“It’s been a long time since I was here,” he says. There’s a weariness in his face.
“What do you mean?” says Catherine.
But he stops talking. She has the feeling as he speaks that he is only thinking out loud. An odd sensation comes to her: he is treating her as if she is a hallucination, some figment of a dream.
She guides him back to his room. He asks for water. One of the nurses brings a cup.
For now, he sits calmly on his bed.
Catherine steps out of the room to call home. A change of plans: she won’t be home tonight, she tells the babysitter, who is accustomed to this kind of thing, Catherine’s overnight shifts a part of their arrangement. Her daughter gets on the phone: “When are you coming home, Mama?” Her voice is so sweet and so clear. A surge of longing comes into Catherine, her eyes blurring with unexpected tears. This boy’s parents, she remembers—someone should call his parents.
The other doctors are conferring in a cluster down the hall.
When she comes back, the boy’s room is empty.
“I asked you to watch the door,” she says to the orderly at the nursing station. She is used to the protocols of the psychiatric ward, but this is a regular hospital, not set up for supervision.
“I did,” says the orderly. “He didn’t come out of that room.”
In the boy’s room, a sudden breeze is rustling the blinds—the window is open. This room, she remembers, is on the third floor.
A terrible certainty comes into her mind, as the other doctors flood into the room behind her: whatever was happening inside that boy’s mind will remain locked forever beyond anyone else’s reach.
She pauses at the window, afraid of what she will see, knowing without knowing: and there he is, three floors below, facedown on the sidewalk, his hospital gown pooling out around his body.
The soles of his bare feet are as white as the moon. His blood shines beneath the streetlight. And his neck—obvious even from this height—is broken.
15.
Some will say later that the official response was too slow. But certain procedures are being followed. Lists are being made. Calculations. There is, after all, a mathematics of disease: how one case grows to three or four, and each of those four to four more.
A quiet arithmetic, a naming of names—this is how it comes to be that thirteen days after the first girl fell sick a nurse’s gloved finger is pressing the doorbell at the house where Annie and Ben and their baby live.
Have they heard, the nurse wants to know, about the sick kids at the college?
A burst of adrenaline comes into Ben’s blood.
She seems nervous, standing there, this young nurse in green scrubs and fresh gloves.
She is holding a clipboard under one arm. She is asking about their baby.
“Is she here?” she says. “Your daughter?”
“Why?” he says, but the details are rushing into his mind, all those reports he has only half heard. An infant can do that: shrink the world to the circumference of her throat.
“We’re taking every precaution,” the nurse says. “We’re monitoring everyone who’s had contact with the sick.” She speaks as if reciting the words of a script, newly learned.
“But who do we know who’s sick?” asks Ben. There’s a sudden tightness in his throat.
The nurse looks away, as if the truth embarrasses her.
“No one called you?” she says. She is tugging at the chain of her necklace; a tiny silver cross catches the light.
He’s been having nightmares about losing the baby. He wakes with a physical sensation, a terrible emptiness in his arms.
It’s the milk, says the nurse. It’s the donated milk from the hospital.
“Jesus,” says Ben. They have a freezer full of it, rows and rows of bottles, pumped from the bodies of other women. And a bag full of old bottles that Grace has already drunk.
“One of the donors,” says the nurse. “One of them might have been exposed.”
He will remember, later, the look on Annie’s face as she walks down the stairs, that last moment before she knows to be worried—that open look, flat, smooth-cheeked.
She is holding Grace in her arms, one hand on the back of her little head—that head. You can still feel the soft spots between the plates in her skull, not yet fused. Fear feels different, so much sharper, with a baby.
“Has she been feeling all right?” asks the nurse.
“Oh my God,” says Annie, bringing her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God.”
She is so sorry to bother them, says the nurse, and she’s never done this before. Her charm bracelet is clinking against the clipboard. But they’re just trying to be really careful.
“I’m supposed to ask if she’s been sleeping more than usual?” the nurse says.
“What do you mean?” asks Annie. She tries to say more, but already she is crying, this new silent cry she’s been doing so much of lately and has almost never done before—she is usually the sane one between them. She is the even keel. But now, Ben is the one who keeps having to take over, like a translator.
“She sleeps a lot,” he says.
Even then, the baby is dozing in a sunsuit, mouth open, in Annie’s arms.
“I need to take her temperature,” says the nurse.
She does not have children, this woman—he is sure of it. It’s in the way she speaks to them so carefully, as if from some great distance. He’s been seeing everyone that way, lately, sensing who has had children and who has not, as if he can suddenly see all the strings that bind one person to another.
Soon the nurse is holding a wand a few inches from Grace’s forehead, no contact. It’s the same kind of thermometer they used in the hospital in those first few hours of her life when her body was still learning to regulate its own temperature, and her limbs, so accustomed to life underwater, were squirming slowly, like a jellyfish moving in a current.
“They said it was sterilized,” says Ben. “I thought the milk was supposed to be sterilized.”
The nurse’s hands are shaking as she holds the thermometer over Grace’s head. She is standing as far away as she can. She keeps having to start over.
“There was some kind of mistake,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
Behind her, the porch swing is rocking lightly in the wind. A dog is barking somewhere. Grace begins to open and close her lips like a fish.
Finally the beeping: no fever. A tiny ping of relief.
But someone will be back to do it again in the morning, says the nurse. They’ll have to do it twice a day.
In the meantime, they should stop using the milk. They should throw out whatever they have left, and switch to formula.
And there is one more thing: “We have to ask that you keep her at home for now,” she says. She is peeling off her gloves. She is already backing away. “And also,” she says, “please don’t leave town.”
For weeks, they’ve been learning to coax Grace to sleep. There is a certain way to swaddle her, a certain rhythm at which she likes to be rocked. They have a turtle that projects lights through its shell and a seahorse that plays soothing music. But she sleeps best to the beating of their hearts, which is why they’ve spent so many hours, both of them, with the tiny heft of her head pressed against their chests, her back curved, her fists clenched, the one bringing the other water or coffee or a few bites of grilled cheese, while the other moves as little as possible for fear of waking Grace up.
But now, they are afraid to let her close her eyes.
Ben skims in an hour all the stories they haven’t read, the two weeks of coverage of the sickness so far. The reports conflict, how serious it is or not. He can’t figure out how many have died. It is hard to find the real facts.