Anyway, here we are in the lobby, and Jane, Callie’s caseworker, is walking toward us in a professional hurry, walking quickly yet in such a way that it’s clear she doesn’t want anyone to think she’s walk ing toward anything urgent, which only makes everything look even more urgent, and nobody is comfortable about any of this.
“Hi, Lorna,” Jane says. She’s coming out to greet us now, walking down a hallway I’ve never been allowed to enter. She’s wearing a white lab coat, but otherwise she’s dressed like a vaguely stylish but relatively severe woman who is somewhere between older-than-college and probably-younger-than-my-parents. “I have to say,” she goes on, “it’s a bit surprising to see you so soon after Callie’s last check-in.” She puts her hand on my shoulder a beat or two after she finishes her sentence, as if she had to think of the gesture before making it. Either that or I just don’t like her and find everything she does slightly annoying. “I have to ask: Is everything okay?”
“Oh, sure. I drove here at eleven o’clock on a school night because things are just swell” is what I don’t say. I stare at her for a minute, then I tell her, “Callie had a fit, and it was not the smallest?” Jane nods and looks from me to Callie. “She was watching this carnivorous plant doc on YouTube,” I continue. “And then all of a sudden I heard her, having the fit, from upstairs with my door closed. When I went down and found her, I got worried enough to get her in the car and come down here.” And I stop there, because that is roughly as honest as I am willing to be with Jane.
I know that with doctors you’re only hurting yourself if you don’t tell them how bad you’re really feeling on a pain scale of one to ten—if they don’t know how bad you’re hurting, then they don’t know how to treat you. But the thing about doctors is that after you tell them your symptoms, they tell you what’s going on and what they need to do to fix it. And that’s not something I feel like I get with Jane.
“Oh dear,” says Jane. “Well, let’s take her back and see if we can’t figure out what the trouble is. Poor Callie, we love her so. She’s just one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever been able to work with.”
“Great,” I say, then catch myself. “I mean, I like her too,” I say. “I’ll need her back, though. I’ve kind of gotten used to having her around the house.”
Jane just looks at me, and I look right back. She smiles, then takes Callie by the hand and goes through the doors and down that hall, and once again I’m not allowed to follow.
I go back to the lobby and sit down in a waiting room chair. I text Dave, Dad, and Mom, in that order. Dad gets confused by group texts, which I learned in a pretty awkward way that I’d rather not go into, so Mom and I agreed that we would not do group texts, for the sake of all of us.
Everyone has something to say in response, but mostly I don’t care. Right now, all I care about is Callie and about getting home and going to bed. I tell my parents I can handle it, and Dad responds with nothing but confidence, and Mom responds with a hesitant OK, but call us if u need us and we’ll be right there!!!! I text Dave a whole bunch of kiss emojis and tell him again how I’m sorry, and he tells me not to even think about it, there’s nothing to even be sorry about, and I almost believe him.
The main question people have for us is how Callie, non-lingual and subject to fits, spends her days. Well, one of the perks of my mom’s position as a tenured college professor is that she usually ends up teaching, like, two classes a semester. There are office hours, but she shares a lab with Dad in our house, which means there’s pretty much always someone at home with Callie. And when there’s a blue moon and all of us have obligations outside the house at the same time, there’s a never-ending supply of grad students looking to get on my parents’ good sides.
I scan the hospital waiting room. There are a couple of coughing children sitting near me, along with a whole handful of parents whose expressions range from worried to bored. Suddenly, two more teens on the other side of the room start having mild seizures, and I’d say they were Arctic Orphans too, except they look like they’re too old. One of the parents seems to think everything’s totally fine, nothing to worry about here, and the other kid’s parent is totally freaking out. But from the way she’s freaking out, I can’t tell if it’s more that she’s embarrassed, as if she’s hoping nobody else sees this, or that somebody will come to help very, very soon. Then I start thinking that maybe it’s both of these things. That she’s hoping somebody’s going to come and say to her child, “I know this is scary and hard, but it’s okay, and it’ll be okay.” Wouldn’t it be nice if there were someone who could just come up to you and say that, and you would believe them, and it would be true?