"Neuro?" asked Step.
"Neurosurgeon," she explained.
"Yeah, I know what a neuro is. I just wondered what it meant that he was calling one."
"I would guess," said Dr. Vender, "that it means he's run into something he hasn't seen before, or else he wants a corroborating opinion."
"Is the baby in danger of dying?"
"As far as I can see," said Dr. Vender, "no."
That was when Dr. Keese came bustling out into the hall. "Dr. Vender!" he called.
"This is Mr. Fletcher," said Dr. Vender.
Dr. Keese held out his hand, and Step shook it. "Nice to see you, I met you when I poked my head into the labor room, remember?"
Step shook his head. "Must have been before I got there."
"No, you were there," said Dr. Keese. "But I think you only had eyes for DeAnne. Sorry I couldn't be in there, but I can assure you that Dr. Vender did everything I would have done, and probably better."
How nice, thought Step. Doctors covering each other against a lawsuit.
"Mr. Fletcher," said Dr. Keese. "Dr. Torwaldson and I and Dr. Vender all agree that we need to stop the seizure activity, and for that we're giving your baby phenobarbital. We've given a fairly massive dose, for his body weight, but we've got to stop the seizures. Once we've got that under control, we'll step the dosage down to the minimum for maintenance. He's going into intensive care now, but I truly don't think he's in any danger of losing his life. So I urge you to go home. It's after midnight and you'll want to be up here in the morning. We'll know more then, and DeAnne will want to see you. All right?"
What choice did he have? He waited until he knew what room DeAnne was assigned to and where to find Zap the next morning, and then he went out to the car. He was just getting into the Datsun when he realized that there was no reason to leave the good car at the hospital. DeAnne wasn't going anywhere for a while. The rusty old two-door could keep its vigil here tonight. As he drove home, he couldn't stop thinking: My baby was born having a seizure and the doctors have never seen it before. Something's wrong with my youngest child, and I can't do anything but pray, and I can't think of a single reason why God should exclude the Stephen Fletcher family from the normal vicissitudes of life and so I don't think my prayers are going to be answered. Not my real prayer, anyway. The "thy will be done" part will certainly be answered, but the part about "Make this all go away so that nothing is wrong, so that the doctors say I can't understand it, there was a seizure last night but now there's not a trace of a problem, and he'll definitely be brilliant and healthy and live to a hundred and four"-I don't think God's going to adjust his plan for the universe to make room for accommodating that particular prayer.
When he got home, DeAnne's mother, Vette, met him at the door. "Oh," he said. "I hoped you'd be asleep."
"And I hoped you'd call from the hospital," she said.
He had forgotten to call. "There were problems. They sent me home. I decided to call from here."
"Problems?" She looked stricken.
"DeAnne is fine. But the baby seems to have something wrong and they don't know what it is. He was trembling. They called it a seizure. Well, actually, they called it 'seizure activity.' But they said it didn't look life threatening."
"Oh, I hate this," said Vette. "I hate not knowing."
"You and me both," said Step. "I guess I ought to call everybody now. It's only eleven P.m. in Utah, right?"
"Also Mary Anne Lowe said to tell you to call her no matter how late."
"OK," said Step. "I'll call her first."
He went into the kitchen and suddenly found himself sur rounded by tiny whining insects. He brushed his hands around his head but they wouldn't go away.
"Oh, aren't those gnats awful?" asked Vette. "I found a can of Raid and I've been spraying them, but new swarms just keep turning up. Do you get them all the time?"
"Never," said Step. "Where's the Raid?" The gnats all seemed to want to zoom right into his ear. "This is all I needed."
"I think they're coming from the laundry room," said Vette. "I haven't found any in the kids' rooms yet."
"We have this weird bug thing," said Step. He went into the laundry room and started looking around for where the gnats might be getting in through. As he looked, he told Vette about the crickets and the June bugs.
"We don't have any regular bug problem, I guess," he said. "It just comes in waves. Every couple of months or so some group of insects decide that our house is ready to go condo."
He found that the dryer hose had come partly away from the outdoor vent. He tried to push it tight, but the pressure jostled it and it fell completely away. Suddenly another swarm of gnats arose. Only they didn't come from the vent-they came from the hose. As if they had been spawned somewhere inside the dryer.
"Here, give me the Raid," he said.
Vette gave it to him, and he first sprayed the swarm that was orbiting his head. Then he sprayed up into the dryer hose and then out through the vent and when he thought he had dosed them enough, he slipped the hose back over the vent and then got a screwdriver from the laundry room cupboard and tightened the collar over the hose so it wouldn't slip away again.
"What are we doing in this house?" he said, when he got back into the kitchen.
"Getting by," said Vette. "Doing what you must for your family."
"We should never have left Vigor."
"Step, you know that I think you never should have left Utah! But you are not having problems with little Jeremy because you moved to North Carolina."
"How do you know? Maybe the doctor did something wrong. In Salt Lake they have a billion babies every year, they've seen everything. Out here there just aren't as many babies and so they're learning on Zap."
Vette winced. "Do you really call him Zap?"
"Well, the first thing Robbie said when he heard the name Jeremy was 'Germy, Germy Germy' so maybe Zaps the lesser of two evils."
"Step, things go wrong sometimes no matter where you live, and sometimes things go right, and you know something? Most things that happen aren't anybody's fault at all, so it's really kind of vain of you to think that your moving to North Carolina caused your newborn baby to have a seizure. You didn't do a single thing to cause it. For all you know whatever problem he has was determined at the moment of conception."
"Yeah, well, I was there for that, too." Then he was appalled that he had said such a thing. He and DeAnne's parents got along really well, but still, you don't talk about the conception of your children to your wife's mother.
"Better call people," said Vette. "I'll keep watching for the gna ts."
Step called Mary Anne first. It took longer than such calls usually did, because he mentioned that the baby was in intensive care and then he had to answer, "We don't know yet" to about fifty questions. It went that way with every call, but he couldn't very well not tell them the baby was having trouble, or when they found out they'd be deeply hurt. Besides, if prayer was going to be of any help in this situation, he wanted all the people praying that he could find.
He didn't finish the calls until nearly three. He had already sent Sylvette to bed, persuading her to go by pointing out that she'd be needed to take care of the kids in the morning while he went up to the hospital, and then she'd take her shift at the hospital while he stayed home with the kids-she'd need her sleep.
"So will you," Vette retorted.
"Yeah, but 1 can take a nap while I'm driving back and forth to the hospital."
She laughed and let him pull out the sofa bed, which DeAnne had already made up for her mother that morning. Then he moved his phone operations into the bedroom. When he finished the calls and took his last patrol through the house, she was asleep.
He looked in on each of the kids. Betsy, cuddled up to the stuffed Snoopy that- for reasons passing understanding-she had named Wilbur. Robbie, holding his real-fur stuffed bunny, which had been named Mammalee since his infancy. And Stevie, holding on to nothing.