Infusion

It’s all my fault.

It’s all my fault.

It’s all my fault.

Caleb’s whimpering disrupts my hypnotic trance. I wonder if his tolerance for my midnight clacking has finally run out. With some effort, I avert my eyes from the typewriter and see a lump swaddled in the bedsheets. The drooping cot takes up a quarter of our studio apartment; he’s so close I can almost reach out and touch him from my spot at the dilapidated desk. He wrestles with the quilt for a few moments, yipping like a young pup, before letting the waves of slumber wash over him once again.

Despite my incessant labor these past few months, my son finds a way to sleep through the night, though his dreams have been tumultuous since Hannah’s diagnosis. So, too, has my insomnia. When Billy and I were notified of her immunodeficiency, I made a deal with God – or Satan or whatever celestial being would listen – that I wouldn’t know sleep until either she is delivered from her grave or I am sent to mine. If a life-for-life exchange were something our Omnipotent Dictator would entertain, the curtain would’ve set on this melodramatic tragedy months ago, but as it is, my beautiful daughter suffers in the hospital and my only remedy is the typewriter and the opus being crafted by its levers.

I refocus my eyes onto the parchment. There they are again, the four words whose echo I can’t escape even if I could find a way to exist outside of myself. My latest manuscript is nearing three hundred pages and who knows how many times those words have bled from my subconscious onto the page.

It’s all my fault.

It’s all my fault.

It’s all my fault.

Billy has spent the last year trying to convince me otherwise, but the self-flagellation is both merited and just. Perhaps only a mother could fully comprehend the ownership she has in her child’s triumphs and tribulations. If a son experiences pain, who else is to blame but the mother whose protection was a failure? If a daughter experiences hardship, who else is to blame but the mother who couldn’t pave a safer road? On the other side of the coin, what greater gift for a parent than to watch a child mature into a better person than you ever were?

That is…if life were fair.

When I hear the lock turn, my heart drops into my stomach like a load of bricks, another symptom only understood by mothers of a suffering child. The moments that rob us of our joy and change our lives forever often begin with something deceivingly ordinary like a phone call or a doctor opening the door to the waiting room. As children, we fear the dark or the monsters lurking therein, but the worst nightmares often come under the guise of normalcy. When Billy walks into the apartment, I search every inch of his face for the only telling detail that matters, but he’s wise to my routine.

“She’s okay,” he mutters.

Only then does my pulse cease its agitated staccato.

“You left her alone?” I ask.

“Stella.”

His voice doesn’t have its usual charming confidence. That grinning light that captivated me all those years ago has been snuffed out by a cruel reality. But above all else, Billy is tired. I know deep down he’s just as tired of me as he is of being bullied by fate. Though he’s occasionally vented his frustrations with the latter, he’s far too stubborn to admit the former.

“Billy, did you leave her alone?”

“Do I ever?” he replies.

“Billy!”

“Of course, she’s not alone!” he snaps. “I’ve asked Sam to stay with her tonight, so I can get a good night’s rest for a change. I can’t very well pour into others if I have no energy myself. I’ll go back in the morning. Unless…”

He’s leading me into the boxing ring again.

“Never mind,” he mutters.

It’s his casual dismissal that sends me over the edge.

“Unless what?!” I scream. “Unless I go to the hospital? How will I write if I’m constantly disrupted with prodding nurses or beeping machines? I need to be here…writing. Isn’t that what you and Sam and the others told me? That the power of my words can deliver her?”

“I just think if you took a break every once in a while, your daughter would appreciate seeing you. She asks about you every…”

“You filled my head with these notions of magic and fantasy, Billy. You taught me the transformative power of fiction. You taught me the limitless power of the imagination, the belief that lives can be truly restored by profound ideas. You told me that fiction inspires, improves, transforms!”

“I know what I told you,” he mutters.

“Then tell her why I’m not there! Tell her I’m writing the miraculous story that will save her life! Tell her that I’ll use the magic of stories to create a better life for her. You’ve made me believe I can do this, Billy. Now, I just need more time.”

“That’s precisely what Hannah doesn’t have!!”

I’ve heard it said that the line between love and hate is dangerously thin, which makes the fire of a passionate relationship a two-edged sword. Through the last decade, Billy and I have had our share of arguments, but oh, I hate him for those hurtful words.

“Now, he’s a realist,” I say, gritting my teeth.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, looking defeated already.

“Billy Richards, the dreaming author, has finally abandoned the clouds to make his wife feel guilty for not being at her daughter’s bedside. I know bloody well she may not have time, Billy! How dare you throw that in my face? I haven’t slept in months, slogging away at what you’ve made me believe will save her life. And now, when I’m less than thirty pages away, that’s when you waltz in here and make me feel guilty for putting into practice what you’ve been preaching for the last decade?”

“Under circumstances like these, there are better ways to spend your time, Stella. Hannah needs her mother.”

“Don't you think inspired writing has true saving power?”

“Of course, I do, but…”

“Then my time at the typewriter is well-spent. My faith in sprouts from what you’ve taught me, after all.”

“Fine!” Billy spat. “Each of us will stay on our separate paths and if Hannah doesn’t pull through, we’ll see who lives with the burden of regret.”

“You bloody bastard!” I cry out. It doesn’t take long for me to see beyond the veil of his bravado. “Ah, I understand now. You don’t want me to finish the story because you wanted it to be you. You wanted to be the savior. You wanted to be the author of the masterpiece that saves her. Always craving the limelight….”

“You’re delusional.”

“You’re envious!”

“No, I’m scared, Stella! Our little girl is battling for her life and her mother is bent over a typewriter. Now, I believe in your writing with every fiber of who I am, but I can’t let these days go by blinded by an experiment that may not work.”

Caleb begins to cry, the vault of his slumber burst open by his parents’ heated argument. I don’t know why his sobbing makes me angry, but the blood rushing to my cheeks makes it hard for me to think how best to comfort him. Of course, things come easier to Billy Richards, who takes a black pipe out of his pocket and feigns a few puffs from the empty instrument. He dangles it within the boy’s reach and Caleb inspects it for a moment before puffing himself. Even at three years old, Caleb still finds solace in whatever he can use as a pacifier.

Perhaps a victim of envy myself, I turn my back to them and continue typing. I can feel the anger coursing through my fingers and into the words that appear behind the stamp of the type levers.

* * * * *

Engrossed in the rhythm of the typewriter’s clacking, I exist in a space independent from time. But the knock at the door brings me back. When I see Sam’s familiar face aghast with a markedly unfamiliar despair, my stomach turns inside out. I know he’s come to announce that the worst has happened. My daughter is dead.

It’s all my fault.

It’s all my fault.

It’s all my fault.

“I’m so sorry…”

Sam speaks the words, but we don’t hear them. Billy doubles over in the doorway, screaming at the top of his lungs.

“Oh, God, NO!!”

I feel something icy grip my heart. My breath becomes shallow at the thought that the beautiful creature we loved into existence is no longer. It’s impossible to describe just how wanted our children were, just how desperately Billy and I wanted to be parents. When the doctors placed Hannah in my arms, a crying bundle weighing less than seven pounds, I fell in love so deeply, and just as quickly fell into the fear that I could lose something so inherently precious to me.

The finality of my loss is so devastating that I become numb. I don’t feel sadness or anger. No, all I can think of is the unfinished project on my typewriter and the power yet to be infused into its words. I wipe a solitary tear from my cheek and take my seat at the writer’s desk.

My fingers are possessed with a palpable desperation. I know exactly how I want to finish my story, so I allow them to roam freely as I let my mind meditate on the twisting path that brought me here. Leaving to America. Taking a chance on a charming young playwright. Submitting my samples to the local paper. Marrying Billy and starting our family. But no, the most important decision of my life hadn’t been any of those. It was this, to surrender my grief and infuse it into the grand masterwork whose power would resurrect my daughter from the dead.

“What are you doing?”

The judgment in his broken voice sickens me. It hurts to stop typing, so close to finishing my best work yet. I don’t see Sam standing in the doorway or Caleb crying on the edge of the bed. I only see Billy sniveling like a traumatized victim.

“Saving our daughter,” I say.

“It’s too late, Stella.”

I can’t describe what becomes unhinged. I tense every muscle in my body until they send involuntary spasms down my arms. The veins in my forehead pulse with heated blood. I am disgusted by Billy’s lack of faith. This man, who was my creative pulse when I didn’t believe in my abilities as an author, should be clinging to the pillars he instilled within me. Instead, he judges me for doing that very thing. I see his black pipe on the bed and know exactly what I need to do.

Tremors and cramps seize my body as I put the pipe in my mouth. I close my eyes and bite down on the end of it until I can feel my teeth cracking into it. My fingers bounce on the keyboard, possessed by the demons of my unstoppable hope. As I unlock my imagination, I feel a satisfying electricity coming off the pipe and through me into the words on the page.

I think of Billy. The way his eyes grinned when he first told me about the magic of truthful storytelling. The way he gleamed when I walked down the aisle. The misty-eyed expression of a doe when I told him I was pregnant. I loved this man from the very first time I saw his self-satisfied grin at New York Harbor. How utterly disappointing to see a man of such conviction falter when we finally are afforded the opportunity to change the course of our lives. I know what I have to do to bring my daughter back from the eternal slumber of death.

Rest well, Billy, I think. Know your sacrifice played an integral role in resurrecting Hannah from the dead.

When I type the final word of my manuscript, the pipe singes my tongue in an explosion of heat and I see an image branded on my brain. I see a group of weeping nurses walking out of a dark room. Just before they close the door, a reanimated monitor beeps, its power supply humming back to life.

“What have you done?”

Someone’s voice rips the illusion from my mind. I open my eyes, an ounce less confident that my work has triumphed over death. Billy and Sam look shell-shocked, but when I look to the bed, only a wisp of steam floats where Caleb used to be. Billy’s stare glares into me.

“What have you done?” he repeats.

It’s all my fault.

It’s all my fault.

It’s all my fault.