I scooped him up, and he was dead weight, his body limp for a moment. I laid him on the couch and he continued to seize, his eyelids fluttering. Emi, too, was fluttering, alighting from one couch to another like a nervous bird, panicking, asking “Is he dead, is he dead?”, over and over while I kept shouting, “Oh god, oh god, Nate,” as I tried to revive him. He wasn’t breathing. “Is he dead?” Emi screamed, and I told her no, but to myself I said Not yet, and as I leaned over his face, listening for breath, Emi jumping and panicking in my peripheral vision, I swore that if he was dead, I would kill myself.
Somehow I found the phone, somehow I dialed *11, 811, then 711, then finally 911, somehow I screamed our address over the phone and told them to hurry while they told me to calm down. Then it was Emi telling me to call Daddy, Emi telling me she was scared, that she was going to run for help. Nate turning blue, turning gray, shaking and shaking. Me trying to rescue-breathe for him, me turning him over onto his side and hearing him finally take a breath. The 911 person telling me to try to stand him up, but Nate was too limp, me trying, Nate falling, me dropping the phone, me carrying him to the front door, realizing that Emi was nowhere. A man showing up telling me he’d found Emi on the stairs, she was too scared to take the elevator by herself, that he’d told the front desk to call an ambulance, that Emi had told this man that she had just watched her little brother die in my arms.
Finally the paramedics arrived, rushing in, wanting to know what happened, but of course I didn’t totally know, I had been in the bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror, and Emi couldn’t tell them: In her six-year-old version of events she had seen him explode in lightning bolts and then fade into nothingness before he died. But he wasn’t dead. He was moaning, making sounds, starting to open his eyes, saying “Mommy” as they lifted him onto the gurney.
“I don’t want to ride in the ambulance, I want to stay here in case Nate dies, I don’t want to see him die again,” Emi told me, but we had to ride in the ambulance, even though it was scary, even though it seemed like Nate might die again as he vomited and passed out.
Once we got to the ER, Nate was conscious, but crying, screaming, trying to talk but unable to talk, unable to focus. Agitated. Emi wanted to know that he was okay, but was terrified to see him in the room with so many cords hooked up to him. Wet hands. Cord. A nurse, a doctor, a social worker, so many people asked me to recount what had happened. I began to explain, and Emi jumped in to tell them, “Mommy can tell you her version of the story, and then I’ll tell you what really happened.” The suspicion that fell upon me in that moment was a thing I could feel, the sound of mental accusations being leveled, the weight of reports being filed. But I noticed everyone relax as I hugged Emi tight and told her of course she could tell her version of what happened, she might have seen different things than the things I saw, and that the grown-ups needed to hear both versions, the grown-up Mommy one and the big-sister one. She sat with coloring books and graham crackers and juice while I choked out the version of events as I understood them, still hyperventilating through tears of shock and guilt.
What I told them: That as far as I could tell, from what I had been able to make sense of, he had left the bathroom with his hands still slightly damp from washing, and had reached under the couch to get his car. In doing so, he had touched an extension cord where one of the plugs was not fully flush with the socket. He suffered an electrical shock and passed out and went into seizures.
What I did not tell them: The plug upon which he seized was the plug that powered my laptop. My computer. My work. The instrument I used to write about them, my children. The thing that simultaneously enabled me to be proximal to them while also taking me away from them, enabling me to be in the room with them, perhaps even writing something about them, some anecdote or story, while utterly being absent from them outside of a Hmmm? or a Sure, that sounds like fun in response to who even knows what was being said.
What I told them: I hadn’t seen it happen, I was still in the bathroom. I’d just heard it happen, and then ran as soon as I could.
What I did not tell them: I was in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror as I put on makeup.
Once they were done, they went to Emi, and I could hear her begin to tell her story of how Nate floated up to the ceiling as he died.
Within hours, he improved. He was able to talk to us again, and while the doctors did their doctoring, I tried to distract him with questions about things we’d done that morning, and he remembered them, so I was hopeful. He perked up a bit more and then wanted to take a nap. I was terrified to see him sleep, but the doctors said it should be fine. I stayed with him at the hospital for as long as I could, then Gil took over and I went home to be with Emi, who was still shaken, like me, who didn’t want to sit near the couch
