At ten to three in the morning my husband and I sat in the emergency room with our feverish five-month-old when his mother walked in holding his pressed work shirt on a hanger, gave it to him, and turned on me. “He never signed up for nights like this. You’re her mother. You handle it.” So I reached for my phone.
The fever had started at dinner.
A hundred and three point eight.
She’d been fussing since six, hot and limp against me, and nothing I did brought the number down. The second time I called her doctor’s after-hours line, the nurse didn’t let me finish.
“Bring her to the ER. Don’t wait.”
So I was in a hard plastic chair at Saint Vincent’s in Erie, under lights that made everybody look sick, with her pressed against me, crying in that thin little voice that scares you worse than screaming.
Colton walked laps by the vending machine. He checked his watch. He rubbed his eyes. He checked his watch again.
“This is insane,” he said.
“What is?”
“I’m running the quarterly review at eight-thirty. The whole region’s dialing in.”
I just looked at him.
“Colton. She’s at a hundred and three point eight.”
“I KNOW that.”
“So why are we talking about your meeting?”
“Because we’ve been here two hours.”
“We’re waiting on a doctor.”
He blew air out through his cheeks. “I can’t sit in this room all night.”
She’d gone quiet on me, which was worse. Her face was red and she was putting out heat like a radiator through my sweatshirt.
“I don’t think tonight cares what either of us can do,” I said.
“I’m wiped out, Kara.”
He said it like I’d done it to him. Like the fever was my idea.
I hadn’t slept more than three hours straight since August. I was wiped out too. But a sick baby doesn’t wait for her parents to get rested.
I didn’t answer. I kept rocking.
A man two rows over was eating sunflower seeds out of his jacket pocket and spitting the shells into a paper cup.
Then Colton took out his phone and wandered off toward the windows by triage. I figured he was texting his boss. Finally telling them he might not make it.
He wasn’t.
—
Thirty-five minutes later the sliding doors opened and Opal came through them. His mother. She lives across the county line, and she’d driven over in the dark.
She had his white work shirt on a hanger, still in the cleaner’s plastic, hooked over two fingers.
She didn’t come to me. She didn’t ask what the thermometer said. She didn’t look at her granddaughter once.
She went straight to Colton and held the hanger out.
“Let’s go.”
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“I’m taking him to my house.”
Colton didn’t say a word. He took the shirt.
That’s the part I kept seeing afterward. His hand coming up for that hanger like he’d been expecting it.
“He can get four hours in the spare room and shower at mine,” Opal said. “I already pressed this.”
She’d stood at an ironing board. Before she got in the car.
“Opal, this is the emergency room.”
“I can read the sign.”
“Your granddaughter is SICK.”
“And my son is dead on his feet.”
“So am I.”
Her mouth went flat. “That’s not the same.”
“How?”
“You’re her mother.”
I pulled the baby in tighter. “And he’s her FATHER.”
“He’s got the whole region on that call at eight-thirty.”
“And she’s got a hundred and three point eight right now.”
Her voice climbed. “He shouldn’t have to sit in a waiting room all night because you got scared.”
People were looking. I kept mine down. “I’m not scared. Her doctor sent us here.”
Opal flapped one hand at me like she was shooing a fly. And then she said the thing she’d driven over to say.
“He NEVER SIGNED UP FOR THIS!”
The room went quiet around us.
She jabbed a finger at my face. “You’re her mother. You handle it.”
The triage printer kept going. The TV on the wall had the sound off. A nurse at the desk had stopped typing. Nobody within twenty feet was pretending not to listen anymore.
I looked at Colton.
All he needed was three words. Mom, stop it. Or I’m staying here. Or even Don’t talk to Kara like that.
He stood there holding the shirt in its plastic.
Not one word.
And that hurt worse than anything his mother said, because right then I knew exactly where I stood with him.
I’d been making his excuses for five months. His job was a lot. He was tired. Being a dad was new. His mother had always run him and he’d never learned to tell her no. There was always some reason I had to carry the extra.
But at ten to three in the morning, with my daughter burning up against me, I was done with reasons.
I got up slow, shifted her onto my shoulder, and put my free hand in the diaper bag.
Colton frowned. “What are you doing?”
I took out my phone.
“Kara…”
I unlocked it.
Opal crossed her arms. “Oh, here we go.”
I looked right at Colton. “Your mom says I should handle it. So I’m handling it.”
I dialed.
Not my mom. Not my sister. Not my best friend.
Somebody neither of them had ever once thought about.
It picked up on the second ring. I turned my shoulder to them.
“My name is Kara Hickey,” I said. Colton watched me. “Yes, I’m in the emergency room right now.” Opal’s chin came down a little. “She’s five months old.” I listened. “Yes.” Then: “Her father’s here. He’s about to leave with his mother while she’s still waiting to be seen.”
Colton came a step closer. “Kara.”
I held up a hand and he stopped.
More questions. Yes. No. That’s right. Somewhere in there Opal’s face changed. She’d worked out this wasn’t my sister.
“Who exactly are you talking to?” she said.
I didn’t answer her. A minute later I hung up.
“Who was that?” Colton said.
I dropped the phone back in the bag. “You both wanted me to handle this by myself.” I looked at Opal. “That’s what I’m doing.”
“Kara, hang on…”
“No.”
His face went tight. “What did you DO?”
“I made sure somebody wrote tonight down. In case you decide to walk out those doors while your daughter’s still waiting on a doctor.”
That landed. Opal went straight on the attack. “This is absolutely ridiculous.”
“Could be,” I said. Then to Colton: “But I’m done being the one who eats every consequence while everybody else leaves the second being a parent gets hard.”
His eyes went to our daughter. Then the doors. Then me.
He didn’t look tired anymore.
He looked SCARED.
—
Not long after, the sliding doors opened again.
When Colton saw who walked in, his face went gray. Opal shut her mouth.
A man thinking about walking out on his five-month-old in an ER at three in the morning was about to be a matter of record.
And I could see he finally got that.
I wasn’t covering for him this time.
The lanyard
It was a woman in a purple fleece with a hospital badge on a lanyard.
She stopped inside the doors and looked around the room the way you look for your car in a parking garage. I lifted my free hand.
I knew her face before I could read the badge. Priya Qureshi. Social work. Saint Vincent’s.
She was the person I’d called. The card with her name on it had been in the front pocket of the diaper bag for five months, behind the vaccine record, and the number on the back went to the hospital operator, who pages whoever’s on, any hour of the night.
Tonight that was her.
She came across the room in sneakers and crouched in front of my chair. She didn’t say hello to anybody. She looked at my daughter first, at her red cheeks and her eyes half shut, and she put two fingers on the back of her neck.
“How long has she been this warm?”
“Since dinner. A hundred and three point eight at home.”
“Has she been seen?”
“Not yet.”
She nodded and stood up. Then she looked at the shirt in its plastic, hanging off Colton’s two fingers, and at the woman next to him in the navy coat.
“Mr. Hickey? I’m told someone was about to leave. Was that you?”
The card in the front pocket
Our daughter was born on the third floor of this same hospital on the eighth of August, at six-forty at night.
Colton held her for about ten minutes. Then he sat in the recliner by the window and watched a ballgame on his phone with one earbud in. At eleven he stood up and stretched.
“I’ll be useless tomorrow if I don’t get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll be back first thing.”
He kissed my forehead and went home. I didn’t argue. I’d just had a baby and I couldn’t feel my legs.
He came back the next day at one, with his mother.
At seven that morning, though, a woman in a purple fleece knocked on the door frame. She sat on the edge of the recliner Colton had left and asked how I was feeding her and whether I had help at home.
“Is Dad around?” she said.
“He went home to sleep.”
She didn’t write anything down. She just took a card out of her pocket and turned it over and wrote the operator’s number on the back in pen.
“Any hour,” she said. “They page whoever’s on. Most people never call it.”
I put it in the front pocket of the new diaper bag and forgot about it.
Then September came, and so did the Buffalo nights.
Colton’s company had moved the regional review to the Buffalo office. Every Tuesday he drove up after work and stayed at a Hampton Inn on the company card, and every Wednesday he ran the meeting and drove home. Tuesday nights were mine. All of them. The two o’clock feed, the four-thirty feed, the one where she wouldn’t take the bottle and screamed till the neighbor’s light came on.
His shirts came back from those trips pressed and in plastic.
“Hotel does them,” he said. “Company pays.”
I’d ironed his shirts for six years. I stopped. I remember being glad somebody was taking care of him, since I couldn’t.
And Opal came by on Sundays with a pan of baked ziti and took pictures of the baby for her Facebook. Grandma’s girl. She’d tell me I was doing great, honey, in front of whoever was in the kitchen.
Now Priya Qureshi stood in front of her son, waiting.
Colton shifted the hanger to his other hand.
“I was going to get some sleep,” he said.
Bailey at the desk
Priya asked if she could sit, and sat in the chair next to mine without waiting.
She had a clipboard. She asked my daughter’s date of birth and our address on Cherry Street and the name of her pediatrician. She asked what time we’d arrived. I told her ten to one.
Opal stepped in before the next question.
“This is a family matter,” she said. “I don’t know who called you, but nobody here needs a social worker. My son has a meeting with the whole region in five hours. He has been up since six yesterday morning. He is going to my house to lie down, and he will be back here before she even gets seen, the way this place runs.”
Priya wrote something.
“What are you writing?” Opal said.
“What you said.”
Colton reached in his pocket and took out his keys.
That was the other thing. We’d come in one car. His. The base for the car seat was strapped into his back seat, and the car seat itself was on the floor by my feet with a burp cloth in it.
“Give me the keys, then,” I said. “If you’re going.”
“Mom can run you home after.”
Opal laughed through her nose. “I’m not running anybody anywhere at five in the morning.”
Colton looked at the keys in his hand. Then he put them back in his pocket.
The nurse from the triage desk came around the counter. Her name tag said Bailey. She’d been the one who stopped typing.
“Hickey?” she said, to the room. Then to Colton, because he was the one standing: “Doctor wants both parents back there for the history. Is that going to be a problem?”
Opal opened her mouth.
“No,” Colton said.
Bailey held the door to the back open with her hip and waited for all of us.
Exam room four
The room had a crib with metal bars, a sink and one chair. Opal followed us in and took the chair.
The doctor was a man about sixty named Majewski with reading glasses pushed up on his head. He listened to her chest and looked in her ears and pressed on her belly while she cried that thin cry.
“Ears are clean,” he said. “Lungs are clean. I want a urine sample, and at this age that means a catheter. Mom, I’ll need you to hold her arms. Dad can help with the legs.”
Colton looked around for somewhere to put the shirt.
There was a hook on the IV pole by the crib. He hung the hanger on it, and the plastic swung and turned around and settled with the back of the shirt facing me.
I held her arms. She screamed and screamed and I said her name into her ear over and over. Colton held her legs for about four seconds and then let go, and Bailey took over without a word.
When it was done Majewski said it would be forty minutes for the lab and went out. Bailey followed him.
My daughter was hiccuping against my neck. I was standing right beside the IV pole, close enough that the plastic touched my arm.
There was a cleaner’s ticket stapled to the plastic at the shoulder. Pink paper. I read it because it was eight inches from my face.
Szabo Cleaners. Peach St., Erie. Hickey, O. 5 shirts, starch light. Standing order. Ready Tuesdays 6 PM.
Under that, in blue pen, a running list of dates. 9/2. 9/9. 9/16. All the way down the ticket. Eight Tuesdays. Then the punch holes where they’d started a second ticket.
Peach Street is ten minutes from Opal’s house.
The first Buffalo night was the second of September.
2214 Linden
Priya knocked and came in with her clipboard.
“I’m going to finish this up and get out of your way,” she said. “Mr. Hickey, I need a number and an address where you can be reached tonight, in case the doctor needs a parent and can’t find one.”
“Same as hers,” Colton said. “Cherry Street.”
“I’ll have him,” Opal said. “2214 Linden. He’ll be in the spare room. Same as every Tuesday.”
Priya wrote it.
I shifted the baby up onto my shoulder.
“Every Tuesday he’s in Buffalo,” I said.
Opal turned in the chair and looked at me. Then she looked at her son.
Nobody said anything. Down the hall somebody’s monitor was going off and nobody came.
“Colton,” I said. “Is there a Hampton Inn?”
He was looking at the shirt on the pole.
“The review’s on Wednesdays,” he said. “That part’s real.”
“And the Buffalo office.”
“They do it on video. I dial in.”
“From your mom’s.”
He didn’t answer that.
Eight Tuesdays. Every two o’clock feed, every four-thirty, the night she screamed till the neighbor’s light came on. He’d been fifteen minutes away the whole time, in a made-up bed, with a shirt waiting on a hook for him in the morning.
The plastic had stopped turning. The pink ticket faced the room.
Opal stood up.
“Somebody had to let him sleep,” she said.
The hook on the IV pole
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Opal said. “You think you do. You don’t.”
She was talking to me, but she kept her eyes on Priya’s pen.
“His father walked out of my house when Colton was eight months old. Eight months. Said he couldn’t take the crying. And I was by myself with a baby and a night job and nobody, and you know what it did to me? It ate me. I had nothing left. I wasn’t going to let that happen to my son.”
“So you took him,” I said.
“I gave him a bed. One night a week. He comes in, he eats something hot, he sleeps eight hours, he goes to work like a person. I iron his shirts. That’s all I did. You want to call somebody about that?”
Priya kept writing.
“And I’ll tell you something else, since we’re all being so honest at three in the morning.” She pointed at Colton without looking at him. “It wasn’t my idea. He called me in July. Before she was even here. He asked me was the spare room still made up, because he wasn’t going to be one of those men who loses his job over a baby.”
Colton said, “Mom.”
“Well, you did.”
“July,” I said.
“I told him he could have it whenever he wanted. And I’d do it again. A man can’t do what he does on no sleep. You women want a partner for every little thing now. I didn’t have one and I managed.”
“You said it ate you,” I said.
She stopped.
Priya looked up. “Mrs. Hickey, I think that’s enough for my notes.”
Colton put his hands over his face and rubbed his eyes with the heels of them, the way he had out by the vending machine.
I walked over to the IV pole with my daughter on my shoulder and took the hanger off the hook. The plastic crackled. I held it out to him, the way his mother had.
“Go,” I said. “Get your four hours. She’ll write down what time you left.”
He looked at the shirt. Then at the baby. Then at the door.
He took the hanger.
“I’ll come straight back after the review,” he said.
“Leave me the keys.”
He took them out of his pocket and set them on the end of the crib. Opal had her coat buttoned before he got to the door. They went out together, and the door swung shut on its slow hinge behind them, and Priya wrote the time down. Three forty-one.
Majewski came back at four-twenty. It was a urinary tract infection. Antibiotics, Tylenol on a schedule, see her doctor in two days. She’d be fine.
I strapped the car seat into the base in Colton’s car myself, in the parking lot, at five in the morning. My hands were shaking so bad it took me three tries to hear the click.
Saturday at nine
The temporary order came through in December. Priya’s notes were in the file. Three forty-one was in there, and the pink ticket, which I’d torn off the plastic before I handed it over.
Primary custody to me. Colton gets Saturdays, nine to five, and every other Sunday morning.
I couldn’t carry Cherry Street on one paycheck. We’re in a two-bedroom over a laundromat on West Twelfth now, and my sister Shawna watches her on the days I work.
The first Saturday he knocked at ten to nine. He had on a plain T-shirt with a crease down the middle where it had been folded in a drawer.
Opal’s car was at the curb with the engine running.
I handed him the diaper bag. The card was still in the front pocket, behind the new prescription.
“Thermometer’s in the side,” I said. “If it’s over a hundred and one, you call me, not her.”
He nodded and took the bag, and I shut the door and set a timer on my phone for five o’clock.
If you’ve ever done the two o’clock feed alone while somebody told you they were out of town, send this to the person who sat up with you.
For more stories about family members choosing sides when it matters most, read the husband who called his pregnant girlfriend his partner and the daughter left behind on her birthday. There’s also the parents who chose dinner over their grandson’s funeral.
