When he got home, DeAnne's mother, Vette, met him at the door. "Oh," he said. "I hoped you'd be asleep."
"And I hoped you'd call from the hospital," she said.
He had forgotten to call. "There were problems. They sent me home. I decided to call from here."
"Problems?" She looked stricken.
"DeAnne is fine. But the baby seems to have something wrong and they don't know what it is. He was trembling. They called it a seizure. Well, actually, they called it 'seizure activity.' But they said it didn't look life threatening."
"Oh, I hate this," said Vette. "I hate not knowing."
"You and me both," said Step. "I guess I ought to call everybody now. It's only eleven P.m. in Utah, right?"
"Also Mary Anne Lowe said to tell you to call her no matter how late."
"OK," said Step. "I'll call her first."
He went into the kitchen and suddenly found himself sur rounded by tiny whining insects. He brushed his hands around his head but they wouldn't go away.
"Oh, aren't those gnats awful?" asked Vette. "I found a can of Raid and I've been spraying them, but new swarms just keep turning up. Do you get them all the time?"
"Never," said Step. "Where's the Raid?" The gnats all seemed to want to zoom right into his ear. "This is all I needed."
"I think they're coming from the laundry room," said Vette. "I haven't found any in the kids' rooms yet."
"We have this weird bug thing," said Step. He went into the laundry room and started looking around for where the gnats might be getting in through. As he looked, he told Vette about the crickets and the June bugs.
"We don't have any regular bug problem, I guess," he said. "It just comes in waves. Every couple of months or so some group of insects decide that our house is ready to go condo."
He found that the dryer hose had come partly away from the outdoor vent. He tried to push it tight, but the pressure jostled it and it fell completely away. Suddenly another swarm of gnats arose. Only they didn't come from the vent-they came from the hose. As if they had been spawned somewhere inside the dryer.
"Here, give me the Raid," he said.
Vette gave it to him, and he first sprayed the swarm that was orbiting his head. Then he sprayed up into the dryer hose and then out through the vent and when he thought he had dosed them enough, he slipped the hose back over the vent and then got a screwdriver from the laundry room cupboard and tightened the collar over the hose so it wouldn't slip away again.
"What are we doing in this house?" he said, when he got back into the kitchen.
"Getting by," said Vette. "Doing what you must for your family."
"We should never have left Vigor."
"Step, you know that I think you never should have left Utah! But you are not having problems with little Jeremy because you moved to North Carolina."
"How do you know? Maybe the doctor did something wrong. In Salt Lake they have a billion babies every year, they've seen everything. Out here there just aren't as many babies and so they're learning on Zap."
Vette winced. "Do you really call him Zap?"
"Well, the first thing Robbie said when he heard the name Jeremy was 'Germy, Germy Germy' so maybe Zaps the lesser of two evils."
"Step, things go wrong sometimes no matter where you live, and sometimes things go right, and you know something? Most things that happen aren't anybody's fault at all, so it's really kind of vain of you to think that your moving to North Carolina caused your newborn baby to have a seizure. You didn't do a single thing to cause it. For all you know whatever problem he has was determined at the moment of conception."
"Yeah, well, I was there for that, too." Then he was appalled that he had said such a thing. He and DeAnne's parents got along really well, but still, you don't talk about the conception of your children to your wife's mother.
"Better call people," said Vette. "I'll keep watching for the gna ts."
Step called Mary Anne first. It took longer than such calls usually did, because he mentioned that the baby was in intensive care and then he had to answer, "We don't know yet" to about fifty questions. It went that way with every call, but he couldn't very well not tell them the baby was having trouble, or when they found out they'd be deeply hurt. Besides, if prayer was going to be of any help in this situation, he wanted all the people praying that he could find.
He didn't finish the calls until nearly three. He had already sent Sylvette to bed, persuading her to go by pointing out that she'd be needed to take care of the kids in the morning while he went up to the hospital, and then she'd take her shift at the hospital while he stayed home with the kids-she'd need her sleep.
"So will you," Vette retorted.
"Yeah, but 1 can take a nap while I'm driving back and forth to the hospital."
She laughed and let him pull out the sofa bed, which DeAnne had already made up for her mother that morning. Then he moved his phone operations into the bedroom. When he finished the calls and took his last patrol through the house, she was asleep.
He looked in on each of the kids. Betsy, cuddled up to the stuffed Snoopy that- for reasons passing understanding-she had named Wilbur. Robbie, holding his real-fur stuffed bunny, which had been named Mammalee since his infancy. And Stevie, holding on to nothing.
You're all safe here in my house, Step thought silently, and yet I really can't keep you safe at all, can I?
Because there's that new one, not six hours old yet, and his life is in danger and I'm not even there because I'm completely useless. And here you are, asleep, safe in your beds, only something's going on inside your head, Stevie, and I can't reach in and find out what's happening and make it get better. I can plug up one hole and sweep the crickets out, but then the june bugs get in somewhere else, and then the gnats. Even when you have a perfect child, nothing stays perfect. Something always gets in. The good things are always, always at risk.
In the bedroom, undressed and ready for bed, he did what he hadn't done in years, though DeAnne did it every night. He knelt down beside the bed, the way he had done on his mission, the way he had done as a child.
He poured out his heart and asked for mercy for his new baby. Let him live. Let him have a good life. If it's within the power of my priesthood to heal him, then let me heal him when I give him a blessing tomorrow. I don't want to lose him. I want all my children, this one as much as any of the others, and all the children yet unborn that you might have for us. Don't take him away from us. Whatever he needs, we'll give it, if we have it to give.
Later, lying in bed, it occurred to him that he might have been praying for the Lord to grant him and DeAnne sixty years of caring for an invalid child. That perhaps what was wrong with Zap was so severe that it would be cruel to keep him here if the Lord was willing to take him home. So he re-entered the prayer that he thought he had closed, and added the phrase that he had deliberately left out when he was on his knees: Thy will be done.
DeAnne had recovered enough to go home, but she didn't want to. "I've never left the hospital without my baby," she said.
"You'll see him every day," said Dr. Keese. "And so will Step. And so will your mother. But you're not on insurance, I understand, and this is going to eat up your savings. You need whatever money you have to take care of Jeremy."