Chapter 15: Onset, Duration, Colour, Recovery
I am going to set out what I told them, because it is the centre of everything that happened afterwards.
I told it badly that night. I was very tired and I said some of it out of order.
I have told it correctly a hundred times since and I am going to tell it correctly here.
An episode is not a cough and it is not a wheeze.
It is not a child crying itself blue.
It is the other thing. He stops.
Not a pause. Babies pause.
A pause is five seconds, and the chest goes on doing what a chest does.
He stops, and the chest stops with it, and nothing moves at all.
The first one was on the ninth of March, 2026, at 2:40 in the morning.
I was in the room because I slept in the room. That was my job, four nights out of seven.
I woke up because the room was wrong, and I have never been able to explain that better than that.
He was on his front with his face turned to the right, which is how he always slept.
He was not breathing. It lasted nineteen seconds.
I turned him and put two fingers on his sternum and rubbed.
On the ninth second of that, he took a breath.
His color came back around his mouth in about twenty seconds after that. Grey to normal, from the outside in.
He did not wake. That is the part nobody believes. He never woke up for any of them.
I telephoned Dr. Moreno at six that morning and I told him and I was crying, which I have never done since.
He asked me four questions and I could not answer three of them properly.
He asked how long.
I said, “About a minute.” It was nineteen seconds.
I know it was nineteen seconds because I went back afterwards and worked it out from the clock, and I was wrong by a factor of three.
He said, very kindly, that everybody is. He said parents say a minute when it is eight seconds and they say a few seconds when it is forty.
He said that an estimate is worth nothing to him and a timed observation is worth everything.
Then he said the sentence that put a recorder in my pocket for the next six months.
“If it happens again, talk into something. Say the time out loud. Then count the seconds out loud until he breathes.”
He said, “Don’t stop what you’re doing to write. Do the child. Talk while you do the child.”
And then he said the other thing, which he probably does not remember and which I will remember until I die.
He said, “You’re the only person in that house who is going to see one of these.”
I bought the recorder on the tenth of March for sixty-one dollars.
The first episode I ever recorded was the eleventh. That is the date on the first file, and everything in this book runs from it.
From then on it went into my right pocket at a quarter past six every evening and it came out at six the next morning.
I did not switch it on and off during the night. You cannot. You are asleep, and when you are not asleep you have a child under both hands.
So it ran. It ran through the whole night, every night.
In the morning I saved the file with the date on it and started a new one.
That is why it was running at 7:41 in the evening on the fourteenth of September in the foyer of that house.
Not because of Serena Montigue. Because of a pediatrician in Evanston who wanted somebody to count out loud.
Detective Hale asked what I did with the files.
I said I kept them on the recorder and copied them onto a flash drive.
I gave the drive to Dr. Moreno at every appointment, and he gave it back at the next one.
She asked what I wrote down.
I said: date, time of onset to the minute, duration in seconds, color and where the color was.
Tone. Whether he woke. What I did. How long until he was normal.
I said: and the room. Temperature, window shut or open, whether he had been unwell that day, what he had eaten, when he went down.
She wrote all of that. She made me repeat the order twice and she got it in the right order the second time.
Then she said, “Where’s the written log?”
I said, “A hardback notebook. Blue. Second drawer under the changing table in the nursery.”
“How many pages have you filled?”
“About thirty.”
She said, “And how many episodes have there been since March?”
And I opened my mouth to answer her, and I could not.
I sat in a family room at ten past three in the morning and I found out something about myself that I did not like.
She said, “Ms. Carter?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“I’ve never counted them.”