Free Ten Days by Janet Gilsdorf Page B

the crib. And then he didn’t. She couldn’t tell Jake about that.
    She pulled a piece of Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose. “Then I put him in his crib.”
    She was cold. She kicked off her clogs, folded her legs up into the chair, and gathered her shift around her bare feet.
    “Then what?”
    “Then it was morning.”
    “And?”
    She didn’t know how to describe it. “Eddie didn’t wake me up for his middle-of-the-night feeding.”
    “And then what?”
    Jake was accusing her of something. Of not taking care of Eddie. “This sounds like a criminal interrogation,” she said.
    “No, no. I’m just trying to figure out what happened last night. Did you call Dr. Elliott?”
    “No.”
    “I told you to do that if you were worried about him.”
    He wouldn’t stop. He kept pounding her with questions. “Do you think Eddie was crying in the middle of the night and you didn’t hear him?
    “Did you take a sleeping pill or something?
    “What time did you wake up this morning, anyway?”
    She didn’t answer. Finally he quit asking.
    He rose, set Chris in the seat of his chair, and stepped toward her. At her side, he stooped, laid his hand on her knee, and stroked her hair. “Please tell me about last night. I just need to know what happened.”
    “Well, I don’t know what happened. When I went into his room this morning, he was pale and barely breathing.” She hid her face behind her palms, made Jake disappear.
    “Okay. Enough questions. I think I get the picture.” He returned to his chair and pulled Chris back into his lap.
    The white band of cloth—the bottom of her nightgown—hung beneath the green and blue plaid hem of her shift. She ran her fingers over the knit fabric, folded it, folded it again, and folded it yet again. Then she unfolded it, and slowly refolded it once more.
    Eddie was still in the treatment area. What was taking so long? He seemed so far away and she was stuck in the waiting room, the place where people idly lingered. Some paced from wall to wall, as Jake had done in ten-minute cycles. Some paged through dog-eared magazines. Others just sat. For her, time was strings of empty seconds tied together like foam buoys along an endless rope—dangling, twirling, bobbing, swaying, but going nowhere.
    Waiting. Waiting. Waiting until she could see Eddie again, could learn what was wrong with him. Was he still alive? The possibility of good news tugged against the probability of bad news; the unknown made her head ache. He’ll be just fine, she told herself. He’s going to die, she told herself a minute later. She ran her fingers through her hair, combing it back away from her face. She wanted the suspense to end. And yet, at the end of the waiting, could she deal with what came next?
    She wanted to make the time go faster. She didn’t want to read. Didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to answer Jake’s probing questions. Didn’t want a cup of the stale coffee from the urn across the room. She couldn’t sleep while sitting up in the chair, couldn’t consider sleeping while Eddie was trapped in the other room. What were they doing to him, anyway? She shifted her weight to her right hip. What was taking so very long? Then she shifted her weight back to the left.
    It seemed as if she spent her life waiting for something to happen: She had waited for her wedding, waited for Jake to finish medical school, for Chris to be born, for Eddie to be born. On a more mundane, day-to-day scale, she waited for Jake to come home in the evenings, for Chris’s birthday, for the trip up north next time Jake had a full weekend off, for the blue linen jacket with the bone buttons she had ordered from the Talbots’ catalog, for the next semester of new students who spoke three or four or six different languages but not English.
    Now, she was waiting to hold Eddie in her arms, to rub her hands against his skin. He’d be scared without her, back in that room, would know something was missing—would