The Moment Keeper. Buffy Andrews

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СКАЧАТЬ you fall and hurt yourself?”

      “Like the time I fell out of Emma’s tree house and broke my arm?”

      “Yeah, like that. A doctor fixed your broken arm, right?”

      Olivia nods.

      “But doctors can’t fix everything. Sometimes a person can’t be fixed. They’re too broken.”

      “Like my ball that got run over by the lawn mower?”

      “Yeah. Like your ball. Sometimes there’s just too much damage and you can’t make something whole again.”

      I wondered why Tom was so sad. It wasn’t like him to be this sad. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him this upset about something that happened at work. He seemed to be hugging Olivia more than usual and I suspected that a child was involved.

      “I want to be a doctor just like you,” Olivia says.

      “But I thought you wanted to be a ballerina.”

      “I want to be a ballerina and a doctor. And a teacher. Like Miss Bogart.”

      Tom smiles.

      Olivia hops off the couch and returns with her white doctor’s kit she got from Santa. She takes out all of the instruments and places them on the couch beside her dad.

      “First, I’m going to listen to your heart.”

      She puts the electronic stethoscope that plays a heartbeat in her ears and listens to her daddy’s heart.

      “You got a little cough. You need a shot.”

      She grabs the squeaky syringe and gives him a shot in his left arm. She places the pretend bandage on his arm where she gave the shot and feels his forehead.

      “You feel hot.”

      She picks up the thermometer with four temperature readings, holds it up to his mouth and selects the highest temperature. “You are hot.”

      Then she wraps the blood-pressure cuff around his arm and squeezes the pump, which makes the dial on the gauge spin. She wraps up her examination by checking his reflexes with the play hammer and his ears and throat with the light scope.

      “You need to rest. Doctor’s orders.”

      Later that night, after Olivia has fallen asleep beside him on the couch, Tom tells Elizabeth what happened in the ER that day.

      “God, Liz, it was awful,” he says. “There were so many bruises on that girl’s tiny body that I couldn’t find a patch of white anywhere.”

      Elizabeth dabs her eyes with tissues. The toddler had been bludgeoned to death by her mother’s boyfriend. He had whipped her repeatedly with a video-game controller.

      “And just because she had a dirty diaper,” Tom says. “She was two, Liz. Two. And she never had a chance.”

      Tom tells Elizabeth that the neighbors heard the toddler screaming for her mother. The mother was in the next room stuffing her face with potato chips and watching the soaps. The screaming got so bad that the neighbors called the cops. But it was too late.

      I understood now the depth of Tom’s sadness and anger.

      “God, after I pronounced her dead, I went to my car and cried, Liz. I’ve never done that before. But I felt so helpless. How can a human being do something like that?”

      “He wasn’t human,” Elizabeth says. “He was an animal.”

      Tom leans against her and Elizabeth wraps her arms around him and kisses the top of his head. “I wish I could take away your pain,” she says.

      Tom sees Olivia’s white doctor kit on the floor, and he smiles.

      I used to love to pretend that I was a doctor. I remember the day we found my doctor’s kit at the Goodwill store. It was brand new. Never been opened. Wasn’t often I found a toy that had never been opened at the Goodwill store, but that was my lucky day. And I was even luckier because Grandma bought it, after she got the clerk to take a dollar less than the ticket price.

      I brought that toy kit home and played and played and played with it. Grandma would lie on the couch and I would do all of the things I just recorded Olivia doing – checking her reflexes, temperature and heart; taking her blood pressure; and giving her a shot.

      Grandma even put some of the cinnamon candies we used to decorate Christmas cookies in an old plastic prescription container for me to use as pretend pills.

      “How am I doing, Doc?” Grandma asked.

      “Pretty good. But you need to make more cookies. That would make you feel better.”

      Grandma laughed. “Are you sure, Doc?”

      “Yes. Making cookies will make you feel better. And maybe some brownies.”

      Grandma made the best chocolate-chip cookies in the whole universe. She didn’t buy the ones you break apart and bake like Rachel’s mom. She made them from scratch. And her brownies were good, too. Rachel’s mom bought brownies. They came individually wrapped.

      “You rest while I check on my other patients.”

      I always placed my dolls and stuffed animals around the room and pretended to do hospital rounds, visiting each patient.

      I walked over to my stuffed panda bear, Lucy. “How are you today, Lucy?”

      Grandma always provided the voices for my patients. “It hurts when I swallow.”

      “Let me check your throat.” I grabbed the light scope. “Open wide. Just what I thought. Strep throat. Here’s a pill.”

      I pretended to give Lucy a pill and moved to my next patient, a doll named Suzy who broke her arm. After examining Suzy, I used the roll of toilet paper Grandma had given me to use as pretend bandages and wrapped Suzy’s arm. After seeing my other patients, I returned to Grandma.

      “Do you think I could go home tomorrow?” Grandma asked.

      “Yes,” I said. “Provided you take this pill and get a good night’s rest.”

      I gave Grandma one of the cinnamon-candy pills and she rolled it in her mouth until it dissolved.

      “I feel all better,” she said.

      And she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, even pretend snoring for more effect.

      How I wished I could have cured Grandma with a cinnamon-candy pill when she got so sick that she couldn’t get out of her chair. Funny that as a child I could fix everything and as an adult, very little.

       Chapter 11

      Olivia holds a keepsake handprint plaque she made out of clay for Mother’s Day.

      “Do СКАЧАТЬ