“You’re okay, honey. Lean against me. You’re okay.”
Jen settled Kaylee down on the blanket and tried to calm her and slow the wheezing. Ricky stood there, stunned.
“She’s okay, Ricky. You were probably a little too rough, but she’ll be fine.”
Suddenly Kaylee started to gag, like she was going to vomit. Jen’s own stomach tightened. This wasn’t just an asthma attack. Then the girl started to convulse. Ricky stared at his sister, his eyes wide.
“Mom—what’s the matter with her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Get me her inhaler from the car.”
The boy’s eyes welled up. “Mom… I’m sorry, I didn’t know…”
“Shut up. Just get me her medicine now. Then we’re going home.”
At home, it took hours for Kaylee to stop gagging and coughing. Jen switched between inhalers and allergy medication, haphazardly guessing at the dosages. She sponged the girl down the best she could, and finally Kaylee calmed and drifted into a restless sleep.
It was dark when Jen hung the kid’s soggy and slightly fishy-smelling clothes out on the line. Then the intense recriminations: How did this happen? Why wasn’t she watching her kids more closely? Maybe the kids would be fine if Dan were here. He’d be in control, keeping everyone in line, sticking to a routine.
She tried to snap out of it and threw some sandwiches on the table for supper.
When she called Ricky to come and eat, she got no response. She peeked in the kid’s shared bedroom and saw the boy sitting in a rocking chair besides Kaylee’s bed.
“Honey, come have something to eat.”
“She’s really sick, Mom. She’s not right.”
She gently took his arm and led him to the kitchen. They sat down at the table and ate in silence, their movements slow. Then Ricky looked up. Kaylee stood quietly behind Jen, like a ghost. Jen whirled around.
“Kaylee—Sweetie—are you hungry? Want to try to eat a little food?”
The girl was ashen faced, and, thinking back, Jen cursed herself for not realizing soon enough how sick she really was. She should’ve taken her directly from the beach to the hospital. Maybe that might have saved her.
But the girl seemed hungry, and that was a good sign. She sat down and mutely pointed to a bowl of potato salad, one of her favorite foods. Jen scooped a small amount on a dish, added a few pieces of chicken salad and placed it in front of her. After one or two forkfuls, Kaylee stopped eating, dazedly stood up, and went back to bed.
It was after midnight when Jen heard Kaylee vomiting. She rushed into the bedroom. Ricky was holding a wastepaper basket under Kaylee’s mouth.
“She’s really sick, Mom.”
The heat from Kaylee’s head and cheeks seemed to burn Jen’s palms.
“Oh baby, you’re burning up. Help me get her up, Ricky. We’re taking her to the emergency room.”
They eased her up to sitting and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. Jen tried to lift her. Dan would be able to carry her, the voice of guilt rambled. They managed to stand Kaylee up and shuffle her through the kitchen, where she heaved again on the floor.
“We’ll get it later. Come on. Let’s keep her moving.”
The scene was compressed into short, popping flashbacks: reaching the car, putting Kaylee in the back seat that was still wet from the river-soaked clothes, Ricky holding Kaylee’s head on his lap. Jen’s hands shook as she started the car and peeled out of the driveway, holding the cell phone in one hand and steering the car with the other. The hospital’s number was on speed dial. They needed to know they were coming.
“Yes. She can’t breathe, vomiting, burning up. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Ricky was whispering to Kaylee who stared blankly. “You’ll be okay, Kaylee. You’ll be okay.”
When they pulled up to the emergency room, Jen barreled out of the car, ran inside and blurted out to no one in particular.
“My little girl—she’s—”
Jen gestured to her car just outside the automatic doors. A gurney was pushed out to the car, and four strong arms lifted Kaylee out. Inside a voice over a loudspeaker called for a doctor. Sprawled on her back, Kaylee’s body hung like a rag doll as they rolled her into a room that had a glass window facing out into the hall. Cables were hooked up to monitors, an IV stuck in her tiny arm, oxygen tubes crackled out of a plastic bag and were inserted in Kaylee’s nose, her dulled eyes vaguely watching the medical drill. Jen and Ricky, transfixed, peered in through the window. A doctor rushed past them into the room, a space that seemed to be sucking the life out of the little girl. In a muted pantomime, the doctor snapped out questions, took the girl’s pulse, checked readings on the monitors, and then stood tacitly, rolling his pencil between his fingers. He mouthed a few orders to the nurse and came out.
“Hi. I’m Richard Turner, the on-call doctor. You are?”
“Jen Elery, Kaylee’s mom. This is my son, Ricky. What’s going on with her doctor?”
He was young, with a five o’clock shadow and dark circles under his eyes. The collar of his shirt was rumpled, and he tapped the end of his stethoscope in small percussive beats against the inside of his hand.
“We don’t know yet. We took some blood, and maybe we’ll have to do other tests. Why don’t you tell me how she got sick. Was she feeling ill before this?”
Jen recounted the day: the beach, the splashing around in the water, Kaylee’s struggle to breathe, the violent vomiting. The doctor listened, expressionless, staring at Jen’s forehead as she spoke.
“What about allergies?” he asked Jen. “Could she have ingested something that didn’t agree with her?”
“She has a bunch of allergies, and her asthma can be severe, but we keep it in check. Could it be the asthma that made her lose her breath and vomit?”
“Look, we just don’t know. We’ve given her something to keep her airways open. She’ll sleep for a while, but I won’t have a clue until we get the test results. We might have to x-ray. We’ll talk later.”
He scribbled something down on a pad and walked away. Jen couldn’t find the strength to ask him more questions, so she took Ricky down the hall to a waiting area. They sat down on the couch, and the boy, still in his pajamas, curled up against her and soon nodded off. Jen closed her eyes but the hospital sounds kept her alert. She listened for Kaylee’s door to open and close.
She fell into a meditative state, drifting between sleep and consciousness. An hour later, she gently laid Ricky down and reached for her cell phone.
At the other end the phone rang several times. Finally he answered.
“Jen? What is it? It’s the middle of the night!” Dan said.
Jen pictured him cuddling with his lover, not a care in the world.
“It’s Kaylee. We’re in the hospital. Can you come?”
“What happened? Why didn’t you call sooner?”
He said he was on his way and Jen felt relieved. And nervous. She prayed he wouldn’t bring lover girl.
As she put her phone away, she could barely hear the doctor’s voice on the phone down the hall at the nurse’s station. His words were muffled but she thought she heard radiation and exposed.
Moments later he entered the waiting area and sat down opposite her on a small table. Jen unfolded herself. As he spoke, the odor of cigarettes tainted the air. A fresh coffee spill stained the sleeve of his white scrubs, and he looked even more tired and bedraggled than before. He saw Ricky sleeping and whispered quietly to Jen.
“We think your daughter may have been exposed to some sort of toxic substance. Do you live near a garbage dump? Was your house tested for radon gas or anything like that?”