The Underside of Joy

over my little boy, her little boy, and I saw then that her entire back was a terrain of hideous scars, a raised map of unbearable pain, as her back expanded and deflated with her breath, trying to push life back into Zach, back into our little boy.

Chapter Thirty-six
    The firefighters and paramedics worked on Zach, and I held Annie, who sobbed uncontrollably, still clutching the water wings. Someone had thrown a blanket over Paige, who slumped on the end of a lounge, staring at the dark blue uniformed arms and legs and torsos that attached themselves to Zach and started an IV, intubated him, put him on a stretcher, moved with him across the patio in synchronization. A man approached me and said, ‘I’m the medical services officer. How long was he in the water before you started CPR?’
    Paige looked up and said in a high, tight voice, ‘Three minutes. I saw him inside right before I answered the door.’ She asked me, ‘How long were we talking?’
    ‘Maybe three minutes, maybe even less.’
    ‘And you started CPR right away?’
    We both nodded. Paige’s robe now lay like a blanket over Zach’s trike in the bottom of the pool.
    ‘Okay. That’s good. That’s a good thing. They’re going to try to get him breathing on his own while we get him to the hospital. Luckily, we’re minutes away from Children’s.’
    ‘Is he going to be okay?’ Paige asked the question I was afraid to. He looked at Annie. He said, ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’
    Only one of us could ride in the ambulance, and Paige said, ‘You, you go. I’ll get dressed and take Annie.’ I nodded, hugging Annie, and sat in the front. They wouldn’t let me ride in the back with Zach. They were still working on him.
    The hospital was only five or six blocks away, and they made me stay in a waiting room while they sped him down the hallway. I sat, staring at a television, not seeing anything but Zach’s blue, bloated face. How long? They’d asked us. Minutes, we’d both said. Only minutes. I prayed the only prayer I could remember, which was Please. I prayed it over and over and over. Please. Please, God. Please let him be okay. Please don’t take him. Please, please, God. Please.
    I felt a hand on my head and I looked up to see Annie. I held her while she wailed, ‘I wasn’t watching him!’
    I held her face in my hands. ‘Annie. This is not your fault. Do you understand me?’ Paige stood by the door in jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair dripping, her eyes frantic. In her right hand she loosely held a clipboard with registration papers; in her other hand she clutched Bubby, still wet from the puddle. I said, ‘They took him. I don’t know anything.’
    She slumped down in a chair and said, ‘I thought . . . I locked . . . the gate.’
    I said, ‘I know, I know. I shouldn’t have come over. I shouldn’t have bought him those stupid water wings. God. Or that stupid trike. He kept telling me he wanted to ride it in the water, to go see Joe . . .’ A doctor appeared. She was young, with short dark hair and stylish black glasses. She said, ‘Who’s the mother?’ We both stood up and mumbled words that came out, ‘I am, we are.’
    She shook our hands, said, ‘I’m Dr Markowitz.’ She looked at Paige, then at me. She said, ‘It’s going to be a long night for you and for Zach. But he has a lot going for him. Early CPR, early EMS support. We call this first hour the Golden Hour, and his has been good. They got him in here fast. But his breathing rate is very low, even for a child’s. The ventilator will help. We’re checking blood gases, pupil response. We’ll be doing a CT scan to check his brain activity . . .’
    ‘He is going to make it . . . He is going to be okay?’ Only Paige’s last word rose in a question.
    ‘The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours will tell us a lot. We’ll finish up our tests, and then you can see him.’
    Bernie came. She took Annie away from the hospital for a while, to get something to eat, and even offered to go to the apartment and take Callie for a walk. I thanked her and handed her the key. Annie went along willingly, burying her head in Aunt Bernie’s side as they slowly walked down the corridor.
    When they let us in Zach’s room, we stopped before going up to him, trying to get our minds around the fact that the blue-tinged swollen little boy was really Zach; the fury of arms and legs of the paramedics working to keep him alive had been replaced by blue tubes