We all followed him down the hall to the same empty room where I’d waited before. He closed the door behind him and took a deep breath.
“Atlas has bacterial meningitis.” I registered at first only that he hadn’t said cancer, willed my ears open, my attention focused . . .
“. . . very smart, very lucky you brought him in when you did. It’s treatable but it’s a very, very serious disease, and children die from it . . .”
Very smart and very lucky. Very lucky. Very lucky . . .
“. . . intravenous antibiotics for a few days and IV fluids because of the vomiting and diarrhea. It’s very contagious, so we’ll prescribe anyone who’s been in close contact with him in the last few days a course of rifampin to be on the safe side. There’s a good chance he’ll recover completely though he’ll be quite weak for a while yet—”
“A good chance?” I interrupted.
“Sometimes children suffer long-term side effects—heart problems, brain damage, deafness. You can’t worry about that right now because we won’t know any time soon. We’re doing the best we can for him right now.”
“Can we see him?” I asked.
“Not tonight. Come back tomorrow and—”
“But if he needs his mother—” Jill began.
“Not tonight,” the doctor said firmly. “Tomorrow you can sort all this out.”
Sort all this out. He didn’t mean the meningitis, about which everything there was to be done was already being done. He meant us, this family, who was his mother and who wasn’t, who got to see him and who didn’t, who was blameless and who was at fault. For a while, no one said anything. Then Jill said, “I’m staying with Dan tonight,” and, nodding in my direction, “Someone else drive her home.” She turned and walked out, Daniel on her heels.
“I’ll take you home,” said Jason and Ethan together.
“My car is here actually. I just needed a ride back to the hospital after she had me arrested.”
“Drink?” Lucas concluded.
“Thanks, I just want to go home.”
“Maybe leave your car here anyway,” said Ethan. “I’ll drive you home and pick you up and bring you back here first thing in the morning before class. We could stop on the way home and get something to eat.”
“I should go home.”
“Gonna be awfully quiet at home. No one there but you.”
This had not occurred to me. I accepted the ride, tabled the rest, grateful to put at least something in someone else’s hands. Said goodbye to Jason and Lucas. Jason hugged me and said it wasn’t my fault. I hugged him and thanked him for being so smart and lucky.
“If you had waited . . .” I said.
“Don’t even think it,” he said.
In Ethan’s car, he didn’t even get the ignition switched on before I was sobbing in the passenger seat, panicked heaving soaking the front of my shirt hands in fists over my eyes gasping for air rocking back and forth shaking like to break apart sobbing. Ethan got out of the car, came around to my side, opened the door, crouched down on the ground in front of me, and pulled me into his arms. We stayed like that till I was done, me leaning out of the passenger seat, folded in half, trembling and soaked, Ethan reaching up, crouching down, air and ground, sky and earth, all directions at once, his hands in my hair, on my neck, his whispers, indiscernible, in my ear. Finally, I was all out.
“I don’t think I can go out to dinner,” I said.
“Let’s eat at your place.”
“I don’t think I’m up to cooking.”
“I’ll cook.”
“You’ll cook?”
“Other people besides you can cook. I manage to feed myself nearly every day actually. Sometimes you have to let someone else make dinner,” he said. And then, “Janey, it’s going to be okay.” I didn’t believe him, but it was sweet of him to say so.
When we got in, the light on the machine was blinking.
Katie.
“Hey, it’s me. Couldn’t get you on your cell, but I wanted to check in, let you know we got here okay. Tried about fifty billion hors d’oeuvres. More tomorrow. It’s pretty crazy. We’re having a great time though. I also wanted to mention that Atlas had some diarrhea late last night and this morning. He seemed fine otherwise. I’m sure it’s nothing. Just wanted to make sure everything’s cool there. Oh well. See you tomorrow. Call me. Bye.”
Thirty-four
The next morning, Ethan and I went back to the hospital early—we both had to teach at ten. No one else was there yet. The doctor from the day before had left a note with a list of names. We were to be allowed back, any of us, whenever we came. Atlas still seemed too small, warm, and lethargic, with half closed lids and a slack little mouth but, the nurse told us, “not worse,” which evidently counts as “responding.”
I was skeptical. Regardless, I went to class anyway. The thing about teaching is you just go and do it somehow, and while you do, there’s nothing else. You find yourself in front of the classroom performing the role of a sane, held-together adult, and so you become one, at least for the duration of the period. No matter what else is going on in your life, if you have to get up in front of a group of people and say something, you are likely to think of something to say.
Since I had genre on the brain, we started there. As my grandmother pointed out, just because a story is sad doesn’t make it a tragedy. All stories are sad, at least a little bit. I told my students to think about all the tears shed during the happiest moments of people’s lives—graduating from school, falling in love, getting married, having babies—not all of those tears are tears of joy. All stories have sad; tragedy is something else altogether. Stories exist on their own, outside of everything. The business of their telling is searching for a genre to call home.
So how do we find home?
“It depends on what happens in them,” Sarah Iverson guessed.
Brent Haddon echoed, “When sad things happen, it’s a tragedy. When funny things happen, it’s a comedy.”
“When there’s lots of sex, it’s a romance,” Pete Fansom piped in from the back.
By the fourth week of summer term, engaged, creative insight is a lot to ask. But I pressed them. The vast majority of stories are none of the above I insisted. Endings are ambiguous. Mostly we see how quick bright things come to confusion. So often, characters go from a state of being settled, where they more or less feel they understand and have a handle on things, to being sadder, more confused, more at sea, more unsure. And then it ends. Obviously, literature is like this because life is too.
With film, it’s easier. In most genres, we know how movies will end. The joy is watching those ends play out. The joy is we know when we watch movies that all the angst, indecision, misery, heartache, injustice, and torture will turn out okay. Most movies aren’t tragedies. Most movies are redemptive. We see their characters going through the hard parts knowing that it will turn out well for them, that they will learn from their pain what they wouldn’t without it. And it is nice to see this play out and to live vicariously, for a few hours, a life where, unlike yours, this is the case. My hip, savvy students named exceptions—there are lots, of course—but we noted they were exceptions indeed. So my gripe was that it seemed unfair that though my life was very filmic (dying relatives, rare diseases, blood feuds, warrantless arrests), my ending wouldn’t be.