The Pink Medicine at Bedtime

Carter was all right. His heart was strong, his lungs were clear, and he was growing right on his line.

“He doesn’t need to be weaned off it,” she said. “It just needs to stop. He might have a couple of rough nights falling asleep at your house. That’s normal. It passes.”

Then she told Josh what to do instead. The same bedtime every night. A bath, a book, a night-light.

A box fan in the room so the babies crying did not wake him. A grown-up who sits with him for the first few nights until he settles.

“A person,” she said. “That’s what works for a little boy in a new house. Not a bottle. A person.”

Josh nodded. He looked at Carter, who had gone very still on the table with his hands tucked under his legs. “Buddy,” Josh said, “are you scared?”

“Am I in trouble?” Carter said, for the second time that week, and his chin was shaking.

Josh got up out of that chair so fast it rolled back into the wall.

He picked Carter up off the exam table, paper and all, and held him against his chest, and Carter put his face in his dad’s neck.

“No,” Josh said. “No, no, no. You’re not in trouble. You’re my good boy. Daddy’s the one who’s sorry.”

Dr. Hagen looked at me over Josh’s shoulder. I had to turn back to the window. Everything outside it went blurry.

Before we left, she told us both she was writing it in Carter’s chart, every word.

She said she was not calling anyone today, because she believed the two of us were going to fix it.

She said she would be asking Carter about bedtime at every visit from now on.

“Every visit,” she said to Josh, and he said, “Yes, ma’am,” like he was nineteen years old again.

The parking lot

Out in the parking lot, Josh buckled Carter into his booster seat in the truck and shut the door.

Then he walked a few steps away from the truck, took out his phone, and called Kendra while I stood by my car.

I only heard his half. I did not try to hear more. He did not yell. Josh does not yell.

But I had never heard his voice like that in eight years of marriage, low and steady, like a man setting something heavy down very carefully.

“Ken, I’m at the doctor with Carter. The pink medicine. Yeah. The doctor told me.” A long pause.

“No. No, you listen. Every night? Kendra, every night?” Another pause, longer. “Did you give it to the babies?”

I held my breath. He listened a long time. Then his shoulders came down an inch. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I believe you. But it’s done. Tonight. It’s done.”

Then he called his boss at the elevator, a man named Dale who has run that dump pit longer than Josh has been alive.

Josh told him he would not be back tonight, harvest or no harvest. I heard Dale say something, and Josh said, “I know, Dale. I’ll make it up. My boy needs me home.”

When he hung up, he walked over to me. He stood there with his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground for a long time before he could look at me.

“You could have just called me,” he said. Not angry. Just sad.

“Josh,” I said, “I called you about the booster seat. Remember how that went?”

He closed his eyes. He remembered. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay. That’s fair.”

Then he said, “Can I still take him tonight? I’ll do bedtime. Me. Nobody else. I’ll sit with him till he’s out.”

I looked at Carter in the back window of the truck, making his stegosaurus fly along the glass. I looked at Josh.

I had spent five days deciding I could not trust him, and I had been half wrong, which is a hard thing to find out about yourself.

“Text me when he’s asleep,” I said. “And tell me what time.”

He texted me at 9:12 that night. “Took 2 books and a back rub and 1 glass of water. Asleep. No medicine. I’ll do it every night.”