Free Devotion by Dani Shapiro Page A

kids splashed in the shallow water along the beach, and bigger kids played freeze-tag as the grown-ups cooked and drank.
    I saw a boy—he must have been seven or eight—running around with the others. He looked like Samson, his raggedy mane of blond hair reaching all the way down his skinny back to his waist. This was Connecticut, not Berkeley. The boy stood out.
    One of the women saw me notice him, and filled me in. “He was very sick as a baby,” she said. “He very nearly died. His parents became born-again. They made a promise to God that if hesaved their son, they would never cut his hair, until he was old enough to cut it himself.”
    I watched the boy whooping it up with his friends. His parents, who had been pointed out to me, were a good-looking couple, blond and rangy. The wife leaned back on a beach chair, balancing a gin and tonic on one tanned knee. It would be years before I exchanged a single word with her, but still—born-again Christian that she was, lapsed Jew that I was—I felt like I knew her. I searched the shoreline for Jacob, my toddler. He was crouched down, examining a rock, his back curved, as if in supplication.

27.
    When we were still living in Brooklyn I craved comfort food and cooked it every night. My favorite was a recipe for meat lasagna that included a cup and a half of heavy cream. Also high on the list was spaghetti carbonara: bacon, garlic, eggs, and more heavy cream. I wasn’t concerned about calories or fat content. Only with flavor, texture, satisfaction. We opened bottles of good red wine usually reserved for special occasions. Dipped hunks of crusty French bread into leftover sauce. Cleaned our plates. Ate dessert.
    During the days, I had begun to work on an assignment for the New York Times Magazine . Jacob had spent one night when he was ill under observation in the pediatric step-down intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital—the hospital on the Upper East Side where both he and I had been born. The ward was filled withvery sick kids, most of whom lived there. Two girls were awaiting heart transplants; the older one had been in the hospital for nearly a year. A seven-year-old boy lived along with his stuffed animals inside an isolation tent with tubes coming out of his stomach. The halls and doors of the step-down unit were decorated with the children’s art projects: watercolors of rainbows, stick-figure drawings of families. Some of the rooms were equipped with video monitors so that the children could communicate with their parents at home.
    While Jacob dozed, I had wandered the halls, talking with some of the kids. During the months that followed, I often found myself thinking about them. Eventually—after Jacob was well again—I called an editor at the Times and got an assignment to write a story. I started spending all my days at the hospital. I wore a special volunteer identification tag—though everyone on the unit knew I was there as a reporter—and made my way in and out of the children’s rooms. I sat in on their tutoring sessions, hovered in their doorways as the doctors made their rounds. The two heart-transplant girls had become close. The eleven-year-old took me aside one day. Her long dark hair streamed in waves down the back of her pink bathrobe. Her eyes were huge and brown.
    “It’s hard to live here in the hospital, but do you know what? I feel really bad for my friend,” she told me. “She’s only nine. She hasn’t had much of a childhood yet.”
     
    There in the step-down unit was the invisible veil that separates the healthy from the sick. It was impossible to be in that hospital ward full of children and push thoughts of Jacob from my mind.I remembered the way that very same veil had settled over us, like the sheerest netting, just a year and a half earlier. On that long ride home to Brooklyn from the neurologist’s office, I had looked out the car window at the Brooklyn Bridge, a sight that had always made my heart lift. Now, my