Derailed

SEVENTEEN

Daddy . . .”

The word you almost never tire of hearing during the day, becoming the word you dread waking to in the middle of the night. It came like a fire alarm in a pitch-black movie theater, and right in the middle of the film, the current feature a kind of domestic drama involving me and Deanna and a woman with green eyes.

“Daddy!”

I heard it again, and this time I woke up for good and nearly fell off the bed.

Memories of other nights like this clamored for my undivided attention even as I tried to deflect them, to concentrate on the physical act of standing up and running barefoot across a dark and frigid hall.

To Anna’s room.

I flipped on the lights even as I entered it — one hand pressed against the switch, the other already reaching out for her. Even with my eyes squinting from the sudden brightness, I could see that Anna looked exceptionally and spookily weird. She was, I was fairly certain, smack in the middle of hypoglycemic shock.

Her eyes were rolled back, to that part of her brain that was reeling from lack of sugar, her body caught in one unending stutter. When I put my arms around her, it was like holding on to a frightened puppy, all shake and quiver. Only if Anna was frightened, she was incapable of telling me.

When I shouted at her, she refused to shout back. When I shook her head and whispered into her ear, when I slapped her gently — no response.

I’d been told what to do when this happened. I’d been prepped and trained and reminded and warned. I just couldn’t remember a word of it.

I knew there was a syringe sitting in a fire-engine-red plastic case. I thought the case was downstairs in a kitchen cabinet. I believed that the case needed to be opened and the syringe filled with a brown powder that was also in the case. And water — some amount of water was to be added.

These things were flying through my mind like a dyslexic sentence I couldn’t quite grasp. I caught the general drift, though, which was horrifying and merciless.

My daughter was dying.

Suddenly Deanna was right behind me.

“The shot,” I said to her, or possibly yelled.

But she already had it in her hand. I felt a momentary surge of pure love for her, this woman I’d married and created Anna with, even in the midst of terror feeling like falling to my knees and hugging her. She opened the case for me, calmly plucked out the syringe, and studied the bold-lettered directions on the way into Anna’s bathroom. I cradled Anna in my lap, whispering that it would be okay, Anna, yes, it would, you'll be fine, Anna, yes, my darling, as I heard the water running in there. Then Deanna was back out, shaking the syringe in her hand.

“Deep,” Deanna said, handing the shot to me. “Past the fat into the muscle.”

I’d dreaded this moment—had imagined over and over what it’d be like. When they’d first trained me on the fine art of insulin giving, pricking thin quarter-inch needles just into the fatty tissue on hip, arm, and buttock—they’d also mentioned this. That eventually there would come a moment when I’d probably have to use it. Not every parent had to, but given that Anna had an especially virulent case and given that Anna had gotten it so young . . . This needle not a quarter inch long, more like four inches, and thick enough to make you turn your eyes away. Because it had to get its pure sugar mix into the brain cells fast enough to keep them from starving.

This syringe was in my hand now, only my hand was quivering as much as Anna was, because it was like stabbing her, even if it was with the gift of life. I placed it by her upper arm, but since we both were shaking, I was afraid to push it in, afraid I’d miss and blunt the needle, waste the liquid.

“Here — ” Deanna took the needle from me.

She put it against Anna’s hip, hand steady, and stuck it all the way in. Then she slowly pushed the plunger down till all the brown liquid was gone.

It was almost instantaneous.

One minute my daughter was lost. Then suddenly her eyes rolled back into focus, and her body gently quieted and settled back onto the bed.

And she cried.

Anna cried, worse even than the morning she was diagnosed and we told her more or less what was in store for her. Worse than that.

“Daddy . . . oh Daddy . . . oh Daddy . . .”

So I cried, too.

I took her to the hospital — the children’s wing of Long Island Jewish, just to be on the safe side. I hadn’t been back since those first excruciating weeks, and the very smell of the place was enough to take me back to the time when I’d paced the halls at four in the morning, knowing that the best part of my life was over. Anna felt it, too; she’d managed to calm down on the twenty-minute ride to the hospital, but the moment we entered the waiting room, she’d shrunk back into my body and hid there, so that I nearly had to carry her inside.

It was 2:00A .M.; we were given an Indian intern who seemed overworked and distracted. Deanna had been calling Anna’s doctor when we’d left the house.

“What happened, please?”

“She was hypoglycemic,” I said. “She had an episode.” Anna was sitting on the examining table, virtually slumped against me.

“You administered the shot?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-huh . . .” He was examining her even as we spoke, doing all the things doctors do — heart, pulse, eyes, ears — so maybe he was competent after all. “We’d better take her blood sugar, no?”

I wondered if he was asking me for my medical opinion or simply being rhetorical.

“We took it before we came. One forty-three. I don’t know what it was before she . . .” I was going to say passed out, fainted, became unconscious but felt reticent to say it in front of Anna. I noticed a bruise had already formed where Deanna had given her the shot and thought that other parents who bruise their children are brought up on charges and locked away.

“One forty-three, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’ll see. . . .”

He asked for Anna’s hand, but Anna had no intention of giving it. “No,” she said, and meant it.

“Come on, Anna, the doctor has to take your blood sugar to make sure everything’s okay. You do this four times a day — it’s no big deal.”

But of course it was a big deal. Because she did it four times a day and now they were asking her to do it a fifth — actually sixth, since I’d taken it before we came here. It was a big deal because she was back in the hospital where she’d first been told she wasn’t like everyone else, that her body had this terrible deficiency that could kill her. It might not be a big deal to the doctor, or even to me, but it was to her.

Still. She was sitting in LIJ at two in the morning because she’d almost died, and now the doctor needed a blood sample. “Come on, Anna, be a big girl, okay?” remembering back to those first days at home when I’d have to beg her to give me her arm, sometimes having to take it from her, brute force preceding brute pain, each time convinced I was committing the worst kind of assault.

“I’ll do it myself, ” Anna said.

The doctor was losing patience now; so many patients and so little time. “Look, miss, we have to — ”

“She said she’ll do it herself,” I said, remembering something else about back then. How after her diagnosis, Anna had spent two weeks here learning how to deal with this thing called diabetes, with hospital protocol demanding that all patients administer one insulin shot to themselves before they could be discharged. And Anna, who feared needles the way other people fear snakes, or spiders, or dark cellars, had made me promise that she wouldn’t have to do that. And I’d said, I promise. And on the day she was due to be discharged, the nurse had come in and asked Anna to do it—to fill up the shot with two kinds of insulin and inject it herself into her already bruised arm. And at first both parents, Deanna and me, had said nothing, letting the nurse gently and then not so gently cajole the patient into doing what she was so clearly terrified of. And finally, with the silence from her only allies nearly deafening, Anna had looked over at me with pure naked pleading. And even though I knew that it probably was a good thing for Anna to give herself a shot, I still told the nurse, No. She doesn’t have to do that. I’d made a promise to her and I kept it. Her body might have betrayed her, but her father hadn’t. It was the kind of moment you feel like bronzing — the one you take out of the cabinet and hold up to the light later on, when you’ve betrayed everything else.

“She’ll do it herself,” I repeated.

“Okay,” the Indian said. “Well then, please let her do it already.”

I gave her the lancet pen and watched as Anna shakily brought it up to her middle finger and snapped the top, a bright bubble of blood already forming as she took the pen away. I offered to hold the blood meter for her, but she took it from me and managed it herself — little Anna not so little anymore, a fighter if there ever was one.

Her blood sugar was fine — 122.

I told the intern that my daughter’s endocrinologist, Dr. Baron, would be coming by any minute.

But Dr. Baron wasn’t coming by. The intern’s beeper sent him scurrying out of the ER, and when he came back, he said: “Dr. Baron says she can go home.”

“He’s not coming?”

“No need. I told him her numbers. He said she can go home.”

“I thought he would come to see her.”

The intern shrugged. Doctors, he was saying, what are you going to do?

I said, “That’s great.”

“Could I please have a word with you?” he said.

“Sure.” I followed the intern to the other side of the ward, where a Chinese man was sitting in a chair, looking down at his bloody hand.

“How is her sit, please?”

“Herwhat? ”

“Her sit.”

Her sight. “Okay,” I said. “She uses glasses for reading. She’s supposed to, anyway,” thinking that it had been a while since I’d actually seen them on her. “Why?”

He shrugged. “There is some damage there. It’s no worse?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Feeling that familiar ache in the pit of my stomach again, as if something were lodged in there that even Long Island Jewish Hospital couldn’t surgically remove.

“Okay,” the intern said, and gave me a pat on the shoulder. Overworked, a little impatient, maybe, but friendly after all.

“Is there something I should be telling Dr. — ”

“No, no.” The intern shook his head. “Just checking.”

After I signed a few papers and handed over my new credit card, we were told we could leave.

Outside in the quiet winter air, our breath merged on the way to the car, one vaporous cloud that followed us all across the parking lot. It should be a black cloud, I thought — wasn’t that the metaphor for ill luck?

“Hey, kiddo,” I said, “you seeing okay these days?”

“No, Dad, I’m blind.”

Well, her blood sugars might be running wild, but her sarcasm was intact and healthy.

“I was just wondering if you noticed anything, that’s all. With your eyes.”

“I’m fine.”

But on the ride home, Anna snuggled against me, the way she used to when she was small and needed to nap.

“Remember that story, Dad?” she asked me after several blocks.

“What story?”

“The one you used to tell me when I was little. You made it up. About the bee.”

“Yes.” A story I’d put together on the spot, after Anna had been stung and I’d told her the bad bee was dead to make her feel better. Only it hadn’t made her feel better; she was horrified that bees die when they sting, even the bee who’d stung her.

“Tell it,” Anna said.

“I don’t remember it,” I lied. “What about the one about the horses? You know, the old man who goes looking for adventure?”

“No,” she said. “I want the bee story.”

“Gee, Anna, I don’t even remember how it starts.”

But she did. “There was a little bee,” she began. “Who wondered why he had a stinger.”

“Oh yeah. That’s right.”

“Tell it.”

Why that story, Anna?

“He wondered why he had a stinger,” I said.

“Because . . . ,” Anna said impatiently.

“Because he saw that every time the other bees used their stingers, they died.”

“His best friend” — she nudged me — “and — ”

“His best bee friend,” I corrected her, “his aunt Bee, his uncle Bumble, all of them used their stingers and then died.”

“He was very sad about this,” Anna said softly.

“Yes, he was sad about this. Because he wondered what was the point, then. Of having a stinger, of being a bee.”

“So then . . .”

“So then. He asked everyone this question. All the other animals in the forest.”

“In the garden, ” Anna corrected me.

“In the garden. But no one could help him.”

“Except the owl.”

“Thewise owl. The owl said, ‘When you use it, you’ll know.’ ”

“And . . .”

“One day, the bee was in the forest — the garden — and he saw a peacock. Of course he didn’t know it was a peacock. He didn’t know what a peacock was, exactly. Just an ordinary-looking bird, apparently.”

“You didn’t say apparently when I was little,” Anna said.

“Well, you’re not little anymore. Apparently.”

“No.”

“Just an ordinary-looking bird. So he thought. Until he landed on it and asked it the same question he’d asked all the other animals. Why do I have a stinger?”

“Why?” Anna said, as if she really wanted to know the answer to the question, as if she’d forgotten and needed to hear it again.

“And the peacock said to the bee, ‘Buzz off.’ Whereupon the bee got angry.”

“And stung the peacock,” Anna said, finishing for me. “And the peacock went ouch, and all its feathers stood out. All of them. All the colors of the rainbow. And the little bee thought it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. And died.”

When we turned into Yale Road, Vasquez was there. Standing like a sentinel under a street lamp.

I drove right past him and almost up onto the facing sidewalk.

“Daddy!” Anna was suddenly not snuggling anymore, but up and alert and maybe even alarmed.

Somehow I managed to steer the car back into the street, then up the driveway to 1823 Yale.

“What’s wrong?” Anna said.

“Nothing.” As insincere a “nothing” as ever left a person’s mouth. Certainly mine. But Anna was too polite to question me any further, even when I grabbed her by the arm and nearly yanked her into the house.

Where Deanna was up and waiting. Coffee brewed, lights on, kitchen TV set to the Food Channel as she waited for the loves of her life to return home safely.

Anyway, we’d returned.

It’s possible she mistook my expression of dread for the night’s events — waking up to find our daughter unconscious and in shock. What else would she think caused me to turn white and pace up and down the kitchen floor?

“Is she all right?” Deanna asked. She’d already directed this question to Anna herself, who with her teenage sullenness back in full working order had simply tramped by her and up the stairs to her room.

“Yeah,” I said. “Fine. Her blood sugar was down to one twenty-two.”

“How is she? Scared?”

“No,” I said. I'm scared.

Anna was a trouper, and Anna was going to be a-okay. But Charley here — that was a different matter. I was trying to deflect my wife’s attention from the door, where any minute now the man who was blackmailing me might ring the bell.

Vasquez was no more than forty yards away from my wife and child.

I walked to the window and stared out into the dark.

“What are you looking at?” Deanna asked me.

“Nothing. I thought I heard something . . .”

She was behind me now. She laid her head against my neck and stood there half leaning on me, one of us thinking the danger had passed, the other one knowing it hadn’t.

“Is she really okay?” Deanna asked me.

“What?” I felt momentarily calmed by the warmth of her body.

“Maybe I should sleep with her tonight.”

“She wouldn’t let you.”

“I can slip in after she falls asleep.”

“I think it’s okay, Deanna. She’ll be fine tonight.” The operative word being tonight, of course. Couldn’t vouch for tomorrow night or the night after that. Of course, it was possible we wouldn’t be fine tonight.

Why had Vasquez come here? What did he want?

“Why do you look so worried, Charles? I thought that was my department.”

“Well, you know . . . the hospital and all.”

“I’m going to sleep,” she said. “I’m going to try.”

“I’ll be up later,” I said.

But after Deanna walked up the stairs, I counted to ten, then went over to the fireplace and picked up a poker. I swung it back and forth a few times.

I opened the front door and went outside.

It was approximately twenty-five steps from my front door to the beginning of the driveway. I knew this because I counted every one. As something to do—anything to do—instead of panic. Of course, it was possible I was already panicking. After all, I was walking down the driveway with a fireplace poker in my hands.

When I made it all the way down to the sidewalk, I took three deep breaths and saw that Vasquez wasn’t there.

The streetlight illuminated a starkly empty corner.

Was it possible I’d imagined it? Was I starting to see Vasquez even when Vasquez wasn’t there — my very own personal spook?

I was honestly willing to believe it—in fact, desperately wanted to believe it. But it wasn’t until I dutifully walked all the way to the corner and even called out his name—not loudly, no, but loud enough for the neighborhood setter to start barking—then reversed field and walked back past my driveway to the opposite corner and still saw no Vasquez, that I was willing to embrace it as gospel.

Maybe I was seeing things. I’d had a near death experience tonight—my daughter’s, maybe, but still. You have one bad fright, you’re due for another. Chalk one up for my old pal fear. Or my new pal — we were spending so much time together these days.

But when I passed the oak tree that established the borders of my property, I noticed a wet stain running down its gnarled trunk. And I smelled something.

Acrid, tart — the smell of Giants Stadium at halftime. So many beers consumed and so many beers given back, the stadium like one enormous urinal. That’s what it smelled like here.

Courtesy of a passing canine? Fine, except for a simple law of physics. A dog just couldn’t reach that high on the trunk — not Curry, not the neighborhood setter, not even a Great Dane. Dogs pissing on trees is a very solemn ritual, or so I’d read — a way of marking their territory.

That’s why Vasquez had done it.

I hadn’t been imagining things. No.

Vasquez had come calling and had left a calling card. See, he said, this is my territory — your home, your life, your family.

It’s mine now.