Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (16 page)

“I thought they’d lost her,” he said.

“They lost sight of her.”

“Bernard, a bereaved father, I thought. Well, bereaved in a way. His children were never allowed to be born.” He got up and moved the wastebasket back to the corner of the room and put the clippers on the highboy.

“He’s made other people’s children his,” Barbara said. Fergus, considering, put his elbow on the highboy. “A reasonable alternative to the terrors of parenthood, some would say,” she added.

He gave her a look of distaste.

She countered with one of boldness. “Maybe even preferable.” “Some would say,” he hurried to supply, sparing her the necessity of repeating the phrase, she who had experienced mother-hood’s joys in such reassuring milieus—just listen to that faithful clock. “Well, we know better,” he said.

And waited for her assent.

And waited.

N
O MATTER HOW EARLY
the hospital counsel gets to work—and he is very early this Tuesday in May—the attending physicians are there already, each of their unremarkable cars in its assigned place in the garage. The nurses have also arrived, the counsel knows; but most of them travel by bus. The clowns’ purple wagon is parked at an annoying diagonal, occupying two spaces. Maintenance should speak to those jokers. The bicycles of the residents are chained tightly to posts.

The counsel locks his car and moves swiftly through the garage. Within its gloom his fair hair looks like dust. His first task today is to draft a preliminary argument, and it will take several hours. The hospital is at last going to sue the state for reimbursement for Tess—poor Tess, the counsel thinks; pretty Tess.

T
UESDAY WAS MY DAY OFF
. That Tuesday I stopped at the diner on the way to the train.

I was always a good waitress. When I had to leave the Sea View a month before the baby because of some law about lifting and stuff, Billie said not to worry. I could come back whenever I was ready. She raised my pay, too, so I could afford the old lady I’d lined up to watch the kid. It turned out I didn’t need the old lady, but Billie gave me the raise anyway when I came back.

Billie must have been surprised to see me but she only asked did I want a cup of coffee.

T
ESS IS PRETTY
. The feeding tube entering her body near the mid-line provides every nutrient a two-year-old has been discovered to require, even a two-year-old who cannot talk or walk or for that matter make any purposeful motion, though she does hold up her wobbly head, and she will more or less clasp an offered finger. Another tube burrows through her chest and into her superior vena cava; outside her body this line is connected, through a cheery plastic device, bright aqua, to four more tubes drawing essential minerals from translucent bags. Nourished abundantly, Tess has round limbs and plump cheeks. Pretty.

She is pretty also because of her hazel eyes and she is pretty especially because of her eyelashes: long, brown, and curly. These lashes could adorn royalty. She is sometimes called “Princess” by the staff. Tess is pretty because of her translucent pallor, alarming though it can be. After a transfusion she is pretty in a party girl’s way, as if she has been lightly rouged.

I
DIDN’T WANT COFFEE
, just wanted to lay eyes on big old Billie. So I stood there. She said nobody would take me for thirty-six in those jeans and that leather jacket, why didn’t I get me a student pass for the train, whack a student or something. Both of us laughed.

I never knew how long two years was until this two years.

T
ESS’S SPARSE SILKY HAIR
, washed daily and kept trimmed by one nursing assistant or another, is the same brown as the lashes. The nose is merely a blunt little wedge. But the mouth is gorgeous, the upper lip with its two peaks resembling a miniature suspension bridge. A designer lip, thinks the nursing student who is selecting Tess’s wardrobe today (a light rose top and a deeper rose bottom and lime green socks; this nursing student has a flair for style). Tess’s lower lip creases into two tiny pillows when she frowns, and stretches into a crescent when she smiles.

The smile … It is a curious thing, that smile. It seems responsive, seems to mimic a smile initiated by someone else, anyone else, anyone who accompanies the greeting with a hearty gesture, bending or even squatting beside Tess’s wheeled padded chair. Strangers, unaware that Tess is deaf, talk to her in standard baby. “Heartbreaker,” they wheedle. “You adorable girl,” they pronounce. (Tess’s gender is unmistakable; all her garments have ruffles.) “You have exceeded the cuteness quotient,” said a pharmaceuticals representative who met Tess in the lobby while she was on an excursion to its tropical fish tank. Tess smiled. Her friends—she has innumerable friends within this hospital, her home since she was medevaced from the seaside hospital she was born in—her friends know she cannot hear, but they talk to her anyway, for to see faces in action, lips moving, is instructive for Tess, according to the neuro-audiologist. Tess smiles at these efforts, too. She smiles also at toys placed on the tray of the special stroller—a yellow plush rabbit with black felt eyes; a plastic merry-go-round that revolves whenever somebody pushes a button. But she has been seen to smile at no one and at nothing: carelessly, even mindlessly it is feared, her head against its supports aslant like a chickadee, or like a robin, or—one much-traveled resident thinks to herself—like that flirt, the ostrich.

This resident possesses a dangerous combination of optimism and inexperience. She is one of the few people around Tess to imagine the child’s future—or, more accurately, to redesign it, for each of the caretakers imagines it. But the resident—she has plans. Knowing that Tess’s neurological deficits are multiple and tangled, the determined little doctor reads history after case history. She thinks about what she reads. She is thinking now while supposedly snatching a much-needed nap in the on-call room. Elbows on the desk, slender brown fingers probing her dense hair, she thinks about clever neurons taking over from failed ones.

I
LIKE THAT SLOW TRAIN
. It goes from town to town, and at the first three stations you can still see the ocean. Then the train runs behind pines like the ones in Maine. I was born in Maine. It runs past factories. It stops in the city.

I got off there, in the city.

I was scared, but I didn’t turn back.

T
HE RESIDENT THINKS
about synapses creating themselves; and she remembers that there are areas of Tess’s damaged brain that have not yet been fully scanned; and she says to herself that until Tess reaches some plateau—and she’s not there yet, she’s still climbing—why, no cap can be put on her progress.

The older doctors are less sanguine. Neurological deficiencies united with gut deficiencies make a grim prognosis. These physicians doggedly do their jobs. The neurology attending follows the case. He may write a paper; no name has yet been attached to Tess’s particular agglomeration of troubles. The surgical attending replaces the feeding tube when necessary. She works with speed and grace. The tube is Tess’s lifeline: she will never have use of her upper digestive tract, never be able to employ her mouth for eating or drinking, never bite or chew. Nonetheless—the dental attending reminds the nursing staff, his pale eyes intense—the twelve teeth Tess has already sprung must be brushed frequently with a little stick tipped with foam rubber, for despite the inutility of the tiny incisors they are subject to decay. (Also they enhance her smile.) The infectious-disease attending—who at this moment is scowling at another child’s lab report floating from the printer—prescribes for Tess’s frequent infections. He is a Bengali trained first at home and then here. Even as he battles the microbes that invade Tess, he wonders, as if from afar, which one will carry her off. Already there are antibiotics that, for her, might as well be barley water. “She is a fly in our web,” he said once to a nurse, surprising her not only with the thought but with his clipped voicing of it. He is usually so silent.

The case of Tess is discussed periodically by the staff, with at least one of the weary attendings present. When immediate concerns about Tess’s condition have been voiced—“Her cranial circumference is not enlarging,” the resident reported yesterday; “Hmmm,” said the neurology attending—the talk turns to her near future, to her disposition, to her removal from the unit, from the single-crib room containing Tess-specific toys, mobiles, and that padded stroller; containing, also, amenities common to all patients’ rooms: giraffes prancing on a frieze; a window looking out on other hospitals; television, sink, wastebasket; hamper for dirty linen; bin for dangerous waste; and, attached to the wall above the crib, a box of rubber gloves. There’s a bathroom for the use of parents and guests. Tess’s bathroom is entered by the cleaning person every morning, and by her mother, who visits once or twice a month these days, though in the beginning she came more often.

I
N THE CITY
I waited for the subway. I lit up, and a black girl in a uniform told me I couldn’t, but she was nice, she let me finish the butt. The subway came. It was after rush hour but still crowded, so I hung on a strap in front of a woman and her two children. They were cute, Mexican maybe, such big eyes, and I made funny faces at them so they’d laugh. But the mother went stiff, so I stopped. I looked at myself in the black window. Round head, round glasses, buzz cut. Maybe Billie thinks I look like a girl that’s still in school but I think I look like a boy that’s turned eighty without ever growing up. There’s a disease like that. I read about it once.

I always liked to make funny faces at kids.

E
XCEPT FOR THE CLEANING PERSON
and Tess’s mother, no one uses the gleaming bathroom. Tess’s father, who had no fixed address at the time of Tess’s conception, had left the state altogether by the time of her birth. The cost of the child’s residence here, the cost of her care, the cost of Tess—this is presently borne by the hospital. The cost is one of those enormous figures flung by newspapers at a horrified public. To the accounting department Tess is an impressive statistic. To the hospital counsel she is always a worry. And today she is a task.

What else can I do?
the counsel asks aloud, partway through his draft. Alone in his office, he directs his question to Tess, seven floors above.
The Utilization Committee is breathing down my neck. Two years. Those pricks can count.

There have been efforts to move Tess into a facility. A facility is certainly her destination if she continues to live. The Sisters of Evangelista would take her, would love to take her, would love to love her; but they are not a hospital, and their medical services are unequal to the demanding body of this tyke. The bags hanging from Tess’s pole must be continually replaced; the cylinder of nutrients attached to the feeding tube likewise. And the places where she’s pierced must be kept uncontaminated; and physical therapy must be performed; and visual stimulation … Tess needs expert servitors. Loved by the Sisters, she’d be dead in a week.

So how lucky Tess is, thinks one of the nurses, who is Tess’s primary today, and is gently swabbing the area around her feeding tube … how lucky Tess is to make her home in the unit, with its trained staff. Here she sees dozens of smiling faces. (Tess now smiles at the primary.) Here the practiced hands who tend her do so unresentfully, for they tend not only Tess but also patients who howl, who hurl little fists, who fiercely suck bottles and pacifiers; who vomit and hiss and grow quite red in the face; whose harelips get fixed and whose stomata get repaired and whose bacterial infections succumb to medications and whose viruses succumb to the passage of time; who often get better; who at last leave, though they may be back. (Tess scowls.)

I
TOOK THE ESCALATOR
up from the subway. The wall there got decorated by kids from some art school. They used bottle caps and other junk they found. I always touch it. My friend the wall.

When I got off the escalator the bus to the hospital was just rolling up.

I didn’t turn back then, either.

Billie says you can always count on me.