The Pink Medicine at Bedtime

Five days

Monday morning I dropped Carter at school and drove to the drugstore on Main before the office opened.

I walked down the aisle with the children’s medicines and stood there looking at all the boxes in their bright colors.

I found it in about ten seconds. Children’s Benadryl, cherry flavor, the liquid. The medicine inside the bottle was pink.

It was $7.49 for four ounces. I turned the box over and read the back, standing right there in the aisle.

Under the warnings, in plain words, it said not to use it to make a child sleepy. I read that line maybe six times. Somebody had put it on the box. Somebody had known.

At 8:01, the first minute they opened, I called Dr. Hagen’s office.

Dr. Lisa Hagen has been Carter’s doctor since the day he was born.

She was the one in the room the night his fever went to a hundred and four when he was eighteen months old.

She is in her fifties, with gray hair worn to her shoulders, and she does not waste words.

The receptionist said the doctor’s schedule was full through Thursday. I said Friday, then, in the afternoon.

She said the only thing left on Friday was 4:15, the last appointment of the day. I said I would take it.

Then I asked her to have Dr. Hagen call me if she had a minute, because there was something she needed to know before the appointment, and I did not want to say it in front of my son.

Dr. Hagen called me back on her lunch break. I took the call in my car in the agency parking lot, with the engine running for the heat.

I told her everything. The bath, the cup, the line, the Mondays, the note from Mrs. Lindgren.

“Where’s his dad in all this?”

So I told her about harvest. About how the elevator runs until ten or later every night in October with the trucks lined up down the road, and how Josh runs the dump pit, and he is never home before ten on a weekend this time of year.

“So he doesn’t know,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t think he knows anything. I think he gets home and the kids are asleep and he thinks it’s a miracle.”

There was a pause on the line. Then I told her what I was asking for.

I asked her if Josh could bring Carter to the Friday appointment, and if she would be the one to explain it to him, and not me.

“I’m not asking you to take my side,” I said. “I’m asking you to tell him the truth in a room where he can’t decide it’s me being jealous.”

Dr. Hagen was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Megan, I’m going to tell him exactly what I would tell any parent. That’s not taking a side. That’s my job.” And then she said, “Get him there.”