Irie and I stood together, singing from Les Misérables. As mistresses of the house, whom could we charge twice for these little pests? In the bathroom together, we practiced horrified expressions, as we blasted the blow-dryer. Lice could not withstand high heat, so as an extra insurance measure, I set my flat iron to 450 degrees, and we took turns clamping down on our roots until our follicles sizzled, then pulling the straightener the length of our hair. I imagined louse eggs cracking and frying between the hot ceramic disks. I’d never been so passionate about murder.
Every night, I’d soak the nit combs in hot water to kill off anything contagious before reusing them in the morning. We were more tired than usual, as I was still teaching Interim, and the last day of public school had not yet arrived. We’d lost hours of sleep grooming our heads, but instead of feeling soft and luxurious like hair in shampoo commercials, our hair felt like corrugated plastic. One evening, eager for even more control, I decided to boil the combs in our stockpot, thinking it would be a more effective way to sanitize our anti-lice tool kit for future use. After turning up the dial, in the distracted madness of the bedtime routine, I lay down to nurse Gustav and fell into a trance.
In the middle of the night, Ryan woke up beside us and said, “Something isn’t right.” Possessing the magic powers of Miss Clavel from Madeline, who awakes with the foreboding of the girl’s rupturing appendix, Ryan sensed danger and was roused from sleep. “It smells like burning rubber.” The room was not smoky, but the air reeked of chemicals and heat. Ryan climbed from bed and plodded down the stairs, where he found a toxic cloud, like exhaust from an old car, rolling across the stovetop. Inside the stockpot, all the water had evaporated, and the red plastic handles from my nit combs had burned into hard, waxy puddles. The heat was still cranked to high, and the pot looked ready to explode.
For the second time in our lives, I’d almost burned the house down. I began to seriously wonder if these were Freudian slips in behavior. One Christmas between the births of Fern and Frank, or maybe Frank and Gus, a house around the corner did burn to the ground. Our realtor had shown it to us twice, before we offered on Hazel Street. Firemen diagnosed the knob-and-tube electrical work in all these old houses. Signs from the universe threatened us from every margin.
I realized, fully awake by now, the rank stench of sterilization permeating my brain, that five babies was probably all I could handle. A sixth baby might lead to a third incident and the likelihood of our home on Hazel Street—or any other future home—going up in flames, melting to the ground, and leaving us charred, homeless, and, as Ryan had often predicted, living like the old lady in a throwaway shoe.
That spring and summer, the pileup of stress grew relentless. In early June, when I was done teaching for the summer and had taken all five children to Leo’s baseball game, ice cream seemed a good idea, but waiting in a long line at the Dairy Queen drive-thru, I received a call from Ryan. He was playing hockey at the YMCA in the “old man’s league.”
“Honey, don’t panic,” he said. “But I need you to meet me at the hospital. An ambulance is on its way to get me.”
“What happened?”
“I went into the wall pretty hard,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I broke my ankle.”
This was one of those fortunate moments when Gabby answered her phone on my first try. She would meet me at our house, where, joined by Betty, they would hunker down and wait for news from the ER, where I arrived even before Ryan did. When paramedics wheeled him in, I could see they’d unlaced his skate and removed his hockey sock with a scissors. His foot was bent and swollen. Our children all boasted brown eyes, so I’d forgotten the sea-glass green color of Ryan’s. His needy and distressed expression reminded me instantly of our boys begging for the comfort of breast milk.
The first order of business was pain relief. The nurse grabbed her tourniquet and went to work installing a port on his left arm. She shook her little vial of Dilaudid—hydromorphone hydrochloride. “You’ll be feeling pretty good in a few minutes,” she said. She unwrapped a needle, filled it from the decanter, and then she pushed the plunger into his port, filling his veins with relief. They call it hospital heroin for a reason. We could not help but think of Rob McNally and all the other addicts we knew.
The ER doctors X-rayed his lower leg, and the image revealed a fracture that would need to be mended with surgery in the morning, but more pressing was his dislocated bone. As the staff prepared to realign his ankle, they asked me to recuse myself, probably standard operating procedure, unless they surmised I’d be especially squeamish. Dilaudid was so powerful that I could hear the staff repositioning Ryan’s ankle without him ever vocalizing pain. The ER doctors admitted him to the hospital overnight to ensure the earliest possible appointment with an orthopedic surgeon.
X-rays soon revealed he’d need extensive surgery, including the installation of a plate with screws. And once the doctor had delved beneath his skin, he discerned he’d also need to reconstruct Ryan’s tendons, which had been shredded like the hairs of an old rope. As Ryan awoke from the stupor of his anesthesia, I kept thinking
