The Pink Medicine at Bedtime

The exam room

I left the office at five minutes to four. I did not change.

I was still in what I had worn to work, my burgundy blouse and my gray dress pants, the clothes I wear when I have to tell somebody their claim was denied.

The clinic sits on the edge of town next to the nursing home.

I got there first and sat in the car with my hands on the wheel until I saw Josh’s truck pull in, with Carter waving from the back seat.

We went in together. Josh said “Hey, Meg” and I said “Hey.”

Carter held his dad’s hand on one side and mine on the other, and swung between us across the parking lot like he was four again.

I had brought the bottle in a paper sack in my purse.

At the front desk, while Josh helped Carter find the yellow fish in the waiting room tank, I handed the sack to the nurse and said, “Dr. Hagen knows what this is.” She nodded.

The exam room was the small one at the end of the hall. There was a growth chart on the wall with a line for every inch, and one window.

The afternoon daylight was coming in through it, the way it does in October.

I stood by the window. I could not sit down. I tried once, on the edge of the extra chair, and stood right back up and went back to the window and put my hand on the cold sill.

Carter climbed up on the exam table himself, very proud, and the paper crackled under him.

He sat there in his dinosaur T-shirt swinging his legs, kicking the step with his sneakers, thump, thump, thump.

Josh sat in the black chair beside the exam table. He had come straight from the elevator in his gray work polo.

He leaned forward with one forearm on his knee, the way he does when he is tired, and he looked over at me.

“What’s going on, Meg?” he said quietly. “Is he sick? You’d tell me if he was sick, wouldn’t you?”

I did not answer him. I looked out the window. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, not answering him, because the whole speech was right there in my mouth, and I had practiced it in the shower all week.

Dr. Hagen came in and shut the door behind her. She had on her white coat, and her gray hair hung loose to her shoulders the way it always does by the end of a long day of children.

She said hello to Josh by name and shook his hand. She said hello to me.

Then she turned all the way around to Carter and said, “Well, look at you. Is that a T. rex or an allosaurus?”

“It’s a T. rex,” Carter said, deeply insulted, and she laughed and said she should have known better.

She listened to his heart and his lungs. She looked in his ears and said she saw a potato in there, and he giggled.

She let him hold her stethoscope and listen to his own heart, and his eyes went wide.

Then she sat down on her little rolling stool so she was lower than him, and she said, in the most ordinary voice in the world, “Carter, tell me about bedtime at your daddy’s house.”

And he told her. He told it the same way he had told me, like it was nothing at all.

Seven o’clock. Kendra’s kitchen. The little cup. Up to the line, or it does not work. The cherry taste.

“I don’t like the taste,” he added. “It’s too sweet. But Kendra gives me a fruit snack after, so it’s okay.”

I watched Josh. I watched it land on him one word at a time. His head came up slowly.

He looked at Carter, and then at me, and then back at Carter, like he had walked into the wrong room.

“What medicine?” he said. “Buddy, what medicine?”

Dr. Hagen had the small pink bottle in her hand. She held it up in the daylight from the window.

She did not look at me. She did not look at Carter. She looked at Josh.

“Josh,” she said, “I want you to hear what this does to a six-year-old every night.”

Carter stopped swinging his legs.