You're all safe here in my house, Step thought silently, and yet I really can't keep you safe at all, can I?
Because there's that new one, not six hours old yet, and his life is in danger and I'm not even there because I'm completely useless. And here you are, asleep, safe in your beds, only something's going on inside your head, Stevie, and I can't reach in and find out what's happening and make it get better. I can plug up one hole and sweep the crickets out, but then the june bugs get in somewhere else, and then the gnats. Even when you have a perfect child, nothing stays perfect. Something always gets in. The good things are always, always at risk.
In the bedroom, undressed and ready for bed, he did what he hadn't done in years, though DeAnne did it every night. He knelt down beside the bed, the way he had done on his mission, the way he had done as a child.
He poured out his heart and asked for mercy for his new baby. Let him live. Let him have a good life. If it's within the power of my priesthood to heal him, then let me heal him when I give him a blessing tomorrow. I don't want to lose him. I want all my children, this one as much as any of the others, and all the children yet unborn that you might have for us. Don't take him away from us. Whatever he needs, we'll give it, if we have it to give.
Later, lying in bed, it occurred to him that he might have been praying for the Lord to grant him and DeAnne sixty years of caring for an invalid child. That perhaps what was wrong with Zap was so severe that it would be cruel to keep him here if the Lord was willing to take him home. So he re-entered the prayer that he thought he had closed, and added the phrase that he had deliberately left out when he was on his knees: Thy will be done.
DeAnne had recovered enough to go home, but she didn't want to. "I've never left the hospital without my baby," she said.
"You'll see him every day," said Dr. Keese. "And so will Step. And so will your mother. But you're not on insurance, I understand, and this is going to eat up your savings. You need whatever money you have to take care of Jeremy."
She said nothing.
"Good," he said. "They'll have you ready to go at noon."
To fill the empty time, she went back to the book. She had forgotten to pack it, and yet it had turned out to be the only thing that could keep her mind off Jeremy. She could read about the family in the book and say, We may have problems, but at least we'll never be like them.
No, it was more than that. The book kept speaking to her, characters kept saying things that echoed in her heart. Like when the nice son in the story said something about how life is like a cliff that's eroding away and you spend your whole life just shoring it up. It was the nightmare of her life, the one that lived always at the back of her mind, and he had named it. Only it wasn't him, of course. It was the author. Tyler wrote those words for me, she thought, so I'd know that I wasn't alone going through these fearful days.
This last morning in the hospital, she reached the passage where the mother in the book speaks of her "three lovely pregnancies" and how she counted down the months, waiting for something perfect to happen. "It seemed I was full of light," the mother said. "It was light and plans that filled me." DeAnne let the book fall onto the blanket and turned her face into the pillow and wept.
She must have cried herself to sleep, because when she next opened her eyes, Step was sitting there, leaning forward on the chair beside the bed, his chin resting on his hands, his elbows on his knees. He was looking at nothing, staring at the wall.
"Hello," said DeAnne.
"Hi, Fish Lady, " said Step. At once the somberness left him, and if she hadn't had that moment of watching him unawares, she would never have known that he was anything but bright and confident. "I understand the doctor wants to kick you out and send you home. And I've got to tell you that I hope you come."
"I will," she said. "But please not yet."
"DeAnne, you'll be up here at least twice a day to nurse him. I'll drive you here, or your mother will. But in between those times, you need to be back home."
She reached out for his hand. "Step, I don't want to leave without the baby."
"He's doing better all the time," said Step. "And we couldn't very well give him all these tests at home."
"I don't like what they're doing to him here," said DeAnne. "I don't like the way he's drugged all the time."
"I don't like it either," said Step. "But we're not doctors."
"They don't know everything," she said.
"But they know something," said Step. "And sleeping in a hospital bed isn't going to make you or me any wiser about what we ought to do. Please-you've spent too much time here alone."
"I hardly have any time alone," said DeAnne. "I think every sister in the Steuben 1 st Ward has been up here twice."
"At church this morning the bishop asked everybody to fast and pray for Zap next Sunday. The whole ward."
It filled DeAnne with emotion to hear that. They really weren't alone. And maybe with so many people fasting and praying, God would hear.
Or maybe not. Maybe it would be like in the book. Maybe things would always be just a little bit out of control, just out of reach.
Step reached down onto the floor. "You dropped your book," he said.
"I don't want to read it anymore," she said.
"Oh? I thought you liked it. Yesterday you even read me a passage from it."
"She knows too much," said DeAnne. "It hurts too much."
"Fine, I'll put it up on the shelf here-"
"No," she said. "No, give it to me."
"So you are going to read it."
"No," she said. "I'm just going to hold it. Is that all right?"
He looked at her strangely.
"I'm not going crazy, Step. It just ... it's an anchor. It's another woman telling me she knows about things going wrong, and I just need to hold the book, OK? I mean at least it's not a Barbie doll or something."
"Fine," said Step. "I just wondered if this is going to become an icon to you. Like scripture. The fifth standard work?"
"Don't make fun," she said. "This is very hard for me, you know. I've always prided myself on making perfect babies. Now all I've got left that I make perfectly is my pie crusts."
"I wasn't making fun," he said, as he reached down and embraced her awkwardly "And he is a perfect baby DeAnne."
"You can't just deny it and make it go away," said DeAnne.
"He has the perfect body for the life God intends him to live. For the life he intends us to live."
God's plan. Nothing we can do about it. Might as well stop praying or trying or anything.
No, he doesn't really believe that, she realized. Because when we've talked about this sort of thing before, it was me who argued that God must plan all our lives or it wouldn't be fair, and he's the one who said, God doesn't have a plan for our lives, he just put us all into a world where no matter what our life is like, we can still discover how good and strong we are, or how weak we are, or how evil or cowardly. He's saying this about God's plan to make me feel better.
"I keep thinking," she said, "that we shouldn't have made love so soon after I used the spermicide the last time."
He shook his head. "It wasn't all that soon, DeAnne."
"You're supposed to wait longer. A week."
"DeAnne, the doctors don't even know what the problem is, let alone what caused it."
"And Bendectin-all these stories about Bendectin and birth defects--"
"In the National Enquirer, DeAnne, not in Scientific American or the Journal of the AMA."
"Step, I don't want to come home without my baby."
"But you will come home without him, DeAnne, because you know that's what's best for him, and best for you. And you always do what you know is right. That's who you are."
She thought about that for a while. "OK," she said. "Call for the nurse."
Later that afternoon, Step dropped by the pharmacy to pick up DeAnne's pain medication. While he was waiting for the pharma cist, he wandered over to the magazines. A woman was standing there, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that she glanced at him and stepped away. He scanned the covers of the newsmagazines, and then, out of sheer boredom, the professional wrestling fan magazines.