LISH
October 5, 2008
The last few weeks had been easier than Lish expected them to be. She’d seen Dr. Cussler three more times, and her energy level had markedly increased as she gradually tapered from three down to one Ativan pill a day. Despite a faint nausea from time to time, she’d experienced no ill side effects from the Zoloft, and Dr. Cussler had continued to steadily increase the dose.
Now she took the children to and from school without Drew’s help, and she cared for the baby on her own at night, though it still took her longer than usual to find the strength to pull herself out of bed when she heard Cecilia’s cries.
More than a month of Saturdays had come and gone, and she wondered how Anne and Della were doing. She’d received voice messages and e-mails from them both, and she often wondered how Anne was fairing at her training program in England, but she hadn’t had the energy to send more than a one-word reply to either of them. “Fry one fish at a time,” Drew told her when she asked him if she should call them back. “And right now you’ve got to focus on your immediate family.”
Lish hoped she would have the strength to invite Della and her family to a Thanksgiving dinner at her home. This was one of the goals she’d secretly set for herself now that it was mid-October, and she was feeling so much better. By then she could show her cousin that she’d made a full recovery, and maybe the two of them could go to England to visit Anne before her upcoming move.
Drew had accepted the position at the Centers for Disease Control, and his start date was the first of December. Lish would finish up the school year with the children and her treatment with Dr. Cussler, and the plan was for her to have the house rented and the children moved by the first of May. That way, she could enroll Andrew and Mary Jane in a school for the last few weeks of the academic year, and they would hopefully make a few friends who they could get together with over the summer.
Of course, Lish was sad to be leaving her home, but she knew she should support Drew who couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity. He was even able to bring the majority of his MUSC research team with him, including Rob, Melanie, and the two other fellows who had helped create the rotavirus vaccine. The fellows were all thrilled about the chance to work on the new flu vaccine team that Drew would oversee. All of the research showed that a pandemic was likely in the next five years, and Drew might very well play a role in saving a large number of lives through his work.
On Friday, though it was a week before planned, Lish decided to cut the Ativan and move down to a half milligram per day. She had agreed to resume writing her newspaper column and needed as much energy as possible to complete the first article she’d written in months. She knew what she wanted to write about—the health benefits of formula if you are unable to nurse. She was going to critique the brands and cover the bottle sterilization process as well as the general feeding schedule for newborns. Also, she was planning a birthday party for Andrew at Jump-Castle-Kingdom, and she wanted to be able to print and mail out the invitations within the week.
On Saturday, her second day on the half milligram of Ativan, she felt an energy like she hadn’t felt since before the baby was born. She even sent Rosetta home early and ordered Drew’s favorite dinner from Cru Catering—beef Wellington, roasted asparagus, and a cinnamon crème brûlée. Then she drove to the Wine Shop with all three children and purchased an eighty-dollar bottle of a Cotes du Rhone, his favorite.
Drew raised his eyebrows when he saw the dining room table set with linen place mats and silver and crystal.
“What’s all this?” He put his hands on his hips, causing his pale blue scrubs to pucker.
Mary Jane came scampering up in her Cinderella nightgown. “Mama made you a romantic dinner, Daddy.”
He lifted her up and rocked her back and forth as he looked at Lish, who had managed to take a shower, put on makeup, and iron a floral sundress with spaghetti straps that she’d worn before she was pregnant.
“So she did,” he said. “And doesn’t she look nice?”
Mary Jane pulled back, looked at her mama and then back to her daddy. She nodded yes and said, “Very.”
The next week started off strong for Lish as she sent in her article, mailed the birthday invitations, and managed to make a haircut appointment, but by Friday she felt a little jumpy and her throat began to burn like before.
She continued to have more energy, but something else was happening too. Every time she went to make a bottle for Cecilia, she saw microorganisms growing inside the bottom of the bottle, inching their way up toward the nipple. On Wednesday, the day Rosetta had the afternoon off, Lish refused to expose the baby to the awful germs, and Cecilia went hungry for hours until Drew came home, heard the child wailing, and said, “What the heck is going on with the baby, Lish?”
“There are microorganisms in the bottle,” she said.
“You couldn’t see them with the naked eye, even if there were,” he said. He rolled his eyes before stomping into the kitchen and holding up a bottle up to the light. “See,” he said. “Nothing’s there.”
Andrew raced in from the back garden with his fingers in his ears and quickly grabbed a juice box out of the refrigerator. He turned to his father. “The baby’s been crying all afternoon. I can’t stand the sound, Daddy, so I’m going back outside, okay?”
After Drew made a bottle and fed the baby, who went to sleep almost instantly after sucking twelve ounces down, he came out on the piazza where Lish was rocking in a chair.
He leaned against the railing. “Don’t go back down this road, Lish.” She watched him set his jaw and look out over their garden. She wondered if he was noticing the last pink blooms on the crepe myrtles along the far edge of the wrought-iron fence. He waved to a neighbor who was walking his dog, then turned back to her.
“You’ve been doing really well, honey. You’ve got to get a grip, okay?”
She nodded as if she was in slow motion and swallowed. It burned like strep throat or the time she had her tonsils out. “I’m okay. I think I’m just tired.”
He sent her to bed at six o’clock and ordered a pizza for the kids.
Friday, on the way to taking the children to school, Lish’s car hit a bump in the road on Meeting Street and she was seized by the fear that she had run over someone. She pictured the basket weaver who sat at the corner of Meeting and John Street, tying the pine needles and sweetgrass into knots that she shaped into exquisite bowls and baskets. Lish was sure she had run over the woman. She could hardly breathe by the time the teacher’s aide opened the car door for Andrew and Mary Jane and cheerfully escorted them into the building.
Immediately, Lish drove back to the spot and circled it four times, searching for the body of a thin and elderly black woman. She pulled over, got out, and walked back and forth around the block, examining the sidewalk, looking for traces of blood. She found nothing and circled again and again in her car. Where was the body? Had the woman been carted off to the emergency room?
Andrew and Mary Jane were the last in line to be picked up that day. Lish had spent the entire morning driving around and around the corner of Meeting and John Streets. She had been only three blocks from school, but she was over a half hour late picking up her children. Her eyelids were blinking incessantly, and her throat was dry and sore.
One of the teachers, a young girl right out of the early education program at the College of Charleston, walked with Lish and the children to the car. “Are you all right, Dr. Sutton?”
Lish’s throat was too dry to answer. She nodded.
“Mommy,” Mary Jane said. She was holding up a large piece of construction paper and talking, but Lish couldn’t make out her words.
The aide paused for a moment before gently closing the door. Lish looked at the paper and Mary Jane’s proud smile. She couldn’t find the words to comment, so she turned back around. With a jerking motion, she put the car in drive and rolled slowly out of the school parking lot.
Rosetta told Lish she wanted to work through the weekend. “Get yourself some rest, Miss Lish,” she said, and she walked her up the stairs to her bedroom. Lish almost called Dr. Cussler once or twice on Saturday morning when her throat felt particularly hot and she didn’t want to swallow, but she felt better after she drank some cool water and took a long, hot shower before crawling back into bed.
Despite their good intentions, the Suttons hadn’t made it to church since Baby Cecilia’s birth. They were scheduled to have her christened in November, and Drew said it would be pretty bad if he showed up just for the baptism and then left town.
So on Sunday, Rosetta laid out a beige suit for Lish and a pair of black, sling-back pumps. Drew rubbed her back in the early morning and said, “Let’s go to church, all right?” Rosetta brought in a tray with a poached egg on toast and bacon, and Lish sat up, took a bite, and then set it aside. It hurt to swallow. She would call Dr. Cussler on Monday. She didn’t want to go back on the Ativan, but she couldn’t stand this either.
As she stood in front of the full-length mirror in her closet, attempting to zip up her skirt, Drew came up behind her in his charcoal gray suit and bow tie, rubbed her arms, and said, “You look great, Lish.”
Rosetta dressed the children in matching green corduroy outfits and put Cecilia in a pale green dress with little pink sheep smocked across the neckline. She made a warm bottle and put it in the diaper bag along with Cecilia’s pacifier and the little blanket with satin edges she seemed to be favoring.
They walked the four blocks to church, a handsome family in their pressed garments and their clean faces and their powdered and perfumed bodies. Drew pushed the stroller as Lish walked between Andrew and Mary Jane. The little girl reached up to hold her hand, and Lish took the hand lightly and began to swing it slightly. But as the historic church bells pealed from the stately steeple of St. Michael’s Church, Lish became completely focused on avoiding the sidewalk cracks or the round black circles of dried gum that were splattered across the well-worn sidewalk.
In church Lish couldn’t get comfortable. The enclosed wooden pew was hard, and it made her spine ache as she leaned back into it. The children were in their own worship service and the baby was in the nursery. Drew was seated to her right, looking away from her toward the altar and the pulpit whose large, ornate wooden roof seemed precariously perched on two columns. For a moment, Lish feared it would topple over and crush the new rector’s head when he took his place in its center and looked out over the congregation as the organist played the last stanza of “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”
It felt like a strong hand was on Lish’s throat, pressing mightily down on her vocal cords. She couldn’t sing. She made a fist and rubbed her knuckles against the velvet cushion when the spit pooled in her throat and she had to swallow. She wanted to stop this. She’d been doing so much better. How in the world could this have come down on her again? If the hand pressed any tighter, she might choke.
After the young rector, who seemed familiar somehow, read the Bible and began his sermon, she grasped her throat as if to yank the hand off of it, and Drew glanced over and patted her knee. She abruptly bent forward, hiding herself in the high walls of the pews. She didn’t want to embarrass him, but she had to get this hand off of her throat.
Drew faked a cough and leaned in. “You okay?” he whispered as the priest moved into the first point of his sermon.
She nodded. She didn’t want to disappoint him. She was not going to backtrack now. She sat up and tried to concentrate on the priest’s words. He was talking about Abraham’s faith. How Isaac asked him where the animal was that they were going to sacrifice as he carried the sticks on his back for the altar they were to build at the top of the mountain.
Before she heard Abraham’s response, the thumping started again on her head. She hadn’t felt it in months and it was like a small hammer, pounding with force in the very center of the top of her head.
She could hardly breathe; she couldn’t swallow. No! she thought to herself. She squirmed in her seat. Drew noted her in his peripheral vision. She moved back and forth, then she grasped the top of her head. The pounding worsened. Her throat burned. No! No! No! she whispered. Someone in the pew in front of her turned to look back.
The fire in her throat was throbbing in her head now. Drew turned to her. He reached out to squeeze her knee, to steady her, but she pushed his hand away. Then she stood and shrieked like she had been shot, and she felt like she had. “No! No!” she screamed and all eyes were on her, including the priest perched high above her in the top-heavy pulpit.
Drew stood up and put his arm around her, but she pushed him off and continued to scream. An internist in a pew several rows back came forward and the priest made his way down the pulpit stairs and across the aisle to her.
Drew squeezed her shoulders with force. “Lish. Come on. Lish, stop.”
She shook her head. She spit. She couldn’t swallow any more. She couldn’t stand it. As two more physicians from the congregation moved toward them, Drew restrained her from the back, picked her up, and carried her screaming down the aisle and out of the building onto the busy corner of Meeting and Broad Street where she collapsed in a heap at the foot of one of the grand white columns as the shadows of the figures attempting to help rose above her.
Someone was asking Drew questions. Someone was praying with their hands open toward her. She heard Drew tell someone to get the children, and then she spit and shut her eyes until she was lifted and carried toward a car that drove her home with Drew pinning her arms to her sides the whole way.
In her bedroom, he poured an Ativan out of her medicine bottle. She put it on her tongue and he watched her until she swallowed. Then he pulled back the covers and stuffed her under them. Rosetta kept an eye on Lish as Drew paged Dr. Cussler, and she agreed to spend the night and look after the kids once a friend from church brought them home. Lish heard all of this from the bed where her head, heavy as an anvil, rested against a thick goose-down pillow. She knew it wouldn’t be long before the medicine would calm her as she entered its thick, heavy haze. She lifted her hand to touch her head. She rubbed the spot where the pounding was becoming duller, and she wondered why she was being tortured so.
Hold on, she said to herself. It will be gone by the second pill.
That night, after Drew forced the second Ativan down her, she stumbled out to the piazza where she crouched beside the rocking chair and took in the fresh air. She could hear Drew check on the children who were all asleep, with Rosetta in the guest bed in Cecilia’s nursery. Then she watched him walk quietly outside and over to the carriage house, where he discreetly rapped on the door.
“Hello there, doctor.” Melanie stepped to the side and closed the door after he slipped in.
The young woman forgot to close the blinds, and Lish could see Drew taking a sip from Melanie’s glass of wine and then a bite of her pasta. The young woman rubbed his back in wide strokes, then massaged his neck. Drew let his head drop so she could get to that spot in the center where he usually had a knot.
“Ahh,” Lish imagined him saying. “That’s the place.” Then Drew glanced over his shoulder, noticed the opened blinds, and turned back to shut them tight.