Second Place Nonfiction Prize
by Janice Peebly
My two year old had a little sniffle, the very earliest glimmer of an impending head cold. I heard him go “sniff-sniff” in between his “vroom-vrooms” as he pushed his red Tonka dump truck across the linoleum kitchen floor as I stirred a jar of Ragu into a bowl of spaghetti noodles. This was in the fall of 1973, soon after we moved to Virginia. In the past, when we lived with my parents when he got a sniffle I would drape a sheet over his crib, put my mother’s old hot steam vaporizer beside it so that the steam would blow in under the sheet, creating a mini hot house in his crib. In the morning he was always right as rain.
But then we moved 400 miles away from my parents. I had been feeling like my tiny nuclear family of two, Josh and I, was getting swallowed up. My loud, ever present, in your face family was consuming us. Sometimes, I knew Josh preferred Bee’s padded shoulders and pillowy bosoms to me. I wasn’t exactly bony but I couldn’t compete with my sister’s bosom as the ideal spot for a daytime nap. I realized I had to get away if Josh and I were going to be our own family.
The final straw was a day in mid October; we were taking our annual drive to the mountains to see the fall leaves. It was one of those days you know you are going to remember for the rest of your life. An Indian summer kind of day. Clear blue skies- a rarity in western PA. The sun sparkled giddily on hillsides of yellow, gold and red with an occasional patch of green from a grove of pine trees. Billie, Bee and I were in the back seat. Josh was asleep on Bee’s shoulder and suddenly I couldn’t stand it another minute. I hated the thought that he might love her more than me. Bee, with her soft shoulders and downy bosoms, who stayed at home and watched my son while I drove 20 miles into the city to work. What if he started calling her Momma, instead of me? I reached over and lifted him out of Bee’s arms. He cried and tried to cling to her but I wouldn’t give up. I settled him against my own chest where he moaned and squirmed the rest of the way to Hidden Valley restaurant where we were going for dinner. My mother turned around and gave me an odd look but didn’t say a word. I knew what she was thinking, though; that I was insane to wake a sleeping baby but my mother wasn’t one to offer opinions unless asked. I decided then that I needed to put some distance between Josh and me and my family. But, where to go?
The next day, when I got home from work at four, I snuck up the attic stairs to Mattie and Jay’s bedroom. It was the boys domain; the “keep out, this means you” sign on the door was meant to keep out we four girls, the bane of their existence. My youngest brother was nuts about geography; he’d taped a large United States map to the wall beside his bed. I picked up one of Jay’s darts and threw it at the map. My dart landed on Norfolk, Virginia.
“Hmm,” I thought, “not a bad idea, only an eight hour drive from Pittsburgh and not much out of the way on the trip to Florida. Dad could stop overnight with me on his way to see Uncle Bob which he did about once a year. Eight hours seemed like the perfect distance away.”
Mum and Dad looked at me like I’d just suggested I was going to live on the moon when I told them I wanted to move. I mean, it had only been a scant two years since I had moved back home with my newborn; my ill conceived relationship with his father already a thing of the past. My parents looked at each other and shrugged.
“Who’s going to watch Josh? Why don’t you take Bee with you to help out,” my Dad asked?
My mouth dropped open and I started to cough. “Uh, no no, I wouldn’t feel right asking Bee to pick up and move on my account,” I said. I couldn’t tell them that it was primarily Bee I was trying to escape.
My father stuck out his chest and I could see he was getting ready to go into his “listen to reason, Father knows best” routine but Mum put her hand on his arm. “Leave it, Bill,” she said.
Would wonders never cease? My mother stuck up for me and my father actually listened to her.
I wanted to ask Mum if I could take her little black vaporizer but it had been her mother’s and she had used it for all six of us when we got a cold. I was afraid to ask. For a tough, no-nonsense woman my mother was kind of sentimental about her things, especially the things from before she was married.
Besides, my pediatrician said cold mist vaporizers were best. No germs. I bought a fancy, state-of-the art cool mist vaporizer when I moved. Thirty bucks it cost. And I really didn’t have that kind of money to spare but I needed to be prepared for the next sniffle.
***
It really was just a tiny sniffle, barely anything. But I was anxious to try out my new $30 vaporizer. Josh was in a youth bed now so I couldn’t make a tent with a sheet. I just put the vaporizer on a chair next to his bed, read The Three Little Kittens who lost their Mittens only twice because I was tired, kissed him goodnight and closed the door halfway.
At five AM Josh woke me, crawling into my bed. He was coughing; a dry, hacky cough and wheezing. Each breath was coming out with a grunty noise like he was pushing the air out with some instrument, a shovel maybe, or one of his dump trucks with the plow in the front. I sat straight up in bed, turned on the light and felt his forehead. He was cool, even kind of clammy. No fever.
His eyes had stayed gray for so long after he was born that I thought they were going to stay that cool, noncommittal baby gray color. But then, shortly before he turned two, his eyes changed to a light brownish, greenish, grayish color that I suppose must be hazel. Tonight, though, his eyes were a colorless, sort of gray, not the pretty gray they used to be, more a dead, absence of color, color. And his face was gray too. Gray white. Thankfully not blue. I’m calm in a crisis. I used to work pediatrics but switched to obstetrical nursing after Josh was born. But, I might have panicked if his lips had been blue.
The pediatrician’s office opened early, seven AM to accommodate working parents. Almost two hours away. Really only an hour and a half, if you counted the twenty minute drive there. I didn’t want to go to the ER unless I had to.
It was the longest two hours of my life. I carried Josh into the living room and we sat in the rocking chair. I turned the chair around so I could watch the clock on the wall above the stove. The whirr of the kitchen clock and Josh’s wheezing were the only sounds. As daybreak finally filtered into the room, the shadows slipped stealthily away, like smoke creeping between the cracks in doors and windows. I rocked back and forth as Josh tossed his head back and forth on my shoulder, struggling to breathe. The grunty, wheezy sound of his respirations seemed to match the rhythm of my rocking. Or maybe it was the other way around.
And I started to think back. I remembered another little boy tossing his head back and forth on my shoulder. It was eight years ago. I had just graduated from nursing school and was working pediatrics. His name was Michael. He was 18 months old and he was dying. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. COPD, an old person’s disease. Why a baby like Michael was dying of an old person’s disease, I didn’t know. Not then and not now.
“Why?” I remember asking Dr Krueser all those years ago. He was my favorite pediatrician; he reminded me of an owl with his beak-like nose, and his brown eyes set close together beneath round brown rimmed glasses.
He peered over his glasses at me. He always looked a bit worried, sad, or resigned but that day he looked even more so. “I don’t know, Rose. He just is, that’s all,” he said.
I can see Michael as though it were yesterday. He even looked like Josh. He had the same square, masculine little face, the same sandy brown hair, the same sturdy, compact body. If you didn’t look too close, Michael didn’t seem all that ill. His barrel chest (from air chronically trapped inside his lungs, unable to get out) gave him a stocky appearance. Spindly arms and legs and his gray ashen color gave it away, though.
Eighteen months old with an old man’s gray eyes peering out at the world. He was already older than his 19 year old parents. This was his fourth admission in as many months. His parents dropped him off and rarely visited until Mrs. Wrent, the head nurse, called to tell them he was discharged. I remembered hating them.
“How could they not come in to see him?” I raged to Mrs. Wrent.
“Rose, you’re too young to understand; they’re just kids, babies themselves. Michael’s care wears her out. She has two others at home, a three year old and now a new baby. They needed that new baby like a hole in their head.”
She walked out of the nurse’s station shaking her head.
I wasn’t much older than nineteen myself. They didn’t seem that young to me. Not then. Now, is different. Now, I’m a parent too. I see them in my mind and they look different to me now. They look lost and scared, like a small child who has wandered away from its parents at the mall and circles aimlessly, a dazed, bewildered look on its face. You see the realization that he is alone in his eyes a split second before the frightened scream begins.
Michael wasn’t supposed to be out of his crib with the plastic tent over it. The tent delivered cool, misty oxygen to help him get enough air to live. But, I couldn’t stand the thought of him in that tent 24 hours a day with no one to hold him or hug him. I’d take him out in the afternoon after lunch, just for twenty minutes or so and I’d rock him in the nurse’s station. He would toss his head back and forth on my shoulder trying to catch his breath. He grunted and wheezed just like Josh is doing now. And I pictured a small red dump truck with a plow on the front pushing air out of his lungs.
Michael didn’t die that admission. I think it was the next one. I was off the day he died. Michael’s crib was in the center on the right in the big room across from the nurse’s station. The room where we put the sickest kids. My eyes always went straight to his crib as I walked from the nurse’s lounge to the station to get report. I saw his empty bed when I came on duty that morning. It shouldn’t have been a shock; I mean I had been expecting it one day. I just always thought it would be one day, not this day.
A few of us went to his funeral. Dr. Krueser, Mrs. Wrent and I. There was hardly anyone at the funeral. A handful of people. A couple neighbors, the hospital contingent- and of course Michael’s parents; the father holding the hand of an older carbon copy of Michael and the mother holding a tiny baby. They stood on one side of the small hole in the ground; apart from the rest of the mourners on the opposite side. We lookers-on fidgeted uncertainly, unsure of how to act, what to say as we gazed at the impossibly miniscule grave. The family, on the other hand, were completely motionless, even the little boy; his arm raised straight up over his head as though he were hanging from his father’s hand. He stood on one foot, his other foot resting atop his standing foot. They looked like a still life painting; someone’s representation of what a family was supposed to be.
Mrs. Wrent told me on the way home that they didn’t have any other family. She said she thought the mother had people somewhere in Suffolk but they hadn’t approved of her marriage and had disowned her.
I thought about that tiny funeral as I held Josh and waited for seven o’clock to come. Where were the grandparents, the aunts and the uncles? There should have been more family to mourn the loss of a little boy.
Sometimes, it amazes me now that I was able to wait those two hours. Able to drive calmly, obeying speed limits, stopping at stop signs. But, I did. When I got to his office, the pediatrician saw him right away.
“Thank God,” I thought, “no more waiting.”
He gave Josh a shot of epinephrine and asked if there was any family history of asthma. It was like a miracle! Josh stopped wheezing immediately; he started to smile and even managed a couple of “vroom, vrooms” as he pushed Dr. Wilson’s red dump truck across the exam table
“My brother had asthma when he was young,” I said.
“Well, let’s see how he does.” Dr. Wilson said.
“You’re sure it’s not something more serious – like COPD or anything, right?” I asked.
Dr. Wilson squinted quizzically. “Now what would give you an idea like that,” he asked?
“I knew a little boy once…” I said.
He patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t be a worry wart.”
I thought about those two hours rocking Josh back and forth, watching the clock and listening to him wheeze. And I thought about Michael. Little Michael who reminded me so much of Josh. I thought, “Worrywart? Me?”
I said, “I’m the furthest thing from a worrywart you’ll ever see.”
The drive home was leisurely and calm, compared to one short hour before. Rush hour traffic was in full swing by then but I felt like I had all the time in the world. I remember running my hand up and down Josh’s back, under his shirt while I waited at a light. I loved the feel of his little boy skin, silky and soft under my fingers. I thought about how glad I was that it was my day off and I thought about how I was going to throw out that $30 vaporizer when I got home. The image of Michael’s parents at his funeral was still in my mind, though; like a grainy scene from a tear jerker movie I’d watched one night when I was transitioning from night shift to day shift and couldn’t sleep and I decided that I would call home that evening and ask Bee if she wanted to come down and stay with Josh and me for awhile.