The Wall Behind My Baby’s Crib

Lily’s cough started at seven weeks old. Not the ordinary hitch of a baby working out a cold. A dry, rattling sound, like something loose was shaking inside her small chest every time she pulled a breath in. Andy and I told ourselves it was nothing for the first week. By the second week we were in Dr. Tobin’s office, and by the fourth week we were there for the third time, and Dr. Tobin, who has delivered half of Caldwell’s children over thirty years of practice, listened to Lily’s lungs for a long time before she finally said the word asthma, out loud, for a baby not yet two months old.

We got a nebulizer sized for a doll. We got an inhaler with a little plastic mask shaped like a bear so Lily would not fight it as hard. We followed every instruction to the letter, because that is what you do when your daughter cannot breathe right and a doctor hands you something to try. It did not work. If anything, Lily got worse through September. She stopped gaining weight the way the growth chart said she should. She grew listless in a way that did not look like a normal fussy baby, more like a small creature conserving energy it did not have enough of. Some nights I would wake at two or three in the morning, certain something had changed in the room, and I would stand over her crib with my hand hovering an inch above her back, counting the rise and fall until I was sure.

Andy started sleeping on the floor of the nursery some nights, just so he would be awake the second her breathing changed. We were exhausted in the specific, bottomless way new parents get exhausted when the thing keeping the baby up is not colic or teething but something neither of you can name.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, our dog started acting like a different animal.

Moose is a lab mix, sixty five pounds of goofy, gentle patience, the kind of dog who used to lie flat against the nursery door for hours just to be near the baby monitor’s static. He had never so much as scratched a piece of furniture in the three years we had him. But that September, Moose became fixated on one wall in the nursery, the wall directly behind Lily’s crib, the one that backed onto the old bathroom.

At first it was small. He would stand there with his nose pressed to the baseboard, ears back, refusing to come when I called him from the doorway. Then it became scratching, real scratching, claws dragged hard enough to shred the wallpaper strip Gene’s crew had hung fresh before we moved in. I would hear it from the kitchen, run down the hall, and find him in exactly the same spot every time, digging at the drywall like there was something alive behind it he was trying to reach.