6. Erin
ERIN
I vaguely notice the wine glass spill its contents across the table behind me as I cross the cottage in four strides and pull the door open.
David.
He’s soaked through with melted snow. The flannel jacket has gone nearly black across the shoulders, his hair is flat to his forehead, water running down the line of his jaw. His hands are shaking. Cleo is in his arms.
She’s limp against his collar. Her pigtails are half-undone, her face flushed in the porch light, and her chest is working too hard.
I can see it from the doorway, the effort in every breath, the small body laboring for each one.
Her feet are bare. He carried her out without shoes.
Her fingers are still curled in his flannel.
She’s unconscious and she’s still holding on.
The wine, the pajamas, the warm room at my back. All of it is gone.
"Get inside," I say. "Kitchen table."
He’s through the door before I finish. I move us both into the kitchen and he lowers her onto the table, slow and deliberate, his hands steadier for having something to do. I step in and take her from him.
The fever hits my palms the moment I have her.
Too high. One-oh-two at least, maybe more, radiating through the thin cotton of her pajama shirt.
Her chest is working hard enough that the accessory muscles at the base of her throat are pulling with each inhale.
I can already hear the wheeze before I reach for my stethoscope.
A tight, high sound on each exhale, bilateral, both lungs making the same strained complaint.
Her fingers are still fisted in his flannel. I ease them free, my fingers between her grip and the fabric, gentle, and turn her palm open against the table. Her hand stays curled for a moment in the air before it relaxes.
"What do you need?" he says, raw and flat.
"Bag. Front pocket. Black zipper. Pulse-ox clip first, then the nebulizer."
I hear him try. The zipper catches, sticks, catches again.
His hands don’t have the fine motor right now.
Adrenaline. It happens. It’s not a failing.
I reach back without turning around, take the bag, and open it myself.
The pulse-ox clip is in the front pocket.
I slide it onto her index finger and the small screen wakes.
The portable nebulizer is in the front, the preloaded vial beside it in the inside pocket.
I fit the pediatric mask over Cleo’s face, thread the elastic behind her head, and she doesn’t stir.
"Hold the edge of the mask," I say. "Just there. Don’t press."
He steps forward. His hands find the edges of the mask at her cheeks and he steadies. I reach for my stethoscope.
Diffuse wheezing. Bilateral. I move to the right base.
Air entry decreased, something down there, mucus or early atelectasis, a lobe gone partly quiet.
I come back to center and press two fingers to the inside of her wrist. Cap refill four seconds.
I look at the nail beds. The color is wrong in a way I’ve seen before.
Keep moving. Next. Forty-four respirations a minute, nearly double the normal for her age, and I don’t have an IV line, I don’t have supplemental oxygen, I don’t have a second set of hands.
What I have is a nebulizer, a go-bag, and whatever this child will let me do to her on a kitchen table.
Breathe. Hang on, Cleo.
"Hand me the small syringe," I say. "Inside front."
He has it in my hand in three seconds. I draw up the children’s acetaminophen and tip the syringe between her lips a little at a time. A small amount, wait, a small amount. Her throat works around it, the swallow reflex catching. Drop by drop.
The nebulizer hisses. Ninety-four. The pulse-ox blinks and settles. Ninety-five. I watch her chest rise and fall and count and watch the number and count. Forty-two. Forty.
The wheezing’s gone quiet. Her body’s fighting, not in crisis.
I straighten up. The small of my back has a crick, and I keep going. I check the nail beds again, the color of her lips. Better. The pulse-ox reads ninety-eight.
I look at the pallor under the flush for one count, the wrong pallor, the one I put down, and I leave it there. Not tonight. Tonight I treat what I can treat.
"She’s better," I say, and I hear him exhale.
Her eyes flutter open.
Unfocused at first, moving across the ceiling without landing anywhere. She’s somewhere else, a six-year-old coming back from fever and fear, now in the clear. The confusion lasts about four seconds. Then her eyes find him.
"Daddy?" She reaches straight for her father.
He scoops her off the table. Both arms, and she’s already pressing her face into his collar, her small fists wound back into his flannel, and he holds her so tight I see his shoulders shake with it.
His chin comes down over the crown of her head.
His eyes close. His hands spread flat and still on her back.
Not gripping, just covering, just making sure she’s there and present and accounted for.
I watch the pulse-ox clip on her finger. Ninety-eight. I keep my eyes on the number because it’s something neutral to look at and I don’t know what to do with my face right now. He’s holding his daughter like he’s holding her life and body back together, and maybe he is.
He holds her for five seconds. Twenty. The fine tremor in his shoulders gradually stills. Cleo is already going back to sleep. She makes a small sound into his collar, something between a syllable and a sigh, and her grip on his flannel loosens. He breathes, and the crisis has passed.
Then he turns to me. What comes out of his throat is forty minutes of held breath finally going.
"She hasn’t stopped asking about you since you left."
I look at his face. Then at his sleeping daughter.
I’m standing in my own kitchen in flannel pajamas with a stethoscope around my neck and the wine spilled somewhere on the table behind me, and he has just said the most quietly devastating thing I’ve heard in fourteen months.
There’s no sentence in me that’s equal to that.
I’m the doctor, and I’m a woman who’s been living on the other end of the feeling he just named, and the pulse-ox reads ninety-eight, and I listen to my own breath move in and out of me.
The kitchen is warm. The lamp on the counter is the warm amber of a lamp that has no idea what’s happening in the room. Cleo breathes. That’s everything.
He carries her to the couch and I follow with the wool throw from the armchair and tuck it around them both where David has settled with her against his chest. She’s all the way under now, safe this time, the boneless deep sleep of a child where the emergency is over and the adults have to figure out the rest. He adjusts his arm beneath her without looking down, the muscle memory of four years alone with this small person.
His hair is still dripping onto his collar, so I go to the hall closet and come back with a hand towel and press it to the back of his neck.
He goes very still. All of him, caught off guard.
But he still holds Cleo, and lets me work.
I blot the water from the back of his neck, his temples.
I undo his hair-tie and soak up the water running down his hair and the line it’s made along his beard.
He smells like pine resin and cold air and wet wool, the whole mountain that came in the door with him.
I sit down on the hardwood floor across from the couch. My back against the wall, knees up, stethoscope still around my neck. The floor is cold through my pajamas.
He doesn’t speak. He holds his daughter, and his hands, which haven’t been still since he came through the door, are almost still now.
I think about those same hands holding the mask steady while everything else in him shook.
Ten minutes ago I was on the sofa replaying a hand on a door handle.
That was someone else’s evening. Cleo’s fists on his shirt have gone open, warm slack palms against his chest. Her mouth is slightly open. She’s out like a light, safe.
The clock on the wall reads eleven-fifty-two. The snow is steady against the windows, the same patient snow it’s been all evening. The radiator under the sill ticks in the cold. Somewhere outside a branch shifts under the weight of ice and settles.
Something loosens in my chest. I don’t investigate it. I’ve been braced for fourteen months, and right now, on this floor, I notice I’m not.
I’ve been telling myself for the better part of a week that Cedar Hollow is just a stopgap.
A year of quiet and some breathing room before I figure out what comes next.
The rocking chair was just a rocking chair.
Four seconds of shared warmth on a doorjamb was just adjacency.
I’m not sure, sitting on this floor, that any of those sentences have been entirely honest.
Who am I even kidding?
I notice the leather cord at his chest in the lamplight and the quiet. Dark cord at the open collar of his flannel, worn and soft, and a golden ring winking from it. I don’t look at it long.
I stay on the floor because Cleo should be monitored and because I’m the doctor and that’s a reasonable thing, and also because the cottage is warm and the child is breathing and the father is holding her and I don’t have anywhere else I’m trying to be tonight.
The wood stove ticks over by the far wall.
Across the room, the spilled wine is drying into the table and I’m not going to think about it.
The window above the sink has fogged on the inside from the heat of the kitchen.
It’s past midnight and I’m sitting on my own hardwood floor in my oldest pajamas with a stethoscope still hanging around my neck and there is a man on my sofa who has not said anything for twenty minutes, and the room is fine with it, and so, apparently, am I.
He says, when the clock reads twelve-seventeen, "Thank you." Two words and nothing else, still looking at the lamp.
I nod. He looks at me then, a second, maybe two, the hazel eyes in the lamplight, something in them that isn’t quite readable from the floor, and then he looks back at the lamp.
I stay on the floor.
It’s time I pull out all the observations I’ve pushed to the back of my days, all the little pieces I didn’t want to think about and quickly reasoned away to not court disaster. I’m a doctor. I have a responsibility, regardless of where that takes me.
I think, during that quiet hour, about the pallor I pushed down.
About the cap refill. About the bruise on Cleo’s shin at Joan’s two days ago that I noted and set aside because six-year-olds bruise, because I have spent years learning not to be the doctor who catastrophizes a normal childhood.
I think about how she’d gotten winded climbing into his truck on Wednesday, the small breathlessness I’d registered and not worked up.
I think about how the pallor in the lamplight tonight was wrong in a way that has a name in the part of my brain I’ve been trying to quiet for fourteen months.
I let these things sit in the back of my mind in a line without touching each other. I don’t build the differential. I don’t write anything down. I leave it where it is and I watch Cleo’s chest rise and fall under the wool throw and I breathe.
The snow comes against the glass. The radiator ticks.
The cottage holds the quiet like a cabin holds wood smoke, close and warm and through everything.
Cleo sleeps. He holds her. I stay on the floor watching her.
At some point he reaches into the drooping corner of the wool throw and adjusts it over her shoulder without looking down, and then his hand goes back to where it was, flat on her back.
After a long time, her open palms slack against his chest, her breathing slow and steady and sure, the fever-flush beginning to cool at her temples, I push off the floor and cross to the couch. I sit on the edge of the cushion, close enough to keep my voice down.
When he looks up, I say, "I don’t think this was just a fever. I want to run some tests."