Accidents and Mishaps
SHE’S ALMOST TWO years old, on her back on their double bed while he’s changing her diaper; as he bends over to unpin the diaper, several coins, three pennies and a dime, drop out of his T-shirt pocket. He pushes them to the edge of the bed, doesn’t want her handling them and then putting her hands to her mouth or sucking on one of the coins and maybe swallowing it. He unpins the diaper, lifts her rear, pulls the diaper out and wipes her with it and folds it up and says, “Stay here a minute, Daddy’s going to clean this,” and presses down on her chest a little, a signal between them she seems to understand that she stay lying on her back where she is while he’s gone. He goes into the bathroom — doesn’t know why he has to wash the diaper out immediately but he almost always does, something about the smell and that there’s feces in it and wanting to get the job over with as soon as possible and not have to think about it later — and empties the diaper into the toilet bowl, flushes the toilet, and after the shit’s gone he continues flushing, which he can do with this toilet because it has a flushometer instead of a water tank, while he rinses the diaper out several times. “You okay, dear?” he yells between flushes, and she doesn’t answer, and he yells, “Fanny … you all right? Say you’re okay, Daddy wants to know,” and she says, “Yes,” and he drops the diaper into the diaper pail, washes his hands, and comes back with a washrag rinsed in warm water, cleans and dries her and is about to poof some cornstarch around her anus when he notices the coins aren’t on the bed. “Hey, where’d they go, the coins, the pennies, where?” and she just looks at him, and he says, “Did you knock them off the bed?” and she shakes her head and he quickly looks on the floor and under the bed and lifts her rear up by her ankles and they’re not under her or the towel she’s on and when he sets her down he sees her eyes bulging out at him and he says, “What’s wrong — Fanny — you didn’t swallow them, did you — in your mouth?” and she looks scared and coughs but can’t expel any air and he says, “Oh, no, what do I do?” and still has his hands around her ankles from when he’d lifted her and jerks her up and holds her upside down in the air and slaps her back and continues slapping it while bobbing her up and down, up and down, and she spits some coins out and starts crying, and he says, “Is that all? You still got something in your mouth or throat? Goddamn, I’m saying are there any more coins inside you?” but can’t make out what her expression says because she’s crying and is upside down and he looks at the coins on the bed, two pennies and a dime, and then hears a coin hit the floor on the other side of the bed, and he sets her down on her back, jumps onto the bed on his stomach, head hanging off the side so he can see what coin it is, a penny, and he says, “Thank God!” and stands up and sits her up and says, “You all right, coins all gone, no more pennies in you?” and she’s crying but breathing normally again, and he grabs the two pennies and dime off the bed and sticks them into his pants pocket and says, “Open your mouth,” and nothing else is in it, and he says, “Never stick coins in your mouth, never, nothing but food, you hear?” and she’s still crying, and he says, “It was my fault too, Daddy’s fault, bad Daddy, leaving them there, but never again will I leave around any pennies or small things like that; you can swallow them and die, just so you know,” and she’s crying more hysterically now, and he says, “Oh, gee, I’m sorry,” and picks her up and holds her to his chest and cheek and pats her back and says, “I’ll tell you this another time, when you’re old enough to understand.”
IN THE CAR, family heading to D.C. to go to the East Wing of the National Gallery, he’s driving, wife beside him, Fanny in her kid’s car seat in back, winter, freezing out, but inside it’s warm, radio playing what the announcer said was a song cycle by Ravel, something with the word Exotiques in it, he thinks, and which he wants to hear to the end to find out exactly what it’s called and who’s singing it and on what label so he can look into buying it this week, he likes it so much, when the car in front of his on the ramp leading to New York Avenue, or maybe they’re already on New York, starts to slow, and he applies his brake a few quick times, the tap-tap-tap he knows to do so the brakes won’t lock, and his car suddenly spins and he doesn’t know what to do, turn the steering wheel into the spin, which he’s heard you’re supposed to do but it seems unnatural, or away from it, which his instincts tell him to do, so he just grips the wheel tight and yells, “Hold on, I can’t control it!” and the car spins all the way around and continues spinning a second round to the ramp railing and his wife’s screaming and the baby’s shrieking and the car slams into the railing on his side and stops, now facing cars from behind that are now coming toward him, the nearest one in his lane managing to stop two feet away, maybe one. It was ice he didn’t see, thought it was a shadow, didn’t even see that, just didn’t see anything on the pavement, maybe wasn’t paying attention because he was absorbed in the music, but later when he gets out to see what caused the spin and how bad the car’s damaged he sees that’s it, ice, big patch of it, five feet by five or almost, his door smashed so hard he couldn’t open it and had to climb over his wife to go out her side, and he thinks, Thank God we’re all right and everything was working for us once we started to spin, that the railing was near to stop us, that we didn’t spin the other way into oncoming traffic, that I did just hold on to the wheel tight and not try to correct the spin one way or the other, that the cars behind us were far enough away not to crash into us once we started spinning and then, when we were facing them, that they didn’t spin out of control when they braked, and so on, and says some of this through the window to calm his wife and daughter, but she’s just staring straight ahead, oblivious to everything, it seems, who knows what the hell she’s thinking, and Fanny’s gone from shrieking to crying.
HIS WIFE SAYS, “You know, Fanny’s standing in her crib and talking kind of funny and doing weird things as if she’s high,” and he goes in with her to look, and Fanny’s laughing but at nothing, it seems, and reaches out to pull his nose, and when he pushes her hand away she laughs giddily again, and he says, “Fanny, everything okay? What’s wrong, you feeling all right? I mean, you look all right and seem to be having a good time, much better than you did last night,” and his wife yells, “The aspirins!” and he says, “What?” and she yells, “The bottle!” and he looks where she’s pointing and sees an opened bottle under the crib and gets it and says, “Oh, my goodness, you think she took some? I must’ve left it here last night when I—” and she says, “How many were there last?” and he looks at the bottle and says, “I don’t know, I think a lot more than this,” and she says, “What do we do? She’s probably swallowed a whole bunch of them,” and he calls the pediatrician and her office says, “Take her to Emergency, but in the minute or two before or in the car try to make her throw up,” and gives several ways of doing it, and he tries and his wife tries and Fanny throws up, but nothing like chewed-up or dissolved aspirins comes out, and they get her in the car, in the backseat with his wife, Fanny still crying now because of the throwing up and what they did to make her do it, he driving with the flashers on and horn blaring most of the time so he can go through red lights, and he carries her into the hospital, nurses and aides put her on a gurney and rush her into the emergency room to pump out her stomach, and while they’re waiting outside the room he says things like “How could I have left the bottle there like that? I mean, I know why it happened and how. We had no children’s aspirins or Tylenol and we both thought it too late for me to drive around looking for a store open to buy some, or I thought so more than you though we both knew she needed something to bring down her fever, so I cut a regular aspirin in half, or even a little less than half, and pulverized it, and gave it to her on a spoon with sugar and water … but leaving the bottle there? On her dresser so close to the crib and no safety cap on it? I don’t even know if I screwed it closed, for Christ’s sake. How could I have been so thoughtless, so stupid, so everything?” and she says, “Shut up, shut up already, it’ll be all right, we got here in time. And if she really took too many she would have been sick to her stomach and thrown up long before she got so delirious, I’m sure of that,” and he says, “You don’t know,” and she says, “I know, I don’t know where but from someplace,” and a doctor comes out of the room and he says to him, “How is it, she’ll be all right, right?” and the doctor says, “What I don’t understand is why’d you ever leave aspirins around like that, and not even the children’s kind,” and he says, “I’m sorry, it was my fault, I was the one who suggested she take half an adult aspirin, gave it, and left the bottle there … but how’s she doing?” and the doctor says, “I don’t know if you realize this or not but she can die,” and his wife screams, and he says, “What are you talking about — you mean if we didn’t get here in time or had her vomit most of it up?” and the doctor says, “No, I’m sorry, but I mean now,” and goes back into the room, and he tries to follow and someone in the room stops him and says, “Please, we’re busy, this is crucial, you’re in the way,” and he makes a complete sweep of the room for Fanny but doesn’t see her past the three or four people working on her with their backs to him, and he goes outside and his wife’s in a chair weeping and he sits beside her and holds her hands and says, “If anything terrible happens I’ll die, I’ll die.” About fifteen minutes later the same doctor comes out and says, “Everything will be fine, parents. We got everything out and in fact there wasn’t that much in there that could have done too much damage. Probably the most painful and traumatic thing for her was having the tube stuck down her throat into her belly, but kids bounce back quickly with things like this though her throat will be sore, and you can take her home in an hour”—he looks at his watch—“yes, possibly even less,” and he says, “Thank you, thanks, but honestly, why the heck did you scare us like that, saying she could die?” and the doctor says, “At the time, based on the information you gave us, or the lack of accurate information, I thought it was the truth and I was angry, people like you — smart people, supposedly — leaving toxic substances around as if they were simply last night’s dried jellied toast,” and he says, “But it was an accident, a very stupid one but an accident,” and the doctor says, “Still — but all right, perhaps I went overboard in my reaction,” and walks away.