Dale Loves Sophie to Death (22 page)

“So! You’re a Freudian,” she said from the doorway, in a weak attempt to appear blasé and in control of some slight humor. She would have to make light of this until she could think of what to say. The doctor looked up blankly at her; then he turned back to his labor over Toby. The nurses fell silent, and there was no conversation at all for a moment.

“You’ve inherited your mother’s fair skin, Toby,” Dr. Van Helder said. “That’s why it’s so hard to find your vein.”

While they finished their work and constructed a protective casing around the needle so that it wouldn’t be jarred loose, Dinah stood there looking on. She didn’t care about trying to explain anything; she knew she couldn’t have made herself clear. Besides, she still wanted to know if there was a chance that it was—Toby’s entire illness, whatever it might be—all her own fault. Dinah’s quiet panic took up so much of her mind that the only other feelings she could accommodate right now were sorrow and responsibility.

Dr. Van Helder went with them while Toby was wheeled on his bed through various corridors and up the invalid’s elevator to be installed in the pediatric ward. “He’s dehydrated,” the doctor said as they walked along. “This will build up his fluid level.”

The IV apparatus was guided after them by a nurse’s aide. As the bed was wheeled along and maneuvered around corners, Toby began to shudder with dry retching again. Dinah looked down at him as if he were very far away, and then stretched out her cool hand and brushed his forehead to reassure him. The doctor glanced at him but didn’t show special alarm or make any comment. The deeper into the hospital their procession progressed, the clearer it became to Dinah that Toby’s welfare was beyond her influence. She wondered if he even knew that she had meant to communicate comfort with her brief, fugitive touch. The air was brittle with detachment; she felt that she might be prevented from making such an overt contact with her own son. In this atmosphere the need to hold on to the fragile gestures of humanity seemed excessively sentimental.

“I’ll be back in a little while when I get the X rays,” Dr. Van Helder said to her before he left the room. In fact, Dinah was in no hurry for him to return. She would gladly have prolonged her ignorance and forfeited the future; it would be better to remain with Toby in this immediate instant than to get on with the truth.

The room had four beds, but Toby was its only occupant, so she switched the remote-control television through all its channels without hesitation. The sound wouldn’t disturb anyone, and she hoped the novelty of the machine would interest Toby, but he gazed at the flashing face of the television with apathy, and he didn’t want to make conversation either. Finally, she pulled up another chair and put her legs on it, and she curled at an angle, with her cheek against the back of her own chair, so that she could watch Toby and rest, too. But her eye drifted away from Toby and the needle in his hand. Without intending to, she turned her mind to a game show on Toby’s television in which two families competed against each other for prizes. She attached her entire consideration to it unwittingly, and when she realized next that time had passed without her awareness of it, she came back to attention with a jolt. The light that summoned the nurse was blinking off and on above Toby’s bed, and Dinah fought through a kind of self-induced haze to orient herself. She looked at Toby and realized that he himself had pushed the call button.

“Toby! You aren’t playing with that, are you? Sweetie, you should only push that button if there’s something you really need!” Even as she said this to him, she saw that she was betraying him once more. She was intimidated by hospitals. She said more easily, “Is there something you need? Are you thirsty or anything?”

Toby looked over at her. “It’s leaking,” he said, “but no one’s come yet.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“The tube there.” And with his free arm he gestured across his body to the tube running from the suspended bottle of liquid to the hollow needle that fed into the back of his hand. All along the flexible piping were little droplets of fluid, and with horror Dinah looked down to see a substantial pool of liquid on the floor by the bed. She had no idea what was being slowly dripped into Toby’s veins—whether or not it was crucial. What would happen if an air bubble made its way through that snaking tube? She had an odd sensation as she leaned over the shiny pool, transfixed; she felt herself blanch. The anger she felt was so absolute and unequivocal, and its summer-long impetus was so great, that its solidification sapped her of any energy directed otherwise. This was someone’s fault! She moved from her chair to the corridor with no thought put to the motion; suddenly she was just there, in the hall, looking for someone who could do something. Two nurses were standing outside their glassed-in station, chatting in good humor, and Dinah was very nearly frozen in place by her fury. But in the next moment she walked rapidly down the hall toward them and circled around the nurse whose back was to her, so that she was standing between the two women.

“Don’t you
see
that?” she said in a voice that even surprised her, it was so deep with an absolute and vibrating anger. She was pointing over the nurse’s shoulder to Toby’s light. “Now you just turn around if you’re not too busy and see if you can
see
that!” But the nurse was already moving off toward Toby’s door as Dinah spoke to her.

Dinah followed her back to Toby’s room and stood by the bed while the nurse found the mechanism that controlled the call button and switched it off. Dinah kept her voice carefully level. “You can see it’s leaking, there. I don’t know how long it’s been like that.”

The nurse adjusted the clamp on the tube and ran her hands over its length, trying to find the point from which the fluid was escaping. “It’s this piggyback bottle that’s giving us all this trouble,” she murmured. A look of clinical indifference was firmly settled on her face, and Dinah was suddenly tired from her anger; how was
she
to know where responsibility should lie?

“There! That’s all taken care of, Toby,” the nurse said with repellent heartiness as she finished fiddling with the tubing and the clamp. “Dr. Van Helder will be on the floor in a little while. He’ll be in to talk to you.” She imparted this information with absolute matter-of-factness, and then she left the room. There was very little injured righteousness for Dinah to muster, anyway, because she had been sitting inattentively right beside Toby when he needed help.

She considered Toby, who was now lying in his bed more alert than before, feeling a little better, it seemed. What she thought was that he had become a masculine presence all at once. He had taken charge without question. When she had been growing up, that had been something that boys did but not girls. Dinah struggled with it still: she still fought her inclination to avoid responsibility—to ask first: Is this all right? Is this allowed?

She looked at Toby with cautious admiration. She had a son who was not a son; he was his own person entirely. By now her emotions had caught up with events, and she was inescapably trapped in the alarming reality. Toby believed he was dying, and he was a competent judge. How would it be? She wasn’t trying to gauge the depth of her own sorrow; she knew that she couldn’t accurately anticipate that. But how could it happen that the world would not have Toby in it beyond a certain point? What would the world be without Toby in it as an adult? They sat together quietly in the room, and Dinah looked out the window to the parking lot below, where the rain fell steadily, just to keep her bearings. She needed to keep abreast of the fact that time was progressing.

When Dr. Van Helder came in, he paused at the foot of the bed to look over Toby’s chart once again, but Dinah knew there wouldn’t be any new information on it. She knew that the nurse wouldn’t have recorded the incident of the IV, but she would have been happy to have him read the chart forever. She wanted, just for a moment, to become senseless; her body had an impulse to flee, because she didn’t even want to suspect it, or to see what manner he would have of imparting the news to make it least uncomfortable to himself. She didn’t know this doctor; she wasn’t willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Dinah had straightened herself when she saw him come in, and now he sat down in the chair where she had been resting her legs, so that he and she were almost knee to knee.

Dr. Van Helder crossed his legs and settled back in the chair before he said anything, and it seemed to Dinah that this elaborate arranging of himself took several dreamlike hours. “Well, I think Toby does have a bad flu,” he said, conversationally. “But that shouldn’t last more than a day or so. He’s dehydrated. I’d like to get his fluid level up, as I told you.” He paused and looked down at his own crossed knees. Dinah sat very still, because it was clear he had more to say, and she wanted to be able to sit in her chair with composure when she heard what it was. “But I’m worried about that leg,” he said in the very deliberate voice doctors cultivate in order to make themselves perfectly clear and yet not cause panic. “Well…in fact, it’s not his leg at all, really. It’s his hip joint. I’m pretty sure he has what’s called toxic synivitus. But I don’t understand why it’s lasted so long. You say almost three weeks?” She nodded. “Well,” he went on, “it could be that the muscles around that joint have spasmed in a sympathetic reaction. That’s probably why he’s still limping.” He raised his hands from his lap in an unconscious gesture of calming the waters. “I think it’s been aggravated by having gone on for so long.” He looked up at Dinah with his face kept blank, and she knew he expected her to explain. But she knew she couldn’t have explained to his satisfaction, so she kept quiet. “It’s a virus,” he said. “No one’s ever done much research on it, because, as I say, it usually goes away within a week or so. I think I’d like to keep him in here for a day or two and give that leg a rest and let him get over this flu.”

Dinah’s gradual relief was so pleasurable that she didn’t mind if he thought she had been careless on Toby’s behalf. She didn’t mind his censure at all now that she knew that Toby only had some virus. Just a virus. Dread still lay solidly in her stomach like a heavy, indigestible food, but she could feel her body reacting just as if her limbs had been numbed and were now coming back to life with a sharp tingle.

“Then he’s all right?” she asked.

He looked at her with a puzzled expression, and then he seemed to be really cross. “Well,
no
. You see,” he said with considerable patience, as to someone of very slow wits, “he’s got something very like an inflamed hip. I think he ought to stay off that leg for some time. He shouldn’t walk on it at all.”

Dinah looked at him, but she had nothing at all to say. She knew it was not serious. This virus amounted to nothing in the long run. This virus was not death! Her social sense had deserted her, and she didn’t respond to his careful explanation of Toby’s ailment as solemnly as Dr. Van Helder clearly seemed to expect her to. In fact, to his obvious bewilderment, she could only smile and smile at him in great relief.

Chapter Ten

Lost and Strayed

O
ver the past few weeks Martin had lost his capacity for enthusiasm, and he was beginning to realize that he was crippled by the loss. His thoughts occupied his head in the same way he now inhabited his own house. He wasn’t likely to take much satisfaction in what grace the rooms possessed, but generally he derived a happy serenity from the sturdiness of the tall building itself and the comforting familiarity of it. Now the walls stood high and foreign to him, and the spaces he wandered through were no longer defined by custom; the rooms seemed never to have had a designated function. In the same way, he had lost the habit of organized reflection and contemplation. On the one hand, he was perfectly aware of his aberrant state of mind, but on the other hand, the dismal conclusions that beset him did not seem in the least unreasonable.

One morning he had come awake very early in his own bedroom, because he had forgotten to draw the curtains the night before, and he had been as stunned by the thought awaiting him when he surfaced into consciousness as he was by the heavy sunlight that bore down on his eyelids so that he dared not open them. He was at once overwhelmed by the knowledge that he had lived more than half his life! In this instance, it was simply the brevity of the span of his existence that staggered him and frightened him. What he wished he wanted at that moment was his mother, but in fact, he supposed he must want God. So he just lay still, since it was too late for him to believe in the reassurance of his mother or any God he might evoke. That morning Martin lay completely awake without any solace, but in the days that followed he looked back on that relatively benign realization of his own passing life with an almost affectionate indulgence.

The
universe
became ominous to Martin rather quickly, and he tried to avoid his own perceptions. Sometimes he simply slept deep into the day or got up before dawn and then napped throughout the afternoon. These erratic habits kept him at a distance from the rest of humanity, but paradoxically, he was obsessed with the news broadcasts on television, and whatever times he chose to eat or sleep, he arranged his day around these programs. He watched television in hope of being presented with some fact that would pull him back into a limited and measured view.

For a while he hit upon a comforting spell of fervent organization; he thought he had come upon an arrangement that would help him make a system for his days. Somewhere along the way Dinah had acquired a surgical steel cart her father had salvaged from the hospital when he was in med school. She had used it all through graduate school as a typing table, and it now sat at one end of the kitchen to house all the various portable appliances that they had accumulated over the years but rarely used. The kitchen was a long and narrow room with windows at one end and a glass door at the other. Martin was most comfortable there, and he devoted considerable attention to his solitary meals. For several days, his eye had been caught by the ill-assorted gadgets on the crowded cart. It was an aggravation to his inherent, personal orderliness that transcended even this crisis of philosophy. The little table had become a catchall of sorts and was heavily laden with dust in the spaces between the orange juicer and the ice crusher, and so forth. At last he set himself to clearing it off and sponging and scrubbing the steel surface with boiling water. It glowed with the soft sheen of sterile steel when he was done, and he could make good use of it. He regulated his schedule, and he lived with a certain sense of satisfaction for several days. He prepared his meals with great care and then transferred the food directly to the spotless metal surface of the cart and wheeled his dinner in front of the television. When he finished eating, he sponged down the table itself; there were no plates to be washed. He had made a gesture toward simply getting on with his days, and he was pleased with himself for it.