Part 2 (2/2)
”Annabel? Anna, I'm back! Hang on! It's okay. I'm coming.”
Abbie scaled the tree and held her breath as she scrambled across the bridge. She clicked the headlamp on and held it over the abyss. The shadows gave way to deeper shadows. The whorled innards of the tree seemed to disappear into nothingness.
”Anna? Annabel!” Abbie kept calling, her heart pounding in her throat now. The cavity echoed back at her like a dry well. ”Anna, please... please, answer me.”
When there was no answer, Abbie swallowed hard and dropped the headlamp into the abyss, terrified of what she would see but needing to know. She watched it fall, down and down and down, clattering against the rotted wood, offering a few frightening glimpses of the endless chute far below, getting smaller and smaller, like a train disappearing down a long train track, until it struck something solid and flickered out. Abbie stared into the emptiness, stunned disbelief blossoming to panic.
”No... how can that... No, no, no... Annabel!”
”Abbie?” Adelynn was getting scared. ”What happened? Is Anna okay?”
”She fell. She fell down in there. She's in there.”
Cold horror. Consequences. It was all cras.h.i.+ng down on Abbie. But now she knew what she had to do.
”Annabel, hold on,” she called down into the dark. ”Hold on, Anna. I will be right back. Do you hear me? I'm going to get Mommy. I'm coming right back, Anna, and I won't leave you.”
Abbie clawed across the wide bridge and swung down through the branches again, but this time she missed the last one and dropped several feet to the uneven ground. Pain knifed upward from a hard twist of her ankle, but Abbie was already running, screaming, ”Mommy! Mommy, come quick!”
SOMETHING TALKY WAS ON the television in the bedroom. I had my back to it but was half listening to the background chatter while I sorted and folded the mountain of clean laundry into neat stacks on the bed. I had my system set up: Kevin's jeans and s.h.i.+rts, my jeans and s.h.i.+rts, Abbie's jeans and s.h.i.+rts, Anna's jeans and s.h.i.+rts, Adelynn's jeans and s.h.i.+rts, girl socks, mom socks, dad socks, pj's, bedding, bath towels, dish towels. I'd been moving it along like a machine since early afternoon, and I was almost done.
Supper was the next box on the flowchart, so that was probably on my mind. I don't specifically remember, but it was that time of day. Kevin would be home in ninety minutes or so. The girls had been outside for about an hour, but there was no need to call them in if they were having fun. The sun was setting, so they'd drift in soon enough.
I didn't hear Abbie screaming as she bolted over the gate and up the driveway, but to be totally honest, I wouldn't have flipped out even if I did. As the mother of three farm-raised tomboys, one of whom was afflicted with a chronic, life-threatening health issue, it's only prudent for me to ration my panic. When I hear someone screaming, it could mean anything from a dislocated finger to ”the dog licked my pizza crust.” I've learned to a.s.sess the situation calmly before I click into crisis mode.
”Mommy!” Abbie burst through the door. ”Mommy, you gotta... gotta come with me-right now. You gotta come outside.”
”Just a sec,” I said absently. ”Let me finish this, and I'll be right out.”
”No, Mommy, now. Anna's stuck in the tree. She's in the tree.”
Something in her voice made me look up. Abbie gripped her side, breathing hard from running, her face streaked with dirt and sweat. A flutter of unease went through my chest. Abbie was frantic, but what she was saying-stuck in the tree-I was thinking stuck in a tree, like you would a.s.sume a kid or a kitten or a kite would be stuck in a tree.
”Abbie, calm down,” I said firmly. ”Tell me what's wrong. Is she hurt? Is she bleeding?”
”No! I mean... I... I don't know. She's trapped.”
”Well, I can't climb up there. She just needs help working her way down. Can you help her figure it out?”
”Mommy, you don't understand!” Abbie seized my arm. ”You have to come out right now. Come on.”
”All right, calm down, sister. I mean it. Let me get my shoes on.”
”No! Now! You have to hurry!”
With Abbie dragging at my arm, I managed to step into shoes on my way out the door. I was still operating on the a.s.sumption that Anna had climbed a little too high and was unable-or maybe just unwilling-to climb down. The sun dipped into the haze on the meadow as we hustled across the yard toward the cottonwood grove where Cypress barked and danced in nervous circles. I scanned the high branches, calling, ”Annabel? Annabel, where are you? Abbie, I don't see her. Where is she?”
At the base of the tall cottonwood, Adelynn was on her hands and knees. She'd found a piece of metal pipe and was gouging desperately at the ground, clawing the loose dirt with her little hands.
”I'm digging her out, Mommy! I'm digging her out!”
It would have made more sense if she'd told me she was digging a hole to China. I swallowed hard and kept my voice as calm as possible.
”Girls... where is Annabel?”
”There!” In sheer frustration, they shrieked at me with one voice, stabbing grimy fingers toward the bottom of the trunk. ”She is in-the-tree!”
Abbie still had a tight grip on my arm. She pulled me to the far side of the cottonwood and pointed to the gaping mouth thirty feet up.
”There!” She was beside herself now, pleading with me. ”Mommy, do you see? She fell in there and went to the bottom.”
It was incomprehensible. I didn't want to comprehend it. No part of me-not my brain, not my heart, not the laundry-folding Robo Mommy-no part of me wanted to accept this. But I recognized that pleading in Abbie's voice, that aching frustration, that pound-your-head-against-the-wall infuriating feeling of trying to make someone accept that all their a.s.sumptions are wrong, that the least dependable thing in the world is everything you thought you knew five minutes ago.
During our long journey to get a solid diagnosis for Anna, doctors told me again and again, ”When you hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras.” Which is really just a catchall excuse for lazy, inside-the-box thinking. I grew to hate that old saying with a pa.s.sion, but that moment in the cottonwood grove, I was thinking exactly the same way.
Maybe it's because we see these choices-consciously or subconsciously-and it's human nature to choose the one that's less frightening.
Choice A: This giant tree, which I had a.s.sumed was a solid object, is actually a giant throat that just swallowed my child.
Choice B: Someone is playing a horrible prank on me.
My brain simply refused to let go of choice B.
When Anna first presented with acute symptoms of pseudo-obstruction motility disorder-a terrible distention of her belly along with intense pain-we made numerous trips to the pediatrician and then a GI specialist, and they always sent her on her way with the basic workup and go-away over-the-counter symptom treatments like Motrin and MiraLAX. Ordinary tummy trouble stuff. But I had begun to understand that this was no ordinary tummy trouble. I wasn't willing to accept that label and watch her suffer. I kept pus.h.i.+ng for a real diagnosis, so when no obvious diagnosis readily presented itself, the real trouble, they decided, was me. Given the choice between (1) mommies can be kinda crazy or (2) doctors don't know everything, many doctors in my experience go for option 1.
After one particularly grueling round of tests, a GI specialist happily summed up the non-results with a broad, ”Good news, Mom! Everything's fine.”
Six-year-old Anna huddled on my lap, exhausted and in pain. I stared blankly at the doctor's smiling face and echoed, ”Everything's... fine?”
”That's good news, Mom.” His smile faded to a stern scold. ”That's something to be happy about.”
”Look at her,” I said. ”She is not fine. Please. You have to help her.”
”I've palpated her and felt no sign of obstruction. We've done blood work, upper and lower GI testing-look, sometimes moms just worry too much. They get nervous and...” He studied me for a moment, then said carefully, ”Sometimes, a mom can have a disorder called Munchausen's...”
For a moment, it seemed like he was about to go on and explain to me what that means, but I'm pretty sure he could tell from the expression on my face that I knew dang well that Munchausen by proxy meant I was somehow making my child sick to gratify my own need for attention. He wisely came down off his high horse. At the time, I was stricken with frustration-rage, to be honest-that he would even imagine I could hurt my child that way. I lay in bed that night, praying for a way to forgive, a way to move on and continue the fight for Anna's well-being. She was in misery, weak and vomiting. I made repeated calls to the doctor's office, telling them, ”She's getting worse.” They kept telling me the bowel prep for those tests always makes children feel sick. She's fine, they kept telling me, she's fine, she's fine, she's fine. That bowel prep, yeah, that sure can make a kid sick, but she's fine.
Late that night, Kevin and I mobilized care for Adelynn and Abbie (our great friends Nina and Paul Cash, who met us in the front yard like tag-team wrestlers), and we rushed Annabel to the hospital. Triage theories boiled down to the usual: ”Think horses, not zebras.”
Long story short, I lost it. I finally found inside me that roar G.o.d gave the mama bear. I don't know what all I said, but I said it plain and in his face, and I made the point that a normal test result doesn't equal a healthy child, and a doctor not understanding something is not the same as that thing not existing.
”Fine,” the ER doc huffed. ”We'll do a few tests. If that's what it takes to make you happy, Mom.”
<script>