The Night He Finally Chose Us

So when Ruthie’s fever started that Tuesday, and I reached for the phone, it was Lorraine who answered first, because Lorraine always answered first.

“She’s teething,” Lorraine said, before I had finished the sentence. “They run a little warm when the molars come. You run her to the doctor every time she sneezes, and the doctor laughs at you after you leave. You know that, don’t you. They laugh.”

“She’s at a hundred and one,” I said.

“I raised a boy to a grown man without a thermometer ruling my life,” she said. “Give her some of the children’s medicine and put a cool cloth on her and quit hovering. You’ll make her nervous, and a nervous baby doesn’t sleep.”

I gave Ruthie the medicine. I put the cool cloth on her. I did not call the doctor, because Caleb was on shift until eleven and I did not want him coming home to a message about an argument with his mother, and because some tired animal part of me still believed that Lorraine, who had raised a child to adulthood, knew something I did not. I rocked my daughter in the dark and I watched the numbers on the little blue thermometer and I told myself the lie one more time.

By ten o’clock the fever was a hundred and three.

By ten thirty it was a hundred and four, and Ruthie had stopped fussing, which frightened me more than the fussing had. She had gone quiet and heavy in my arms, her eyes half open, her breath coming fast and shallow like a bird’s. I called Caleb and he did not pick up, the machines too loud on the floor, and I called Lorraine out of pure habit, the way your hand goes to a railing that is not there, and she said, “You are working yourself into a state. Rock her. I’ll come in the morning.”

And then, at eleven minutes to eleven, by the clock on the microwave that I will remember until I die, my daughter’s little body stiffened in my arms and began to shake.

I did not know then that it was a febrile seizure. I did not know it was the fever itself, climbing too fast, that does this to some small children and that most of them come through it fine. I knew only that my baby’s eyes had rolled and her arms had gone rigid and a sound was coming out of me that I did not recognize as my own voice. I laid her on the living room rug the way you are not supposed to and are also not supposed to not, and I called the plant’s front desk and made a boy I had never met go find my husband on the floor, and I called the ambulance, and the whole time I was praying the kind of prayer that has no words in it, just a wall of need thrown up at the ceiling.