Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [70]
“Yes.”
“Why don’t we just drive there?”
“Dr. Blake said not to, that this is the fastest way.”
My mother paced by the front door, peering out the sidelights from time to time. I stood with my jacket on and the diaper bag slung over my shoulder. Within minutes we heard the siren.
Neither my mother nor I was allowed to go with the medics. My mother handed the baby over, and it wouldn’t be until years later that I’d understand how hard that was for her to do. After the rear doors of the ambulance were shut, my mother ran for her car, the green VW. “Get in,” she yelled to me.
My mother, a ridiculously cautious driver—sometimes to the point of exasperation on the part of her passenger, usually me—backed out of the driveway in one shot and left rubber as she raced after the ambulance. She took the Bug to its max, straining the engine, so that she could keep the ambulance in sight. I held on to the door handle and tried not to speak, because my mother, under the best of circumstances, was not an expert driver. Usually she sat forward, hunched over the wheel, looking behind her in both directions before she dared to change lanes, a practice I never saw my father do. But that day my mother was a pro.
She abandoned the VW, door open, at the emergency entrance and ran after the gurney that held Clara, whose cries we could hear receding. I followed my mother, the oversized bag flapping against my thigh and slowing me down. I knew it was serious as soon as I saw the doctor hovering over the gurney. Clara was wheeled into a cubicle with white curtains on either side. She was put inside a metal box, which struck me as bizarre and my mother as horrifying. “Can’t I at least hold her?” my mother begged.
“Step aside, Mrs. Dillon,” the doctor said.
“If I nurse her, she’ll stop crying,” my mother said.
“Nursing her right now would be the worst possible thing you could do,” he said.
I didn’t like the doctor, who seemed bossy and self-important and barked at the nurses around him. He treated my mother as an annoying object that was simply in the way.
“Is it bad?” she asked.
“Your baby can’t breathe,” the doctor said.
I stood against the wall on the far side of the room. I let the diaper bag fall to the ground.
“Nicky, here’s two quarters,” my mother said, standing in front of me. “Go find a pay phone and call your father. You know the number?”
I did. I sometimes called him from home after school if I had a math problem I couldn’t solve.
“Do it now,” she said.
I picked up the diaper bag and searched for a pay phone. A woman sitting behind a desk gave me directions, and I finally found a bank of phones near an elevator. “Dad, you better come,” I said.
“Why?” he asked, and I could hear alarm in his voice.
“Clara can’t breathe,” I said.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“At the hospital where she was born.”
“Tell your mother I’ll be right there.”
I sat by the wall, a buffer of nurses and curtains shielding me from Clara. She was moved to another part of the hospital, and I moved with the entourage. Sometime that night my mother looked over in my direction and said, “Rob, she’s green.”
My father came over and sat beside me.
“She’s going to die, isn’t she?” I asked.
“Of course not,” he said.
“Then why is there so much fuss?”
“That’s the way hospitals are,” he said.
I knew this wasn’t true. When I’d broken my wrist the year before, we’d had to wait for two hours in the emergency room, until my father finally lost his temper and started yelling at the triage nurse that his daughter was in pain.
“I’ll call Jeff and Mary,” my father said, referring to a couple my parents were friendly with and who lived near the hospital. “You can eat and watch TV, and I’ll come get you later.”
That night the doctors worked on Clara for hours. She had a not-uncommon but life-threatening form of infant pneumonia. My mother was told that Clara might not make it through the night, a fact I wouldn’t learn until later. At Jeff and Mary’s, I ate pizza and stayed up late watching TV. I slept in a guest room in a shirt that belonged to Mary. In the morning