Chapter 23
The cry was wrong.
Rognar knew it before he was properly awake.
He knew it in the part of him that had learned Charlie’s whole vocabulary in eight weeks.
The hungry cry and the tired cry and the bored cry and the one that meant she’d dropped something she wanted back.
This was none of those. This was thin and high.
It came in a rhythm that hitched and pitched up at the end like a question she was too small to ask.
He was across the hall and into the nursery with his heart going before his feet had decided anything.
She was hot.
He knew it through his palm on her chest before the thermometer confirmed it.
The dry radiant heat coming off her that a healthy sleeping baby didn’t have.
She turned her face into his hand and cried that thin wrong cry again.
She pulled at the side of her head with a fist at her left ear, clumsy and furious.
His stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Okay, he thought. Okay. Do it in order.
He did it in order. He got the light on low so it wouldn’t hurt her eyes. He got the thermometer. The ear one made her scream, so he used the forehead one, drawn across in the arc the box had shown, and it read 102.0. He read it again. It still read 102.0.
He set it down and picked her up against his chest where she liked to be, and she did not settle the way she always settled. She kept pulling at the ear.
He got the folder Deb kept out one-handed and found the fever page with the dose by weight. His hands were not steady. He looked down at them like they belonged to somebody else. The paper shook. He held it flatter against the changing table so it would stop.
Order. You do it in order and then it’s done and then you know what to do next.
He got the infant Tylenol and the little syringe and drew the dose.
He checked it against the page. He checked the page against her weight from the last appointment, the one he’d recited to Nora along with the ninety-first percentile.
He got the medicine into her. She fought it and then took it.
He picked the thermometer back up and ran it across her forehead again.
It read 102.0, which he had known it would.
Two minutes did not change a fever, and he knew that.
He checked it anyway. His hands wanted a task, and the task he wanted was one that would tell him she was fine.
She pulled at the ear.
She cried the wrong cry.
He had his phone in his hand and Nora’s name up and his thumb over it before he’d decided anything at all—and stopped.
He’d promised. This isn’t going to become your responsibility.
He’d built their relationship on that. He’d taken her off Deb’s laminated schedule so she’d never once be a call somebody made at two in the morning out of nobody’s decision but geography.
He pressed it anyway, then hung up before it connected.
Charlie arched against him and screamed.
He dialed again. He got as far as the ring. She’s a person, he thought. She has clients. She has a life she arranged so nobody would do this to her. He hung up again with his heart in his mouth and set the phone face down on the changing table like it had burned him.
He walked Charlie. He walked the length of the hall and back, and then again. Low light, one big hand cupping the small furious head, saying nothing. There was nothing to say that a seven-month-old with a fever could use. He kept walking to have something to do with his legs.
The knock came at the back door forty seconds later.
She had a coat over her pajamas and her hair down and no glasses. She took one look at him standing in his hall with his daughter screaming against his shoulder. She didn’t ask what was wrong.
“I saw the lights,” she said. “Ear?”
“She keeps pulling at it. Her temperature’s a hundred and two. I gave her the—”
“I know you did.” She was already in, already toeing the door shut behind her against the cold. “Show me the numbers.”
He showed her the folder. She read it the way she read a client’s books, one pass, no fuss, and handed it back.
“That’s the right dose,” she said. Not I’ll take her.
Not let me. She looked at Charlie, red-faced and streaming and pulling at the ear, and something painful crossed her face.
She put her hands in the pockets of her coat and left them there.
“First slot at the clinic’s at eight. Do you want to wait for it or do you want the after-hours line now? ”
Both of them. She’d handed him both of them.
“Clinic,” he said. “It’s not… She’s not limp, she’s furious. That’s better. That’s the good one.” He was telling himself as much as her, and she let him. She didn’t tell him he was right, which would have meant she’d been in charge.
“Then we’ve got six hours,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on. You’ve got her.”
He had her. He walked her. Nora sat in his kitchen in her coat with two mugs going cold and did not once ask for the baby.
Around half past four the Tylenol did its work.
The screaming dropped to a whimper and then to a damp exhausted quiet.
Charlie slept against his chest in a way that was still not right—too heavy and too warm—but at least she was sleeping.
Nora put a blanket over the both of them when he sat and went back to her chair.
She’d made it plain she was staying. She had not made it a favor. She’d made it not up for discussion.
The clinic smelled of strong soap and the cheap coffee. The doctor who came out for them at ten after eight was the half-orc pediatrician from the very first week, with a calm, unhurried manner. The absence of hurry did more for his chest than the Tylenol had done for Charlie’s.
“Mr. Stonebreaker. And who’s this cross young lady?” She crouched to Charlie’s level and didn’t reach for her. “Left ear, I’d guess, from the way you’re guarding it. What’s she been doing?”
You. Directed at him. He answered it.
“Pulling at the left one since about two. Off her food last night, now that I think about it—she left half a bottle and I thought she was just full. Temp topped out at a hundred and two, came down with the Tylenol around four thirty. Sleeping now but heavy and hot to hold. No rash, I checked, and she’s cross, not floppy. ”
He felt Nora, beside him, not saying the part about the bottle.
She’d been there last night when he told her about the half-bottle.
She’d filed it the way she filed everything.
She did not now supply she left half a bottle at the eight-fifteen feed as well, even though he watched it stay behind her teeth.
She held the diaper bag. That was her entire job and she did it as though it were the only job in the room.
“May I have a look in the ears? She won’t enjoy it.”
“She won’t,” he agreed. “Do you want her on the bed or on me?”
“On you’s fine. She’ll fight it either way, but she’ll fight it happier on you.”
He turned Charlie against his chest and got her head still with one hand the way Brogan had shown him. The doctor went in with the little light and Charlie shrieked and twisted. He held her exactly as steady as she needed to be and no steadier. It was over in four seconds.
“There we are.” The doctor straightened.
“Left ear’s got a nice little infection brewing.
Right’s clear. Nothing on the chest, throat’s fine.
This is the ordinary one, Mr. Stonebreaker—it’s viral more often than not at her age.
Hers has gone bacterial, with that temperature and the length of it.
I’m going to give you a course of amoxicillin.
I’ll tell you now she’ll hate the taste, and you’ll wear more of it than she swallows for the first two days. ”
“How long till it—”
“Better in two to three days. Worse tonight before it’s better, most likely, because that’s how ears go.
Keep the Tylenol going for the pain, every four hours, no closer.
If the temperature won’t come down at all, if she goes floppy, if she stops taking fluids, or if you see her guarding her neck—then the after-hours line, and don’t sit on it.
But…” She looked at him, and there was something almost gentle on the flat professional face.
“You did exactly the right thing. Most first-timers don’t. ”
“He’s not a first-timer,” Nora said.
To Charlie. Not to either of them. She said it down to the baby, tucking the loose duck-sock foot back into the sling with one finger, like a secret told to someone too small to keep it. He’s not a first-timer. Then she straightened up and went back to holding the bag.
He had to look at the poster about handwashing for a moment. His eyes had gone hot and this was not the place.
Nine in the morning, and the amoxicillin sat on his kitchen counter in its little white box. The adrenaline of the crisis had finally faded away, and left them sitting silently in a cold kitchen.
Charlie was asleep in her crib at last. Properly asleep this time, with her mouth open and her fists uncurled. She was deep in the boneless sleep of a baby who’d been awake and in pain for seven hours and had finally been told, chemically, that she could stop.
Nora had made toast. Neither of them had eaten it.
“You didn’t answer for me,” he said. “In there.”
She looked up from the toast she wasn’t eating.
“You knew about the bottle. The eight-fifteen one. She left half of that too and you were there. You had it. You let me tell the doctor she was too heavy and work out for myself it was the fever. You let me say it.” He turned the little white box on the counter.
“You had every answer in that room and you sat on your hands.”
“You got it right.”
“I got it right second.” He looked at the counter, at the box, at the printed sticker with Charlie’s name on it, Stonebreaker, C.
, spelled out by a machine as though it were an ordinary fact about the world.
“I love you. There’s a refill. I have to call the clinic on Thursday for it, they said Thursday because she’ll need the second week. ”
The kitchen went very quiet. The kettle he’d boiled and not used clicked once as it cooled.
“Rognar.”
“I know what I said.” He didn’t take it back. He didn’t build a joke on top of it even though he’d spent his life doing that, because if you’re the one who laughs nobody checks on you.
He just left it out there on the counter next to the box of antibiotics, the biggest thing he’d ever said sitting flatly beside the smallest domestic fact he owned. And he made himself look up from the counter and at her face while he waited for whatever came next.