15. Tess
Tess
He picks up on the first ring and doesn’t say hello.
“What.”
“Dell Children’s. I’m putting her in the car.”
“Don’t drive.”
“I’m already driving.”
“Tess.”
“I’m hanging up.”
He’s in the ER lobby before I’m finished with the intake woman. I’ve never asked him how. He’s never told me, and it’s one of about four things I’ve decided not to make him explain. She’s admitted fast, which is not a good sign. A fast admit is never a good sign.
What follows is the kind of hell where nobody will tell you anything because there isn’t anything yet.
They swab her. They cath her for a clean sample and she screams like she’s being murdered and I hold her shoulders down myself, because I’m not letting a stranger be the one doing that.
The IV takes three tries and after the second a nurse says the word dehydrated in a tone that takes my legs out.
Somebody says meningitis once, as a thing they’re ruling out.
Just once. It lives in that room for the next six hours anyway.
Shane doesn’t touch anything. He doesn’t ask a doctor a question over my head.
He never says we, and he never introduces himself as her father to get an answer faster.
When the resident comes in and looks between us for whoever’s making decisions, he tips his chin at me. Every time. Without a word.
There’s a commotion at the desk sometime before dawn and he’s gone for a while, and when he comes back he sits down and doesn’t mention it.
I find out afterward that reporters reached the lobby before dawn, and Shane went out and gave them a photograph.
Himself, in the parking garage, looking exactly as bad as he looked.
He told them a family member was unwell, asked them not to name the hospital, and stood there and let them shoot him until they had enough to file.
Nobody ever ran the words fever or infant.
Nobody knew she was in that building. He paid for that with his own face and never once brought it up to me.
Eventually the doctor comes back with urine results showing a serious infection and blood work suggesting it may have started to spread.
It is treatable. She is halfway through the sentence about antibiotics when my knees quit. I make it to the chair.
Then I come apart, in a plastic chair, under a Sesame Street mural, in the loud ugly way I haven’t done since April. He’s beside me and he doesn’t touch me and I hate it, and I say his name, and he puts an arm around me and I put my whole face in his shirt.
“She’s alright. Both of you are alright.”
“I’m so tired.”
“I know.”
“I don’t mean tonight.”
“I know what you mean.”
I stay there a while. His shirt is wet with my tears and neither of us mentions it.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll wish I hadn’t.”
“Tell me anyway.”
So I do.
“When she was born they took her straight up. I didn’t hold her for nineteen hours. I was down the hall by myself with a cuff going off on my arm every fifteen minutes and there was a TV on at the nurses’ station.”
He goes very still.
“You were in Tulsa.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Somebody had it on the music channel. Live. And the volume was up because it was the middle of the night and everybody on that floor was dead on their feet.” My voice has gone flat, which is what it does.
“So I laid there for two hours listening to twenty thousand people scream your name through a wall while our daughter was four doors down with a tube in her nose. And you sounded so happy. You sounded like it was the best night of your life.”
His arm has gone rigid. I can feel his heart going.
“It was,” he says.
“I know.”
“Tess.”
“I’m not doing this to hurt you.”
“You’d be allowed to.” His voice is completely gone. “That’d be fine. That would honestly be fine.”
“I’m not, though. I’ve just never said it out loud to anybody and I’ve been carrying it since October.”
He doesn’t apologize. Even in the middle of it I notice that, and I notice he doesn’t reach for it once, because sorry would be about him and would want something back, and he’s picked that up somewhere in the last two months. He says, “Tulsa was the ninth.”
“Yes.”
“We did an encore that night we weren’t going to do. Ricky’s amp went in the second half and we finished it acoustic and everybody said it was the best show of the run.”
“Okay.”
“I want to know things like that,” he says. “Even when there’s nothing to do with them.”
Around noon a woman from the hospital’s communications office comes in with a lanyard and an apologetic face and asks whether we’d like to discuss a statement.
“No,” I say.
“Of course. I only mention it because there’s some interest downstairs and sometimes families find it helps to get ahead of.”
“There’s no family here that needs to get ahead of anything.”
She looks at Shane.
“She’s answering,” he says. “You’ve got your answer.”
The fever breaks in the afternoon. By evening she’s grabbing at the pulse ox on her toe and trying to eat the tape, which the nurse says is the best clinical indicator in the building.
They keep her overnight for the second dose.
There is one recliner. I tell him to take the narrow bench under the window, and he lies down with his boots hanging off the end.
Sometime in the night I wake up because the chair has tipped and I’m not in the chair.
I’m on the bench. Sitting up, folded sideways, with my head on his shoulder and his arm along the back behind me not touching me, and I have no memory of getting there, which means I crossed a hospital room in my sleep to a specific person. I don’t move. I tell myself it’s because I’d wake him.
In the morning the light comes in gray and Sadie is up in the crib making her opinion known, and I go over and she’s a different animal entirely.
Pink and outraged and picking at the IV tape.
Shane comes to stand at the foot of it, three feet back, hands on the rail, the way he always stands. And she looks past me.
Right past me, at him, and both arms go straight up over her head, and her hands open and close twice, that grabbing thing, and she makes the demanding noise. The one she normally makes at me.
“Tess.” He hasn’t moved a muscle. “Tess, is she?”
“Yeah, she is.”
“What do I do?”
“Pick her up.”