Paris by the Book(60)

“Fine,” I said. “Ellie, of course, fine. So let’s go in.”

But I couldn’t. Because it took a moment to put the prior hours away. And because if Ellie wanted to go in and see Daphne, or if I did, we learned that we would have to put on hospital masks. And latex gloves. And bouffant caps over our hair. And lightweight fluid-and tear-resistant multi-ply isolation gowns that did not tie in the front like a bathrobe, but in back, where you had to have someone, like your oldest child, tie it for you—which gave her the chance to study once more the clothing I’d originally selected for the night.

“Is this my skirt?” Ellie asked.

I didn’t answer. I was inside. I was looking at Daphne, who looked nothing like my child. This body had my daughter’s features—her dark, swooping eyebrows, her upturned nose, her widow’s peak, her very first pimple appearing on her soft, still chin—but she couldn’t be my Daphne. Her face was waxen, completely false, unrecognizable. Nausea rose in me like a fist. What a fool I’d been to pretend I could pretend for a minute that Robert was dead. Death had nothing to do with pretending. Life, on the other hand, had everything to do with believing. This body was Daphne’s. She was alive and she would only stay alive so long as I stood there and willed it. It wasn’t a bargain, or it was, and the cost was everything.

I felt hours pass, but only minutes did. Blood was drawn. Urine through a catheter. And now a man in a white coat arrived and spoke to us. I just heard sounds. When Ellie was born, I’d had an old-school nurse during the overnight stretch, one who muttered of vast health care conspiracies, but who wanted me to remember especially this: the shorter the coat, the newer the doctor. I’ve had doctors since tell me it’s not true, and I have never believed them.

This man’s coat hit him at his waist, like a waiter. That couldn’t be good, unless things were different in France. But everything was different in France. I looked helplessly at Ellie, who translated for me.

“He wants to know if she’s had a vaccine for—”

She broke off and said something to the man in French, pantomiming a pen. He wrote something down. I find French handwriting no more legible than Cyrillic; 1’s look like 7’s, and 7’s, emoticons for anger. I’ve never been able to read it. I gave the pad to Ellie.

“I don’t know what this is,” she said, and looked up at the man.

“She’s had her MMR,” I said. Ellie tried translating. “Measles-mumps-rubella,” I said. Ellie shared this, too. He shook his head, pointed to the pad, looked at me.

Ellie looked at the pad again. “Pneumonia?” she said, to him and to me.

“She’s never had it,” I said.

The man spoke, a long word that, with some patience and the help of the pad, I translated as pneumococcal meningitis. I could go back to the file folder at home, the file where I kept their birth certificates and passports and immunization records, but I didn’t need to, because I knew. Way back when in Wisconsin, the other moms had said there was something funny with that vaccine—or not that one, but all of them, or getting so many vaccines at once. And so I’d said no, and so Daphne hadn’t gotten it, the pneumococcal meningitis vaccine.

And then I felt like a fool, and so she got it. Just not on schedule. Did that matter? No, Daphne’s pediatrician in Milwaukee had told me.

Isn’t that what the pediatrician had told me?

I tried to explain all this to Ellie.

“Holy crap, Mom,” Ellie said.

“You got yours on time!” I said.

The man spoke to me in rapid French. My language skills were returning, but slowly, not fast enough.

He may have said something about different types of meningitis, how the vaccine worked most of the time, not all the time, not against everything, and who knows how they did things in America, anyway?

And then I heard lumbar and puncture and risk and—this word I definitely heard—behave. I took an extra-deep breath and looked at Ellie.

“Um, he’s telling you to behave, Mom,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You got the part about giving permission to ‘puncture’ her back?” Ellie said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Mom?” Ellie said.

“If it’s a lumbar puncture,” I said—he nodded—“then yes. But tell him I want a real doctor in here, and now.”

“Mom,” Ellie said.

“His coat is too fucking short,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

But he understood me. Because, it turned out, he understood English.

“The true doctor come now he watch,” he said. “But I make the true poke.”

“I want true doctor poke,” I said, in the fractured English I speak when my fractured French fails.

“I am the doctor,” he said. “I am finishing the training.” He was an intern, then? A resident? I couldn’t ask because he then turned to Ellie and continued in French: your mother is crazy if she wants to take this sick girl clear across Paris to the American Hospital in Neuilly for a “real” doctor, who, at this time of night, will be a vacationing orthodontist from Texas—I think he meant orthopedist, or maybe he didn’t—covering for the doctors they pretend to have there. I am trained to do this. We do this here. He left the room.