Chapter 3: What I Did Not Look At
There is a version of this in which I looked up at her.
It is in the second newspaper piece, and in a book a man wrote about the family in 2029 without speaking to me once.
In that version I look up, and our eyes meet, and something passes between us.
Nothing passed between us. I never saw her face.
I have been asked why perhaps forty times. I have two answers. Both are true and only one is flattering. The unflattering one first.
I was afraid of her.
Not of being hit again. Of the other thing, which was that she could end me with a telephone call.
If you look at a person’s face in that moment, it becomes a fight between two people.
If you keep your eyes down, you are furniture, and furniture is not usually pursued.
I learned that in a nursing home in Rockford at nineteen and I have never unlearned it.
The second answer is the one about the boy, and I would stand behind it in any room in the world.
You keep your eyes on the patient.
It is the first thing they teach you and it is the only thing I kept out of three years.
You do not look at the family. You do not look at the doctor. You do not look at the door.
You look at the person who cannot tell you what is wrong with him.
You keep looking, because he will show you, and he will only show you once.
So I lay on the marble with my cheek ten centimetres off it and watched a fourteen-month-old boy.
I wrote this down four hours later in a hospital corridor, on the back of a parking receipt. So I am not reconstructing it now.
He was sitting with his legs straight out in front of him, which was how he sat when he was tired.
He had his left forearm flat against the front of his shirt and his right hand over it, holding it there.
He was not moving the left arm at all.
That was the whole of it, and that was everything.
Ethan was left-handed. Or he was going to be. You cannot say it properly at fourteen months.
I had written it on his chart in July because Dr. Moreno liked to know. Reaches consistently with the left. Transfers to the right.
He took his cup with the left. He put his hand on the window with the left.
He held the red ring in the right so that the left stayed free.
So when I put my own hand out on the marble and said his name, and he looked at me, and did not put out the left hand —
That was when I knew.
I knew before anybody else in that house knew, and I could do nothing whatever with it. I was lying on the floor with a shoe on my hem.
I said, “Sweetheart. Show me.”
He did not show me. He was fourteen months old.
His breathing was fast, which on its own means nothing. A crying child breathes fast.
I counted it anyway, off the movement of his shirt, because counting is what my hands do when they are not allowed to do anything else.
Forty-four in a minute. High. Accounted for by the crying. I wrote it down later regardless.
Colour good. Lips good. No stridor. Nothing on the out-breath.
This was not one of the other things. I need that on the record early.
That night in the foyer was not one of his episodes.
It was a Monday, it was twenty to eight in the evening, and he was wide awake.
The episodes were a different matter and they happened elsewhere.
I did not put the two things beside each other for a long time.
Above us, the house did what that house always did, which was nothing.
There were six people accounted for that evening.
Ethan and me. Serena. Mrs. Achebe, who was in the linen room on the second floor.
Teodora the cook, who had gone home at seven.
And Marco Ruiz, who was not in the house at all but in the gatehouse, four hundred metres down the drive.
Nobody came.
I want to be fair. The foyer of that house is enormous, and a crying child was not an unusual sound in it.
Serena moved. The pressure came off my hem and then came back.
She had turned to look at the place cards. Four hundred of them, white on white marble.
That is what she was looking at. I remember the direction of her shoes.
“You think anyone believes a nanny over me?” she said.
She did not say it loudly and she did not say it cruelly.
She said it the way you tell somebody the trains are not running.
I did not answer her.
I got my right elbow under me and got as far as sitting, and the hem tore four centimetres at the seam.
Ethan had come down into the flat exhausted crying, with hiccups in it. He still had the red ring.
And then the lights at the far end of the west corridor dipped, and came back.