Be Still My Beating …
Maddie was born with a ventricular septal defect, which only means that there was a miniscule hole between the lower chambers of her heart. She was less than one day old when the cardiologist put a stethoscope to her mottled chest, listened, and then described to us the high-pitched whooshing that he heard. On a torn piece of paper he sketched the heart, with its atriums and ventricles, and drew arrows to show the flow of blood, in and out, valves flapping open and closed. He drew a tiny circle around part of the septum, tracing and retracing the line until the hole was the darkest mark on the page. His words were garbled to me, and the only ones I understood were, “It’s not that serious.” That night I sat alone with her, exhausted, one finger on her chest, as if to block the tiny spurts of blood inside.
Every year since then, usually after the holidays, we return to Boston and visit the cardiologist, who stoops and listens, playing hopscotch across Maddie’s chest with the cold end of a stethoscope while she nervously looks on. Minor septal defects usually close on their own, but we needed to know when this would happen. It didn’t happen the first two visits, but this year, after staring thoughtfully into the corner of the room, where festive balloons danced on the wallpaper, the cardiologist smiled and said, “It’s gone.” Nicole cross-examined the doctor and his diagnosis until her anxiety was assuaged, and Maddie bubbled with pride, as if she’d fixed her heart all on her own, and I slowly collected our coats and scarves, ready but reluctant to leave.
There was relief, of course, but for some reason I was also sad. That microscopic hole in her heart, smaller than a pinprick and benign as a bruise, was a small reminder that my daughter, for all the physical resemblance her genetic inheritance conferred on her—dark brown eyes, long lashes, skinny legs—was her own creature, apart from me; when I contemplated the recalcitrant whooshing of blood, the distance between us felt mythic. It was strange to hold her while she slept, her skin flush, her lips slightly parted, her hair damp and sticky. I had never before felt so simultaneously close to and distant from anyone, and the small, vaguely threatening idiosyncrasies of her body—its aversion to the peanut, its sluggish digestive system—heightened that feeling. Now that her heart was normal, she seemed to have lost some of the fragility that made her so mysterious to me.
We grimaced into the cold wind and walked beneath the buildings until the street emptied onto Huntington, where we caught the inbound E train. The tracks toward Lechmere were under construction, so we disembarked at Government Center and rode a shuttle bus to the Museum of Science. Once there, Maddie became pale and listless, and even the giant tyrannosaurus, bedecked in a festive red and white scarf, failed to amuse her. She was constipated again, and when I picked her up she screamed. She screamed as I carried her to the lavatory, screamed as I latched the bathroom door behind us, screamed as I put her down on the toilet seat, and screamed as her bowels contracted and finally relaxed. She wasn’t proud of herself, just sore and tired, and it wasn’t until she found the cavernous NASA shuttle pod, an interactive exhibit on the Museum’s third level, that she finally began to enjoy herself. She delivered intrepid farewell speeches—“Daddy, I am going to an adventure to the moon, and I will be very careful, and you stay here with Mommy and do not worry, because I will come home later!”—before disappearing inside and counting backwards toward blastoff. She really believed, for a while, that she would be launched beyond the stratosphere, her parents shrinking in the distance until they were smaller than the hole that was no longer in her heart.
We saw a movie about lions in the Museum’s large theatre. The narrative, built around the usurpation of one old lion by a younger, more virile challenger, seemed constructed from outtakes of a Disney feature. I liked the film better when we saw it in Montreal, where the erudite voiceover prattled on in guttural French. After the dethroned lion had expelled his last plaintive roar and wandered away in exile, we retrieved our coats and waited outside for the shuttle that would take us back to Government Center. Maddie tried to throw chunks of ice against a nearby tree, but the wind was prohibitively cold, and her eyelids were nearly closed when she finally stumbled against my leg. Nicole helped zip her into my coat, and she fell asleep against my shoulder.
There were at least thirty people waiting for the shuttle, which was already crammed with passengers when it finally arrived. People stumbled over the exhaust-soaked snow bank and filed into the bus, and Nicole and I, saddled with bags and stepping gingerly, found ourselves at the end of the queue. Somehow, we made it on. “Move to the back!” the bus driver bleated into the loudspeaker, but no one moved. I had one arm around Maddie, the other around a pole smeared with fingerprints, and as the bus lurched forward I nearly fell back into the crowd. If the bus stopped too quickly, and if I lost my footing, I would fall headfirst into the wide windshield, through which the brake lights of automobiles flashed menacingly.
Several passengers might have given up their seats for us. One candidate was a teenager in a pink ski coat and pink wool hat set back on her head, and her bangs, combed straight forward and gelled to points, hung like knives against her forehead. Another was a portly man in an overcoat, a magazine clutched beneath an armpit, a briefcase clamped between his legs. But the one I fixated on was the man in the Red Sox baseball cap, wearing rimless glasses, nodding his head to the music on his iPod. He was about my age, with a thin goatee outlining his jaw and sideburns that fell to his earlobes, and I stared at him, at his pale green eyes, at his narrow nostrils, at his puckered mouth, mentally daring him to notice me. The bus turned a corner and I swayed into a passenger, who smiled and politely quipped about how packed we all were, like cartoon sardines in a battered tin can.
“Ask him to move—or do you want me to ask him?” Nicole whispered, but I shook my head, because, though irritated, I also relished the indignation I felt. I imagined an altercation with the goateed man, tried to conceive a defense that absolved him from the civic responsibility of relinquishing his seat to me, and couldn’t. I examined the letters on his baseball hat and became an instant Yankees fan; silently, I practiced the most vile invectives I could imagine. Maddie moaned, turned her head, and snored into the collar of my coat. That’s when I imagined myself as one of the paternal heroes of cinema, clutching his child amid some dire catastrophe—an avalanche, a hurricane, a nocturnal invasion of black-clad dissidents—and carrying her to safety. Her face strewn with ash, her forehead marked with innocuous cuts, she gazes up at her father and whispers, “I always knew I was safe with you,” falling asleep as the wail of sirens heralds the belated arrival of uniformed rescuers.
But safety was just a few blocks away, and traffic was so slow that we were never in danger of crashing, and my daughter slept through it all, unconscious and unaware of her father and all his stupid fantasies.
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