Dept. Of Speculation

18

My daughter breaks both her wrists jumping off of a swing. Her friend, who is five, told her to jump off it. I promise nothing will happen, she said. But why did she promise that? she wails later at the hospital.

We have been there once before, when she stuck a plastic jewel up her nose by mistake. I tried to get it out with tweezers while my husband talked me through it on the phone, but it just went farther in. He took a cab from the city to meet us there. On the way to the hospital, she sobbed and sobbed. “Has anyone ever done this before? Has any kid ever done something like this before? Ever?” At the emergency room, we perched ridiculously on the edge of our seats, waiting for our name to be called. Hours passed. Jewel up nose = lowest mark on the triage scale.

Later my husband said, “I should have remembered this. You are only supposed to do that if you can remain very calm. Were you very calm?”

This time she is sobbing so hysterically that they can’t get the X-ray for her wrists. The technician does my left hand to show her what it is. He holds the film up to the light and we all look at it. Here is the bone, shot through with emptiness, the solid ring, the haze of flesh. I think of a boy I met once on a bus who told me he was a Christian Scientist. He said they believed in idealism, which means that only the soul is real. He said once he fell off a jungle gym at school and they thought he had broken his foot, but in truth he had not broken any bones and had no pain as there were no such things as bones and pain, but only mind that could feel nothing. I remember that I wanted to be a Christian Scientist then. But in time this passed.

Afterwards, incredibly, they give her morphine. She begins to talk dreamily about doughnuts. How she will get a dozen as a reward for this and take one bite out of each of them.

We take our daughter to the doctor’s office to get the casts. After he puts them on, he warns her not to drop anything in them. “If you do, you will have to come back and have them removed, then put on again under anesthesia,” he says. We leave the office.

Something fell into my cast.

What?

I don’t know.

But you’re sure something did?

No, maybe. Maybe I just thought it.

You just thought it?

No, I felt it.

You felt it?

Maybe.

What was it?

I don’t know. Something.

What?

Nothing, I think. Maybe something.

What?

Nothing. No, something.

We wash her hair in a bucket, try to scratch her wrists with a chopstick. It is summer and she cries because she wants to swim.

What Wittgenstein said: What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside of this body.

One night we let her sleep in our room because the air conditioner is better. We all pile into the big bed. There is a musty animal smell to her casts now. She brings in the night-light that makes fake stars and places it on the bedside table. Soon everyone is asleep but me. I lie in our bed and listen to the hum of the air conditioner and the soft sound of their breathing. Amazing. Out of dark waters, this.