This child, he says, and he points at her name, a purple impression on the top of a form, is very, very sick.
He waits. Breathes in and breathes out.
This child is seriously ill and she needs to be admitted to this hospital right away. She will be admitted into the paediatric intensive care unit. That is where she needs to be, sir. Not going home with you. We know what she needs. You, sir, you are the person who does not fully understand the situation.
We glare at each other. I sway in my own exhausted stench. Close my eyes for one second. I know what I look like.
Or I can call child services if you prefer, he says. We can start a file.
DDT was supposed to be the miracle cure. The end of Typhus and Malaria. Cheap and available everywhere. They sprayed it directly onto people’s heads, into their armpits. Clothes fumigated. Whole houses. Beds, and pillows, and sheets. Utensils, cookware. Entire populations disinfected. They called it the pesticide that saved Europe. Guy got a Nobel Prize for inventing it. Total extermination. The side effects go unnoticed until it is too late. Already deep in the food chain. A half-life of 33 years in nature. Toxicity building up through each stage, passed from organism to organism. Ground water, rivers and lakes. Grains. Cash crops. Poultry and Fish and Reptiles. Endangered Species. Infected crocodiles and alligators, Bald Eagles and Peregrine Falcons. They lay eggs with thin, almost transparent shells. No protection. Causes infertility in humans. Breast cancer. Miscarriages. Low birth weight. Developmental delays. Numbers too high to count. But lice adapt. They go on. Become resistant. Completely unaffected by DDT now. Not like us. Trace amounts of it in every single person’s blood.
Chronic kidney disease. Dangerously low filtration rate. Advanced infection. A congenital abnormality.
They strap the baby down. Immobilize her arm on a gauze-covered splint. A resident tries to find the vein for an infant IV. The nurse practitioner watches as the resident jabs and jabs again.
I can’t find it, she says.
We are all watching.
It’s always hard with small kids and babies. Just relax and try again. You’ll get the hang of it eventually.
Two more misses. The resident bites the tip of her tongue. Another failed attempt.
We hold the baby’s other hand. Pet her head. Everything will be okay. Her face contorts. She turns to look at us. Total confusion in her eyes. Betrayal. Why do you do this to me?
The nurse finally says, okay give it here. Then she misses three more times before something happens. She releases the tape and the medicine flows out of its plastic bag.
Make sure she doesn’t pull that out.
She looks at me and I shake my head. They leave.
ULTRASOUNDS AND X-RAYS. Inject a dye into her bladder. Watch her pee on the monitor, the black colour running backwards, up through the malformed valve, snaking along the wrong path back to the shrunken kidney.
You see that? The technician says.
That is a high grade reflux with already extensive scarring. Lucky we caught it when we did. He pushes buttons. Screen captures for her file.
We try to take it all in. Get through to the essential information. Attempts at questions.
So what are we talking about here? I say. Is she going to be okay? How bad is it? We’re not in transplant territory, are we?
She jumps in before he can say anything.
I could give her my kidney, right? One of us. We would have to be a good match. Then she could have a normal life. Be able to run around. I want her to be able to run around. Not sick all the time. We got it early enough, right? You can fix it. She’s going to be fine.
I’m sorry, he says. I don’t know anything. Just run the machine. The doctors interpret the results.
He checks his watch.
Have to wait and see. Could be severe complications or a simple procedure to fix the valve. Function might come right back to normal. You can’t tell anything in the beginning. It doesn’t look good now, but it all depends on how she responds. Could go any number of ways.
No sign of them for two weeks, but we can’t be sure.
It’s done, I say. They’re gone. We made it.
Better be right this time, she says. Can’t take much more.
My brain still teeming. The itch. It doesn’t require proof or evidence. Thought is enough. You do it to yourself. Lice. Imagine them crawling on your head. Claws touching skin. They pass over us, across this family.
I wander the quiet house at night. Think I sense them everywhere, penetrating cushions and clothes and blankets. No place too intimate. Asleep in our bed. Her head against the pillowcase, hair fanned out. The girl with the Clash T-shirt. We get to choose each other, but kids have no say about the nature of their own lives. Two girls and a boy. Dead to the world. Separate beds. Each clutching a stuffed animal. What are we to these people? Genetics. A story they make up about themselves.
Can’t sleep without the stuffies. Essential part of the night time ritual. Sacred objects made in a Bangladesh factory. The soft places where children dump their love for the first few years. Think of the crying and the frantic searches. What happens to us if one of these toys gets lost or left behind at the grocery store.
But the lice creep in. Even here. Wait it out for a chance to come back. I take the battered elephant and the patched monkey and the frayed horse. Pry them out of the kids’ arms without waking anybody up. Bring them downstairs to the basement. Toss everybody into the deep freezer for the night. They sleep on a value pack slab of frozen pork chops. The only treatment guaranteed to kill.
This is what I have learned from Hans Zinsser. Lice need a regular temperature. Can’t survive extreme shifts. Sensitive to the smallest change in the host. They can tell when it is time to move on. The writing on the wall. A bad fever sometimes enough. Lice know what you don’t. Leave a body voluntarily the second it starts to cool. People who have lived through cataclysms — veterans from the war, victims of earthquakes, those who escaped the camps — they will tell you. Lice, like a cloud, like ink, seeping from the head and the groin of a corpse. Confirmation. They register it first, the cold taste, the stillness. Bodies on the ground, dropped in the exercise yard, leaking their insects.
We take it in shifts. Not smart to burn out two people at the same time. The room has one chair that can fold out into a very narrow single bed. One sits up with the baby, while the other goes home and tries to sleep. My turn, then your turn. Rotation. We pass in the hall sometimes. Exchange Tupperware meals. Concerned families waiting in different houses. The news. What the doctor said this time. Nothing happened today. She had a good night.
Medication. The baby wakes up, starts to come back to herself. Little by little. Gurgling and happy sometimes, but not out of the woods. She reaches out through the metal bars of the hospital crib. Holds my finger.
They have her hooked up to a machine. Tubes and wires. A long strip of paper, like a sales slip, scrolling out. Something inside draws a continuous erratic line over the narrow graph paper. It goes up and down. Sometimes rests for a long plateau. The nurses consult it every time they come in the room. We have no idea what it means. When we ask, they say: more data for the chart. There are numbers, too. Three of them. Two for blood pressure, we think, and then something else. A single flashing light, but no sound. The bulb is purple. Blinks on and off. Fluctuates. A silent rhythm, picking up and coming back down. Her heart, most likely, but it seems too slow sometimes.
I come to relieve her. 10:30 at night. Freezing outside. Other things will happen, but we will never live clearer than this. I take off my boots. She puts hers on. Car outside waiting in temporary parking. Meter running. The heater will stay warm if we switch fast enough.