cellulitis

Photo by Joshua Chehov on Unsplash

After we left the hospital, I took him back to the hospital. His eye looks puffy, I told the pediatrician in the emergency department. (A Tuesday morning, nearly empty, but haunted by the specters of our first visit. The coughing unhoused. The vocal elderly. My own spouse with her lost voice.) I don't think the infection is back. Take a few pictures throughout the day to see if anything changes, but he's probably fine. He didn't know he was telling an alcoholic to make herself a cocktail. He didn't know that document lurks just behind fight and flight. Soon my photos were a grid of my child's face. More so than usual, I mean. Close-ups, not sliding-down-the-slide shots. His brown-black eyes and smooth brown skin. But was it smooth enough? Was that sudden blush evidence of the tantrum he just had (brother reclaiming iPad) or the creep of fever? Was that a scratch or the red slash of infection? I touched each photo and spread two fingers to zoom in, to climb inside and try to alleviate doubt, invasive as Strepotoccus pyogenes. 

I wielded two thermometers like a gunslinger. Wrote down temperatures like a scientist. The mad kind, of course.

The first time we left the hospital, the nurses untethered him from the machines that had proved, for a month, he was alive. The green zag of his heartbeat. The pulse ox reading that had, two times or was it three, dipped. Each time he'd stopped breathing, he had started again, on his own, within seconds. Normal normal normal, they promised. Full-term babies do it too, they said, but no one notices because they're not being monitored. The baby who had never been inside me was now inside my rental car, five pounds in the car seat I'd unboxed that morning. I stopped four times before we even left the parking structure to make sure he was breathing. He was. Could I be a pulse oxometer and, also, a mother?

Dear baby, you are not a baby anymore. When my phone hovers above your face, you look at me with uninfected eyes and say, No, Mommy. I think, Good, don't let me get to you. Keep your own DNA and your own spirit. You forgive me, an unearned miracle, and at night you insist on putting your head in the crook of my shoulder. You have never had a security blanket, but lately you like to fondle the moles on my inner forearm as you drift. There are two of them, brown as eyes, and you pick pick pick until they bleed. I say, Gentle. I say, That hurts Mommy. But I don't mean it. Or I mean: Nothing about any of this is gentle. This business of living in a body and loving someone who also lives in a body. What I mean is: Take me. You already have me. Every cell.