The leg had been a bit stiff for a few days. But one morning there was a hoarse squeak while changing. She folded it under her stomach as she crawled, then dragged herself in front of it, lips pursed. She trembled when you approached the knee joint. We went to the doctor and then to the emergency room.
It was nine o’clock in the morning. A sister opened a room just for us with a sweeping gesture. Tree wallpaper, linoleum, a chair on wheels, a bed with a paper cover, an IV pole, a clock on the wall that seemed to lead a life of its own. The minutes crept by, I rode back and forth in that chair, peeled a banana. I googled some. It said “arthritis,” “autoimmune disease,” “leukemia.” I immediately buried those words. And suddenly we were two hours further, without having seen anyone.
A hospital is a vacuum. It swallows you up, the world becomes a vague idea immediately after entering. You eat a sandwich with margarine, drink coffee with wee powdered milk, but you taste nothing. You are no longer in charge of anything.
After another hour, the knocking on our door started. Assistants came by, assistants to assistants, nurses, a single doctor. A picture was taken, an ultrasound, we carried her through the halls, lying flat under a machine, leg stretched, shrieking with anger and pain. A heel prick to draw blood, I knelt by her clammy cheeks and hot breath and sang ‘sleep baby sleep’ to her, five times, ten times, pressing until there was enough blood lasted a lifetime. Then wait again, for a result, another doctor. She sat wild in her pram, with wet Nero curls and her mouth curling down. The banana firmly in her fist, we couldn’t pry it off in the examinations, her beacon in a hell of white coats.
It wasn’t bad at all, we said to each other and we summed up the arguments on our fingers. She ate well, she didn’t have any weird spots, she was happy if she could forget that leg. She still flirtatiously turned her head when you looked at her.
A doctor entered, carefully closing the door behind him. “It was broken by a hard blow,” he said. There was a long silence. “And frankly, we don’t see that often in babies.”
She sat haggardly upright in her pram, with wet Nero curls and her mouth curling down
You know right away and you don’t blame them. A baby that breaks a knee, my God. Immediately we started to philosophize aloud about what could have happened. Cheese had hung on her while she was in the pram, we have this wooden rainbow toy they always swing by, that thing is so heavy, that’s just a life preserver, that has to go now, Ezra pushed her over and was ashamed too bad to tell us. “Yes, two brothers, that can sometimes be rough”, I heard myself rattling, the betrayal to those two sweet, careful boys flamed in my neck.
The doctor walked away. “Sit up straight,” I hissed to Willem. “But we didn’t do anything,” he hissed back. “But they think so,” I said. “Then I’m going to tell them not to think that,” he said. “That’s extra suspicious,” I said. “No, not at all,” he said.
The doctor came back in. “It’s not broken anyway,” he said. “Her other leg looks the same.”
And then it went really fast. The sister in tow said: “Go to the family room, the doctors will be there in a minute.” And there we went, to the room with the sofas and the toys, the room you’ll never get out of, that’s where it starts, there they come to tell you that from now on your life will be forever different.
Willem looked grey. I cried.
Three doctors came in, the eldest, a senior orthopedist who had descended from Olympus to this limbo, felt something on her knee. For the first time, she didn’t make a sound. “An overblown cold,” he said. “Painkillers and home.”
The hospital opened its mouth and spat us out. The trees still turned out to be the trees and I smelled the stones in the afternoon sun.
We were lucky, we said to each other.
But that was madness, of course.