Chapter 21: The Cast
The cast went on at five past one in the morning on the fifteenth of September.
Fibreglass, below the elbow, thumb free, four to six weeks, review on the twenty-ninth.
They asked me what color and I said blue, because he was asleep and somebody had to answer.
I have wondered since whether I had the right to choose the color. That is the kind of thing I lie awake about.
It weighed about a hundred and ten grams and it went from below his elbow to the base of his fingers.
The care sheet went on the front of the little refrigerator in the nursery kitchenette with a magnet shaped like a bee.
Keep dry.
Do not put anything down inside it. Report swelling, color change, or a smell.
I read that sheet perhaps forty times in five weeks and I could recite it now.
Here is what a cast is to a fourteen-month-old, which nobody tells you.
It is not pain. By the third day there was very little pain and he was taking nothing for it.
It is that his arm stopped being an arm and became a piece of equipment attached to him.
He hit things with it. Within about a day he had worked out that it made a completely new noise on the cot rail.
He did that for eleven minutes on the second afternoon, laughing, with his face going red.
I let him. It was the first good thing that had happened since Monday and I was not going to be the one to stop it.
He chewed the edge of it where it met his elbow until I put a sock over the end of it at night.
And on the fourth day he discovered that the red ring went over it.
He got the ring onto the cast up to about the middle of his forearm and then he sat and looked at it.
Then he held the whole arm up in front of his face and turned it and the ring slid down and hit the plaster.
He said his word.
He wore that ring on his cast, on and off, for four weeks, and when it came off with the cast he would not take it back in his hand for two days.
That is the good half.
The other half is that he stopped reaching with the left.
I do not mean that he could not. The fingers were free and the thumb was free and there was nothing whatever wrong with them.
I mean that on the sixteenth, the seventeenth and the eighteenth of September, that child did not put out his left hand once.
Not for the ring.
Not for the cup. Not for me.
He put out the right, every time, and he was slower with it and he dropped things and he got cross.
I wrote it down, because I write things down. Day 2, no L reach.
Day 3, no L reach. Day 4, no L reach observed.
On the nineteenth he took a piece of banana off my plate with his left hand and I had to go and stand in the corridor for a minute.
Sleep was the other thing.
He slept on his front, knees drawn up under him, left arm straight out above his head, face turned right, towards the door.
He had slept like that since he was about five months old and there was no negotiating with it.
He could not do it with a cast on. The arm would not go where the arm went.
For nine nights he went down on his side with the cast propped on a rolled towel, and he woke four or five times a night, and he was furious about it.
He took forty-one minutes to go down on the second night. His normal was eleven.
I have those numbers because I took them.
On the eighteenth it was thirty-three. On the twentieth it was twenty-six.
Dr. Elias Moreno telephoned the house at twenty to eight on the evening of the seventeenth.
Roz brought the handset up to the nursery and stood in the doorway while I took it, because I was not permitted to be alone with him.
He said, “Lily. Tell me about the arm.”
I told him. Distal radius, left, displaced, reduced under sedation, cast at 01:05, review the twenty-ninth, fingers warm, no swelling, no color change.
He said, “Good.” Then he said, “Now tell me about the rest of him.”
Nobody had asked me that. Not the police, not Aaronson, not the woman in the navy suit.
I said he was sleeping badly, forty-one minutes down on Tuesday, waking four times, and that he had not reached with the left hand in three days.
He was quiet for a moment and then he said, “That’s normal and it will stop.”
Then he said, “Has he had an episode since?”
I said no. Not on Monday, not Tuesday, not Wednesday.
He asked me to check the notebook rather than answer from memory and I said the notebook was in the room and the answer was still no.
Then he said, “Send me the audio for the eighth of September. I want to hear the forty-four seconds again.”
And I had to tell him.
I said, “I can’t. They have my recorder.”
There was a pause on that line of about four seconds. I know because I counted it, standing in a nursery with a housemaid in the doorway.
Then Dr. Moreno said, in exactly the same voice he used for everything else:
“Then get another one.”