Donna Zalter
Recurrence
September 20, 2009
She sits waiting in the frigid examination room in the pediatrician’s office with her son. They’ve been waiting a long while for the doctor to enter. She stares at the cheery green walls, the framed animal prints. The baby scale, white and chipped, lies crooked on the counter. The mother straightens it, so it is exactly parallel with the window, remembering her twelve year old’s first illness as an infant, skinny, big eared, and bald. “He looks like he will be handsome one day,” an old lady crooned after stopping her on the street once.
At six weeks, the baby’s ailment was monumental for the new mother-- a viral infection, which made him spit up all the milk he drank. She’d run him over to the doctor’s office, panicked, late, covered in sour breast milk. She’d been up all night, worried that he’d suffocate or starve.
Now, she is early for her appointment. Two days ago, her son had fainted during his school orchestra rehearsal for the musical production of “Salvation,” a student-penned parody of Salvador Dali. She had rushed him to the doctor then. Today, they were getting the results. The doctor had requested they come down in person.
Her son sits across from her on the doctor’s swivel stool, fidgeting, tugging at his shirtsleeves and cufflinks his father had bequeathed him, dressed in his band tuxedo, because there will not be enough time for them to return home before “Salvation,” stages its opening night. Every few minutes, he raises his head from his homework he brought along, asks her for help that he doesn’t need.
The doctor enters, dark skinned, foreign, and, glancing over at her son twirling his pencil over his thumb back and forth, back and forth, with an air of indifference, tells the mother that her son has, once again, a common virus, nothing to be alarmed at. He does not tell her that her son needs more tests, because there is every indication it might be something more serious, like a rare form of childhood leukemia.
He does not tell her that because when the doctor‘s eyes cloud over, and he begins to speak in hushed tones that foreshadow only terrible news, the mother chooses not to hear. She has blocked her ears with her palms like her son did as a toddler when she would scold him. He does not tell her because the hum of the florescent light has become deafeningly loud. He does not tell her because the vile of urine she holds in her hand, the sample her son was supposed to leave behind in the bathroom for the nurse but forgot, drops from her hand at the word “leukemia” and splinters on the linoleum floor, splattering the baseboard, and she has become fascinated with the sparkly pee on the floor, and has no room to contemplate any other disorder.