Eight

“I WANT HER MOVED,” Garrett said.

It was five-thirty. Dawn was coming up, and from the narrow band of black the night before, the corridor revealed itself filling with the light, the promising pink-gold of a summer’s day. Grace had gone to the window, and realized suddenly that the room faced the Charles River. There was a yacht out there, early as it was: she saw it heading seaward.

When Garrett spoke, she turned back to him, and the room. Anna lay nearest the window. Machines hummed at her side. She lay immobile now, her eyes closed as if asleep, her hands at her sides; but restraints kept her in position. During the night she had been thrashing against the ventilator and the IV’s. Her face was swollen and bruised, and her fingertips blue. Glass from the shattering windshield had peppered the left side of her head. Anna had turned on the point of impact, been thrown backward and then forward again, hitting the steering wheel. Glass from the side window had lacerated her arm. The ventilator hissed: a noise that Grace would never be able to forget.

Anna had come back from surgery at a quarter past midnight. The nurse had told them that a subdural hematoma had been operated on.

Grace and Garrett had stood in the corridor while Anna was wheeled past them from surgery; speechless, Grace watched the transfer to the ICU. Grace had felt nothing at all at that moment; she was watching a TV screen—it was happening to someone else, someone else’s family, someone else’s daughter. She had looked away, and her gaze had fallen on another woman in the waiting room, whose door was open: a young woman, trapped in this same frozen stance, a friend on either side of her. Both were talking. The woman’s eyes were dull, anesthetized with shock.

There was nowhere else to look, except to the floor. Grace didn’t want to look past her own daughter and see this woman’s sixteen-year-old son, the victim of a motorcycle accident, in the far bed.

The neurosurgeon came to speak to them.

By then, it was a little past two A.M.

Dr. Daniel Coram was a tall, elderly man, with a softly persuasive voice.

“We’re interrupting a cycle here,” he told them, quietly. “When a brain is injured, it swells. The compression that results decreases blood flow and oxygen. This, in turn, causes more swelling…”

He had held her hand. This kindly man.

She had started to cry again: unstoppable tears that poured out of her without warning.

“We’ve taken away the hematoma and repaired the blood vessels,” he had continued.

It was almost a song, with its own gentle rhythm. She tried in vain to force herself to listen to him, and not the softly moving motion of the words. She heard their sibilance, the weight of them. But not their meaning.

“How are you?” Dr. Coram eventually asked.

She had trouble wrenching her gaze from their hands to his face.

“I’m fine,” she said. Almost lightly.

“You’ll get yourself a cool drink,” he said. An instruction. “Something to eat.”

“I couldn’t eat,” she told him.

Coram had looked at Garrett with a smile. “Anna will have a lot of tests,” he said. “We’ll monitor the pressure. It’s a long process. It’s a careful process. We may have to use a ventricular drain, or a shunt,” he added. “But don’t be afraid of what you see.”

“She’s moving,” Grace interjected. She had suddenly noticed the flurry of activity behind his shoulder.

“We have to use a lot of tubes, and we have to use the ventilator,” Dr. Coram said. “Sometimes the patient will react to that. It’s reflexivity, nothing more just now.” He had squeezed Grace’s hand again. “I’ll speak to you again in the morning.”

Morning was here now.

Since four A.M., Anna had been still. Perfectly still and soundless.

Grace stared at James Garrett now.

“Moved?” she repeated. His murmured sentence, from the chair next to Anna’s bed, where he sat, had only just filtered through to her. “Moved where?”

“A better facility.”

She shook her head. “But there isn’t a better facility,” she said, in astonishment. “Look at this place. Look at it.” She walked around the end of the bed to him. “Move her away from the surgeon, and the staff here?” she said. “You can’t be serious.”

“This is a public hospital,” he told her.

She clenched her fists at her sides. She knew she was doing it, but she couldn’t stop herself. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said.

“James,” she said, “I’m not going to argue with you. Anna is lying here between us. There’ll be no arguing.”

“Good,” he said.

She put her hand to her mouth, and laughed. A kind of deep, humorless exasperation. “Dear God,” she told him, “you are astonishing. You want her moved simply because this is a public hospital? You are an astonishing fucking bigot.”

He returned her look. He glanced, pointedly, at the fist pressed to her mouth.

“I don’t mean right away,” he said quietly. “When she comes around. For recuperation.”

“Why don’t you just leave her alone?” she demanded. “Why don’t you leave them both alone?”

Garrett had remained perfectly still. “You’re tired,” he said. “We’re all tired.”

She turned away. She drew up a chair and sat as close to Anna as she could get.

“Go back to Myrtle Street,” he told her, softly. “Here, take my key,” he said, taking it from his pocket and offering it to her on the flat of his palm. “Have a shower. Sleep.”

“No,” she said, ignoring him.

“I’ll stay with her.”

“No.”

There was silence.

He walked to the door.

“Then I’m going to sit with Rachel,” he said.

Rachel Elizabeth Russell had been born at five in the morning four days before Christmas. It had been a bitterly cold winter. She was two weeks overdue. The labor lasted twelve hours, and the birth was breech.

Toward the end of the night the baby’s heartbeat began to slow, and there was a flurry of activity, and talk of an emergency C-section. But Rachel appeared in a rush, finally: small for her term, at five pounds two ounces. As they handed her child to her, Anna had seen Rachel’s wide-open eyes, and had a little frisson of disappointment as Rachel’s attention immediately drifted away from her. Anna had read in a magazine that newborn babies held your gaze, apparently transfixed by the sight of their first human face.

“Hey,” she had murmured, stroking her baby’s cheek. “Say hello, Rachel. Here I am.”

They lived with Grace; Rachel came home to the house on Christmas Eve. Anna had been touched to see how much effort Grace had put into the decorations. All the trees in the garden were full of tiny white lights; the same lights were strung along the rails of the porch. Inside, a huge spruce was all colors—an extraordinary mixture of oranges and reds and blues, the Caribbean shades that both she and Grace loved. There was a big terra-cotta-and-blue angel on the top of the tree, papier-mâché, with outstretched wings of gold, all Grace’s own work. In one hand, the angel carried a trumpet; in the other, a bottle of rum.

“Ma,” Anna said, laughing. “You’re incorrigible.”

“Even the angels are celebrating,” Grace said, winking at her.

They had gotten into a cozy routine over the months, one of these being that while Anna had her morning shower, she would leave Rachel with Grace, and then take the morning tea to her when she was finished.

One particular morning in September, there had been a gale blowing off the coast. There was a draft in the sitting room that Grace had complained about before; when the wind was in the right direction, like today, the blind on the window tapped against the frame.

Anna came out from her shower, hair still wet, dressing gown on, carrying the tea tray.

“I’ve noticed something odd,” Grace told her.

She was sitting opposite Rachel, who was in a high chair.

Anna had put down the tray. “What?” she asked, pouring from the pot.

“Watch her,” Grace said.

Anna paused. She looked at her daughter. Rachel was rocking slightly. “She always does that,” Anna murmured.

“Watch,” Grace said. “Listen.” And she cocked her thumb at the blind, tap-tapping on the window frame.

After a few moments, Anna sat down. “She’s rocking in time,” she said. It was true. Rachel was pushing her back against the chair in beat with the tapping blind.

Mother and daughter looked at each other. “Well,” Anna observed, handing her mother a mug of tea, “she’s going to be a musician. A drummer, obviously.” She leaned back on the couch. “She’ll run off with a rock band when she’s fourteen,” she said. “A female drummer in a six-man band.”

Grace didn’t drink the tea. “Watch again,” she said. “Look at her fingers.”

Anna leaned forward. Rachel wasn’t looking at them. Her gaze was focused on the tray of the high chair. There were eight or ten little squares of toast there, untouched.

“Do you see it?” Grace asked.

She did. Rachel’s fingers on her right hand were also describing a beat.

“It’s not the blind,” Anna murmured. “It’s the wires.”

She glanced out of the window.

They had put a rotary drier in the garden. It was folded, but, in the high wind, that, too, was making a noise. The plastic-coated wires were moving against the metal pole.

“Two beats,” Anna mused, looking back at her mother.

Grace nodded. “Did you ever see a child of that age even hear a rhythm, let alone hold two different beats at one time?”

“I don’t know,” Anna responded. “I don’t know kids.”

“Well, I do,” Grace said. “And I haven’t.”

Anna shrugged. She got up, walked the couple of steps to Rachel, and held up a piece of toast for her. At once, the baby began to cry.

Anna lifted Rachel from the chair. Rachel’s screams intensified. She arched her back, and tried to slide from Anna’s grasp.

“So I’ve got an unusual baby,” Anna told her mother, as she walked to their room to change Rachel out of her nightclothes. “That’s fine by me,” she added, over her shoulder. She turned back to Rachel, and pressed her lips to her face, ignoring the wails of protest. “Who wants to be ordinary?”

She shut the door behind her.

To tell the truth, she had been annoyed with her mother. She hated it whenever Grace suggested, even by a glance or an inclination of the head, that she knew better.

Well, she had thought to herself, hoisting Rachel off her shoulder and putting her on the bed, she doesn’t know better.

She had looked at her daughter’s creased red face, at the eyes screwed shut, at the fists raised and clenched at the shoulders.

“You’re OK,” she whispered. She tried to prize the tiny hands open, wriggling her index finger into the baby’s grip. “You’re OK, Rachel,” she soothed. “You’re OK. Hush now. Listen to me…you’re just fine.”

A year and a half later, they were sitting in the children’s ward of the hospital.

After a slow start—she hadn’t actually walked until she was fifteen months old—Rachel was now extremely mobile. In situations like this, where it was necessary to sit for a while, and wait, Rachel could never be persuaded to stay still. She moved constantly, from the instant of waking to the instant of falling asleep. If she could be bribed into sitting for a few seconds, she would never sit in her mother’s or her grandmother’s lap. No one’s lap, in fact. And not on seats with any kind of fabric covering. And not on plastic tub chairs, the kind they had at preschool. And she would not be directed: not even by a gentle fingertip on the arm.

When things got really bad—and Rachel was capable of working herself into breath-stopping storms of temper—Anna wrapped her arms around her and got her in a kind of wrestling hold, pinning her arms to her sides, while she waited for the piercing, high-pitched screams to subside. It meant squatting down on the ground and forcing the child into this human straitjacket. It could take anything up to twenty minutes to calm her—but the alternative was worse. If she wasn’t held down at such a time, Rachel would run. Just run, full speed. She wouldn’t look back. She wouldn’t care what was in the way. Anna had seen her run at speed straight into a garden fence, cutting her face and upper arms. And God help any other children who happened to be in her line of sight.

In the arms-by-the-sides hold, Rachel’s heels would drum against her mother’s knees or legs or ankles. Anna had long ago lost count of the bruises. And of the looks she had incurred in shopping malls or the street, or a park. Other mothers sometimes looked at her sympathetically, but, more often than not, she would get disapproval.

Older women were the worst.

They would lean down and try to touch Rachel. “What are you so cranky about?” they would say. “Oh, what a noise!” They would smile. “Is she holding you tight? Is it too tight?”

Of course, the running and the anger and the bruises were not the worst.

Not by a long way.

When Anna had been pregnant, she had had very little concrete idea of what her baby would be like. As an only child herself, her ideas about child care were at best hazy. She read what she could—she knew the bare facts—but she was totally unprepared for the mind-bending anxiety of bringing a child into the world. She often felt helpless: unprepared, naïve.

And yet, on one very specific subject, she had been totally, blissfully confident.

She knew that she and her child would have a deeper bond than most. She knew that they would be a support to each other. She would even allow her imagination to run forward through the years, to the days far in the future, when Rachel and she would talk together, or go on trips; even to the time when Rachel would have her own children.

When so much else in her life had been drifting and insubstantial, she would be able to depend on this, she knew. This deep and special understanding that she and Rachel would share.

There had been only one very small voice—one tiny, submerged whisper in the back of her mind—saying that Rachel would be her father’s and not her mother’s child. It was a voice she had preferred not to listen to, until that morning at the hospital. She hadn’t even listened to it through Rachel’s obsessions. Or the routines that became more pronounced with every passing week. Anna would watch her daughter play such odd games; and she would watch the way Rachel held and carried herself—the spinning, the curled-up position against a wall, the hands repeatedly hitting the floor, the long, long periods of complete dreamlike inactivity.

Rachel had never made eye contact with her, never run to her, never held up her arms or wanted to be kissed.

She lived in another world entirely.

“Mrs. Russell?” a woman said, breaking her reverie.

Grace touched Anna’s arm.

“Yes,” Anna responded, rising to her feet. “Actually, it’s Miss Russell.”

Dr. Bauer smiled. “And Rachel?”

“Yes,” Anna said. “She’s here.”

She walked a little way up the corridor, to where Rachel was sitting on the floor.

“Rachel,” Anna said. “Rachel…”

Grace had gotten up. “I could bring her in to you when she gets up,” she offered.

“She’ll get up,” Anna said. “Rachel…”

“You know,” said Dr. Bauer, “that’s not a bad idea. We’ll talk. Rachel can come in her own time.”

Anna looked at Grace, who nodded encouragement.

Dr. Bauer’s office was light and colorful. It looked out over a garden, in which there was a child-sized chair and table. Mobiles hung from the lower branches of the trees.

“We find it’s a good idea,” Dr. Bauer was saying, as she showed Anna to a seat. “Except when it snows.”

“Then they don’t go out there?”

“Oh, they go out. But so do I,” the woman responded. “That’s how my circulation stopped below the knees.”

Anna smiled hesitantly.

“Make yourself comfortable.”

They sat down alongside each other.

“You know how Rachel comes to be here,” Dr. Bauer said. “That this is a recommendation from preschool.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” Anna said.

Dr. Bauer held up her hand. “Can we go back a little?” she asked. She had a notebook in her hands. “Rachel is two years old…”

“Yes. Just over.”

“She was enrolled in the play group at fifteen months…”

“I thought it was best for her to meet other children.”

“So it is,” Dr. Bauer agreed. “So it is.”

“She just has her set ways of doing things. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“Set ways?”

Anna clasped her hands in her lap. “Well, if she comes into school, and finds something out of place…”

“She notices placing?”

“Yes. The toys. The instruments.”

“Does she relate to specific toys?”

“She’s a little possessive over a few,” Anna admitted, slowly. “She likes the ones that make sounds, you know…”

“Does she sleep?”

“Excuse me?” Anna asked.

“Does she sleep well at night?”

“Well…she does wake.”

“How many times a night?” Bauer asked.

Anna shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Approximately? On average?”

“Four. Five.”

“And eating?”

“Yes, fine.”

“No fads? Or preferences?”

“She…” Anna stared out at the garden. “A few.”

Dr. Bauer nodded. She regarded Anna closely for some moments. “Tell me what’s great about Rachel,” she said. “I get the feeling you’re always having to explain what’s problematic. But tell me what’s good.”

Anna turned, and met her gaze. The woman was in her forties, she guessed. Comfortable looking. Motherly. Anna wondered if she had any children of her own.

“She remembers,” Anna said. “Patterns. Music. She loves music.”

“Wonderful. Any kind in particular?”

Anna smiled. “Bach. Mozart.”

“Good heavens! I wouldn’t know the difference.”

“Oh, she knows the difference,” Anna said. She sat forward. “She gets the CD’s. She knows the covers. She keeps time.”

“Does she favor an instrument?”

“Yes,” Anna said. “That’s what this was about. That’s where this started. It’s the xylophone. You know, those toy ones, with the colored bands, the wooden ones?”

“I know.”

“And we have a toy piano at home, very small, it plays its own tunes…”

Dr. Bauer was silent. She hadn’t taken her eyes from Anna’s face.

Anna stopped talking, feeling the intensity of the gaze. She dropped her eyes.

“Are you concerned?” the woman asked. “Are you worried?”

Anna started to protest, automatically, that she wasn’t anxious. The words were in her mouth, the usual rushed explanation that Rachel was merely a little out of sync with other children; that her moods, the things she did, weren’t malicious. She started to try to say that there was something—she was sure that there was something in Rachel, so far down, so deep, so hidden from them, and that she was exhausted with the effort of trying to reach it, but that, once found, this essential quality of her daughter would be amazing. Unique. As if there could be a key, and the key would be marked Rachel. One day, she was sure that she would find this answer, and use it, and release her child. And this daughter she so loved, and whom she so wanted to be near, would come running toward her, and Rachel would at last look at her, and she would…she would say something to her…

But the words didn’t come.

Not the words she expected.

Anna looked at Dr. Bauer.

“Yes,” she had admitted, at last. “I’m very worried.”