Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

She explained that it was best for him to spend a night in the hospital: it wasn’t anything serious, but it was safer to remain under observation and have a little checkup the next day.

The boy shook his head and said he was fine, he wanted to go home right away.

“I’ll sleep here with you, tomorrow morning I’ll take you around the hospital and in the afternoon we’ll go home, I promise.”

“I can’t stay here for a month, vacation is coming up soon and I have to go to summer camp.”

“You won’t be here for a month.”

Finally, Luca and Lorenzi intervened, seeing perhaps how defenseless she was, that she lacked the strength to persuade or force him.

“You’ll go to camp, I promise,” Cecilia added at the end. She prayed the boy wouldn’t start crying, though it was much more likely that she would be the one to burst into tears.

* * *

Later she returned to the ER to trade shifts so she could be free for a day. Then she phoned her mother to go to pick up Michela; she didn’t want to ask Silvia because she’d noticed that she seemed tired lately, up nights working to meet a deadline. Nevertheless she called her, too, and asked her to stop by the house to pick up a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush for the boy. Silvia assured her that she would go get them a bit later.

Mattia wouldn’t eat, but he was fine, he was lying on the bed looking out the window, still angry but now resigned to spending a night in the hospital. Being there with him in those circumstances was difficult; Cecilia felt she was annoying him, so she came up with things to do. She went to buy a small bottle of mineral water to put on the bedside table, a large sketchbook, and an Asterix comic book, and then went looking for a towel. She spoke with Lorenzi, she spoke with another pediatrician, she spoke with the head nurse and another nurse, each time she went back to see Mattia and told him what everyone was saying, that it was nothing, that the next day they would do a fun test with a huge doughnut that would go around his head, and draw a perfect map of his brain. Mattia nodded, but wouldn’t talk. At some point, thankfully, he began reading Asterix in Britain .

Cecilia went to wait for Silvia in the hallway and sat down on one of the iron benches just outside the glass doors. She tried looking up at the sky to see what kind of thoughts the prolonged observation of that color in that exact shade could induce and concluded that they couldn’t be too bad, the child was just sulking to express himself and she happened to be the closest person handy.

“What happened?” she asked him once they were alone.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“But where were you?”

“In class.”

“And what were you doing?”

“Listening to the teacher; Miss Elisa told us she’s going to India.”

“Then what?”

“Then all I saw was black. When I opened my eyes I was lying on the floor and I saw faces all around me and the teacher said to stand back, that I needed air, but I was breathing okay.”

“All you saw was black?”

“Yes.”

“Was it awful?”

He thought a moment and then replied: “No, because I wasn’t conscious of it.”

“And then you were okay?”

“Yes, but the teacher insisted on calling Papa. I mean, first she called you and you didn’t answer, and I told her again that I was okay, and she called Papa.”

“My phone was dead,” Cecilia said guiltily, as though confessing a terrible sin.

In front of the elevators two colleagues were talking with a tall, thin man who wasn’t wearing a doctor’s coat. Ever since the hospital administrator had been arrested, any man in a suit and tie who didn’t look like a doctor or a patient was assumed to be a plainclothes revenue officer. She recognized one of the two, she’d taken a CPR course with him in which they simulated chest compression and ventilation with an Ambu bag on a life-size mannequin. The mannequin’s name had been Ken, but she’d forgotten the name of that coworker. During the coffee break, he’d told her all about his daughter, who in the first five years of her life had been bitten by a dog, a rabbit, and a mouse (they lived in the country, and the little girl had walked into the dining room where the family was gathered, waving the index finger to which a small gray mouse was tenaciously clinging), had swallowed a coin and a battery from a Swatch (they discovered the battery before stitching up the dog bite, when they did a chest X-ray), drank a few gulps of dish detergent, was nearly drowned (pushed from a pier by a younger child), and had broken her arm flying off a swing. According to her colleague, some children couldn’t help it, it was as if they were born without whatever gene urged caution, as if they lacked the innate ability to recognize danger. Now his daughter was sixteen and had learned to be careful. But they’d gone through five years of terror. (As her coworker said that, he was smiling, he wasn’t terrified in the least, that wasn’t real terror.) Five years of terror, Cecilia thought; maybe years of terror are never more than five, maybe there’s a rule or a law that establishes the maximum number of consecutive years of terror. The small group broke up, and she went back to the boy, who in the meantime had fallen asleep. She returned to the hall and noticed that the sky was a warmer shade of blue, a color that would continue to fill her with positive thoughts, thoughts tinged with joy, in fact, like those dreams in which nothing happens yet you experience an intense feeling of happiness.

Silvia’s silhouette appeared as she approached from down the corridor, walking along an imaginary diagonal line, veering to the left, then pushed back to the shady side of the hall by the light pouring through the windows. Cecilia didn’t move and Silvia noticed her presence at the last minute, maybe because she didn’t expect to find her sitting out there, maybe because she was preoccupied. She seemed preoccupied as she hugged Cecilia and asked for the latest update, distant and certainly less talkative than usual. Cecilia thought her sister must be upset, like she herself had been a few hours ago (like she still was); she thought Silvia, too, might be afraid that it was starting all over again, just when it seemed to be behind them. She didn’t have an exclusive on terror.

Silvia hugged and kissed and cuddled Mattia, then pulled his pajamas out of her bag, first the top and then the bottoms, and laid them out on the bed next to him, shaping them into a full-length figure. Cecilia and the child watched her, not knowing what she was doing. When she realized it, she took the pajamas and folded them again, then handed them to Cecilia, saying, “Here you are.” She seemed ill at ease. She began joking, saying that if you asked her, Mattia had pretended to faint because he was sick and tired of being in school. Suddenly she went back to being the boisterous sister, chatty as ever. She insisted on a detailed description of the fainting scene, and without letting Mattia finish, told them about how she’d passed out once in college. She had ended up stretched out in front of the lectern with professors all around her, as if she were the subject of an examination. The boy laughed.

When it was time to go, outside the room, Silvia asked if Cecilia had been frightened.

Cecilia said yes, very much so. “And you?”

Silvia didn’t understand.

“I mean: Were you frightened, too?”

“Oh, yes, very much so, me, too.”

“Did you have an argument with Mama?”

“Me? No, absolutely not.”

“You seem strange.”

“I haven’t even talked to her.”

“Do you think she’s worried?”

“I’ll stop by and see her, then I’ll call you or send you a text. Do you want me to bring Michela to spend the night?”