Between Husbands and Friends (35 page)

He doesn’t reply.

I leave him, go into our bedroom, and stretch out alone on our queen-size bed.

But this isn’t my night for sleep. No sooner have I fallen into a deep doze than a noise wakes me: Jeremy coughing. I stumble through a familiar night-nurse routine, finding the teaspoon, the children’s cough suppressant, the Vicks VapoRub, the cherry cough drops that probably don’t do any good but help Jeremy to believe that not all medicines taste bad. Jeremy feels warm to me, no doubt because of the accumulated heat of the two cats and the electric blanket. He’s fussy and exhausted and doesn’t want to let me take his temperature with a mercury thermometer and I’m out of tongue fever strips, so I turn off the electric blanket. I manage to get the cough medicine down him and prop him up on two pillows, then bumble back to my own bed, dizzy with fatigue.

I wake to the smell of coffee. Amazing. An adult in the house again. I lie there, loving the aroma, letting it lull me into a sense that this is a normal morning like any other. I hear Jeremy cough; I hear Max talking to him.

I find everyone in the kitchen. Max is at the stove, preparing his famous scrambled eggs. Margaret flutters around him, handing him the salt and pepper, taking the eggshells from him and disposing of them, setting the table, pouring orange juice, fussing over Jeremy, so happy to have her father around that she can’t stop smiling. She’s dressed for school, and so is Jeremy, but after one look at him, I know I’m keeping him home.

“Morning, Glory,” I say to my daughter, kissing her cheek.

“Morning, Mom.”

“How do you feel this morning, Jeremy?” I bend to kiss his cheek, too, and let my own cheek linger against his forehead. I’m pretty sure he has a fever.

“All right,” he says and bursts into a series of coughs.

“You know what?” I speak casually, stirring milk and sugar into my coffee. “I think I’ll keep you home today.”

“But Dad’s going to drive us to school!” Jeremy protests.

“Honey, listen to yourself. You’re coughing. And you didn’t get much sleep last night at all.”

“Mom, I want to go to school!”

“Better stay home, sport,” Max says. “Better take care of yourself and get over your cold.”

“If I stay home from school, can I come to town meeting tonight?” Jeremy asks.

Max hedges. “Let’s see how you feel this afternoon.”

“Dad,” Margaret says, “all the teachers are talking about town meeting. They said you’ve been writing editorials in favor of developing the Lamb property, but lots of people think it should go to conservation.”

A blob of egg falls from Jeremy’s fork. I reach over to wipe his shirt. As he answers, Max stretches out an arm to shove Jeremy’s chair closer to the table. “That’s true, Magpie. It’s a complicated situation, and an emotional one.”

Margaret watches her father carefully. “They say Mr. Cunningham is the lawyer for the ConCom.”

“Uncle Chip?” Jeremy asks.

Max doesn’t flush or pause. “Right. Uncle Chip.”

Margaret presses. “Are you mad at Mr. Cunningham, Dad?”

Here it is, I think, the first test, and certainly not the last by a long shot. Jeremy senses the tension and stares from his sister to his father.

“No, honey, I’m not mad at Uncle Chip,” Max says evenly. Calmly he meets his daughter’s eyes, speaking with the measured judiciousness that people have come to admire him for. “Mr. Cunningham’s a lawyer. It’s his job to speak for the people who hire him. He and I might disagree at town meeting, but that’s business, not personal. We’ve been on opposing sides of issues before, you know that. He’s a Republican, I’m a Democrat, you must have heard some
of the arguments we’ve had.”

“It’s kind of weird, you being on the side of the developers.”

“I know. It’s not my customary position. But I’ve done a lot of research on this matter, and I believe that building the complex will be the best thing for the majority of people in this town.”

“I heard the principal tells Mr. Clarence that it’s going to be like
Clash of the Titans.
”

To my infinite relief, Max throws back his head and laughs. “Then it should be entertaining for everyone.” He rises. “If you want me to drive you to school, Margaret, better hurry. I want to leave in five minutes.”

“Dad?” Jeremy twists in his chair. “Are you coming home tonight?”

Max looks at his little boy. “Yeah. Right after work.”

Jeremy nods to himself, once, sharply, like Max does, satisfied.

The rain has stopped, but the skies remain gray, and wind tosses the heavy leaves of the trees so that they occasionally fling their drops of water against the house, making a sound like someone tossing pebbles at a window. When Margaret and Max leave, Jeremy slumps in his chair like a balloon with all the air gone out of him.

“Hey, chum, I want to take your temperature.”

He fusses, but I insist, and discover that his fever has suddenly shot up to 102 degrees.

I call Wally Calder, our pediatrician, then I bundle Jeremy up warmly and drive over to the clinic. We sit docilely in the waiting room, while other children with their own coughs, sneezes, itches, and aches, grumble and whine in their mothers’ arms. People look at us sharply each time Jeremy coughs. I know the sound is impolite, irritating; I smile guiltily and remind him to cover his mouth. He sits on my lap, his skin hot, parched-feeling, as uncomfortably dry as a fish out of water. A new vein of dread has opened up within my heart and glitters at me like a metallic thread leading into a frightening labyrinth.

Jeremy knows Wally well and does not shy away from the doctor’s various intrusive investigations. Wally is deft and humorous, a genius with children, and pretty great with mothers, too. He’s calm and ugly in a kind way that makes him seem accepting of anything, a mother’s greasy hair after a week with a sick child, a parent’s neurotic need to bring a child in
over nothing more than a little cough.

“Well, buddy,” Dr. Calder says. “Do you know what we get to do today? We get to have a chest X-ray!”

“Will it hurt?” Jeremy asks.

“You won’t feel a thing. I promise. It’s sort of cool, like a
Star Wars
kind of gadget.” He looks at me, glasses glittering. “I think we might have a little pneumonia going on,” he says cheerfully.

His office is in the same modern glass and stucco building that houses the hospital, and it’s only a matter of walking through a maze of corridors to get to the X-ray room. Again we wait patiently. Jeremy sits on my lap without fussing, his head burning through my shirt.

After the X-ray, I pull Jeremy’s shirt back on over his arms. We return to the hall, intending to walk back to the pediatrician’s office, only to see the doctor striding toward us down the corridor, his white coat streaming out behind him.

“Hey, Jeremy.” Wally Calder has the X-ray in his hand. He squats down to be on Jeremy’s level. “You know what, buddy? You get to get some VIP treatment today. You know what VIP means, don’t you?”

Jeremy shakes his head.

“It means Very Important Person, and that’s just what you are. You get to check into the hospital today.”

“I don’t want to,” Jeremy says, cringing.

“Come on, you haven’t even seen it yet. You get to lie in bed and watch TV all day. Listen, I’d like to do that myself.”

“I don’t want to,” Jeremy insists.

“Well, you see this X-ray here, Jeremy? It shows me that you’ve got pneumonia. Your lungs are congested. I would bet that you’re having trouble breathing. Even more than that cough, I’d bet that you’re working hard just to get breath into those lungs. That’s making you feel tired, like you don’t want to play ball or even go to school. Well, the only way we’re going to get rid of that congestion is in the hospital, with some really powerful medicine that’s going to zap the pneumonia. See what I’m saying?”

Jeremy nods warily.

“Let’s go back to my office and get your admission organized,” Wally says. “I need to make a few phone calls.”

Jeremy takes the doctor’s outstretched hand and walks by his side. Stunned, I follow.

Once we’re seated in the pediatrician’s office, a pretty young nurse appears.

“Jeremy? Can you come with me? I forgot to weigh you.”

I rise, but Wally says, “You can wait here, Lucy. He’ll be right back.”

Jeremy obediently slides off my lap and takes the nurse’s hand. She shuts the door.

Wally leans toward me, his face suddenly stern. In his white lab coat, with his thick glasses flashing like some kind of scientific equipment, his sharp scent of antiseptic and soap, he seems frightening and cold.

“Lucy, Children’s Hospital called me three weeks ago to tell me that Jeremy has cystic fibrosis. I’m so sorry.”

“Is he terribly sick?”

“He’s got pneumonia, and with cystic fibrosis, infections in the lungs are always much more dangerous. Look, I’m not trying to scare you. I want him in the hospital because we can get better antibiotics into his system faster than with oral medications, and he needs some fluids, too; he’s becoming dehydrated. Have you told Jeremy he has cystic fibrosis yet?”

“No. I wanted Max to be with me when I tell him, and we’ve just been …” How do I explain these past three weeks? “So busy.”

“So you haven’t gone to any of the clinics at Children’s Hospital?”

I shake my head. “We were on Nantucket …”

Patches of red blotch Wally’s face; he is angry with me, or frightened. “There are all sorts of things you need to learn.
Soon.
Things that can prolong Jeremy’s life. That can save his life.”

I nod meekly.

“Lucy, this is not the end of the world. Jeremy can have a good life. He can have a long life. But you can’t be a coward about this.”

“I know.”

“All right. Let’s get Jeremy into the hospital. I’m going to call ahead. You take this X-ray with you.”

I phone the newspaper. Max is out and not responding to his cell phone.

I ask to speak to Roland Cobb: “Tell Max I’m taking Jeremy to Children’s Hospital. He’s got pneumonia. I’ll call him from there.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Roland asks.

“Yes, please. Call the high school. Someone needs to tell Margaret where we are. Perhaps after school she could go over to—” My mind stops dead. “Matthew Cunningham’s” is what I usually would say, have always said. Ordinarily I would have spoken with Kate a hundred times by now, arranging for Margaret to be picked up, driven to piano lessons, fed, and tended to. Without Kate there, it’s as if a void opens up beneath me. I can’t even think.

Roland says, “I’ll have Andrea go to the high school and get Margaret. She can stay with us this evening, and as long as necessary.”

“Thanks, Roland.”