Bedtime Story (19 page)

Epilepsy? What the hell was going on?

“Not that I know of,” Jacqui answered.

“Diabetes?”

I let Jacqui answer the doctor’s questions. David’s face was white, almost translucent, his lips grey and dull, and crusted with dried blood. His body was entirely still, save for the slow expansion and contraction of his chest. His hands, though, were moving, ever so slightly. Twitching.

“We’re going to get him in for a CT scan as soon as we get a slot. We’ve sent the blood work out. We’ll take a look at everything,” Dr. McKinley was saying.

“So what is it?” I asked, turning back to face him.

“We’re not sure,” he said, in a warm tone at odds with the terse matter-of-factness with which he and Jacqui had been communicating moments before. It was a tone intended to placate, to soothe: it set my teeth on edge.

“It’s possible it’s something as simple as food poisoning,” he continued leadingly.

“We both had the same thing for dinner,” Jacqui said, ruling that out.

“Or it could be something viral. Seizures are often seen in children fighting a fever.”

“What was his temperature?” Jacqui asked.

The doctor hesitated a bare moment, a stutter in the conversation that most people probably wouldn’t even have noticed. Jacqui looked down at the floor.

“It’s normal,” he said. “We’re running tests. We want to exclude meningitis, cancer, metabolic disorders. You should know, most cases of epilepsy are idiopathic: there’s nothing ominous or obvious that triggers them. And the majority are well controlled. We’ll know more in the next few hours.”

I glanced pointedly at the bed. “He seems calm now.”

The doctor turned toward David. “We’ve got him sedated. The convulsions had slowed by the time the ambulance picked him up—”

Ambulance?

“—but we needed to draw blood and confirm his vitals. We had to sedate him.”

The thought of David in the back of an ambulance … I couldn’t say anything, watching the tiny spasms in his fingers.

“You can sit with him, if you’d like,” the doctor said. “I’ll be back as soon as the test results come in. And I’ll see about the CT.” He touched Jacqui quickly on the upper arm before turning away.

Standing at David’s bedside was a slow agony. I wanted desperately to take Jacqui’s hand, to rely on her strength. I was stunned when I felt her fingers touch mine, felt our hands interlace easily, naturally.

David’s body was covered almost entirely with a nubbly flannel sheet, antiqued with constant use.

“What—?” Staring at the blood on David’s lips, I gestured toward my own mouth.

“He bit into his lips. And tongue. When—”

“What
happened
?” I interrupted. “I don’t know. You haven’t said.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She took a deep breath. “David went to bed at about eight-thirty, no argument, no bargaining. I was watching TV a while later and I heard something upstairs. I thought it was David going to the bathroom, but then there was a crash.” She shook her head. “When I got upstairs, he was on the floor beside his bed. Convulsing.”

She looked down at the bed, her gaze lingering on David’s pale face. She crossed her arms and held herself like she had a sudden chill.

In our silence, the tiny space seemed to swell, the narrow opening at the edge of the bed, too tight for the two of us to stand in comfortably, seemed to grow, a gulf opening. I had never felt so small, so helpless, so inconsequential.

I leaned forward against the steel rail of the bed. “How you doin’ there, sport?” I asked in a whisper. I reached out and gently cupped my hand over his, which throbbed and jerked. It felt like Nolan, David’s hamster: it pushed and seemed to struggle against my hand, trying to get free.

“It’s gonna be all right,” I said, wincing at the platitude.

His face was a pale cold mask, utterly devoid of expression. His puffy lips were parted slightly. He didn’t look like he was sleeping, he looked—I couldn’t bring myself to think the word.

Except his eyes were moving. I could see them behind his closed lids, shifting and distending the thin skin like an undersea creature about to break the surface. The motion was unnerving, like watching him drown.

But it wasn’t irregular, like the twitching in his hands: his eyes were bouncing regularly from side to side, in unison.

The night seemed to pass like moments in a dream. Sitting in our quiet corner, we could watch the unceasing traffic into the Emergency Room—the slow, shambling, uncertain steps of people looking for signs, unsure of where to go or what to do with themselves; the decisive slamming of gurneys through doors and raised voices of the paramedics, joking with the nurses, holding court in the lobby as they waited for their patients to be handed over, for their stretchers to be returned.

Neither of us said much. Periodically, Jacqui and I, alone or together, would wander into the ward, slip between the curtains to David’s bed, hoping for some change, some development.

“They’ve got him pretty sedated,” she said at one point, staring down at him. “They’ll see what happens when he starts to come around in the morning.”

“I know.”

As I moved past her, I touched her softly in the small of the back and then walked away.

Standing outside, just around the corner from the ER entrance I lit a cigarette. I was blowing out the first lungful of smoke when the doors slid open and Jacqui stepped out.

I reflexively tucked the cigarette out of sight, though I knew she had already seen me.

“Busted,” I said sheepishly.

“Can I have one?” she asked.

I fumbled with the pack, then cupped my hands around the Zippo to light it for her. I was stunned.

She took a deep drag and held it for a moment, shuddering slightly as she restrained a cough. “Almost twelve years,” she said. “When did you start again? With more than the token one or two a day, I mean.”

I tried to think. “It’s been a pretty rough year.”

“Yeah.”

We puffed in silence for a long moment, watching the smoke curl up toward the streetlights.

“We don’t both need to be here,” she said. “Nothing’s going to change before morning.”

“Do you want to—?”

She shook her head. “I can’t.” She gestured at the ER.

“Right.” Not with her co-workers watching. Not when she felt she could, maybe, do something, anything, if she needed to. “When are you supposed to work next?”

“Monday. Afternoon.” She took a drag off her cigarette. “We’re going to need to get some sleep.”

“Yeah.”

I dropped my cigarette and crushed the butt with my heel. I didn’t want to leave. I could see what she was saying, but it wasn’t just David that I wanted to be there for.

How long had it been since we had shared a cigarette late on a Saturday night? How long had it been since we were on the same side in a fight?

“So you think I should—” I gestured toward a cab waiting a short distance away.

“Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I lied. “I understand.”

“I’ll call you if anything—”

“Yeah.” I nodded emphatically. I took a couple of steps toward the cab and then it hit me. “You’re thinking this is going to be a long-term thing.”

She hesitated, and the sudden weight of our situation crushed in on me. That look on Jacqui’s face, that pause: David wasn’t going to be better when I returned in the morning.

I let myself in through the front door. I had to see it for myself.

Everywhere I went there were signs of a tragedy: a knocked-over stack of magazines in the living room; the kitchen sink full of cold grey dishwater; a pile of Davy’s laundry that I had folded and placed on the stairs for him to take up to his room now scattered and strewn. I
imagined the heavy shoes of the paramedics kicking at the clothes, a T-shirt catching in the wheels of the stretcher.

I tried to breathe evenly as I climbed the stairs. David’s bedroom was the worst of all.

His blankets had been pulled across the floor. The mattress had slid partly off the bed frame, its corner bright blue where the sheet had pulled away.

I surveyed the chaos slowly, trying to build a story around what I knew and what I was seeing. Davy in the early stages of the seizure, falling out of bed, trying to hang on but dragging the mattress with him. His flailing arms catching the bedside table, knocking it over, smashing the lamp, scattering all of his most prized possessions—baseball, glove, video game, book—onto the floor. I could see my son staggering around the bedroom, crashing into the shelf by the door, knocking books to the floor, smashing the glass of a picture of the three of us at Disneyland. Falling against his desk, spilling the glass of water, pens falling to the carpet, Nolan’s plastic cage tumbling onto its side.

I could see him in the middle of the floor, his body heaving and shuddering in the rounded, clear space amidst the chaos, his teeth uncontrollably gnawing into his tongue, his lips.

Unable to bear where my imagination was taking me, I kept noticing small details: the way the spilled water pooled around the edges of his computer keyboard. The faint, blue glow from the video game, which had fallen open. The way the baseball seemed to sit at the lip of the glove, as if about to be caught.

Standing there, surrounded by his life, by those things he loved, I wanted to take David something, something to comfort him, something to tuck into the hospital bed with him. Something familiar that would be there when he woke up.

Until he was about six, David had loved a battered brown teddy bear. He had called the bear Pik, after a Pokemon, and he carried it with him everywhere, usually by the ear. Jacqui and I had thought there would be a fight when it came time to separate the two of them, but David took care of the separation on his own. We had only noticed the absence of the bear after a few days.

I wished I knew where the bear was: it would have been perfect. Something to hold, something soft, something familiar and meaningful.

I stepped into the room and righted Nolan’s cage. The hamster was all right, cowering in the corner beside his overturned food bowl. David’s old baseball glove lay on the floor; it was dingy and battered and soft. That would have to do.

As I bent to pick it up, though, I spotted
To the Four Directions
beside it on the floor, partially concealed by the sheet. I had noticed it before, but it hadn’t really registered: what was the book doing in his room? Jacqui had put it on top of the fridge, homeland of exiled objects.

“That little …”

I could picture it; it was something I would have done.

No wonder he didn’t put up any resistance to going to bed.

I replaced the book on top of the fridge before going out the back door. No need for Jacqui to know.

It was only lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, that it occurred to me: the book was in his room. He wouldn’t have forgotten to replace it in the kitchen before he went to sleep, risking his mother’s wrath. And it was partially under the sheet.

David had been reading when the seizure hit.

On my way back to the hospital the next morning, I half expected to find David wide awake, sitting up in bed, playing that damn video game, as if my absence and a few hours in his mother’s tender care were enough to bring about a full recovery.

I found him exactly the way I had left him, broken and still.

I tucked his baseball glove into the crook of his arm, and kissed him gently on the forehead. “Good morning, Davy,” I whispered, before sitting down in the chair beside the bed.

Jacqui went home then, and I spent the morning at David’s side. I didn’t see a doctor at all until Jacqui returned several hours later: she was back less than three minutes and here he was.

He was older than the doctor we had seen the night before, balding, but with a bushy beard, almost sloppy in what looked like his street clothes. He glanced at me over the top of his glasses, but didn’t acknowledge me as he leaned against the bedrail and started flipping through the chart.

As Jacqui bent to brush David’s hair back from his forehead, she looked at the baseball glove. Biting her lower lip, she smiled at me.

“Has he ever had a seizure before?” the doctor asked.

“No—” Jacqui said, but he cut her off.

“Is there a family history of epilepsy?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

The doctor nodded, still looking at the chart. I don’t think he had glanced at David at all.

“Does”—he had to glance at the top of the sheet for his name—“David
have any allergies? To food, or to any medication he might be taking?”

“Not that we’re aware of,” Jacqui said, her voice growing cold, impatient. All the same questions.

The doctor nodded again, but he still wasn’t looking at David. “And has he suffered any injuries to his head recently?” he asked. “Sports, perhaps? Or a fight in the schoolyard?”

“No.”

The doctor pushed his glasses up. “Well, the tests came back negative for meningitis.” He looked at Jacqui, not at David. “I think the first thing we need to do is send your son …” He couldn’t even remember David’s name. “For some tests. I’ll order an MRI and a CAT scan.”

“Dr. McKinley put in a request for a CT last night,” Jacqui said.

“Then I’ll make sure that happens,” he said, momentarily focused. “He’ll get priority if he’s coming from Emergency. After, we’ll get him admitted and we’ll see what the tests show us.”

“Doctor,” I asked, “is it possible we’re jumping the gun a bit?” Jacqui looked at me—I couldn’t tell if she was agreeing with me or not. “Isn’t it possible that once the sedative wears off, he’ll just …”

The doctor was flipping through the file, and I had run out of words. I couldn’t shake the feeling that David was just going to wake up, that all of this would vanish behind us like a bad dream.

“According to this,” the doctor said, “your son was treated early last night with a single intravenous dose of lorazepam.” Jacqui nodded. “That should have worn off a little while ago.”

He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and looked up the bed at David. “Ah yes. It seems our patient is awake.”

My knees buckled at the words. I turned to smile at my son, my mouth tightened to say good morning.