Child of Mine

I study the pattern in the linoleum floor, my forehead resting on the edge of the mattress. I sit, bent over, in a hard chair beside her hospital bed. My daughter’s hand rest on the back of my neck where my hair is damp and curling from the rain that fell in sheets as I stood panicked and dumb outside the ambulance. I lift my forehead off the edge of the bed and look at her ashen face, so perfect in its paleness.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, tears welling up, chocolate swirls above the white of her cheekbones. Charcoal spittle clings to the corners of her mouth and her teeth are tinged with gray as if she has just finished a licorice slurpee. I wonder where my antidote is.
Sighing, I reach for her hand, close mine around it and marvel at the smallness of it. How can it still be so small? My own tears threaten and I clear my throat to warn them off. Her other hand, connected by plastic tubing to an IV bottle suspended above her bed, reaches out to touch my face and I snap my head up and away, out of her reach. I do not let go of the little hand I am holding though…I clutch it as tightly as I used to when it was time to cross the street.
“I just wanted it to stop,” she says. Simple, no elaboration, just so.
I lower my head back to the bed and digest this. I want it to stop, too. I realize that for the first time in a very long time we are on common ground. She pulls her slender hand away from mine and curls it under her chin. She is tired she says. I am tired too (another thing to share) and my weariness pounds behind my eyelids like a heartbeat.
The doctor comes in and I sit straighter, trying to focus on the words he is saying. Is he speaking to me or to her? She is answering him, a little girl’s voice chirping through black rimmed lips.
“I don’t know how many I took, maybe twenty or twenty-five,” she says. “I was looking for Tylenol, I had a headache, I guess. Then I saw the other pills, and …I didn’t plan it, or anything. I was just standing there with a headache and just so tired of it all, and it came to me…it seemed like the only way. I just wanted to make it stop,” she repeats her plaintive refrain.
I try to listen to the doctor explaining how she was lucky she did not take twenty to twenty-five Tylenol, while I envision my child standing in front of our medicine chest, reaching out for a bottle of muscle relaxants. Her liver would be mush, he says. Mush. I find that odd. Mush. Is that what doctors say? He places his hand on my shoulder as he leaves. “Hold on,” it seems to say, fingers squeezing.
We are alone again and she asks for something to eat. I look into her dark eyes, hungry to see her in them. She is not there.
Food. I am eager to see her eat. I want to watch her mouth open and close, see her throat work the morsels down into her belly. I want to feed her myself, hold the spoon in front of her, my own mouth open to show her how. I regret not having breastfed her.
I raise myself up from the chair and I feel heavy. It is hard work just to stand there. I walk out of the room, past the policeman who sits in a wooden chair like mine just outside the door, past the woman writhing on a gurney in the hall, her hospital gown hitched up, exposing thigh and dimpled buttock. I avert my eyes from hers as she is too much in them. I cannot afford to see her.
The man in the next room is vomiting and yelling obscenities between retches. The nurses ignore him, but I cannot. He is mad. But in his madness, I see beauty, a freedom that beckons me. I could scream and retch and let my ass hang out of my johnny and just let go. I turn from the puking man, stopping up my ears with palms of my hands to drown out his siren’s call.
The nurse tells me the cafeteria is on the third floor. Go right at the end of the hall, take the west elevators up to three; go past the gift shop, to the left. In the elevator, two medical students discuss a patient while I read the hospital’s privacy statement on the wall. I try not to listen, thinking how ashamed I would be to have what has happened talked about. I begin to cry
I weep as if I am alone. Like a child, I heave great gulping sobs that cannot be stifled even though my fist is stuffed into my mouth. The medical students stop talking and look at each other for direction. They are all facts and techniques, with no real sense of what is needed to truly heal someone.
The elevator doors open and I rush out, turning to look at the young man who enters after me. He is carrying a bouquet of roses and a stuffed pink bear with a bib that proclaims, “It’s A Girl!” in festive lettering. The young man’s chin is dark with stubble and he looks happy as he pushes the button for his floor. He has no clue.
The hallway leading away from the elevator is lined with artwork. I notice one abstract painting that reminds me of her because she would get it. Where I see only kindergarten splats of color, she would see conflict, wisdom, resolution.
My sobs subside as I think about the painting of a lighthouse that she did in oil. It hangs in my bedroom and I love the detail of the waves as they crash against the rocks in the foreground. I am always amazed at how she was able to capture the colors of the sea so perfectly; deep green, midnight blue, Caribbean turquoise, pure white. She hates the painting, a classroom project she was forced to complete. She detests any art that is representative, preferring to cull her own meaning from less accessible works.
The cafeteria is deserted. Only the vending machines offer any hope. I agonize over my choices, wanting to fill her up with wholesome goodness. I contemplate running home to stuff and roast a chicken; then laugh out loud at the idea. My laughter echoes in the empty cafeteria and it sounds edgy and lunatic. I watch my dollar bill slip in and out of the vending machine like a mocking tongue.
I return to the elevator empty handed, a failure. I push the button for the fourth floor. She is in the basement, yet I am going up. The elevator carries me higher.
The doors open to another hallway adorned with art, if that is what it can be called. Pudgy new faces peek out of daisies, peonies and lion’s manes. Naked babies rest snug in walnut shells and peapods, as if that is how they got here.
I should not be here, yet I turn down the corridor and walk until I come to the observation window. I watch them, all lined up in rows, wrapped tight in straight-jacket swaddling, their little faces not really like those in the Geddes photographs. These faces are red; some of them are pinched and swollen. Some have tiny starbursts of broken capillaries on the puffs of their little cheeks. It isn’t easy, I think, even now.
I stand in front of the window long enough to see the young man from the elevator enter the room with a young woman in a pale yellow chenille robe with matching slippers. She looks tired, the color of the robe emphasizing the pallor of her skin and the dark bruise-like circles under her blue eyes. It never changes, I think, it is just one long exhaustive labor.
I return to the elevator and descend the four flights to the emergency room. Retracing my steps, I stop to look in on the beautiful madman next door. He has been replaced by an elderly woman, ancient really. She reclines, stiff in the bed, her mouth frozen open in a toothless gape through which she sucks in rasps of dry air. Her eyes scream curses at the obscenity her life has become. I look away, aware of her watching me do so.
I nod to the policeman as I pass. He smiles back; it is a nice smile. A smile that says he has been here a dozen times before and he can assure that this one is going to be just fine. She isn’t like the others he has seen, she isn’t really crazy, or worse, she doesn’t have parents who are as bad off as she is. His simple reassuring smile and assumption that I am a good mother threatens to overwhelm me and I swallow a sob before it can escape.
Next door to the old woman, a young woman, my daughter lies sleeping. Her mouth is open and she is breathing through it noisily. Her face has pinked up a bit beneath its cap of unnatural auburn hair. I notice an empty apple juice container and two half-eaten cups of gelatin, green and orange, her least favorites.
I lower myself back into the wooden chair and rest my cheek against the cool of the metal rail someone has raised in my absence. She is safe here, taken care of, her needs are being met. I look at my watch.
“Why don’t you just leave?” she says. Her eyes look right into mine and I can see that she feels she has just caught me at something. I reach out and brush a wisp of hair away from her eyes. I lower the rail and rest my forehead once more on the bed. I cannot speak to her.
“I am glad I called you,” she says, her tone softer, less accusatory. I raise my head and nod at her. I am glad too. The alternative is unthinkable.
Looking at her now, a full grown person, I remember the first time I ever saw her. She wasn’t breathing. Her eyes were wide open, black chasms of inscrutable depths. Her scrawny red body was stretched out impossibly long between the two gloved hands of the doctor, her head tilted just enough for her to make eye contact with me. She wasn’t breathing. She looked right into my terrified eyes and did not blink. I remember thinking then that she was holding her breath.
As she grew, I never changed my mind. As she had resisted breathing, she resisted all things, withheld herself from me, kept unfathomable secrets that I yearned to know but was too afraid to ask.
Now here we are. She reaches for my face and I pull away. I cling tightly to her hand and she deftly slips it out of my grasp. We dance a painful pas-de-deux of need and regret, neither of us capable of anything more.