CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They took him through two doors that swung and I got as far as the second one.
There was a woman there with her hand out. Not touching me. Just out, flat, at the level of my chest, the way you stop traffic.
“Mom. Mom. You can’t come back.”
Everyone in that building called me Mom for three weeks. Not one of them ever used my name. I did not mind it as much as you would think.
Through the gap in the doors before they swung shut I got about four seconds of it. A lot of light. Four or five people moving around a table with my son on it, all of them talking at once in short pieces, and one voice over the top saying numbers.
I caught two words.
Thirty-four.
I did not know what they belonged to and I filed them anyway, the way you file a license plate.
Then the doors came together and there was a poster on them about hand washing.
Somebody took Ivy off in a different direction to be looked at. She went. She looked back at me once from the end of the hall and I did the thing with my hand that means I’m right here, and she turned around and went with the nurse.
And then I was standing in a corridor.
There is a particular kind of hallway they put you in. Vinyl floor with a pattern in it that is trying very hard. Chairs bolted in a row. A television up in the corner with the sound off showing an infomercial about a mattress. A vending machine. A framed print of a lighthouse.
I stood in it for a while. I don’t know how long. Somebody walked past me with a coffee.
Then I found the bathroom.
I want to tell about the sink, because if there is one thing out of that whole night I could hand to somebody so they’d understand, it isn’t the fire. It’s the sink.
It was a white one. New, or new enough, with a curved lip and one of those faucets you wave at.
I put my hands under it and the water came on and what came off my hands was black.
Not gray. Not dirty. Black, and thick, and it went down that white porcelain in ropes and pooled around the drain before it went, and I stood there and watched it and something in me went absolutely quiet.
I washed my hands.
I got the soap out of the dispenser and I did it properly, the way there is a poster about on the doors down the hall, front and back and between the fingers and around the thumbs and the nails, twenty seconds, and I rinsed, and the water was still black.
So I did it again.
I did it again after that.
I have no idea how long I stood at that sink.
Long enough that the automatic faucet timed out on me eight or nine times and I had to keep waving.
My forearms were black to the elbow. My wrists had a tide line on them.
It came out of the creases of my knuckles for what felt like an hour, a little less every time, and it never once ran clear, it just went from black to gray to a kind of brown, and I kept going, and I understood at some point that I was no longer washing anything off.
I stopped when my hands started to shake so badly I couldn’t hold them under the tap.
Then I looked up.
The mirror over that sink was a good one, unfortunately.
I looked like something they pull out of a river.
My hair was flat to my skull on one side and standing straight up on the other.
There was soot in the lines around my mouth.
My T-shirt was gray and stuck to me and there was a rusty smear down the front of it where I had been holding my son.
My right foot had a square of gauze taped to it and I was wearing one hospital sock.
I did not care about any of that.
What I was looking at was my hands, up on the edge of the sink, and the thing on the third finger of the left one.
My wedding band.
It was the only clean thing on me. Water and soap for twenty minutes had done nothing to my skin and had polished that ring like a piece of jewelry in a case, and around it there was a rim of black, packed in tight where the metal met the finger, in a perfect circle, because I had not been able to get in under it.
I stood in a hospital bathroom at half past one in the morning and looked at a ring with a burnt line around it.
And I did not take it off.
I want that on the record because of what everybody assumes. People hear this story and they assume there was a moment, a big one, with a small metal sound, probably in a bathroom, probably that night.
There wasn’t. I put my hands back under the water and washed around it.
I would take it off on the twenty-fourth of March, standing at a different sink, in a room with a bare bulb, for a completely unglamorous reason, and it would take me about four seconds, and I would not feel anything at all.
That night I left it on, because he was still my husband, and because my son was through two doors with a poster on them, and because taking it off would have required me to have decided something, and I had not decided anything yet.
I had only heard a name through a door.
Jess got there at ten to two.
She came around the corner at a walk that was almost a run, in a parka over pajama pants and her husband’s boots, and she had a plastic bag from the twenty-four-hour pharmacy in one hand.
She did not say anything sympathetic. That is why I have kept her since I was nineteen.
She looked at me for about a second and a half and then she said, “Okay,” and put the bag on a chair and took out a package of underwear, a pair of sweatpants, a toothbrush, and a phone charger, and handed me the charger first.
“You’re at eight percent,” she said. “I checked when you didn’t answer.”
Then she sat down and made me sit down and did not ask me a single question, and we sat in that hallway side by side looking at a silent mattress infomercial for twenty minutes.
At two o’clock a doctor came out.
He was maybe fifty, in scrubs, with reading glasses pushed up on his head, and he sat down on the chair across from me instead of standing over me, which I noticed and was grateful for.
“He’s stable,” he said. “That’s the first thing. He’s stable and he’s breathing on his own.”
I nodded about six times.
“His carboxyhemoglobin came back at thirty-four percent.”
There were my two words.
“That’s carbon monoxide bound to the blood, and thirty-four is high.
For reference, a heavy smoker runs around eight or nine.
” He let that sit for a second and then went on, evenly.
“The good news is that it’s very treatable and we started treating it in the ambulance.
The part I want to talk to you about is what we do next. ”
He explained hyperbaric oxygen to me at two in the morning while I sat there with black in the creases of my knuckles.
He said there was a chamber. He said it was on the other side of the building.
He said the pressure gets him the gas off the blood faster than anything else can, and that with a level like that in a child they do not wait around, and that there were some risks and he would go through all of them, and that he was recommending it, and did I have any questions.
I had one.
“Will he be by himself in it?”
He looked at me over the top of his glasses.
“There’s someone with him the whole time,” he said. “He will not be alone for one minute.”
I said okay.
I signed three pages on a clipboard with a pen tied to it with a string, and my signature came out about half the size it should have been, small and cramped down in the corner of the box, and I looked at it and thought, that isn’t mine, and signed the next one exactly the same way.
Then they took him across the building, and Jess went to find Ivy, and I sat back down in the chairs.
At twenty past two a woman came down the hallway pushing a computer on a cart.
She had a lanyard and a very kind, very tired face and a clear plastic sleeve of forms, and she parked the cart at an angle so the screen was between us, which I understood later is a thing they are trained to do.
“Hi. Mom? I’m so sorry to do this now. I just need a couple things for registration.”
“Okay.”
“Patient’s date of birth.”
I gave it to her.
“And do we have insurance?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have the card?”
“No.”
“That’s all right, that happens.” She typed something. “Is it through your employer or a spouse’s?”
I sat in a chair in a hallway in a stranger’s sweatpants.
“My husband’s.”
“Okay. And the policyholder’s name?”
“Michael Halloran.”
“And his employer?”
I looked at the lighthouse on the wall.
“Milwaukee Fire Department,” I said.