I hoped he would stop at the end of the banner, but when he got to the punctuation, he yelled, “Escamation point!” once before starting over, yelling the G and running back toward the word Go.
Now a middle-aged fellow who had been drained already was peering out from around the curtain, munching his Nutter Butters. A woman in a scrubs top came around, too, wanting to catch the second act of the Natty Knows His Letters show.
He hit the wall under the G, and started yelling the O without bothering to pivot and run away from it first. He walked down the wall, yelling each letter and one-hand slapping the wall under it in turn. I started to get up, but Walcott put a hand on my leg.
“Nathan James Pierce,” he called out, deep and boomy. It was his You’re five seconds from a time-out voice, and Natty finally paused. He turned to look at us, the fold between his eyebrows that I called his grump line visible from here.
“Come sit down!” I told him, sternly, and his whole face set itself into the very shape of mutiny.
He called back, “No, Mommy! I want to run Go, Indians.”
I felt the pause, a sudden breathless silence, as all the strangers understood what had happened before I did.
“What did you say?” I asked him, but it came out too soft for him to hear it.
On all the watching faces there was something more than interest, now. It was almost as if he’d scared them. Natty was the only three-year-old child I really knew, but the shocked faces focused on my child told me loud and clear that this was not normal. This wasn’t normal at all.
“Did he just read that?” Walcott asked.
I shook my head, because he couldn’t have. I looked around, hunting a simple explanation. Was there a picture of an Indian, maybe? The end of the banner only had a feather and a tomahawk, and anyway, what would a picture of “Go” look like?
Only the older mother in her expensive glasses seemed unperturbed. “Just like Hilde,” she said. “She taught herself to read when she could barely walk.”
I glanced at Hilde—hunched over, emaciated, white as a corpse—and I didn’t find this comforting. Not remotely.
“He can’t read,” I said to the older mother.
And immediately, like a refutation, Natty called again, “I want to run Go, Indians!” He pointed one emphatic finger at the banner.
I found myself standing, and the paperwork slipped from my hand and landed in a scatter on the floor.
Hilde began scooting toward us, swiveling her feet first, then sliding her butt along the seat, coming down the bench like a sidewinder, but never taking her eyes off Natty. She stopped beside her mother and leaned around to look at me, and those pale, wet, froggy eyes, so big they bulged a little from the sockets, seemed like a metaphor for all the eyes in the world, staring at us in this shame-soaked building, the last place on earth I’d ever wanted to revisit.
“He’s special. Isn’t he.” She spoke flat. Not a question so much as a confirmation of a thing she’d already decided.
Her mother gazed at her with fond indulgence. “Just like you, sugar.”
I walked away from them without answering, crossing the gym to Natty. I felt like every step I took was echoing and calling even the eyes of insects and angels to stare at us.
I knelt down and took him by his arms. I looked down into his face. “How did you know that banner said, ‘Go, Indians’?”
I was hoping he would say Walcott told him, but Walcott was as gobsmacked as me, as shocked as every staring asshole in the place.
Natty only said, “But I did to want to run Go, Indians,” in a pitiful whine.
Then I noticed how hot his arms were, how his hair stuck up in sweaty tufts. I put one hand on his forehead, and it was blazing. Touching him, I was surprised my fingers didn’t blister.
“Crap,” I said, taking hold of his arms again. “Are you sick?”
“No,” he said, grumpy, because of course he was.
I started to call for Walcott, but right then Natty’s spine stopped working and his knees buckled. He flopped into an instant crumple, and only my grip on his arms kept him from smacking hard onto the floor.
“Natty!” I screamed. “Natty!”
He twitched and rolled in my arms, eyes open but so, so blank. His lips parted, and a froth of white foam dripped out between them.
I didn’t think. I couldn’t. Mimmy would have known to call for whatever nurse was right behind the pipe and drape—there had to be at least all kinds of med techs—but that never occurred to me as Natty jerked and trembled and his blank eyes rolled back into his head. I swung him up against my chest. I held him close, and I sprinted for the door, running us away from the closest help, screaming Walcott’s name as we went.
Chapter 2
The hospital was less than three miles away, but we had to go right through the heart of downtown to get to it. I don’t know how Walcott did it without killing some pedestrians. He drove so fast, horn blaring, not so much as pausing at the stop signs.
I sat in the back, clutching Natty close. I hadn’t put him in the car seat. He could choke on the foam that drooled out between his lips, painting his slack cheek. I held him with his face turned sideways, calling his name over and over as he spasmed, and Walcott careened down the road. By the time he screeched to a halt in the turnaround by the emergency room entrance, Natty had stopped seizing, but his eyes were made of glass and he didn’t answer me for all my calling. He was breathing, but he was only a little breathing body. There was no person in it.
I spilled out, running through the automatic doors with Natty bouncing and jouncing bonelessly against me. Walcott left his car where it was and came in right after me.
A calm and smiley nurse manned the registration desk. She took one look at us, at Natty’s still, small form, and led me right to the back. She was saying something, her tone very soothing, but the words washed past me, nonsensical and lost. Walcott pulled my purse off of my shoulder and stayed with her to do the paperwork, digging for my insurance card and ID.
A different nurse, tight-lipped, with eyes that looked to me as hard as flint pebbles, pried Natty from my hands and led me to a curtained cubicle. She lay him down on the bed, checking his temperature with an ear-thermometer, while I said, “But you should get a doctor. He should see right now a doctor.”
She spared me an irked glance. “You need to calm down. His temp’s at one-oh-two, so this is likely a febrile seizure.”
I didn’t know what a febrile seizure was, and I could not calm myself. Not when this thin-lipped bitch was touching the inert body of my son with such casual hands, business-like and cold. I babbled on, begging her to go and get a doctor, now, telling her about his eyes rolling loose in his head, about the foamy spittle on his lips. Natty lay in a limp string, and she went right on peering in his mouth and up his nose and into his ears with a pen light, telling me I needed to relax, like we were at a spa.
She finally turned to me—turned her back on my terrifyingly still child!—and said, “Ma’am, I need some information. Do you want to help your son? The best way to help your son is to take a deep breath and tell me what I need to know.”
She stood between my son and a doctor, this woman made of bricks. I gulped and nodded, moving to the other side of the narrow bed to be by Natty. I looked down at him, petting his floppy little arm, and said, “Ask, then.”
Natty stared vacantly off into the corner, as the nurse said, “Febrile seizures are quite common at this age, but to be sure, I need to know if there is any history of epilepsy in the family? Or type one diabetes?”
I glanced up at her, uncomprehending. “I don’t have epilepsy. We don’t have diabetes. You think Natty has epilepsy?”
She said, cool as a robot, “Ma’am, I told you. I think this is a febrile seizure. We’re just ruling things out.” Natty lay so very still. “What about on the father’s side?”
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“He doesn’t have a father,” I told her, unthinking. Mimmy always handled this kind of question: at the pediatrician, at his preschool, at this very hospital when I gave birth. She’d also smoothed down the town gossips and any friends who had questioned me directly and gotten a sharp You should mind your own damn business for their trouble. I’d had no practice answering, and anyway, all I could see was Natty. I bent over him, still petting his arms, his face, as if the sweetness in my hands could call him back to me.
After a pause, the nurse said, “You mean, you aren’t sure who the father is?”
She said it in such a judge-y, snotty tone that I actually paused in all my panic and looked up at her, this woman who stood between my kid and a doctor. How much longer would she stand if she thought of me as just another careless teen mom with a throwaway kid? I felt that invisible red letter glowing on my breast again, an S this time for sure, and I snapped the truth, the truth I never said out loud anymore. I snapped it at her without thinking.
“I mean he doesn’t have one. I mean I was a virgin until a full year after he was born.”
She was clearly taken aback, and I felt the very air in the room change as her overcool, professional demeanor dropped way. Her eyebrows got away from her and headed straight north.
Her impatient gaze changed, too, but not to kindness. To a specific kind of carefulness. To a certain understanding.
“Okay,” she said, drawing out the second syllable very long. “So, no epilepsy or diabetes that you know of. What about mental illness? Is there any history of mental illness? In the family. That you know of?”
I felt my face flush. I shook my head no, back and forth, but she clearly thought she’d found the slot where I belonged. Not a slut, just a crazy person, with a crazy, seizing son. That’s what she thought, this woman who had all the power.
“I didn’t mean that like it sounds,” I backpedaled. “Can you just tell me what a febrile seizure is? Or maybe get the doctor to come tell me?”
“Sure,” she said, way too soothe-y, the way a person would speak to a feral dog that might be snappish. “How did you mean it, though, exactly?”
Then we stared at each other, me acutely conscious of Natty zoned out beside me, needing some kind of help that I didn’t know how to give him, her implacable, but also some gross kind of over-interested.
And then, and then, thank God, I heard the dulcet voice of Mimmy, rising clear and commanding over all of this pure hell. Walcott must have called her; our candy shop was only a mile away. She sounded close, outside and to the left of our curtained cubicle.
“Shandi? I hear you talking, where are you? And why is this child standing here bleeding? Whose bleeding child is this, please?”
“Mimmy!” I called, like a drowning girl, my voice sounding so teary and so high. “Mimmy! Mimmy!”
I heard the click-clack of her heels coming six steps closer, and then she thrust aside the curtains. They moved back with a blessed scraping sound, and there she was. Mimmy. Beautiful and terrible and calm, calm, calm.
“Can someone come and help this bleeding girl?” Mimmy called over one shoulder.
I blinked, disbelieving; the pale teenager from the gym stood beside her. Hilde, her mother had called her. Unmistakable, with her lamplit eyes and dead black hair. She peered into our cubicle with a creepy, close-lipped grin, so serene it took until then for me to notice she had a long carpenter’s nail spiked all the way through her left palm, so deep I saw it coming out the other side. Her right hand was cupped under the nail, catching the slow drips of bright red blood that fell from the tip. I gaped at her, and the ends of that smile curled up even higher.
“I heard what you said. But I knew. I knew already,” she told me, low, as Mimmy stepped past her into the cubicle.
Mimmy came to the other side of the bed from me, close to the nurse, and bent down to Natty. She put her hand on his chest to feel his breathing and she called his name. When he didn’t respond, she said over her shoulder to the nurse, “Exactly what is a febrile seizure?” and I knew Hilde was not the only one who’d been listening long enough to hear me claim my miracle.
“I didn’t mean to bring it up again. I only . . .” I said to her, but Mimmy looked up at me with such soft eyes.
“Shhhh, baby, I’m here now,” she said. “You don’t have to explain.” And then, cool and collected, to the nurse, “A febrile seizure is . . . ?”
The cold nurse swallowed and said, in a tight voice, “A simple convulsion caused by a fever. This child has an ear infection, and that’s probably what triggered it.”
“So it’s scary-looking, but not serious?” Mimmy asked, voice imperious, but her eyes still so soft on me, her gentle hand on Natty’s chest.
“Not serious at all,” the nurse said. “If the brain overheats, it sometimes reboots itself, the same way a computer will. It’s very common at his age; he could come around at any second. I’m actually more concerned about your daughter. She seems to—”
At once Mimmy was straightening, turning to the nurse, smiling and stepping in close to take her arm. Mimmy was so ridiculously pretty, so poised, that all her life people had simply made way for her. So much prettiness draped over a slim spine made of steel—Mimmy bowled everyone right over. Not just men, either: women, babies, dogs. Anything with eyes would stop to gaze at all the ways she was symmetrical, at her skin’s sheer glow, at the impossible rich colors of her. While they paused, she stepped into the spaces that she wanted, and then kept them. I was cute enough, with my dad’s dark, thick hair and a round, pixie-nosed face, but nothing like her. Now Mimmy turned the nurse away from me, murmuring in honeyed tones, handling this part the way she always had. She turned her beauty and her charm full force onto that cold nurse, dazzling her into compliance.
I was left standing by Natty, with Hilde’s gleaming gaze crawling back and forth over both of us. Another drop of blood fell off the nail’s point, red as her cherry lip gloss. It spattered onto her pale palm.
“It is the child,” Hilde whispered, reverent, to me and only me.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I answered on pure instinct. “No, it isn’t.”
“He’s come,” she intoned.
“No, he hasn’t,” I said.
Before she could say more, the nicer nurse from the front appeared around the corner. “There you are! Miss Fleming! Your mother is about to have a kitten, and what were you thinking, slipping off while she was in the ladies’?”
Hilde docilely let her body be turned and led away, but she kept her head swiveled, staring back over her shoulder at my child.
As they left the nicer nurse was saying, “You stay put until we can get you into X-ray. You could injure your hand farther!”
I ran two steps forward and I pulled our curtain shut. Something had gone bad wrong in Hilde’s head. Whatever it was, it was worse than the nail in her hand . . . that nail, its perfect placement in the center of her palm, it reminded me of something. I couldn’t quite connect it for a moment, and then I had it. That hairline scar down Walcott’s thumb, and that nail in her palm, both so exact and centered. I came to a cold understanding then: Like Walcott, Hilde had done it on purpose. Of course she had. But not for a sweet reason. For a crazy, crazy, crazy one.
I should have realized it before. She couldn’t have accidentally gotten nail-stabbed at that clean gym. Had she crept under the bleachers, taken the nail from her bag and . . . I tried to imagine the amount of will and mental illness it would take, to drive a nail right through the center of your own hand, hard enough to make the point come out the other side. Then what? Had she told her mother, “Oh, I tripped and landed on a nail?”
Her mother was an idiot if she thought this was an accident, and yet they must have told the nurses that it was. Otherwise they’d be taking Hilde to Psych instead of X-ray. Also, I’d just had a short seminar in
exactly what it sounded like when a nurse talked to a crazy person, and Hilde’s nurse wasn’t talking to her that way. Not at all.
All that talk about It is the child plus her do-it-yourself stigmata hand—Hilde was rocking some kind of spooky Jesus complex. And if she carried nails for self-impalement as a matter of course, what else might she have secreted in her big handbag?
I shuddered. I should definitely tell a nurse, although I doubted I had much credibility with mine.
When I turned back around, Natty’s eyes were focused on me.
“Hi, Mommy,” he said.
I forgot about Hilde Fleming. I forgot everything in the sweet wash of relief that spread all through me, and I burst into tears.
“Hi, Natty,” I said around my sobs.
Mimmy and the nurse stopped conferring and the nurse said, “There now, you see?”
Whatever Mimmy had been telling her, it had made her cold eyes on me slightly kinder. Or maybe the nurse had gotten too Mim-rolled to function at full bitch. It happened.
“Hi, baby,” Mimmy said to him.
“Why is Mommy crying?” Natty asked her.
“Oh, she’s just happy,” Mimmy said. “You got a fever, and she was all worried, but now you’re okay, and look! We’re all so happy!” She smiled up at me, soothing my son and me at the same time, taking care of us, like always. “Mimmy’s here now,” she crooned, petting Natty’s sweaty head, but her words were meant for me as much as him. “Mimmy’s going to take her babies home.”
Chapter 3
Forty-eight hours after our emergency-room visit, the antibiotics had Natty feeling himself again. He popped up at six A.M., ready for breakfast, pinging off the walls with pent-up energy. The kid needed to run it off. I texted Walcott—he got up early every morning in the summer to write, so I knew that he’d be awake—and we all three drove to a park Natty liked on the town square.