Sick Day

The Habit

Chapter 74: Sick Day

Lila's fever announced itself at 5:42 on a Thursday morning by way of a phone call in which Renee's voice had that thin, practical tightness people use when the day has already broken formation before sunrise.

"She says her throat hurts, her head hurts, and school is an instrument of oppression."

From the background Lila said, "All three claims are medically linked."

Noel was dressed and at Morrow in nine minutes with a thermometer, ginger ale, and the kind of moral certainty that comes from having no meetings anybody else had built their day around.

The child was hot to the touch and deeply offended by the fact.

"This is bad timing," she told him from the couch under a blanket she had dragged down despite the fever.

"Most illness is rude that way."

Renee stood by the kitchen counter already halfway into guilt.

"I can get sub plans sent, but if I miss today the district will act like literacy depends on my body specifically."

"Go," Noel said. "We'll manage."

She hesitated only long enough to kiss Lila's forehead and hand Noel the pediatrician's number on a sticky note he did not need because the note itself was part of the ritual by which mothers permit absence.

By eight-thirty Lila was installed on Noel's couch on Linden under the old quilt Edna had once called ugly and later admitted was warm. The television played cartoons at low volume. Saltines lived on a plate by her elbow. The fever medicine sat on the coffee table beside the green notebook, which Noel moved elsewhere after deciding no symbolic architecture was improved by cough syrup.

The day thinned around them.

No bus stop. No school forms. No work list except the one required by sickness itself: temperature, fluids, rest, another blanket, remove the blanket, repeat.

At ten she slept hard for nearly an hour, mouth open, one hand curled around the bent ear of the rabbit from the overnight room. Noel sat in the chair across from the couch and answered two messages from the clipboard list, then stopped because even the sound of his own typing felt too busy for the room.

Care of the ill, he remembered, contains long stretches where competence has nothing to accelerate. Once all the supplies are in place, the work is simply presence.

When she woke she asked for toast, rejected the first slice on philosophical grounds, accepted the second, and watched half a nature documentary about otters with the grave concentration fever gives to trivial things.

"Do they know they're on television," she asked.

"No."

"That feels like theft."

At noon Edna called to ask after the patient and ended up sending over chicken noodle soup by Darren's oldest, who delivered it to the porch like a deputized citizen and left before Noel could thank him properly.

By midafternoon the fever had come down enough for Lila to become argumentative again, which Noel took as a positive clinical sign.

"I think I should still get the attendance prize for today," she said.

"On what basis."

"Inner effort."

"That is not how institutions work."

"A flaw in the institutions."

Renee came by just before four, dropped her bag at the door, and put a hand on Lila's forehead with the speed and accuracy of long practice.

"Better," she said.

"Still oppressed," Lila replied.

Renee looked at Noel over the child's head.

"You all right?"

He almost answered with logistics. Medicine at ten. Soup at noon. Fever lower by three. Instead he said the truer thing.

"Yeah. Quiet day."

Renee nodded as if she understood that quiet could be labor too.

After they left for Morrow at dusk, taking soup in a container and the blanket folded over Renee's arm, the house stayed still in a different way than usual. Not lonely. Used.

He opened the notebook and wrote:

I spent today with a feverish child on my couch under Edna's ugly warm quilt and was reminded that some of the most necessary work in a house has no visible result besides a lower temperature and a person less afraid to sleep in front of you. No heroic repair, no revelation, only saltines, cartoons, soup, medicine, and the discipline of staying put.