The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [78]
I did not have a thought, but I had a vision, or an image, a fleeting memory of the stars as they looked the night I drove out on the interstate, as many stars as worlds as eras as species as humans as children, an image of the smallness of this one gigantic child with her enormous fever. When each of them was born, Dana used to say, “There’s one born every minute,” but she was grinning, ecstatic with the importance of it. “Isn’t it marvelous what you can do with a little RNA?” she would say, just to diminish them a little. But they couldn’t be diminished. So, however many worlds and species and children there were and had been, I was scared to death. I crept to the phone and called the clinic, where, thank God, they were wide-awake. I said, “Is it possible to die of the flu?” They put a nurse on right away. Was she very sick?
“What does that mean? She has a temperature of 105.2.”
“But how is she acting?”
“She’s not acting any way. She’s asleep.”
“Is she dehydrated?”
“She urinated at around ten thirty. We’ve maintained lots of fluids.”
“Is she hallucinating?”
“She’s asleep.”
“Is she lethargic?”
“She’s asleep, goddammit!”
“Is it possible to wake her?” Her voice was patient and slow. Now I had another image, the image of Stephanie’s head flopping back on my shoulder and the utter unconsciousness of her state. I said, “I’ll try.” She said, “I’ll hold.”
And then I went in and I sat her up and I shook her and shook her, and I said, “Stephanie! Stephanie! Wake up! Wake up! Stephanie? Listen to me. I want you to wake up!” She groaned, writhed, protested. She was hard to wake up. I reported this to the nurse and she left the phone for the obligatory hold. After a while she came back and told me to bring her in. Her tone was light enough, as if it were three in the afternoon rather than three in the morning. I began to cry. I began to cry that my wife was unconscious with the flu, too, and that I didn’t dare leave the other children in her care, and pretty soon the doctor came on, and it wasn’t Dan but Nick, someone whom we know slightly, in a professional way, and he said, “Dave? Is that you, Dave?” and I of course was embarrassed, and then the light went on and there was Dana, blinking but upright in the doorway, and she said, “What is going on?” and I handed her the phone, and Nick told her what I had told the nurse, and I went into Stephanie’s bedroom and began to wrap her in blankets so that I could take her to the hospital, and I knew that the next morning, when Stephanie’s fever would have broken, I would be extremely divorced from and a little ashamed of my reactions, and it was true that I was. They sent us home from the hospital about noon. Dana was making toast at the kitchen table, Leah was running around in her pajama top without a diaper, and Lizzie had escaped to school.
I sat Stephanie at the table, and she held out her wrist bracelet. They had spelled her name wrong, Stefanie Herst.
“That’s the German way,” said Dana. “It’s pronounced ‘Stefania.’ Shall we call you that now?”
Stephanie laughed and said, “Can I have that one?” pointing at the toast Dana was buttering, and Dana handed it to her, and she folded it in two and shoved it into her mouth, and Dana buttered her another one. They were weak but in high spirits, the natural effect of convalescence. I went into the living room and lay down on the couch. I looked at my watch. It read 12:25. After a moment I looked again. It read 5:12. It was not wrong. Across the room on the TV, Maria and Gordon and some child were doing “long, longer, and longest.” Leah was watching them, Lizzie was erasing and redoing her papers from school, and Stephanie was coloring. Dana appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel, then smiled and said, “You’re awake.”
“I’m resurrected. Are you