“You’re right, you should go,” she says. Then, “Do the kids know?”
“Not yet, no.”
“OK, you go.” Avoiding the mangled side of my neck, she hugs me quickly, but generously. A good hug. One that makes me realize I am in serious need of adult contact.
Wyatt’s eight-year-old hugs are few and far between, and when he gives them, he turns his face away from my eyes and my clothes as if the smell and the sight of me is unbearable. Before the hug even begins, he is pulling away.
Chloe’s three-year-old hugs are communion, all fluttering butterfly hands and moist skin, but they are also greedy. Chloe is known for holding my face between her grubby palms and squeezing hard. If she can’t reach my face, she is on my leg, her small hands grabbing the cellulite on my thighs.
Kids are takers. They poke their little straws into your Capri Sun soul and they suck.
I drive myself to St Joe’s hospital with my window down. Warm breeze blows at my face, cooling my cheeks, but my scalp is sweaty and tingly.
Hospitals make me nervous. It’s a phobia, really. Driving to one is akin to nearing the front of the line for a haunted house. Not a cutesy haunted house targeting a wide-eyed middle-school audience, but one that indiscriminately employs thirty-year-olds with criminal records and runs extension cords to power real chainsaws.
The last time I went to a haunted house, I elbowed a zombie in the jaw and knocked him over a coffin. I hope I can keep my hands to myself at St Joe’s.
3
SHRINK THIS WOMAN
The soapy, metallic scent of Betadine is up my nose.
I am on my back, shirt off, bra on, shivering. The hospital air is chilled. Plus, I’m anxious.
The ubiquitous white tissue paper crinkles beneath me as I wiggle slightly on the narrow bed. My ER room is partitioned by a modern sliding glass door behind a curtain.
“These don’t look like bat bites. More like scratches,” the woman doctor says. She told me her name a minute ago, but I’ve forgotten. Blue gloves on, she wipes my broken skin with Betadine, which is shockingly cold, and sets the yellowed cotton ball refuse on a tray.
My doctor is slender and has straight blond hair with seemingly natural highlights. Like a child. Her gorgeous hair is swept back into a ponytail so smooth and flawless, I am mystified. She is not conventionally beautiful and has no curves to her body, but her complexion is clear, her teeth are white, and her nose is petite. These features—natural highlights, dainty nose, small pores—are the bland features women like me covet as we get older and have to exert effort to keep masculinity from creeping into our faces.
“Yes, scratches,” I say. “That’s what I was thinking.”
“You could get rabies if one of the bats had saliva on its claws and that bat also had rabies,” she says. “Those are very low odds. Only six percent of bats have rabies.”
She finishes cleaning and bandaging my neck, then palms the garbage and throws it away. “Sit up, please,” she says, lifting the top of my gown off my lap and holding the armholes open. I do as I’m told. I sit, then slip my arms through.
She pulls a penlight from her lab coat pocket, clicks it on, and aims it at my eyes. “Follow my light. You say they attacked you?”
“I know. I know,” I say, tracking her light, “it sounds nuts. I must have been in their way as they flew by.”
“Hm.” She clicks her light off and slips it into her pocket.
“Two teenagers saw it happen.” Why do I feel like a child trying to prop a lie?
She shrugs like maybe she doesn’t believe me, but also doesn’t care. She finishes the standard six-point inspection checklist (respiration, pulse, eyes, ears, nose, throat) while she continues, “A dozen bats in the area have tested positive for rabies so we need to be on the safe side. We’ll give you the first vaccine tonight along with an antibody shot to prime your immune system. This is all standard post-rabies exposure protocol. You will make appointments before you leave for follow-up shots. You need to get them all within one month.” She makes eye contact and widens her eyes. Sclerae as white and healthy as her teeth. “I don’t want to scare you, but untreated rabies is fatal. If you finish the series of four shots, you will be fine. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever had an allergic reaction to a vaccine?”
“Not that I know of.”
The nurse who typed my information—name, birthdate, reason for visit—into her laptop minutes ago starts typing again, presumably recording my answer. The nurse is my age, maybe older. Her hair is curlier and messier than the doctor’s, the skin around her jaw and neck is sagging, but she has the same clear, efficient, kick-ass look in her eyes as her colleague.
“Have you ever been diagnosed with cancer?”
“No.”
“Heart disease?”
“No.”
“Have you ever had surgery?”
“No.”
“What medications are you currently taking?”
“Adderall.”
“For attention deficit?”
I nod.
Shame slides in like a sliver under a nail. It’s small, but poignant.
If I were on a cholesterol-lowering drug, would I feel ashamed by the profuse globular fat molecules bobbing slothfully through my blood? If I were taking asthma medication, would I feel ashamed by my melodramatic bronchioles?
I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Lungs and blood are just lube and gaskets. The brain is a window into a person’s soul, their true state of being, internal strength, trustworthiness, and integrity. My brain, stripped down, without meds, is inadequate.
“How often do you drink alcohol?”
Would this question ordinarily come later in the questionnaire, but she moved it up in the queue in light of my attention deficit admission?
“Once a week, tops.”
“When you do drink, how many do you consume?”
“One or two glasses of wine, I guess.”
“Any other medical issues you worry about?”
This question bloats inside my head.
This would be a good time to tell her I haven’t slept more than a few hours in four days. This would be a good time to tell her that when I gazed out the window over the kitchen sink yesterday morning, the tip of a blue spruce tilted thirty degrees toward the ground before it righted itself. That hours ago when I was sitting on the toilet lid while the kids took a bath—with their ear-piercing laughing and shrieking amplifying off bathroom walls and water tsunami-sloshing out of the tub and onto a mess of towels and balled clothes on the floor—something inside me, some working part that’s supposed to remain fixed, free-fell for a moment. That I sense the vibrating strings interlacing the universe on the verge of ripping apart.
If I said these things, the doctor might document some tidbit that could force me to undergo some sort of mental therapy for which I don’t have the money or time.
You just need sleep.
“I haven’t been sleeping well lately so I don’t feel myself.” She waits, in case I want to reveal more. When I stare dumbly at her, my shoulders slouched, she says, “You can talk to your primary about a sleep aid like Ambien, but there are side effects. If you think your sleep difficulties are temporary, I would stick with Benadryl for a short-term solution. Always knocks me out.”