The Doctor's Wife (7 page)

“Go get help,” the Doctor's Wife yells at Chrissy. The Doctor's Wife is holding John down on the couch while he thrashes.

Chrissy runs next door, jumping from the retaining wall down to the driveway of Franny and Marylin Rubatino's house. She bangs on the door.

“Come quick, it's John,” she says, “He's having a seizure.”

Franny runs after her. When they get back to the house, Chrissy can't watch. She runs upstairs and buries her face in her pillow.

People try to sell their houses and they can't. Who wants to buy a house with a bad septic tank? Who wants to buy a house fronting a dirty lake? Nobody wants to change until it hurts more to stay the same.

The eggs can't be too tough, but neither can they run, the Doctor insists. On the one hand, the Doctor's Wife understands her husband's finickiness. She hates the rubbery white part of a boiled egg. Nevertheless, yesterday when the Doctor complained about how she'd prepared the eggs, she'd flown into a rage, stopping herself at the last second from throwing a plate on the floor. “You can make your own eggs,” she'd snapped.

“I'd be glad to,” he'd replied calmly, which didn't help her mood.

What she can and will do is set the table, heat the water in the teakettle and balance the raw eggs on the counter, so that the Doctor can boil them when he is ready. She even makes him toast, flinging it on a plate, scraping it with butter. She'd be better off if she could sit down for a second and have a cigarette, but for that she'll have to wait.

“Breakfast is ready,” she shouts upstairs. Where are the kids? She stomps up. She can feel herself stomping. The girls are sleeping in their twin beds, the brand new ones they'd immediately carved their names into with the beheaded tips of bobby pins. “Wake up, darlings,” she says, clapping her hands loudly. Chrissy's leg hangs out of the bed and Ann opens her eyes.

“I'm awake,” Ann says, sitting bolt upright.

“Well, get up.”

She goes into Bob's room. “Rise and shine, baby,” she says, opening the door. He's sitting at his desk in his pajamas, his taxidermy kit in front of him. He's holding an open jar of fake eyes. “Wash your hands and come down for breakfast.”

The Doctor's Wife takes towels from the upstairs bathroom to the utility porch downstairs, where she throws them in the washing machine. She hates to have any laundry left over from the day before. She goes back upstairs to check on John, who is still sleeping, breathing raggedly. She kisses him on his forehead and rubs his back.

Downstairs, she sees that the Doctor has had his breakfast, but left his toast. Why does she bother? She dumps the toast into the trash.

“What happened to breakfast?” the Doctor asks when he emerges from the downstairs bathroom. The Doctor's Wife sees the eggs on the counter, sees that she's cleared his plate before he even sat down to eat.

She whoops with laughter. The kids come down in a stampede.

“What's wrong, mom?” Ann asks, sleep in her eyes, but sounding alarmed. The Doctor shakes his head.

Nobody else seems to think that what she did is at all funny. She is the only one with a sense of humor.

The Doctor's Wife takes John down to Seattle Children's Hospital where she stays with him for five days while yet more tests are run. On the third day, a Saturday, the Doctor drives the other kids from Lake Stevens. Healthy children are not allowed in the Children's Hospital, so the Doctor's Wife holds John up at the window while she waves at the others standing down below in the parking lot.

Children's Hospital can't say what's wrong, so a few weeks later the Doctor's Wife takes John to the University of Washington Hospital, and there the neurologists can't say exactly either, but they finally have an idea. Electrical charges move along neurons to control everything we do. John's body doesn't make myelin, the protein that acts as a protective sheath around the neurons, so the electrical signals from his brain can't travel fast enough, and the signal goes uselessly into the surrounding tissues. What this means, for example, is that the electrical command is lost in between John's brain and his throat and so he can't swallow. That's all the doctors can say.

“Neurologists either know what's wrong and can't do anything about it, or they don't know what's wrong and can't do anything about it,” the Doctor says to his wife. The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife face a choice. They can take John to The Mayo Clinic or the Johns Hopkins, turning their lives over to useless hope. Or they can take him home.

They take him home.

Ann packs her vinyl suitcase. She doesn't usually like to spend any time away from home and she especially doesn't see the point of going to Campfire Girl camp. There's a lake to swim in and activities like archery and sailing, but Ann doesn't like activities. She likes to read and she likes to swim. She has her own lake right in the front yard. But she wants to prove to herself that she can be brave. Also her mother has sewn Ann's name into all of her clothes, and it's too late to back out of it.

“I'm going to have the room all to myself,” Chrissy says. Ann places her rolled up socks in her suitcase. “And I'm going to sleep in your bed.”

“I don't care.”

“I'm going to sleep in your bed in my bathing suit.”

“So.”

“I'm going to put an earwig in your bed and it's going to lay eggs.”

Ann hates the thought of earwigs and Chrissy knows it, but she keeps her mouth shut.

“You're so mean!” Chrissy shrieks.

Their mother comes in to the room and hugs them close. “Oh, Ann. Chrissy.” Their mother is crying and she squeezes them. Ann knows what happened.

“Am I still going to go to Campfire Girl camp?”

“No, darling.”

The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife think that it is necessary for the kids to see John's body so that they don't think of death as an unnatural event. The kids file in. What do they do? Where do they look? Their little brother is skinny from not eating and his chest doesn't move.

The Doctor has been trying not to worry so much. He's on a fishing trip with Gretel and Bobby, who's thirteen. They're on the northern fork of the Stilliguamish, fishing for steelhead, but not right this moment. It's too late in the morning to fish. The Doctor and his son are eating ham sandwiches, standing up. Gretel follows the Doctor's every movement: hand to mouth, hand resting slack by the waist, then up to the mouth again.

The Doctor takes a drink from his beer can. A sharp, hot pain sears his throat. He drops his beer can on the ground and says, “Jesus Christ,” but doesn't yell. Gretel laps up the spilled beer as it seeps into the riverbank. He didn't yell, because he doesn't like to yell, but he wishes he did. You never expect a bee sting to hurt as much as it does.

“Bee stung my throat,” the Doctor says by way of explanation to his son.

“Is the bee still in there?” asks Bob.

“I'm pretty sure I swallowed it,” the Doctor says, surprised to think this is true.

“Where's the stinger?”

The Doctor harrumphs. “It seems to still be in my throat.” If his throat starts to swell shut, something will have to be done quickly. He knows how to perform an emergency tracheotomy. The first he ever did was on the deck of the destroyer
O'Bannon
, off the coast of Guadalcanal. For the burned soldier shedding sheets of skin, the tracheotomy was as useless as the syrettes of morphine.

“If I pass out, I need you to help me,” the Doctor says to his son. He takes a knife out of the tackle box, and a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, removing the ink reservoir from the pen's casing. He takes Bob's hand and guides his finger to the place between the Adam's apple and the cricoid cartilage. “With the knife, make a half-inch slit, pinch the cut, and then poke the tube through the hole. I'll regain consciousness when I can breathe again.”

“OK,” Bob says, drawing his hand to his own throat.

“Probably you won't have to do it,” the Doctor says, handing his son the pen. Gretel, done with the beer, moves closer to the Doctor, putting her head under his right hand. “Good dog,” the Doctor says.

“Dad?” Bob asks, coming close. Their hands almost touch on the top of the dog's head.

The Doctor looks at the river, birch trees leaning toward the water, the steelhead hiding in the shadows. Two big dragonflies buzz past, connected to each other, mating. Gretel, who might not be the smartest dog, lopes after the dragonflies, snapping her jaws.

“Dad?” Bob asks again.

“Yes?”

“What do I do after you wake up?”

“When did you find out what John had?” I ask my grandmother on the telephone.

“We knew pretty soon after he died. We sent off tissue samples to Atlanta.”

“To the CDC?”

“Yes.”

“It seems like there aren't any journal articles about meta-chromatic leukodystrophy until the early sixties.”

“That sounds about right.”

We're quiet. The disease is still incurable. Nobody lives past the age of four.

“There are some things that are good to remember and some things that are hard to remember,” the Doctor's Wife says.

On Christmas morning, six months after John's death, the Doctor's Wife directs the girls to the tree in the corner of the living room. Propped on a fir branch in front of a green light they find a small envelope with both of their names written on it. Chrissy is absolutely positive that the envelope was not there before today. She takes the envelope down. Inside she finds a typed poem, written by her mother and pasted on a card.

“Hooves” is rhymed with “moves.” “Equine” is rhymed with “so don't you whine.”

“What's equine?” asks Chrissy.

“Horses,” Ann says.

Chrissy's heart beats fast. “We're getting horses!”

The girls are not, in fact, getting horses. But they get the second best thing, riding lessons at the Boggses Skyline Stables. The Boggses and the McLanes own B&M, the grocery store at Frontier Village, the new shopping center on the ridge above the lake. Taylor's Pharmacy, B&M and the rest of the buildings have false fronts meant to resemble those in an old western town.

The girls start the lessons in a wet, cold March, running home from the bus after school to change into jeans and sneakers. At the stables they learn things like, “The only person who doesn't fall off a horse is the one who doesn't get on.” They learn how to ride Western, in which one leads with the reins, and how to ride English, in which one leads with the bit. When riding English, one posts when the horse trots, sitting up very tall in the saddle. While they take their lessons, Chrissy can't help but notice that her friend Alison Packer rides her own horse instead of a loaner. Rather than jeans and sneakers she wears jodhpurs, a little riding coat, and beautiful black glossy boots that come up past her knees.

“Who cares about that?” the Doctor's Wife says, when Chrissy asks for her own riding outfit.

“I'm going to save up and buy my own boots,” Chrissy says to Ann when they're getting ready for bed.

“I have a better idea.”

“How much do you think boots like that cost?” Chrissy says. She doesn't like Ann to have better ideas.

“Let's buy a horse,” Ann says.

This
is
a better idea.

“How are you going to pay for a horse?” the Doctor's Wife asks the next day.

“We'll save our money.”

“What money?”

She can scoff, but what else can she do? Nothing. It's their own allowance and they can do with it what they will. But by the time summer rolls around, it has become clear that saving up allowance money is not going to be enough. Fortunately, a solution presents itself. During strawberry season, an old white-painted school bus makes stops all along the road around the lake, picking up kids to take to the berry fields in Hamilton. Each strawberry flat earns the picker fifty cents.

The first day of the season, Chrissy and Ann wait for the bus with Cathy Gunderson and the Bergs, shivering in the gray morning. In the field the foreman teaches them how to do the job. The strawberries are meant for the cannery, so they have to be hulled, which means digging out the green stem with your fingers, and by the end of the day, Chrissy and Ann's hands are stained red. At home, the Doctor's Wife makes the girls dip their hands in a solution of water and Clorox until the red is gone.

Then Chrissy and Ann change into their bathing suits. The horse is important, but they wouldn't dream of having jobs if they had to work all day and couldn't swim.

One day after two weeks of picking, they are in the fields when an older kid hits Chrissy dead on the cheek with a hard little strawberry, compact as a stone. She pitches a strawberry back and then it's war.

“Over here,” Chrissy yells, calling to her allies as she ducks behind a tractor. Cathy and the Bergs join forces with the Hagens against kids from the other side of the lake.

They see the foreman running across the field.

“Hey! You just cost me a hundred dollars,” he yells. Chrissy feels slightly bad about this. She pulls strawberry chunks from her hair. “If you ever do that again you'll be sent home and the bus won't pick you up anymore.”

If they get fired they won't be able to buy a horse!

“Take your clothes off outside,” the Doctor's Wife says when they come home.

They've been continuously encouraged by their mother to open a savings account, but they don't think much of that idea. It is better to hold and count the money whenever they feel like it, so they keep their wages in a cigar box under Ann's bed. At the end of July, they shut the door to their room and spread the bills and coins out on Ann's bed.