“Not yet,” I said. “Is that normal?”
We traded places at the bedside.
“She’s gonna be fine,” said the nurse. She flipped through the clipboard at the foot of the bed. “She’ll rouse soon. It’s just time to check her vitals.”
I left the room with a foreboding that surprised me.
The cop and I stepped into the hall. I explained it to him like this: My daughter and I had taken the bus down from Conway the previous morning, just a father-and-daughter Saturday trip into Boston for the sights (swan boats, roasted cashews, the chandelier at the Copley, etc., etc.), and had lost her inhaler in the lagoon, and maybe it was petting the horses that kicked up her asthma. But I noticed that after several minutes of him writing up his report with an awkward leftie scrawl, he had stopped writing and was listening to me with a kind of strained interest. He asked where was the girl’s mother and I said she was back in Conway with our other little one, waiting for the two of us to be discharged. We were both shaken up over what happened, I told him, but we knew that Mass General was one of the best hospitals in the world and besides we were never going to go anywhere without her inhaler again. And then he finally asked for my name and I put out my hand and said, “John Torraine.” We shook hands. “And your daughter is?” “Jessie. Jessie. Short for Jessica. But she hates being called Jessica,” I added. Then the cop told me he was all set but that I was eventually going to have to fill out some paperwork for the hospital. I didn’t have insurance, I said, but you could bet I was good for it. He said I could work that end out with the hospital.
Finally, he let me go.
I walked back into the room shaken. Then I stopped short. Meadow was awake. The nurse in pink was leaning over her, having just placed her glasses back on her nose. Meadow, now tilted upright on the mechanical bed, beamed with restored sight.
“Daddy!” she whispered.
I went over to the bed and clasped her skinny arm, which looked brown against the white linen. I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry for years.
“Jesus Christ, it’s good to see you,” I said.
“Good to see you too, Daddy.”
I fluffed the pillow below her head, uselessly. I brought my forehead to hers.
“OK,” I said. “It’s OK.”
“OK,” she said, hoarsely.
“OK.” Finally, I laughed. “This is wonderful.”
The nurse laughed too. “It is wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful.” She gathered her instruments. “Meadow was just asking me where her daddy was.”
I drew back, looking now at the nurse, my smile still arrayed.
“Well, here I am,” I said, after a long moment.
“Just like I said,” said the nurse.
“Just like you said,” murmured Meadow, nuzzling the pillows with both cheeks.
Then I said, half-choked, “I’d never leave you.”
“I know that,” Meadow said. She lifted her arm. “Look, I got a bracelet.”
As the nurse was passing me I reached out and grasped her shoulder more firmly than I’d meant to. She raised her eyes with a glimmer of alarm.
“Sorry,” I said, pulling back. “God, sorry to, like, grab you.” I brushed my damp forehead with my wrist. “I was just wondering if we might be able to go now.”
The woman smiled. “You want to leave right now?”
“Is that possible?”
“Let me get someone. OK?”
“OK, sure. Who?”
“Well, I’ve got to talk to the doc. Let’s see if the doc can come take a peek at her. OK?”
“OK, great. Great. You’re going to go ask the doctor now?”
The woman looked over her shoulder, striding out. “Absolutely.”
I turned back to my daughter, who was walking her fingers through the air, her cheeks in high color, like a girl in a fairy tale. I went to the door and looked both ways down the hall. No rushing, no alarms, only an intake nurse sitting nearby in a cone of light, shuffling papers. Dawn was breaking in the eastern windows. A discreet light. Go in there and pick her up, I thought, and run. Or run yourself. Now. There are the stairs. There is the elevator. She said her name. Meadow had. She said her real name. I stepped back into the room. Meadow was sucking apple juice through a curly straw, tethered by the wrist to an IV. Dear God, I thought. OK, ten minutes. Ten more minutes, then we’re gone. I found her clothes in a white plastic bag hanging inside a child-sized wardrobe. “Scootch down,” I said, and yanked up the sheets from the foot of the bed. She was incurious as I slid her purple sweatpants up underneath her floral johnny. And then I stopped. The vents by the window came on, blowing gusts of dry, hot air into the room. I did not pick her up and I did not run. I did not run away alone, one selfish survivor, one perfected criminal. Instead, I sat. My aging knees creaked. The boy on the other side of the curtain sighed in his sleep.
“Meadow,” I said. “Give me your hand.”
She did. It was small and dark and coldish.
I pressed it against my cheek. She fell in and out of sleep.
I don’t recall how much time passed. Fifteen minutes. Fifteen years.
Someone cleared his throat in the doorway. Without turning around, I knew exactly who it was. The guy just couldn’t stay away. I tried to clear my expression of open dislike, and looked over my shoulder.
“I was hoping you were the doctor,” I said.
The cop returned my expression with nothing, absolutely zero.
He stood awkwardly for a moment in the doorway, and then told me that there was some hospital paperwork to complete and he was just there to show me where it was. Couldn’t I fill out the paperwork here in the pediatric ward? I asked. My daughter was wakeful now and I didn’t want to leave her alone.
He said, “It’ll only take a minute.” He said, “Come this way.”
I stood and leaned down close to Meadow.
“Sweetheart,” I whispered.
Her eyes fluttered open.
“I’ve got to go somewhere for one minute. OK?”
She nodded. “OK.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
“You’ll be right back?”
“Yes,” I said.
She covered my hand with her own. “You promise?”
“I promise.”
That’s what I said.
The intake nurse looked up at me when I emerged from the room and then hastily looked away. There was no other soul in sight.
The hallway was endless. As we walked, the subtext between us seemed to deepen prismatically. My escort walked very close to me but with a casual roll. I felt his canvas jacket brush my bare arm and heard the jangle of all of his violent instruments. We turned a corner. Another hall. The tension made my bowels cramp. I almost stopped. I almost stopped and grabbed his arm and cried, What the hell do you want from me? But suddenly, he halted. He pointed me toward a set of swinging doors at the end of the hallway. He told me to walk right through and I’d see the registration desk. I tried to hide my surprise. He was letting me go? Had I passed a test by walking down that gauntlet? I nodded to him. I walked the twenty or so paces without glancing back. As I pushed through the doors and stepped into the glass-ceilinged solarium, I was thinking, maybe sometimes you just have to believe everything is going to be OK.
I guess I startled the officers that were waiting for me. They didn’t seem quite prepared as I strode into the solarium. There were two of them, a large black man and a broad-backed white woman, talking quietly in relaxed poses, and they had to leap over the chairs when I saw them and turned and ran. Then all was clear. The animosity was clear, the struggle. I was already back through the swinging doors and running toward the pediatric unit with a good lead when they pursued with their whole lot of noise. People stared and froze. They neither moved to stop me nor got out of my way. A doctor leaning over a gurney in the hallway held a bladder of fluid over his head to avoid dropping it. Onlookers seemed paralyzed, not knowing which of us was the aggressor. Look. Look at me. Imagine me. A man of forty, in beach-crusted khakis and a checkered shirt. I skidded into Meadow’s hallway, and there, in a brilliant end around, my familiar opponent approached me with both hands out.