Hooked (20 page)

“What happened?” Will asked.

“I was making dinner and a pot of pasta water banged against something and some of it spilled onto Ian’s leg,” I said.

“Thea, Jesus Christ,” he said. Something in his voice said he was expecting this to happen, as though it were inevitable. “What the hell.”

“It was an accident,” I said.

Dr. Lyons walked past us with an older guy in a white coat. “Whenever you’re ready,” she mouthed, pointing to the room I’d just left.

“Where are you?” Will asked. “I should call my parents.”

“Just come. You can call them later. Dad’s here.”

“Your dad?”

“Yeah. I called him first because I thought he’d know what to do. He was a paramedic in college.”

“Your dad was a paramedic?” he asked, disbelieving.

“Come soon,” I said.

When I hung up, Ian was sleeping in my arms. The gauze pads on his leg were soaked through with a mix of ointment and pus. It hit me how badly I’d screwed him up, but I pushed the thought away. I went back into the room where Dad and Dr. Lyons and the guy in white were talking.

“Thea, this is Dr. Evans,” Dad said, as if he were introducing someone who had arrived at his house. “I explained to him what happened.”

“Hi there.” He winked at me. “Maybe it’s a good idea to
have a look while he’s asleep.” He craned his neck to look at Ian’s leg as the rest of his stout body stood erect. Ian flinched but didn’t wake.

“Yes, folks, that’s a burn,” he said cheerfully. “But I’m happy to report we’re not going to do anything drastic about it. No scary surgeries. We’re just going to hang out and watch it and swab it with cream and let the skin do its magic tricks.”

Dad exhaled like he’d been holding his breath. “Okay,” he said.

Dr. Lyons moved behind me and must have made a gesture directed at me.

“So tell me what happened,” Dr. Evans said. “Some kind of freak accident with a pot of something?”

“I don’t know how it happened, I really don’t,” I said, scared that they were going to haul me off. “It just spilled over while I was bringing it to the sink. I feel so stupid.” I shook my head while Dad and the doctor hung their heads to the floor. “You understand that it was an accident, right? That’s all it was. An accident. I made a mistake. I’m very careful with him, you know. I am. Dad?”

“I know you are, Thea.” He sighed, shaking his head. “You just have to be
more
careful.”

I thought of all the hours with Ian, the endlessly repeating, looping thoughts about whether he was eating enough or pooping too much. I saw myself tiptoeing and holding my breath when he slept in the morning. How I walked down the street with him in the stroller, seeing nothing else but his face in front of me. The thanklessness of it all numbed me. I burst into tears.

Will came into the room. “What’s the word?” he asked, panting.

“I’m Dr. Evans, and I take it you are the father.” The doctor held out his hand. The room we were in was full of computers on carts, and a nurse sat nearby reading CNN and watching us. “He’s going to be okay. We’re looking at second-degree, superficial burns. Lots of blistering and clear fluids, not pleasant to look at, but he’ll be okay.”

Will hovered over Ian’s leg. “Poor thing,” he whispered. “Mama’s gonna order in from now on. Don’t worry.” He smiled and looked up at me and squeezed my arm. It was the last time I remember him being on my side.

Dr. Evans said he wanted to keep Ian in the hospital overnight. There was a single room open in Pediatrics at the end of the hall.

“You should go home,” I said to Will when we got to the room. “Get some sleep.”

He looked at the single bed, at the sole chair where Dad had already parked himself. “You going to be okay?”

“Just bring him a new onesie when you come tomorrow,” I said. “The long-sleeved, blue, striped one. And maybe some socks.”

Will kissed my cheek, then Ian’s. “Hang in there, little guy,” he whispered on his way out.

I held Ian, looked at the soaked bandages and winced. Clear fluid was normal, the doctor had said. Normal. Dad leaned forward in the chair, reading my mind, and it hit me
with a rush how glad I was to have that sage, stuffy, older lifeform that was my father perched in the corner. “It’ll heal,” he said. “The feeling Dr. Evans gave was that it looks worse than it is, thank God.”

“I know,” I said.

He forced a tired smile. “You should call Mom.”

“You know how she is with gore.”

He nodded, like he was enjoying some personal, fond joke about her. Then he closed his eyes and rested his head against the orange leather seat while I dialed Mom.

“How serious do they think it is?” she asked. Her TV blared in the background.

“Can you turn that down?” I asked, hugging Ian closer. “They said it’s second-degree burns.”

“So he won’t need a skin graft, thank God.” I heard the TV go silent, and her voice sounded all of a sudden oversized and echoey. “But he’ll probably have scarring. I hope for his sake it’s not a real deformity. Are you sure you don’t want to switch hospitals? Lenox Hill is really the only one in this city worth its salt.”

“No, Mom, we’re fine,” I said. “They know what they’re doing.”

“I hope so,” she said. “Will’s there, right?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

“Okay.” She hesitated. “Do you want me to come?”

“You don’t need to,” I said. “We’re getting out tomorrow morning.”

“Good,” she said quickly. “Call me when you get home.”

When I looked up, Dad was watching me on the phone, playing with the curtain cord. “Well, I guess I should head out,” he said. “Let you guys get some sleep.” Change fell out
of his pocket as he stood up, and it rolled all over the floor. He looked to see if it had woken Ian up. “Sorry,” he whispered, gathering the coins. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

“Thanks,” I said as the door swished closed. I angled the small task lamp on the side table away from us, then turned it off. I carefully lay Ian down into the same plastic box he was wheeled around in when he was born, and I lay flat on the bed. It hit me how recently we were all there and how different things felt now. A nurse peeped through the door, saw me staring at the ceiling and went away. I felt a weird, jumpy urge to see if Ian was okay, and as I stood up, watching his blanket move up and down as he breathed, something happened. I stood over him and thought about how purely, wholly good he was and how I was never going to be able to protect him from or make up for all of my mistakes. I wondered what the hell I’d done, not just with the accident, but the whole thing. Having him. What had I done? Why had I brought someone into this world? I imagined Ian in a calculus class, struggling like me and feeling like shit, and I imagined someone making promises to him, about a job or something else, and him getting his hopes up and the person not making good on it. I imagined Ian loving someone like I loved Will and that person dropping dead on the street. I thought about blood and accidents until a cyclone of grief mashed me up and I wondered how the hell I’d ever thought it was okay to disappear that summer with Vanessa. How could I have done that to them? A trolley rolled down the hall outside my room, one of its wheels catching and banging on every turn. It stopped at my door and a guy peeked in.

“No trays, ma’am?” he asked.

I shook my head and the smell of old food seeped into the room as sobs ripped through me. I thought about Mom and
Dad. Was life nurturing, in some inexplicable way, or was it just a never-ending string of losses in different shapes?

I whispered to Ian, “Remember when you were born and I couldn’t stop saying, ‘Oh my God?’ ” He slept on his back with his head turned all the way to his shoulder. At that angle his head looked like it could have spun right around. Did infants have ligaments? Connective tissue? I lay down on the bed and fell asleep in a splinter of light shining from the bathroom door, thinking, This sadness, whatever it is, somehow binds me to Ian, and as a result, to this world, like it or not.

The next morning a nurse griped to someone outside our door over the sound of clattering dishes.

“Without saying anything, she just
took
it from me,” she said. I opened my eyes and saw Ian sprawled across my chest on his side; he felt cooler, less clammy, and he had a content pucker on his lips. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. Things felt strangely, wonderfully calm between me and him. A feeling hit me that I’d always somehow known him, or if not him, his spirit; I felt like his spirit had always been with me, climbing the stairwells at school, crossing Fourteenth Street, drinking a soda inside the movie theater on Third Avenue. But I wished I could look down and see his leg healed, the damage I’d done erased.

Will walked into the room with his mother a couple of hours later. He handed me Ian’s striped onesie and a pair of
white socks, then went straight to the windowsill where my jacket was. “Do you have anything else? Mom’s going to drive us home.”

I lay Ian in front of me on the mattress to change his diaper and get him dressed. The doctor had said to keep his leg uncovered and I wondered how I was going to keep him warm against the October chill. Loose blankets, I decided. Will was staring at Ian’s leg from across the room.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I know it looks horrible, but there’s a topical anesthetic in the cream, so it’s not hurting him, right? Otherwise he’d be screaming.”

“Do you want to go wash up or anything?” Mrs. Weston stood next to the bed with her hands on her hips, at the ready. Be positive, I laughed to myself. I finished changing Ian and handed him to her, my shirt still open, not caring what she saw. “Ooh, poor baby,” she said, taking him gingerly.

“Mom, I’ll hold him,” Will said, walking quickly over. “Why don’t you go get the car and bring it around and we’ll meet you downstairs.”

“One day,” I said, on my way to the bathroom, “I’ll stop beating myself up about this, at least I hope I will.” I tried to catch Will’s eye, but he was looking down at the table, at the instructions that came with the medication.

The elevator stopped at every floor on the way down.

“Hi,” I said, leaning toward Will. “Missed you last night. Glad we’re going home.”

“Me too,” he said, staring at the elevator numbers as they lit up and dinged.

I got into the backseat, where Will had already laid Ian’s car seat. I wondered how the hell I was going to get the strap over his leg.

“Just do one side,” Will said. “You don’t have a choice.” Then he went around and got in front next to his mother. “Take it easy, Mom,” he said. “I don’t want him banging around back there. He’s been through enough.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Weston said as she sped down Seventh Avenue.

Ian’s leg was smeared with greasy cream and covered with thick, gauzy bandages. He looked like a tiny maimed soldier. Someone honked behind us and Mrs. Weston swerved, trying to get out of the way.

“Forget about him,” Will said sharply. “Just focus on taking it slow.” I remembered Will saying Mrs. Weston was a shitty driver, that she’d point to something she saw out the window and then steer toward it.

“Did they send you home with anything?” she asked.

“Just more cream,” I said. “The doctor said I should call if Ian seemed distressed or feverish but that the pain should be subsiding.”

“Yeah, half his leg was almost scalded off,” Will said. “But it shouldn’t hurt a bit by now.”

“It wasn’t scalded off,” I said. “The doctor’s more concerned with potential infection at this point. Making sure the leg stays clean. He said any scars from the burn will heal completely within a year.”

“Sure, he’s young,” Will scoffed, turning the radio on. “He’ll get over it.”

“I think your cells do multiply more quickly, the younger you are,” Mrs. Weston said, catching my eye in the rearview mirror. Was she actually sticking up for me?

“Yeah, well, he’ll only need a hundred billion or so.” Will sat back and gripped his knees.

“Did I ever tell you about when I spilled coffee on Roy?” Mrs. Weston said.

“Uh-uh.” Will stared out the window.

“This whole thing made me think of it,” she said. “We’d just gotten a new coffee percolator, I think it was a late wedding present, and I was trying to figure out how to use it and the whole thing exploded.”

“Oh no,” I said.

“Yup. The whole thing blew, and bits of grinds and hot water sort of showered on top of his head,” she said cheerfully. “Bits of coffee grinds on his cheeks, it looked like razor stubble.”

“How bad was it?” I asked. “Was he burned badly?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t remember. I don’t even remember what we did. Can you believe that?” She stopped suddenly at a red light.

“Watch it!” Will said, gritting his teeth. Ian jumped in his sleep as the car heaved to a stop. I loved those flinches. Like he was sending out little smoke signals of alertness and life while he slept.

We got into the house and I sat down to give Ian the boob while Will and his mom took the gauze pads and other stuff from the hospital out of the paper bag. I pointed to the big square pillow on the armchair, the one I used to lay Ian across.

“Can you pass me that?” I asked Will.

Mrs. Weston rushed over to get it. “Here you go.”

Will went to the sink and threw water on his face and wiped it with the towel hanging on the refrigerator door.

“Are you all set as far as things from the drugstore?” Mrs. Weston sat down next to me on the couch.

“We’re all set,” I said. I looked at her face, remembering
again how I’d been afraid of her when I’d first met her. Had she changed or had I?
Be positive
.

“Okay.” She looked at Will. “You all right, honey? Can I get you guys some sandwiches?”

“I have to get back to school,” Will said. “I’ve already missed too much.”

“They’ll understand, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Weston. “How could they not?”

“Yeah, it’s not every day—”

“Can’t you stick around for a little bit?” I said, cutting him off. Ian started to scream. The burned part of his leg was brushing up against the pillow, so I flipped him to the other side.