My Papier-Mache Heart

She’s fine, now.

She’s going to be fine.

I didn’t know that 24 hours ago.

***

Her fever broke in the car, at 5:45 a.m., a half-hour after I woke her father with a frantic whisper.

The small girl in the pink nightie printed with ballerina slippers chattered away, innocent of the knowledge that we headed were toward the hospital.

“Look, Mommy! The moon! It looks like a slice of apple! You love apples! Wanna slice of apple? Remember when we made a fruit salad and put apple slices in it, and Daddy loved it?”

I pressed my hand to her head, now so cool. A mere hour ago her body heat woke me up as she tossed restlessly beside me.

“Daddy,” I said, in a low voice from the backseat, “her fever broke. Let’s turn around.”

Blue eyes met my own dark ones in the rear-view mirror.

“Sure?” her father asked.

I nodded. I wanted to spare her another midnight visit to the ER.

***

I woke up at 9:30 a.m., her small body wrapped in a sheet next to me. I remembered that we agreed to leave for home Monday, both concerned enough to cut our visit one day short.

In the kitchen my grandmother-in-law packed bags of food for us.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry we have to leave early. But the fever … she’s had it since Friday.”

***

We waited for her to wake, she needed the rest. We’d be hitting the road late, with a seven-hour drive ahead of us, but she needed to sleep.

At 11 a.m. she cried out. I went to her.

She was screaming and bucking wildly in the bed, yelling “ouch! ouch!” and clutching her neck.

“Poo, tell mama where it hurts,” I whispered urgently. “Where does it hurt!”

She was covered in an ugly, red, raised rash. The blotches were hot to the touch. I could not calm her as she thrashed in my arms, still screaming with her eyes closed.

“Hospital,” I said to my husband. “Pick her up and let’s go. Now!”

***

“She’s not gonna do it,” the nurse said, grimly. “Put her over your lap, mom.”

I pulled my daughter’s underpants down and forced her body across my lap. Refusing to take a thermometer in her mouth, the nurses would have take her temperature rectally.

“I have to go potty!” my child screamed. “I have to pee!”

The number stopped blinking and I pulled her into my arms as she cried wretchedly. Her bladder let go all over my lap. She looked at me with a terrible mixture of adult emotion in her three-year-old eyes.

“I’m sorry, Mommy! Don’t be angry, Mommy! I’m so sorry!” she sobbed.

I held her tight as the word “meningitis” branded itself inside my closed eyelids. I prayed clumsily to Jesus, Mother Mary and my dead father.

“Please,” I begged. “Please.”

***

If you ask me how I am, I will tell you I am fine. Everything is fine, just fine. Like a suburban house, neat and tidy, my life appears.

But if you look a little too closely, you’ll see that the blinds are crooked and the lawn needs mowing.

I’m fine, I’ll tell you.

I won’t tell you that I am deeply frightened by the ambivalence I feel toward the boy growing inside me. I won’t tell you how my husband and I bicker and snap. I won’t tell you that some days I find myself shouting at my preschooler out of sheer frustration. I won’t tell you that some nights I feign morning sickness to sleep alone in the guest room, just to get eight hours of time to myself.

I won’t tell you about the dark horses loosed from their stables late last night as the wheels hummed against the blacktop, carrying us home. I won’t tell you about their obscene riders and the apocalyptic what-if what-if what-if drumbeat of their hooves.

I’m fine. We’re all going to be fine.

***

I believed my heart had been tested and emerged whole and solid, if battle-scarred. I believed I’d weathered grief and lived to tell the tale. I believed my heart is a muscle, strong and hardy and beating ceaselessly in my chest, ready to meet any task.

I believed that until I held my terrified child in my arms yesterday in an emergency room far from home, crooning to her desperately, uselessly, oblivious to the hot pools of her urine, stinking of terror, puddling around my shoes.

At that moment precicesly, I realized that my heart is nothing more than a papier-mache Valentine, precariously positioned beneath the crushing weight of not one, but now two, precious little souls.