Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

“Okay,” said Ira. “You go talk to them.”

Ira went back to Apitchi’s room. He was hot, limp, in a very deep sleep. He didn’t stir when Ira kissed his forehead. Ira peered closely at him. Then she pushed the nurse’s call button and went out the door.

“There’s something wrong with him,” she said to a nurse. “Come in here. Please. You’ve got to get the doctor to look at him. There’s something wrong.”

“We’ve got a chest X ray ordered,” said the nurse, brushing past her, “and we’ll probably get him on IV antibiotics. The doctor was here while you were gone and they think he maybe has pneumonia. It’s probably pneumonia,” the nurse said, as though that was reassuring. “Do you want to help me,” she said, seeing that Ira looked stunned, eyes filling with tears, “do you want to help me get him ready for the X ray?”

Ira nodded and tucked his blanket in around his feet.

“We can wheel him out,” the nurse said.

Ira kept her hand on Apitchi’s head as they made their way down the hall. His hair was rough, thick, and matted. They had given him a sponge bath but there was still soot behind his ears, she saw, and a black line at his hairline, and soot in the corners of his nose. He didn’t smell like ash, though, she thought, bending over to kiss him again as the elevator took them down. He smelled like a little boy. He was named Apitchi for the robin that made its nest just over the door and raised its babies the summer she was pregnant. Alice was named for her mother and Shawnee for the prophet. Ira’s father had been religious, he had named them with spirit names, too, and he had brought Ira back from the Cities when her husband left her. He had helped her obtain a legal divorce and he had given them all of his veteran’s pension money and his social security.

They went down to the X-ray room. Ira had to stand behind a lead shield. Apitchi was shrinking, she thought, into his sleep. But the nurse assured her that she’d seen plenty of children with pneumonia and every one of them had gotten well.

Once Apitchi was settled back in his room and got his antibiotics, Ira thought she’d better go back and see the girls. Shawnee was sitting up in bed when Ira entered the room. Her hands were wound in soft clubs of gauze and she was trying to work the remote control on the television. The TV was suspended between the girls, opposite them on the wall.

“Here,” said Ira, taking the remote control, “what do you want?”

Shawnee looked fixedly at the screen and shrugged.

“Alice?” Ira was carefully pressing channels.

Alice frowned at the television. They let their mother flip through the channels, twice over. Finally Alice raised her arm, the one without the IV. “I want that one.”

“Okay.” Ira put down the remote control and sat next to Shawnee, but Shawnee said, “Mom, could you get off the bed? I need to lay down.” Ira got up and helped arrange the covers over her. Shawnee’s feet were bandaged, too.

“How do they feel?” said Ira.

“Bad,” said Shawnee.

“Can I do anything?”

Shawnee stared briefly at her mother, then looked away. It seemed to Shawnee that she had been on a long trip, that she had gone somewhere far away and her mother was left behind. Her mother was back in a place where nothing had happened to Shawnee, but in truth everything had happened. She had been to the edge of life. Apitchi and Alice had gone there too. Shawnee had dragged her brother and her sister back. She hadn’t allowed them to die. Or herself, either. Now that she was back on this earth, she was lonely. She wanted someone to say to her, Shawnee, you saved them . Not to look at her with eyes that said, You burnt the house down .

Ira put her hand out to stroke Shawnee’s hair, but Shawnee jerked her head away from her mother’s touch without taking her eyes from the television screen. Ira sat down and put her hands in her lap and pretended to watch a man coaxing an alligator from its underwater den. She was wondering if Seraphine had told her children something that set their minds against her, or if they were mad at all, but maybe just surprised to be in a hospital. She thought that she should talk to Shawnee and Alice about what had happened. I should find out, I should know, I am their mother , she thought. But at the same time she dreaded knowing any details because all of it, every bit, was her fault. She had put her children in that danger, she had left them, and knowing more about what they had suffered could only make her feel worse. It reflected her failure to protect them. Also, she had a bad instinct. It was growing in her. Ira was afraid that at some point, when she was very tired maybe, she would say to Shawnee, How the fuck could you have burnt down the house? Our only place to live? All we own? Gone? How the fuck? Ira was so afraid of blurting this out that she got up suddenly, and left the room.

She sat with Apitchi until his fever let go, his skin cooled a little, and he no longer frowned in his sleep. When she returned to the girls, a nurse was giving them extra milk, juice, pudding, crackers, and they were eating every bit. It was still an hour before the lunch trays would come. Ira was hungry. Yesterday there had been an extra tray sent to the floor and one of the nurses had brought it to her. So she’d had an entire dinner—turkey, gravy, beans, mashed potatoes, even a coffee. She had eaten every scrap on that tray. But there had not been an extra breakfast this morning. Ira was hoping there would be an extra tray at lunch again, and she did not want to leave the floor in case she might miss it. But she also wanted to find out how Morris was.

Ira went searching down the hall on the adult ward. But she was too shy to actually look into the rooms. Quick, casual glances through each door did not reveal Morris, so she asked about him and a nurse took her all the way to the end of the hall. The room was dark, the curtains drawn, and Morris’s eyes were covered, as Ira had thought they would be.

“You have a lady visitor,” the nurse said.

“Seraphine?” said Morris.

“No, Ira.”

“Boozhoo!” Morris put out his hand. “How are your kids? Come in here. Siddown. There’s crackers.” He didn’t grope, but put his hand precisely on the table pushed up next to him. He lightly touched a stack of cellophane-wrapped saltines. “Would you like some?”

Ira took a package, opened it, and ate both saltines. They melted on her tongue.

“Have more,” said Morris.

“No, I gotta get back. My kids’ lunch trays are coming. My kids are doing good. Apitchi’s got pneumonia, except.”

“They can treat pneumonia, it’s safer to get pneumonia than a lot of things.”

“Yeah,” said Ira. “I was scared though. How about you?”

“Me,” said Morris, touching his hair, which was bunched up over the bandages, “I think I have finally done it. Maybe I’ll go blind now, all the way blind. One of my cornea’s all scratched up, the other got ulcerated. They just told me. Anyway, the suspense will be over.”

“You won’t be able to drive,” said Ira.

“Well, I wasn’t supposed to, really, I should have told you. I’m sorry about that.”

“You tried,” Ira said. “If you hadn’t gone in the woods after my kids and the snow got so bright, maybe your eyes wouldn’t have quit on you.”

“It was gonna happen,” Morris said. He patted the covering on his eyes, adjusted the bandages. “So, your kids okay, really?”

“The girls won’t talk to me yet.”

Morris nodded, as if that made sense. “Give them time to come out of it,” he said. “There’s water, too, in that pitcher. The nurse just put new ice in.”

“They taking good care of you?”