Orson Card - Lost Boys

"Better call people," said Vette. "I'll keep watching for the gna ts."

Step called Mary Anne first. It took longer than such calls usually did, because he mentioned that the baby was in intensive care and then he had to answer, "We don't know yet" to about fifty questions. It went that way with every call, but he couldn't very well not tell them the baby was having trouble, or when they found out they'd be deeply hurt. Besides, if prayer was going to be of any help in this situation, he wanted all the people praying that he could find.

He didn't finish the calls until nearly three. He had already sent Sylvette to bed, persuading her to go by pointing out that she'd be needed to take care of the kids in the morning while he went up to the hospital, and then she'd take her shift at the hospital while he stayed home with the kids-she'd need her sleep.

"So will you," Vette retorted.

"Yeah, but 1 can take a nap while I'm driving back and forth to the hospital."

She laughed and let him pull out the sofa bed, which DeAnne had already made up for her mother that morning. Then he moved his phone operations into the bedroom. When he finished the calls and took his last patrol through the house, she was asleep.

He looked in on each of the kids. Betsy, cuddled up to the stuffed Snoopy that- for reasons passing understanding-she had named Wilbur. Robbie, holding his real-fur stuffed bunny, which had been named Mammalee since his infancy. And Stevie, holding on to nothing.

You're all safe here in my house, Step thought silently, and yet I really can't keep you safe at all, can I?

Because there's that new one, not six hours old yet, and his life is in danger and I'm not even there because I'm completely useless. And here you are, asleep, safe in your beds, only something's going on inside your head, Stevie, and I can't reach in and find out what's happening and make it get better. I can plug up one hole and sweep the crickets out, but then the june bugs get in somewhere else, and then the gnats. Even when you have a perfect child, nothing stays perfect. Something always gets in. The good things are always, always at risk.

In the bedroom, undressed and ready for bed, he did what he hadn't done in years, though DeAnne did it every night. He knelt down beside the bed, the way he had done on his mission, the way he had done as a child.

He poured out his heart and asked for mercy for his new baby. Let him live. Let him have a good life. If it's within the power of my priesthood to heal him, then let me heal him when I give him a blessing tomorrow. I don't want to lose him. I want all my children, this one as much as any of the others, and all the children yet unborn that you might have for us. Don't take him away from us. Whatever he needs, we'll give it, if we have it to give.

Later, lying in bed, it occurred to him that he might have been praying for the Lord to grant him and DeAnne sixty years of caring for an invalid child. That perhaps what was wrong with Zap was so severe that it would be cruel to keep him here if the Lord was willing to take him home. So he re-entered the prayer that he thought he had closed, and added the phrase that he had deliberately left out when he was on his knees: Thy will be done.

DeAnne had recovered enough to go home, but she didn't want to. "I've never left the hospital without my baby," she said.

"You'll see him every day," said Dr. Keese. "And so will Step. And so will your mother. But you're not on insurance, I understand, and this is going to eat up your savings. You need whatever money you have to take care of Jeremy."

She said nothing.

"Good," he said. "They'll have you ready to go at noon."

To fill the empty time, she went back to the book. She had forgotten to pack it, and yet it had turned out to be the only thing that could keep her mind off Jeremy. She could read about the family in the book and say, We may have problems, but at least we'll never be like them.

No, it was more than that. The book kept speaking to her, characters kept saying things that echoed in her heart. Like when the nice son in the story said something about how life is like a cliff that's eroding away and you spend your whole life just shoring it up. It was the nightmare of her life, the one that lived always at the back of her mind, and he had named it. Only it wasn't him, of course. It was the author. Tyler wrote those words for me, she thought, so I'd know that I wasn't alone going through these fearful days.

This last morning in the hospital, she reached the passage where the mother in the book speaks of her "three lovely pregnancies" and how she counted down the months, waiting for something perfect to happen. "It seemed I was full of light," the mother said. "It was light and plans that filled me." DeAnne let the book fall onto the blanket and turned her face into the pillow and wept.

She must have cried herself to sleep, because when she next opened her eyes, Step was sitting there, leaning forward on the chair beside the bed, his chin resting on his hands, his elbows on his knees. He was looking at nothing, staring at the wall.

"Hello," said DeAnne.

"Hi, Fish Lady, " said Step. At once the somberness left him, and if she hadn't had that moment of watching him unawares, she would never have known that he was anything but bright and confident. "I understand the doctor wants to kick you out and send you home. And I've got to tell you that I hope you come."

"I will," she said. "But please not yet."

"DeAnne, you'll be up here at least twice a day to nurse him. I'll drive you here, or your mother will. But in between those times, you need to be back home."

She reached out for his hand. "Step, I don't want to leave without the baby."

"He's doing better all the time," said Step. "And we couldn't very well give him all these tests at home."

"I don't like what they're doing to him here," said DeAnne. "I don't like the way he's drugged all the time."

"I don't like it either," said Step. "But we're not doctors."

"They don't know everything," she said.

"But they know something," said Step. "And sleeping in a hospital bed isn't going to make you or me any wiser about what we ought to do. Please-you've spent too much time here alone."

"I hardly have any time alone," said DeAnne. "I think every sister in the Steuben 1 st Ward has been up here twice."

"At church this morning the bishop asked everybody to fast and pray for Zap next Sunday. The whole ward."

It filled DeAnne with emotion to hear that. They really weren't alone. And maybe with so many people fasting and praying, God would hear.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would be like in the book. Maybe things would always be just a little bit out of control, just out of reach.

Step reached down onto the floor. "You dropped your book," he said.

"I don't want to read it anymore," she said.

"Oh? I thought you liked it. Yesterday you even read me a passage from it."

"She knows too much," said DeAnne. "It hurts too much."

"Fine, I'll put it up on the shelf here-"

"No," she said. "No, give it to me."

"So you are going to read it."

"No," she said. "I'm just going to hold it. Is that all right?"

He looked at her strangely.

"I'm not going crazy, Step. It just ... it's an anchor. It's another woman telling me she knows about things going wrong, and I just need to hold the book, OK? I mean at least it's not a Barbie doll or something."

"Fine," said Step. "I just wondered if this is going to become an icon to you. Like scripture. The fifth standard work?"

"Don't make fun," she said. "This is very hard for me, you know. I've always prided myself on making perfect babies. Now all I've got left that I make perfectly is my pie crusts."

"I wasn't making fun," he said, as he reached down and embraced her awkwardly "And he is a perfect baby DeAnne."