Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (31 page)

“Good. This incision is transverse again, very small, just big enough for the pen. Leave the knife in.”

The blood kept me from seeing anything, but in my mind was suddenly every detail of a picture from one of my old textbooks. I cut into the cricothryoid membrane. I felt a little pop. “Okay.”

“Zack, are you wearing gloves?”

“Yes, Grandpa.”

“Then pick up the tube and be ready to give it to your mother. When you’re ready, Darcy, release the thyroid cartilage, take the tube in your left hand, and rotate the knife ninety degrees
with your right, then insert the tube in the incision—it should slip right in—and pull the knife out.”

Rotate with my right hand, insert with my left. I could do that.

And I did. The pop was a little louder.

Finney’s chest rose sharply as his lungs pulled in air from the makeshift passage. It had worked.

I felt like sinking to my knees, in prayer, in exhaustion, but I had to keep holding the pen.

Finney wasn’t reacting to the pain from the incision. The relief of being able to breath, the life-giving oxygen filling his lungs, must have overridden the pain sensors.

Dad was having Zack wrap gauze from the first-aid kit around Finney’s neck and the base of the pen. I wondered when Zack had put gloves on. I hadn’t told him to. I watched him as he slipped the roll of gauze under Finney’s neck. His hands were steady.

A dentist would need steady hands.

The manager kept his hands clamped to Finney’s head. The angioneurotic edema—the swelling—continued. Finney’s eyes were getting puffier, but his chest was rising and falling. He was breathing, and he was wanting to touch his neck, to see what was hurting. We kept talking to him, telling him that he was safe now, that he was making his chest so big and was doing such a great job, but no, he couldn’t move. The dark-haired waitress got a wet napkin and started dribbling cool water on the hives. Dad stayed on the phone in case something went wrong. But nothing did.

At last I heard the ambulance siren. A moment later, a strong gloved hand closed over mine, and I eased mine away. Finney was no longer my responsibility. I sagged in relief, scooting out of the way of the EMTs.

“That was amazing, Mom,” Zack said. “You saved his life.”

“Grandpa had as much to do with it as I did.” I would not
have wanted to do that without a physician’s supervision. “And you, you were great.”

The ambulance drivers said that I could ride to the hospital with them, but I’d have to sit in front, out of their way. That was fine. I was glad not to be in charge anymore. Zack told me that he would drive the car to the hospital. He’d get directions from someone.

The step up into the ambulance was higher than I had expected. I almost lost my balance, but I grabbed on to a handle and hoisted myself in. The other doors slammed; the siren started to blare. The ambulance swung out onto the highway, turning so quickly that I swayed against the door. I straightened, but couldn’t think of any reason why I needed to sit up straight. So I leaned sideways, pressing my cheek against the cool glass window.

My dress was a mess. The place where I had gotten it caught on the door was full of snags and pulled threads. The bodice was splattered with blood and phlegm. Across the skirt front were some pinkish brown streaks. It looked as if I had wiped my hands there, but I couldn’t imagine what could have caused those stains. Then I remembered. The makeup.

I touched my finger to my eye. It came back blacked with mascara. I wiped it off, leaving a black smudge along with the pink ones.

I thought about calling Guy, but I didn’t have my purse. Or my shoes. I looked down at my feet. My stockings were laddered with runs, and my big toe stuck out of a hole in the left one. The edges of the hole were tight between my toes and around the side of my foot. It was uncomfortable. I reached down and pulled on the stocking until my toe was covered.

We reached Southampton and then the hospital. It was brick, only three or four stories in its tallest wing, much smaller than what I was used to. Guy was waiting outside the emergency-room
entrance, talking on his cell phone. He broke off the call and went directly to the rear of the ambulance.

I got back there as the hatch was swinging open. “How’s Annie?” I asked.

“She’s going to be fine . . . except that they’re making her stay overnight. We’re still not sure—”

He broke off. The EMTs had backed out, one pulling Finney’s gurney, the other still holding the tube.

“What’s going on with his neck?” Guy’s voice cracked. “Is there something in his neck? What happened?”

“Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“Your father . . . he said something about an emergency airway . . . but what’s that in his neck?”

Guy obviously had no idea how desperate things had been. He hadn’t understood what Dad had meant. He must have assumed that we had taken care of everything with an EpiPen. I put a hand on Guy’s arm. “He’ll be fine.”

Guy hurried to follow the gurney. I moved more slowly, knowing that I wouldn’t be allowed back in the treatment area. The hole in my stocking caught and pulled. The concrete was abrasive on my feet.

I got inside just as the big double doors leading into the treatment area were swinging shut. I went to the reception desk to find out where Annie was.

The receptionist eyed me and my ruined dress uncertainly. “Ah . . . you can’t go up there without shoes.”

Shoes
?
After all I had done, they cared about my
shoes
?

My expression must have frightened her because she popped out of her chair and a moment later returned with a pair of slippers. They were one-size disposable mules, the kind given to patients to wear between the dressing room and the X-ray. If you picked up your feet, they fell off. I shuffled to the elevator. Annie’s
room was only on the second floor, but I wouldn’t have been able to climb stairs in this footwear.

I wondered why they had admitted her. Unless she was still in tachycardia, it was probably for a psych evaluation. A teenager ingesting an unknown substance . . . the prudent course would be to hold on to her for twenty-four hours.

I got off the elevator just as Dad and Zack came out of the stairwell. Apparently they had arrived in the parking lot at the same time. Zack had my purse.

“I don’t suppose you thought to look for my shoes?”

“Oops. Didn’t think about it.” Zack glanced down at my feet. “I suppose you don’t want me to laugh.”

“Honestly, I’m beyond caring.”

Dad put his arm around me. “You did good work, Darcy B.”

“I couldn’t have done it without you. Or Zack.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’ve never seen one of those.”

“You hadn’t even
seen
one?” I ran a hand over my face. “Good Lord, Dad, I’m really glad that I didn’t know that.”

“It didn’t seem like a good time to bring it up.”

We followed the signs and went past the nurses’ station. At the end of the hall, Mike was talking on his phone. Jeremy was with him. I supposed there were signs somewhere about not using personal cell phones in the hospital, but most families ignored those warnings, so why shouldn’t we?

“Mom!” Jeremy looked me up and down. “What happened to you?”

“She just saved Finney, that’s what,” Zack snapped. He hadn’t liked his older brother’s tone. “Mom cut his neck open with a kitchen knife and stuck a pen in his windpipe.”

“You did a tracheotomy, Mom?” Jeremy turned to me. “Outside a hospital?”

My next goal in life was to keep my older son from being one
of those pompous doctors who don’t respect nurses. “It’s called a cricothyroidotomy. Combat medics are the ones most likely to need to do them now.”

“She was awesome,” Zack said.

Mike finished his call. “That was Guy on the phone, calling from the emergency room. He just found out about the crico-whatever. He asked that we not tell Rose how bad things got. And, Darcy”—Mike turned to me—“he asked me to say something to you, but he didn’t know what.”

I flipped my hand. “All in a day’s work.”

There were two beds in the room, but the bed closer to the door was empty. Annie was asleep in the one by the window. Rose was in a chair next to her, and Cami was perched on the radiator. In the guise of kissing Annie, I felt her pulse. It was fine.

“We don’t understand what happened with Finney,” Cami said. “We heard it was a flavored water, but he would never take anything from someone he doesn’t know.”

“Claudia gave it to him,” Zack said. He’d followed me into the room. “She saw that the water was ‘all natural’ and didn’t read the label.”

It occurred to me that I had no idea where Claudia was . . . and I didn’t care.

“We’ve taught him to recognize the word
corn,
” Rose said. “Did he look at the label?”

“He wouldn’t have thought to,” I said. “He would have trusted Claudia.”

Rose’s lips tightened. I knew she was thinking exactly what I was. Claudia had been acting as if she were one of us, one of the moms-in-charge. But the first responsibility of such a woman is always the safety of the children. Always.

“Did you need the second dose from his EpiPen?” Rose asked. Both she and Finney carried two-dose “dual packs.”

“Or
was one enough? I can’t believe that I forgot to give you the one from my purse. I’m almost glad that we didn’t hear about it until he was in the ambulance on the way here. I would have been beside myself about not leaving his EpiPen.”

“You weren’t holding your purse.” I tried to distract her. “Zack gave it to the EMT. I’m sure if you’d had it in your hand, you would have remembered.”

“Who knows? I was so sick about Annie. But you didn’t answer my question about the EpiPen. Did you need—” She stopped, and I knew that she had finally noticed what a mess I was—the ruined dress, the raccoonlike makeup. She straightened. “I would like everyone to leave except Darcy.”

“What?” Cami asked. “Why?”

“Just leave.”

Dad organized it, touching Cami on the back, herding the men, shutting the door behind him.

“What happened?” Rose said as soon as we were alone. “That’s blood on your dress. This isn’t just corn exposure, is it?”

Why did I keep getting put in this spot? “Guy asked me not to say anything.”

“Darcy, what is going on?”

I’m not sure I could have done what she had done outside the restaurant this afternoon. When Annie was in distress, when we had no idea what was going on, I had asked Rose to step away, and she had. She had trusted me to handle things. I would have found that harder to do than anything that had happened inside the restaurant.

I wanted to be like that: I wanted to trust people in that way.

I took a breath. “We couldn’t find his EpiPen.” She gasped, but I kept on talking. “Claudia and the photographer had him take off his fanny pack for the pictures, and we think it was thrown out. So he did go into anaphylaxis. His throat was swelling. I
called Dad, and we did what you would think of as an emergency tracheotomy.”

“You cut into him? Into his neck?” She struggled out of her chair, knocking aside the tray table that was in her way. “Oh, my God, I have to see him.”

“You can’t. They won’t let you. They’re probably removing the tube now. He’ll be sedated. And, Rose, when Annie wakes up, she’ll need you here.”

“Annie . . .” Rose sank back down. “It must seem that we only care about him, that she could be hanging from a bridge and we wouldn’t care as long as he was all right.”

“No, she cares about him too. She’s more worried about you and Guy than about herself.”

“Guy and me?” That made no sense to Rose, but she couldn’t think about it right now. “Oh, Darcy, I can’t believe what I’ve done. You were exactly right about her, and I refused to listen to you. I was so wrong; I couldn’t have been more wrong. All I wanted from her was not to need anything, and she must have figured that out because she tried to fix everything on her own.”

“Did she tell you more? Did she overhear us in California?”

Rose nodded. “Yes, and apparently she took three Ritalin tablets from your purse the next morning.”

Now it was my turn to wince with guilt. I hadn’t noticed they were missing.

“She took one on the airplane ride home, and she studied all the way. Then, when she got home, she said she couldn’t sleep, so she kept studying. She took one before the test, and I remember . . . the teacher said that it was a good thing there were so many essays and short answers on the test because otherwise they would have thought that she’d cheated. Can a pill really make that much difference?”

“You have to need it. If a non-ADD person takes one, it
doesn’t do much. And the pills alone aren’t enough. You’ve got to be motivated, you have to want to change, and clearly she did.”

Rose shook her head. “Everyone was so thrilled with how she did on that test that she started getting pills from other kids. She swears she never used them as a recreational drug, and then she wrote down what she took when.”

“If you have to do something stupid, dangerous, and illegal, I suppose keeping good records is the way to go.”