The Night He Finally Chose Us

The doctor was young, a Dr. Halvorsen, and he explained the seizure to us in plain words, that the fever had come up too fast, that her exam looked reassuring but that a baby this small with a fever this high and a first seizure gets watched, gets bloodwork, maybe gets sent up to the children’s hospital in Indianapolis if anything looked wrong. He said the word meningitis once, carefully, the way you set down something that might break, not to scare us but because he would not lie to us, and I felt the floor tilt. They were going to do a test, he said. They were going to watch her for hours. We should settle in.

“Settle in” at a quarter past midnight, over a sick baby, with a word like that in the air.

Caleb and I pulled the two hard chairs close to the crib. He held her hand through the rails. I held his shoulder. The monitor beeped its steady beep and somewhere down the hall a drunk man was arguing with somebody about his truck keys, and I let myself breathe for the first time in two hours, because my husband was beside me and my daughter was under good lights and the people here had said I did right.

The automatic doors at the end of the hall opened at twenty to one.

I heard her before I saw her. You always hear Lorraine before you see her. She has a voice that is built for a room larger than the one she is in, and she was using it on the poor girl at the registration desk, saying that her son was back there, that she needed to come back, that she was family.

Peggy stepped out to the hall. I heard her say, kindly, that it was two visitors to a bay, that we were a family with a very sick little one and that the parents were with the child, and that Lorraine was welcome to wait in the waiting room where it was quieter.

“I am the grandmother,” Lorraine said, in the voice.

And then she was in the bay anyway, because there is no door on a curtain, and because the girl at the desk was nineteen and Lorraine is sixty-two and has spent a lifetime walking through rooms that told her to wait.

She did not look at Ruthie first. I want that on the record, because I have gone over this night a thousand times in my head and I keep coming back to it. My daughter was lying in a hospital crib with a needle in her arm and stickers on her chest, and Lorraine’s first look went to Caleb. She crossed to him and took his face in both her hands the way you would a boy of ten, and she said, “Oh, you look terrible. You look just terrible. Have you eaten anything?”

“Mom,” he said. “She had a seizure.”