Experimental Film

“I’m okay,” Clark claimed, wavery voice sounding anything but. Then he leaned forward, without even a second’s warning, and puked all over me.

Though St. Mike’s was closer, we eventually ended up at SickKids Hospital, because not only did Clark’s vomit smell absolutely horrifying—it had a greenish-black consistency, like dirt and rotting tubers, wholly incompatible with anything we’d actually seen him eat that night—but he was also burning up, so hot that taking his temperature made my hand tingle. Step one was a hasty clean-up and new clothes while Simon called a cab; Step two had us all in the back seat, Clark humped and moaning over our largest plastic salad bowl. By the time we got there, we had more than enough fresh samples for the ER staff to look at. They rushed Clark off, leaving us to wait. I

called Mom after composing myself enough to not sound crazy.

“I’m coming,” she said, brooking no disagreement. Not that I had any, for once.

The SickKids’ waiting room is a massive, echoing space bordered by McDonald’s and Starbucks on one side, and downtown Toronto’s most central source of gluten-free and non-allergenic snack foods on the other. Here and there, big flat screens blast continual Treehouse TV, though they thankfully turn the volume down at night. Simon and I sat holding hands, neither of us looking at each other, while I looked down at the few things of Clark’s I’d thrown into a shopping bag before we left: two fresh changes of clothes, his furry white blanket, various soft toys, some books he liked, his iPad.

“I don’t get it,” Simon said to nobody in particular. “He seemed fine earlier. Didn’t he seem fine?”

“Seemed fine to me,” I agreed.

“These things come on fast though, I guess, with kids. They run hot and high, burn through them quickly; I did. I mean . . . I think I remember Mom and Dad saying I did.”

“Yeah, I think your mom told me something about that once. Some fever you and your sister got, knocked you both out for a week.”

“Uh huh.” A pause. “I should call them, probably. Just to keep them in the loop.”

“Probably, yeah. You have your phone?”

“. . . No.”

“Okay, that’s okay. Take mine.”

“Thank you, hon,” he said, voice breaking slightly. I pressed his hand as I passed it over, trying to transmit whatever comfort I could through sheer contact. We both knew that since Simon’s parents lived in Mississauga, that’d make getting to SickKids’ more difficult for them than for Mom, though hardly impossible; they’d appreciate being copied in, though, even without an immediate diagnosis. Hell for all I knew, Mom had called them already, on her way out the door.

She turned up a few minutes after, just as I was paying for coffee, and hugged me so hard I almost dropped it.

No guilt, not even any questions. Just my mother’s arms around me, the way I sometimes tried to put mine around Clark, till he got too uncomfortable to accept it: gave his fake little Disney laugh, vibrating and babbling, then fought his way free again. Leaving me to laugh as well and call him a creep (I’m not a creep, I’m a dangerous creep, Mommy), something she never liked, and wasn’t exactly afraid to say so—you think he doesn’t hear you, Lois, but he does; you need to understand that, and act accordingly. But what she never got was how I had to do it, to minimize the hurt bouncing back my way, this pain I’d long since absorbed—the idea I had no right to feel. To play Bad Mommy to the hilt and wear that title like a joke, call myself it, before anybody else could.

Always thinking, as I did: I hold as much of my son in my heart at any one given time as I can, Mom, and I’m sorry if that seems like it’s not enough. But I have to protect myself, first and foremost: not from him, but from my own . . . disappointment in him, over things he can’t even help, over my own reactions to those things. The sheer poison of it. I have to keep myself just far enough apart from him to be able to love him at all, knowing it’ll never be as much as he deserves to be loved. And that’s not because he’s broken, no. Not at all.

That’s because I am.

It’d been three in the morning when I first woke, or thereabouts. Around six—just as the sun was starting to think about coming up—the pediatrician assigned to Clark’s case finally came out to talk to us.

“I see he has ASD,” she began, flipping through his chart. “Has he ever had a seizure before?” That made us all sit up.

“No!” I snapped. “Did he have a seizure?”

“Mrs. Burlingame, we’re just not sure. Things got fairly ischemic-looking around the same time the fever broke, but with these kinds of episodes it’s about establishing a pattern. Except that we don’t really want to do that, so . . .”

. . . no way of knowing until we figure out the variables, the inciting factors, Dr. Harrison’s voice chimed in, in my head. Followed by my own, replying: Until I have another one, you mean.

(. . . basically, yes.)

“My name’s Ms. Cairns,” I started to point out, but Mom waved me silent. “Please, doctor,” she said, “my daughter’s just upset, obviously. You see—”

“She was hospitalized over last weekend, at St. Mike’s, for something very similar,” Simon hastened to put in as I glared at Mom. “Though, I mean . . . I wouldn’t think that was catching, exactly.”

The doctor blinked. “You had a seizure?”

“That’s debatable,” I muttered, as Mom clarified, helpfully: “Two, actually.”

“Um, well—I’m surprised you didn’t put that on the intake form.”

“Seriously? Why would I? The circumstances were completely—” I shook my head, huffed. “Let’s put it this way: high fever aside, I had no reason to connect the dots. We don’t even know what happened, let alone why.”