Dad, I thought. My father. Vater. How to prepare for you? I wondered if he would look the same. I wondered if his English had improved. I wondered if he’d remarried, if maybe he had finally reciprocated the attentions of the Caribbean woman who lived in the apartment below ours and who adored my father despite his comical stiffness in her presence. I did not wonder if my father would be angry with me for my long silence. I did not want to flatter myself with the thought that he would be angry about it. In fact, the more I thought about him, the more certain I became that he would not be changed at all, and the happier I grew about that, whereas when I was a boy, I wanted him so badly to be different.
I was disoriented when I awoke, fully dressed atop the made bed. It was late, but the television was still playing, volume off. Jets of damp air came through the vents below the window. Meadow was sitting upright across from me in her bed, still in her dress, looking stricken.
“What is it?” I said.
She looked at me hazily but did not answer.
“What is it?”
I stood and leaned in to her face and took her by the shoulders. After a long pause, she drew a shallow breath.
“I’m fine,” she wheezed. Her breath sounded broken.
I stood up.
“What?” I said. “OK.”
I turned in a circle, trying to remember where we were.
“We’re in Boston,” I said.
“I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine.”
This time, the words left her spent, hanging slightly forward.
“You are fine,” I said. “Of course you’re fine.”
I turned on the lamp by her bedside.
“No.” She squinted. “Turn it off, Daddy. Too bright.”
“You’re right,” I said, obeying, leaving us again in the flickering darkness. “I bet you, if we sit here, and I tell you a long, interesting story, you’ll be able to breathe normally and fall right back to sleep. All right? Scoot over. And sit up straight. That always helps you breathe, doesn’t it? To sit up?”
She mustered a smile, and I fluffed the pillows all around her.
Dear God, I thought. Not this.
“My story,” I said, “is called ‘The Camel of Boston Common.’ ”
I waited. I could hear her rasp in the darkness. Stay calm, I told myself. Staying calm would be my only important function. Her affliction — can I call it that? — was something that had manifested itself when she was about four, somewhere during the final act of her parents’ marriage, and perhaps for this reason, I never thought of her asthma as entirely physical. I mean, I related to it metaphorically, the threat of spiritual suffocation. Which is not to say I ignored medical solutions. I’d been there when the treatments were prescribed — a small albuterol inhaler to which she immediately affixed glittery stickers. Not a serious case, the pediatrician had said. Could be a lot worse. But she should keep this with her at all times.
“Once upon a time, there was a camel who got lost in Boston. He — uh — he had never been to Boston before, so he did not know that the people of Boston are prejudiced against camels. In fact, there was a shoot-to-kill order on camels — an obscure law that camel activists had tried to repeal but kept falling short of the votes they needed given the cronyism and general anti-camel sentiment in Faneuil Hall. How are you doing?”
With a wheezy inhalation, she nodded.
“OK? Great. OK. So this camel — his name was Alal — had gotten bizarrely, totally lost in Boston, separated from his, what, his herd. But everywhere he went, people were so rude to him, calling him Humpback and Goat-Hoof, and nobody would tell him which way to the Sahara. Somewhere around the corner of Boylston and Arlington he spied a nice little patch of grass. This was, as everybody knows, Boston Common.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes, Butterscotch.”
“Can I have my inhaler?”
I swallowed the stone in my throat. “As you may remember,” I said, “your inhaler is in your backpack. Which is in Vermont.”
She turned her head toward me, her cheek pressed against her hand, and sighed like a very old soul.
“We can get you a new inhaler, of course. But we can’t get a new one right now. I mean, it’s three o’clock in the morning. We’ll find a pharmacy first thing in the morning.”
She stared at me in the flickering light. Her gaze, somewhat vacant and dry, gave me pause.
“Don’t be scared,” I said.
She nodded.
“Don’t be scared. That makes it worse.”
“It feels like — someone is — tying—”
“Tying—”
“—tyingmythroatupwithstring.”
“Oh, Meadow, I wouldn’t let anyone do that. OK? Don’t let yourself imagine that.” I sat upright. “I know just what’ll help.”
I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower spigots, calling out toward the bedroom, “I used to have trouble breathing when I was a boy, too. Did I ever tell you that? This was back in East Germany. We didn’t have very advanced medicine back then. We didn’t have inhalers. Things got bad enough, they’d take you to the hospital and intubate you.” I came out of the bathroom, peeled back the bedspread, and gently scooped her up. “So of course, my mother tried to find home remedies. Eucalyptus. Prayers to the Moon God, what have you. But the only thing that seemed to help”—I placed Meadow on the cold tiles of the bathroom—“was a nice hot steam shower.”
She was an absurdly colored bird in the steam. I helped her off with her little jacket, and then she stepped out of the collapsed dress. She stood trembling in her underpants, not even bothering to cover her chest. I could see the strain of her ribs under her skin.
“If this doesn’t help, I’ll take you straight to the hospital.”
She inhaled. “Idon’twanttogotothehospital.”
“Boy oh boy. Let me tell you, neither do I. So let’s stay positive. Upsie-daisy.”
I lifted her into the bathtub and she stood in the basin with her hands drawn up under her chin. Her eyeglasses instantly fogged. I reached in to remove them from her face, and as I did so, I grew slightly dizzy myself, remembering those distant treatments.
“You inhale the steam,” I said, “and I’ll just sit right here on the toilet. Very dignified.”
She said nothing. I closed the plastic curtain and sat beside the bathtub on the cold toilet lid. The shower curtain billowed out of the basin. From its tattered hem water was pouring brokenly. A dirty tributary pushed across the tiles toward the door. I could hear the sound of water upon my daughter’s skull.
We’d done everything the doctor said. She had a couple minor attacks, so we bought a HEPA filter and gave away the mouse and didn’t feed her gluten, and then we got divorced. I could still remember those and other emergencies as clearly as if they had just occurred: a bad burn once when she tried to fry some Play-Doh, the time she ingested a Christmas rose at her grandmother’s and we wept all the way to the hospital, several horrible fevers, in which we experienced ghoulish waking visions throughout the night vigil as if we had, according to our prayers, changed places with her. In a bygone era, we would have lost her ten times over. And yet we never did. We never did. Whatever force took her to that edge always brought her back to us.
“Butterscotch?”
“Yes?”
“Does the steam seem to be helping?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
“But—”
“But what.”
“I feel spinnish.”
“You want a chair in there? Something to sit on?”