Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [8]
Chloe finally stops crying, but her body is listless and heavy, her eyes glassy. I take her temperature again, this time without disturbing her too much. Despite the Tylenol, her fever has climbed another degree. One hundred and five. I check the clock. 1:15 a.m. I hastily throw on sweatpants, socks, and running shoes, grab the quilt from Chloe’s crib, and quickly wrap her.
Downstairs, Earl, the night doorman, is sipping his coffee from a paper cup, looking fresh and alert, when Chloe and I come flying out of the elevator. Without my having to utter a word, Earl flags down a cabbie, packs us in, and, leaning into the front window of the cab, shouts something to the driver in Spanish. By the time we reach the hospital, Chloe is in the midst of a convulsion brought about, I’m later told, by the high fever.
When caught in time, fever convulsions are quite manageable, the very young-looking intern tells me, speaking with an authority he could not possibly have earned yet. They bring down her fever with an injection and give her an IV of fluid to help rehydrate her. The needle looks enormous punched into her little arm. By 4:00 a.m. her fever is down to one hundred and three; by 6:00, an acceptable hundred and one. By 7:30 Chloe and I are back in the apartment. Diagnosis: viral infection, source unspecified. I should be relieved, but I’m not. I put her to bed and pace the apartment, picking up where I left off last night, imagining with each lap that I’m sinking lower and lower and that soon I will have worn a hole clean through to Hope’s apartment on the floor below. I actually think of calling Hope, who has no children of her own and might not understand or fully appreciate my worries, but at least she’d have coffee. I imagine her expression as I report to her my litany of concerns about Chloe’s health, how I’ve convinced myself that she has suffered permanent brain damage and might never learn to speak, or that she will be deaf. Hadn’t Helen Keller gone blind, deaf, and mute from such a virus?
I let out an audible sigh. I’m totally spent, physically and psychologically, and yet, hidden under the thin skin of my exhaustion and worry lurks another raw emotion, one that I haven’t had to fully identify until now. I’m angry. Furious, actually, that Jake wasn’t there to help me, to help Chloe. And what about the message I’d left him in the middle of the night? Surely he recognized that the person bleating like a wounded animal into the other end of the phone was me. Why didn’t he call me back? More evidence of his monumental callousness.
It would be so simple to hate him, but I haven’t quite figured out how to, or at least how to sustain it. I’ll make a heroic effort at it, like now, or during anger-management class, and then I’ll remember something, some silly thing that weakens my resolve to inflict upon him the most grievous punishments, like castration or dismemberment. Now, for instance, as I imagine calling him on the telephone and screaming at him that his daughter almost died, suffering fever convulsions in a filthy Manhattan cab, all I can think about is how he shivers uncontrollably when awakened out of a sound sleep. When it happens he looks pathetic and boyish. It’s hard to hate someone when you know the most intimate secrets