Zoey comes around before the ambulance gets to our house, but two fainting spells in two days is enough to worry the most sanguine of mothers, which I am not, and send Brian into a worst-case-scenario level of hypochondria that I haven’t seen in him since I was pregnant.
We spend the weekend ferrying Zoey back and forth to the hospital, where she’s put through a battery of tests. She has a headache that won’t go away, and her vision’s a bit blurry she says, but each test tells us nothing, only scratches one more archaic possibility off the list, like on an episode of House. And maybe it’s the influence of television, but I keep expecting Zoey to get worse, for more symptoms to appear. Instead, all she does is submit to each blood sample, body scan, and pupil-dilating exam with an uncharacteristic silence, and no answers emerge.
On Sunday, while Zoey’s with an eye doctor to check if her problems are optical, Brian and I see the neurologist. He’s come in on his day off, and though he claims to be happy to do so, the fact that he’s dressed like a teenaged boy sends a different message.
We thank him for taking the time, and I sit quietly while he flips through Zoey’s charts and tests results, and Brian reels off possibilities like answers in a multiple-choice exam. Dr. Coast shakes his head at each of them, and eventually Brian runs out of suggestions. The clock on his wall ticks loudly, a reminder of each second passing by.
Dr. Coast finally puts down Zoey’s file. “I understand that this must’ve been a trying few days for you, but I think that everything that can be done has been done.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Zoey.”
I hear the words, but they don’t bring relief, not yet.
“But how can that be? She fainted twice in twenty-four hours. And her headache? The blurry vision. That’s not normal, is it?”
He leans back in his chair. The hood of his brown sweatshirt reminds me of a monk’s cowl.
“I understand your confusion, and if I were at the beginning of my career I’d be running a whole battery of tests to be 100 percent sure. But I think Zoey’s had enough tests, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course,” Brian says, concern edging out his usual professional medical tone, “but we need to be absolutely positive. Surely you understand.”
“I do. Unfortunately, we often have to live with uncertainty in these kinds of situations. We know so little about the brain, really, despite our efforts. But if I had to give you my best guess, I’d say it was stress related.”
“She’s eleven,” I say. “There’s nothing stressful going on with her. She … she’s a good kid. Things with her are good.”
“The beginning of adolescence can be a very stressful time. Surely you remember?”
Brian makes a frustrated noise. “She’s not like other kids. She takes things in stride. And with her IQ …”
“Yes, I’ve seen that in her file, but that might just mean she’s better at hiding things. And those competitions she does must be stressful.”
Brian’s jaw clenches and I reach for his hand. He squeezes it and glances at me as if to ask, Are we on the same page? We are.
“She likes those competitions,” I say. “We don’t push her to do them. And she’s been doing them for years without incident.”
“Perhaps she’s changed the way she feels about them?”
“She would have told us.”
“Maybe she didn’t realize it herself.”
“So that’s it? We take her home and … what?”
“Monitor the situation. Make sure she eats well and exercises and makes time for things that are relaxing. Talk to her. If she’s experiencing anxiety, I can recommend someone, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary. My bet is that this won’t happen again.”
“This is crap,” Brian says. “We know her. I was with her right before this happened. And I’m telling you that if she’d been ‘stressed,’ we would’ve known. No.” He leans forward, resting his hands on the front of the doctor’s desk. “No. I’m afraid we’re going to have to insist that you pretend like it is the beginning of your career.”
A couple of hours later, we’re standing in the sterile viewing room for the MRI machine, watching Zoey being loaded in.
The technician sits to the right of us in a white lab coat, her eyes on the screen. Thin slices of Zoey’s brain appear like they’re coming out of a deli cutter. The whole room feels like the future, and it is husha-husha silent except for the clicks and whirs of the machine.
Zoey looks pale and skinny and small in her washed-out blue hospital gown, the soles of her bare feet the only thing less than pristine. I can feel the tension seeping out of Brian next to me. I place my hand at the base of his neck and begin rubbing gently. Something that’s always calmed him in the past. The muscles in his neck start to unclench.
“You don’t blame me, do you,” he asks, “for the competitions?”
“Of course not. And I agree, Zoey loves them. She always has.”
“She really seemed okay. Everything was like it always is. If those damn TV cameras weren’t there, no one would’ve had to know about it.”
“Were they there last year?”
“It’s something they were trying this year because of how popular those spelling bees have become.”
I nod. I’ve watched them myself sometimes. Some of the same kids from the spoken word circuit are involved in them too. But Zoey’s never shown any interest.
“I want to kill the little bastards who put that video up,” Brian says. “When this is resolved, I’m going to figure out who did it.”
“I don’t think that will solve anything.”
“Might make me feel better, though. Might make Zoey feel better.”
“I’m guessing Zoey would prefer to pretend this never happened. And then there’ll be a poem about it. Diving for the floor/for all the world to see/words failing me.”
“Yes. That sounds like her. And like you.”
“No, she’s better. She’s braver.”
“You always discount your talents. I don’t know why you do that.”
“Years of practice?”
He shakes his head. “Apropos of nothing, and sorry I didn’t ask before, but how was your thing?”
“My thing?”
“The funeral.”
I suck in my breath. “You know, in all of this, I’d forgotten about it.”
And this is true. I’ve barely thought about Jeff from the moment I got Zoey’s tearful phone call. Maybe an aftershock is coming, but for now my mind seems to be fixating on the right things. The right now.
“It was … sad,” I say. “Do you blame me? For not being there? At Nationals? Maybe if I had been …”
“You’re here now. That’s what counts. And like you said, this wasn’t our fault. There’s no one to blame. Dr. Coast is probably right. Not about the stress, but about it being nothing. He has to be right.”
“He does. He really does.”
Brian takes my hand, and we twine our fingers together as another slice of our daughter’s brain thunks into place on the screen beside us.