeremy said, “Will you say something? I can’t tell what you’re thinking.”

  It was hard to use my tongue to form words, but finally I said, “I just want her to be okay.”

  We looked at each other, and Jeremy said, “She will.”

  Another doctor, a different one from Dr. Mittra, said they were keeping us overnight. This was after we’d been in the little exam room for six or seven hours. The room they took us to then—they pushed me in a wheelchair with Rosie on my lap, because they didn’t want to let me carry her on foot—had a crib with a mattress more than four feet off the floor and a double set of stainless-steel bars covering both the top and bottom halves. I rocked Rosie to sleep and deposited her gently on the mattress. Jeremy then went to close the two sets of bars, and they met with a great clanging lock that awakened Rosie, and all at once, she was crying, reaching for me, and I heard myself shrilly saying, “Jeremy, open it! Open them! Get her out!” Because it was my dream: My dream of Rosie in a prison cell had come true, except that it wasn’t a prison cell, it was a hospital crib.

  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, whi
ch 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.