Free An Uncomplicated Life by Paul Daugherty Page A

summoned. She wasn’t polite about it. She was also correct. Medicines had been mixed up. A few days later, Jillian was crying uncontrollably in the middle of the day. Crying was bad, if only because it produced mucus in the nose, which drained to Jillian’s lungs.
    “She’s crying because she’s hungry. I’ll feed her,” Kerry said.
    “Not now,” she was told. “We don’t want any liquid in her throat when she’s crying.”
    “She’s crying because she’s hungry,” Kerry insisted. “I know my child.”
    Again, no.
    “Why won’t you listen to me?” Kerry yelled, a week of frustration and worry purged in one primal scream.
    They listened. Kerry fed Jillian, and Jillian stopped crying.
    Still, Jillian was losing weight, and her lungs were not clearing. She’d been in the hospital for a week. We needed something good to happen, and we needed it fast. “I’m starting to get scared” was what I told Kerry. “It’s beyond the normal worry.”
    We were beyond tired. We wore our fatigue like a second skin. It defined us, it was almost a painkiller. By Day 8, we were numb. The hospital ceased being a place of hope. It was a repository for dirges, featuring precise, beeping-monitor solos. We hadn’t given up on hope, but we really wanted to see some.
    Then suddenly the monitor went off, and the platoon of nurses marched in. I scanned their faces. Nothing. Then one nurse left quickly. Seconds later, two doctors came in.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked. Kerry and I were told to step back.
    We backed up—away from the doctors and the nurses and the crib holding our daughter. Seven people were surrounding the crib. I thought Jillian was going to die. I didn’t blame the doctors, the hospital, Kerry or myself then. I didn’t blame anyone. I was all out of blame.
    Instead, I closed my eyes and prayed this:
    “God, do not bring Jillian this far, only to let her leave. You blessed us with her. Let her life be a blessing. She is here for a reason. Her life is not an accident. Do not take her before we find out what that reason is.”
    Our tight world turned inward another notch: Crib, doctors, Jillian. There was nothing else on the planet, absolutely nothing.
    A nurse moved away from the crowd around the crib and left the room. She returned with yet another long needle at the end of yet another long tube. For this latest attempt at finding a suitable vein, the nurses shaved Jillian’s head. Kerry, ever the calm portion of this marital unit, approached the crib, sidled between the nurses and collected Jillian’s freshly shorn locks. Daughter on the brink, mother collecting hair.
    “First haircut,” she explained later. “I had to save her hair. The first haircut is the first haircut, no matter where you have it.”
    Another nurse removed the needle from its sterile packaging, and Kerry knew she was needed there to hold Jillian down before the nurse jammed the needle into the top of my daughter’s head. I had to leave the room.
    AND THEN THE DAMNEDEST thing happened.
    It was odd, it was lucky. It was Jillian being Jillian at the most perfect time, when nothing else would do.
    At the feel of the needle, Jillian started screaming down to the tip of her toes. She screamed at the pain of it all and maybe the injustice, too. Jillian might have lacked the smarts to understand what was happening, and the capacity to wonder why it was happening to her. But she knew she was hurting; and she knew she was angry and had had enough. She was done with all of it. She was born on the day of the San Francisco earthquake, and now she was moving her own personal fault line. She was shaking her metaphorical fist.
    What happened next is easily described but not easily explained. You could say the force of Jillian’s protest shook heaven and earth and, not coincidentally, a great gob of the junk currently fouling her lungs. You could say that Jillian literally screamed the snot out of herself.
    It was Jillian saying, “I’m sick