The Queen of Hearts(10)
“What’s happening to him?” I whispered.
Dr. X inspected Silver’s eyes with a light. “Intracranial pressure’s too high,” he said shortly. “His brain stem is herniating.”
“What does that m—”
Emma materialized at my side and took my hand. “His brain is swelling,” she said softly. “See, his pupils are blown.”
I looked. Silver’s eyes were a featureless black, the green irises nearly eclipsed by the enlarged pupils.
“Can’t they operate?”
Emma shook her head in the direction of Silver’s chart, her usual incisive gaze blurred. “I don’t think he has the kind of brain bleed that can be fixed by neurosurgery.” She looked at his smooth young face, buried under tubes and tape.
“Wait, guys,” I said, looking back and forth between Emma and Dr. X. “Wait. You mean he’s going to die? Right now?”
The charge nurse, Val, glanced at the clock. “His mother isn’t going to make it here in time,” she said.
We watched Silver’s heart rate fall. Val wrote down some numbers from one of Silver’s drains; one of the other nurses did something to an IV; someone silenced the shrieking alarms. Without a word, Dr. X picked up Silver’s hand and held it between his own. Silver’s heart slowed further, ebbing down to a few last lonely beats. Then it stopped.
I thought about the geeky physics T-shirt he’d been wearing and his skinny broken leg and turned my head aside so no one would see me wrestling to control my expression.
One of the nurses left and returned with a small bag labeled PATIENT BELONGINGS. She took out a wallet and opened it.
“His name was Ryan,” she said.
I felt a hand grip my shoulder. A low voice, in my ear: “Are you okay?”
I nodded, not wanting to be so self-absorbed that the focus of a tragedy would shift—even for a moment—to my reaction to it, but also I didn’t trust myself to be able to speak. Dr. X leaned toward me, so close I could feel the warmth of his skin, and then gently, he reached past me to Silver’s sightless green eyes and closed the lids, leaving his hand cupped for a moment against the boy’s still face. Then, without looking at any of us, he turned and walked out of the room.
Chapter Four
BODY DYSMORPHIC DISORDER
Zadie, Present Day
I resented that I wasn’t the kind of woman who felt sickened by the thought of food when I was upset, because that would have been easier than the realization that I’d scarfed down an entire container of leftover lasagna followed by a huge bag of chocolate chips, which is what happened last night when I was thinking about possibly seeing Nick again. A full-on binge was bad enough, but back-loading meals at midnight was stupid. And the night before going to the pool—well, words failed to describe how regrettable that was. Now I’d have bathing suit trauma on top of the rest of it. Something horrendous had happened to my metabolism in the last year or two so that one tiny food indiscretion would result in the sudden appearance of a five-months pregnant abdomen. The only way to atone was to forgo all appealing food in favor of vile green smoothies and then exercise as if I were afflicted with ’roid rage.
Despite this, I was looking forward to a day at the pool. One nice thing about living in the South: it was warm enough that the club didn’t close the pool until the end of September, or sometimes later. Since Emma was bringing her nanny, in theory we could enjoy our Friday-morning-off work by stretching out on the comfy padded chaises by the big pool and sipping iced drinks and generally indulging in pampered sloth, which was something we’d talked about doing all summer. Since she was a trauma surgeon, Emma had a tough work schedule. Her days off rarely seemed to coordinate with my Mondays and Fridays off. Throw in a total of five kids, two husbands, one obese pet, various school and volunteering obligations, and a multitude of errands, and it was a testament to our friendship that we hung out as much as we did. We were due some fun, actually. The last couple of times we’d seen each other hadn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs.
Three weeks ago, my household had gone viral, and not in any kind of positive marketing way. Every member of the Anson family was spewing vomit except Drew, who promptly claimed a work obligation requiring his presence in China. While the rational part of my brain understood he had zero control over his travel schedule, the vindictive part of my brain hoped he’d come down with E. coli on the plane as punishment for leaving me on my own with our four hurling offspring.
My immune system normally functioned like an impenetrable force field, bolstered by years of exposure to the germ factory of the hospital. But this time I went down hard. By the time the last of the kids got sick, a few days later, I was so feeble and demoralized I hadn’t budged from the playroom—the most expendable room in the house—in almost twenty-four hours, except to retrieve Gatorade and broth. I’d dragged in a couple air mattresses and papered the room in wall-to-wall beach towels. I also established vomiting outposts at all four corners of the beds, consisting of plastic planters lined with grocery bags, in case the vomiter in question couldn’t quite make it to the disgusting bathroom, which now resembled the seventh circle of hell. The kids and I languished on our beach-towel-covered air beds, moaning, occasionally raising our heads to check on the status of whatever was showing on Animal Planet.