The Age of Grief (22 page)

Her eyes opened. She uttered, “Did you have these aches and pains?”

“Not really.”

“I’ve never felt anything like it. It must be what rheumatoid arthritis is like.”

“Anything else?”

“A little woozy. How’s Stephanie?”

“Temperature.”

“How much?”

“Lots.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “How much?”

“104.”

“Did you call Danny?”

“He’ll just say bring her in at 105. I gave her some Tylenol and I’m going to give her a lukewarm bath.”

“Oh.” Her voice was very low. She closed her eyes.
After a moment, tears began to run through the lashes, over the bridge of her nose, onto the pillowcase.

“She’ll be all right.”

She nodded, without opening her eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m sad for us.”

“We’ve had the flu before.”

“I’m sad for us, anyway.” She snorted and wiped her face on the quilt.

“We’ll be all right, too.” She opened her eyes and looked at me, sober, speculative, in retreat. Not if she can help it, I thought. I said, “I love you.”

“I know.” But though she continued to look at me, she didn’t reciprocate.

Finally I said, “Well. I’m going to work on Stephie.” She nodded.

Lizzie was doing a good job. Stephanie lay on her back, with her eyes closed and her chin slightly raised. Lizzie was smoothing the washcloth over her forehead and down her cheeks. She had a look of concentration on her face, the same look she gets when she is writing something. I stood quietly in the doorway watching them and listening to Leah mount the stairs. Soon she came into view, her hand reaching up to grasp the banister, her eyes on her feet, careful. She looked up and smiled. I would like to have all these moments again.

Just then, Stephanie threw out her arm, smacking Lizzie in the face. Lizzie jumped back in surprise, already crying, and I was upon them with reassurances. “She didn’t mean it, honey. Stephie? Stephie? Are you there, sweetie? Do you want to take a little bath?” She was tossing herself around the bed. She said, “Megan, don’t. Don’t!” I picked her up
to carry her into the bathroom and she nearly jerked out of my arms. She was soaked with sweat and slippery. After the bath, she was still above 104. It was like a floor she could not break through.

I kept a record:

I longed for some magic number, either 103.8 or 105, for either reassurance or the right to take her to the hospital. She writhed and spoke and sweated and grew smaller in my eyes, as if the flesh were melting off her. I kept reminding myself that the fever is not the illness but the body fighting off the illness. It is hard to watch, hands twitch for something to do. And I was beat, after those nights with Leah, but even if I dozed, I would wake after an hour, and my first feeling was raging curiosity: what would it read this time?

8 a.m.: 104.2

Lizzie walked to school alone and I took Leah to her day care. I ran home, my fingers itching for the thermometer. I was ready to believe any magic, but none had taken effect. I gave her more Tylenol, another bath, took a shower, stepped on the scale. I had lost twelve pounds since Dana’s opera. The High Stress Family Diet.

9:30 a.m.: 104.4. Dan, the pediatrician, told me to keep taking her temperature.

After I read it, I shook the thermometer, just to see if the mercury was able to register any other number. I called the pediatrician again. He said that it would go down very soon. I said, “It’s not impossible that it could just stay at this level, is it?”

He said, “Anything is possible.” I was glad to hear him admit it.

I should say that I talked to her the whole day. “Stephanie,” I said, “this stinks, doesn’t it? We’ve been at this for days, it seems to me. Pure torture, an endless task. Sisyphean, you might say. I remember the myth of Sisyphus quite well, actually. We read it in seventh grade. You will probably read it in seventh grade, too. I also remember the myth of Tantalus. He kept trying to bite an apple that would move out of the way when he leaned his head toward it. Sisyphus had to roll a stone up the mountain, and then watch it roll back down again. I think I remember it because that’s what seventh grade seemed like to me. Anyway, sooner or later you will know all this stuff. And more. The thing is, after you know it, it will float in and out of your consciousness in a random way, so that if you ever just want to sit and talk to your own daughter like this, not having a conversation but just talking to keep her ears greased, as it were, then all
of this stuff will come in handy. But I am here to tell you, Stephie dear, that every word, whatever its meaning, gets us closer to tomorrow or the next day, when you will sit up and look around, and I will breathe a long sigh of relief.” The paternal patter. During the night, it eased toward 105, and I took it every forty-five minutes. At two, Dana got up to spell me, but when I got up at two thirty, I found her passed out in the hallway and carried her back to bed.

She is light. She is only 5’ 4”, though she seems taller to the patients because she always wears those three-inch Italian heels in the office. People marvel at this, but in fact she doesn’t stand on her feet all day, she sits on a stool. The shoes flatter her ankles, her hips, her waist, everything up to the back of her head, because everything is connected, of course. She is thin. She weighs 107 or 108. Once I had a good grasp on her, I could have carried her anywhere. She was wearing a white flannel nightgown scattered with tiny red hearts. She was warm and damp, her hair was askew, she would have said that she didn’t look her best. A silk shirt, those heels, a linen or cotton or wool skirt, a good haircut, lipstick—that is looking her best, she would have said; a fine-grained surface, a sort of enameling. Women who are more relaxed find her a little cold, or archaic, or formal, but it seems to me that she has poured herself into a sort of dental mold, too. Dentists make a lot of money. Dental conventions are full of dandies. Two dentists in conference in the lobby of the Dallas Hyatt are more likely to be talking about tailors than about inlays. Her body is not yielding. It has a lot of tensile strength that is inherited, I think. Her brother Joe can bench-press 250 pounds, though he doesn’t lift weights as a hobby. In any pickup softball game, her sister Frances
has amazing power at the plate. To lift Dana in one’s arms is to feel not weight but elastic resistance.

To take Dana into one’s arms, and to be taken into hers, is to feel, not yielding, but strength. When she holds your hand, she grips it hard. When you hug her, she hugs back. When you kiss her, her lips, which are firm, press against yours. Picking her up reminded me of those things, reminded me that retreat isn’t always her mode, is rarely her mode, has never been her mode, is, in fact, a function of point of view, of where you are in the field of her activities. I pushed the covers back with my foot and laid her down. She groaned. I pulled her nightgown over her feet, pulled the sheet up to her chin, then the blanket.

Stephanie had been asleep since about eleven. I opened the curtains of her room partway, and shook down the thermometer by the streetlight outside. I opened her drawer and took out a fresh nightgown. The house was quiet, and I was fully awake somehow, though I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in six days, or slept the sleep of the innocent in weeks. The darkness, when I closed the curtains, seemed a presence in the house, sensible, like heat. I let it envelop me where I sat on Stephanie’s bed. I might have said that it pressed against my skin, got under my clothes, filtered into my hair, coal dust, blackness itself, sadness. I reached out my hand and put it on Stephanie’s small hip under the covers. It submerged her, too, pressed her down against the dark pillow so that I could barely see her face. Even her blond hair, coiled against her neck, moist with sweat, gave off no light. Now the darkness felt as though it were getting into me—by osmosis through the skin, mingled with my inhalations, streaming into my eyes and up the optic nerves to seep among the coils
of the brain, replacing meditation. It pooled in my ears. My pulmonary arteries carried blood into my lungs, where it was enriched with darkness, not oxygen, and then it spread through the circulatory system, to toes and fingertips and scalp. The marrow of my bones turned black, began spawning black blood cells. And so thought was driven out at last. Meditation, the weighing of one thing against another, the dim light of reflection, the labor of separating thread from thread, all gone.

I ran my hand gently up Stephanie’s back and jostled her shoulder. “Time, sweetie,” I said. “I need to take your temperature.” I jostled her again. No response. Now I put the thermometer on the night table and lifted her in my arms. Her head flopped back against my shoulder, and I put the thermometer into her partly open mouth, then held her jaws closed. I was glad she seemed to be getting sounder sleep—she had been restless for two nights now. I counted slowly to 250, then took out the thermometer and laid it gently on the night table. Then I unbuttoned her nightgown and slid her out of it. Her skin was so damp that it was hard to get the sleeves of the clean one up her arms. I stretched her out on the mattress, smoothed the blanket over her. Then I carried the thermometer into the bathroom and turned on the light. 105.2. My hand was still on the switch. I pushed it down and submerged myself in darkness again.

I did not have a thought, but I had a vision, or an image, a fleeting memory of the stars as they looked the night I drove out on the interstate, as many stars as worlds as eras as species as humans as children, an image of the smallness of this one gigantic child with her enormous fever. When each of them was born, Dana used to say, “There’s one born every minute,” but she was grinning, ecstatic with the importance
of it. “Isn’t it marvelous what you can do with a little RNA?” she would say, just to diminish them a little. But they couldn’t be diminished. So, however many worlds and species and children there were and had been, I was scared to death. I crept to the phone and called the clinic, where, thank God, they were wide-awake. I said, “Is it possible to die of the flu?” They put a nurse on right away. Was she very sick?

“What does that mean? She has a temperature of 105.2.”

“But how is she acting?”

“She’s not acting any way. She’s asleep.”

“Is she dehydrated?”

“She urinated at around ten thirty. We’ve maintained lots of fluids.”

“Is she hallucinating?”

“She’s asleep.”

“Is she lethargic?”

“She’s
asleep
, goddammit!”

“Is it possible to wake her?” Her voice was patient and slow. Now I had another image, the image of Stephanie’s head flopping back on my shoulder and the utter unconsciousness of her state. I said, “I’ll try.” She said, “I’ll hold.”

And then I went in and I sat her up and I shook her and shook her, and I said, “Stephanie! Stephanie! Wake up! Wake up! Stephanie? Listen to me. I want you to wake up!” She groaned, writhed, protested. She was hard to wake up. I reported this to the nurse and she left the phone for the obligatory hold. After a while she came back and told me to bring her in. Her tone was light enough, as if it were three in the afternoon rather than three in the morning. I began to cry. I began to cry that my wife was unconscious with the flu, too, and that I didn’t dare leave the other children in
her care, and pretty soon the doctor came on, and it wasn’t Dan but Nick, someone whom we know slightly, in a professional way, and he said, “Dave? Is that you, Dave?” and I of course was embarrassed, and then the light went on and there was Dana, blinking but upright in the doorway, and she said, “What is going on?” and I handed her the phone, and Nick told her what I had told the nurse, and I went into Stephanie’s bedroom and began to wrap her in blankets so that I could take her to the hospital, and I knew that the next morning, when Stephanie’s fever would have broken, I would be extremely divorced from and a little ashamed of my reactions, and it was true that I was. They sent us home from the hospital about noon. Dana was making toast at the kitchen table, Leah was running around in her pajama top without a diaper, and Lizzie had escaped to school.

I sat Stephanie at the table, and she held out her wrist bracelet. They had spelled her name wrong,
Stefanie Herst
.

“That’s the German way,” said Dana. “It’s pronounced ‘Stefania.’ Shall we call you that now?”

Stephanie laughed and said, “Can I have that one?” pointing at the toast Dana was buttering, and Dana handed it to her, and she folded it in two and shoved it into her mouth, and Dana buttered her another one. They were weak but in high spirits, the natural effect of convalescence. I went into the living room and lay down on the couch. I looked at my watch. It read 12:25. After a moment I looked again. It read 5:12. It was not wrong. Across the room on the TV, Maria and Gordon and some child were doing “long, longer, and longest.” Leah was watching them, Lizzie was erasing and redoing her papers from school, and Stephanie was coloring. Dana appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel, then smiled and said, “You’re awake.”

“I’m resurrected. Are you sure I was breathing all this time?”

“We had a nice day.”

“How do you feel?”

“Back to normal.”

“How normal?”

“I’m making fried chicken.”

“Mashed potatoes?”

“Cream gravy, green beans with browned almonds, romaine lettuce.”

“The Joe McManus blue-plate special.”

“I set a place for him at the table, just like Elijah.”

The ironic middle. We were married again, and grinning. We’ve always made a lot of good jokes together. I heaved myself off the couch and went to the shower. Not so long ago, Lizzie came home and said. “You know when you let the bathwater out and there’s a lot of little gray stuff in it?”