Lost Boys

11: Zap

This is what happened when the baby was born: On Thursday, the twenty-eighth of July, DeAnne went to her doctor's office to find out why the baby hadn't shown any intention yet of entering the world. It was the due date, and DeAnne had no desire for a bonus week of pregnancy like the one she had with Robbie. When Dr.

Keese examined her, he looked surprised. "You haven't had any labor pains?"

"I don't ever get hard labor pains until I'm about to deliver," said DeAnne.

"Well, get ready for them, then," he said. "You're at six centimeters."

"Oh," said DeAnne. "I guess that means I don't have time to plow the back forty before the baby comes."

"I think it means that if I were you, I'd go out and get in my car and drive to the hospital. I'll have Rochelle call your husband."

"This is really inconvenient," said DeAnne. "My mother is flying in from Utah tonight at nine-thirty. Do you think the baby will be here by then so Step can go pick her up?"

"Are you aware that you are speaking absolute nonsense?" asked Dr. Keese. "Things like that are no longer your concern for the next few days, and certainly not for the next few hours."

She stopped at the reception desk and borrowed the phone.

"Hi," said Step. "What's the news?"

"I'm at six centimeters and the doctor says I don't really have time to go home."

"OK," said Step. "Any pains yet?"

"None," she answered. "But I'm sure they'll make up for it later. Remember that Mother's arriving at nine-thirty"

"I've already arranged with Sam Freebody to pick her up if we happen to be at the hospital by then," said Step.

"Oh," said DeAnne. "How will he know her?"

"He'll look for the woman with short, tightly curled salt-and-pepper hair who seems lost and abandoned and who answers to the name 'Vette."'

"You make her sound like a lost dog."

"And I'm going to call her before she gets on the plane and tell her to look for a man tall enough to change lightbulbs without a stepladder and wide enough that he couldn't get two rattlesnakes to reach all the way around him. I think they'll find each other."

"I know you're perfectly able to handle things, Step. But I have to ask about these things or I'll worry."

"I know," said Step. "Did I complain? I'm trying to reassure you so you don't worry."

"Well, you're doing a splendid job. Call Sister Bigelow or Mary Anne Lowe to stay with the children."

"Whichever one says yes, I'll get the other one to finish mowing the lawn for me."

"Very funny. As soon as whoever it is gets there, then I need you to bring me my bag, the one I packed with everything I'll need in the hospital."

"Yes," said Step. "I'm already standing in our bedroom and I have just opened that bag."

"Don't open it, Step, or something will fall out."

"I'm now putting into the bag your copy of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which you told me you intended to read in the hospital but which you had neglected to put in the bag."

"I hate you when you're so superior-sounding."

"Now I'm going to sound bossy," said Step.

"Go ahead, I can take anything-I'm a woman."

"Get off the phone, leave everything to me, drive to the hospital, and I'll be there within thirty minutes."

"OK, Junk Man."

"Oh-wait-what was the name of the hospital again?"

"Step, you can't have forgotten the-'

He laughed and laughed.

"You are sick," she said. "I hope this little boy is nothing like you."

"I hope he's just like you," said Step, "except with a handle."

"I love you and I'm scared so please hurry."

"That's my plan. I love you too."

She ran only one stop sign on the way to the hospital. When she walked into the room, they made her sit in a wheelchair. I drove myself here, she thought, I walked from the parking lot, and now I need somebody to take care of me?

Well, why not? She was no longer in charge of anything now, except the baby inside her that had finally decided he was coming. Without insurance, but with a mother and father who loved babies and had looked forward to this one with hope, as they had looked forward to all their children.

Step made the calls first, though he was dripping with sweat and covered with grass clippings. Sam Freebody would have no problem picking up DeAnne's mother-he would hold up a placard in the airport saying

"Sylvette Brown, Grandmother again." Mary Anne Lowe was in her car heading over to the house to watch the kids almost before she hung up the phone. Bappy Waters would come over and finish mowing the lawn and put the mower away and bag the clippings. Step even called Ruby Bigelow, ostensibly to warn her that DeAnne probably wouldn't be teaching her class a week from Sunday, but actually because he was pretty sure that the Relief Society president would want to be informed of all childbirths- in-progress so that when sisters in the 1st Ward called her with the news, she could say, "I know."

Step told Stevie to open the door only if it was Sister Lowe, and then he headed for the laundry room, stripped off his grass-covered clothes, and bolted for the bathroom in his underwear. "You're not going to the hospital in your underwear, are you, Daddy!" shouted Robbie.

"I'm going to take a shower," he explained.

"In your underwear?" shouted Robbie. Robbie thought this was so funny he followed Step down the hall, repeating it. "In your underwear? In your underwear?"

"No, in your underwear," said Step. He closed the bedroom door, tossed his underwear into the laundry basket, and took the fastest shower of his life.

He got out, threw on his clothes, picked up DeAnne's bag, and when he got to the family room he discovered that Mary Anne Lowe was already there, armed with a bag full of coloring books, crayons, and little-kid board games. "Please help Sister Lowe all you can," Step said to the kids. And to Sister Lowe he said,

"The kids don't like anything so don't bother fixing them dinner."

"Da-ad!" said Robbie.

"Robbie will eat anything with ketchup on it, including small live animals," said Step. "Stevie will only eat pasta with parmesan cheese on it, no butter, no salt. And Betsy doesn't actually eat food, she just cuisinarts it and sprays it in a fine mist all over the kitchen."

"Don't believe him!" cried Robbie. "He's joking!"

"We'll do just fine," said Mary Anne.

Step looked at Stevie. "Will you help with your brother and sister?"

"Yes," he said.

Mary Anne turned to Stevie now. "What do you hope it is, a boy or a girl?"

"It's a boy," said Stevie.

"We had ultrasound," explained Step.

"Oh, so did we, on our last one," said Mary Anne, "but we wouldn't let the doctor tell us. We didn't want to know."

"We're gonna name it Zap!" said Robbie.

"Zap?" asked Mary Anne.

"For Zapata," said Step. "A great Mexican revolutionary"

She grinned. "What's next, Pancho Villa?"

"Not likely," said Step. "DeAnne said that the only way I could name one of our kids for the bandit who drove her ancestors out of Mexico is if I give birth to it myself," said Step.

"Why are you still standing around?" asked Mary Anne. "Aren't you supposed to be telling her when to breathe or something?"

"Naw," said Step. "We believe in using epidural blocks. No pain. We work crosswords during labor."

"Go, please, you're making me nervous," said Mary Anne.

"Thanks for helping," said Step.

"Don't worry, I'll get even with you."

When Step got to the hospital he found DeAnne already wired up in a labor room. A nurse took the bag and the two of them settled down to their vigil. Everything was going normally now, which meant that the pains were starting, and that meant that DeAnne needed to have Step talk continuously, except when she couldn't stand to have anybody talking to her. By now he was pretty good at guessing when to be quiet and when to babble. Or maybe she was just better at hiding it when she couldn't stand to hear another word or when she was desperate for him to distract her from the horrible process that evolution had decreed for human women-giving birth to big-headed babies.

The nurse bustled in and out; the anesthesiologist punched a hole in her spine and fed in the tube for the epidural block.

Then came the bad news. "Dr. Keese's current patient is having a little trouble," said the nurse. "She may require a caesarean. If she does, there's a backup here for you-Dr. Vender. Is that all right?"

"Do we have a choice?" asked Step.

"Dr. Vender will be fine," said DeAnne. Then, when the nurse was gone, she said, "Vender is a woman.

She just joined the same practice that Mary Anne's ob-gyn is in, and Mary Anne is thinking of switching to her.

She says she's getting a good reputation."

"I don't like changing horses in midstream," said Step.

"Neither do I," said DeAnne. "But that's the way it goes- if your doctor's with another patient when your time comes, then he's not going to drop that baby on its head and come to you."

"Maybe we'll get lucky," said Step.

"Maybe that other woman will get lucky."

They didn't get lucky. DeAnne was ripe and ready to go, and Dr. Keese was still with the other woman. Dr.

Vender showed up, solemnly businesslike-she looked to Step like one of those women who always wore midcalf brown skirts in college and put on little teeny half-smiles if somebody made a joke.

In the delivery room, it didn't take all that long. DeAnne had had enough babies now that she watched her own episiotomy in the mirror, though Step didn't think there were enough babies in the world to get him used to the idea, so he didn't watch. Then, just like clockwork, out popped the head, a little twist for the shoulders, and presto, boy number three. Zap.

"Hi, Zap," said Step.

"Oh, can't you let him hear his real name?" said DeAnne. "He'll want to go back if he thinks he's going to be Zap for the rest of his life."

"Hi, Jeremy Zapata Fletcher."

"Is he all right?" asked DeAnne.

"Twenty digits total, distributed normally" said Step.

Clip. Snip. The nurse took the baby from Dr. Vender and laid it on the scale. "Be useful, here, daddy" said the nurse. "Watch the baby and don't let him walk anywhere."

"He's shivering," said Step. "I think he's cold."

The nurses were preparing something over on the side counter. Dr. Vender was taking care of the placenta and stitching up the episiotomy.

"Can't we cover him or something?" asked Step. "He's really shivering."

"Now, don't worry mama," said Dr. Vender. "Everything's just fine."

Step wanted to snap back at her: Don't talk down to us like children.

"Here we go," said the nurse. She took note of Zap's weight and then dripped something in each of his eyes with an eyedropper. "Oh, I know you don't like that," said the nurse.

"This is definitely not normal," said Step. "He's shivering and you've got to do something about it."

"What's wrong, Step?" asked DeAnne.

"Nothing's wrong," said Dr. Vender. "Daddy's just being a worrywart."

"Can the babytalk," said Step, unable to endure it another moment. "DeAnne is a grownup and so am I, and we'd both like to know what's going on with the baby."

"We've already sent for a neonatal specialist," said Dr. Vender. "It appears that it may be some kind of seizure activity. There's no proximate cause. There was no oxygen deprivation and no anomaly in any of the baby's vital signs during delivery."

Step figured that what he was hearing was the standard dis claimer to avoid a malpractice suit. He also figured that it was probably true. But that still didn't answer the real question. "Is the baby going to be all right?"

"His vital signs are just fine," said Dr. Vender. "This isn't normal, but at the same time it may not be dangerous at all. Please, now, as soon as I know anything more I'll tell you, but it's time now for your wife to go into the recovery room."

Step leaned over DeAnne, kissed her, and squeezed her hand. "Can't I hold him?" she asked. "Can't I see him first?"

Step knew what she was thinking: Something is wrong with my baby. I don't want my baby to die without my having held him when he was alive. "Of course you can," said Step to DeAnne.

He looked at Dr. Vender, raised an eyebrow. She beckoned to the nurse who had the baby. The nurse brought Zap to DeAnne and laid him in the crook of her arm. DeAnne turned her head to see him. "He's beautiful," she said.

It was true. All newborns are squat and red, of course, but Zap was a genuinely pretty baby.

"He really is shivering," she said. "Don't be scared, Jeremy. We already love you. You've got a wonderful life ahead of you."

The nurse took the baby back. Another nurse wheeled DeAnne out of the delivery room, with Dr. Vender right behind.

"I'd like to hold the baby," said Step.

"The neonate's going to be here in a minute," said the nurse, "and we've got to get the measurements."

"He's not going to grow in the next thirty seconds," said Step.

"You're a feisty one," said the nurse. He could tell that she was not going to say I like that in a man.

"I'm sorry" said Step. "But this little guy is a lot more important to me than hospital routines, and there isn't a line of people waiting outside for this room."

She handed him the baby. Just like the three times before, the first thing he thought was: I never knew that babies could be so small. All his memories of the older kids were from later in their babyhood. The first minutes were always new again. "I think he's shivering a little less."

The nurse didn't say anything.

"Does this happen often?" asked Step. "This kind of seizure?"

"Everything happens," said the nurse. "And nothing's ever the same twice."

Which told Step that she had seen babies like this who died.

She was still measuring when the neonate came, a doctor named Torwaldson. "Why wasn't this already done?"

"I insisted that she let me hold the baby for thirty seconds," said Step. "I threatened to break the windshield of her car if she didn't."

"I'm done here," said the nurse. She did not think Step was at all cute.

Torwaldson started taking soundings with his stethoscope. "It's time for you to go to the waiting room, Mr .

... Fletcher."

"Tell me about this kind of seizure," said Step.

"I'll tell you about this kind of seizure when I know what kind of seizure it is," said Torwaldson. "Pheno," he said to the nurse. "Let's get this under control."

Step left. There were times to be assertive and times to get out of the way.

He did not go to the waiting room. Instead he went to recovery, and the nurses there gave him no trouble about getting in to see DeAnne. Apparently she had been asking for him.

"Is he OK?" she said.

"The neonatal physician is checking him out. He said some thing about pheno. In my mind that seems to go with barbital. I assume that's something to stop the trembling."

"Did he seem worried?" asked DeAnne.

"He seemed competent and he seemed confident," said Step. "How are you?"

"It hurts," said DeAnne, "but they're being very nice and pumping me full of drugs. I think they're going to give me a sleeping pill or something because I'm so worried about the baby. Say a prayer with me, Step.

Please?"

Step held her hand and prayed for the doctors to be able to find out what was wrong and to do whatever medical science could do to fix the problem and please let them have a long life with this little boy, they wanted him so much, but thy will be done. "I think he'll be fine," said Step. "I really do. They weren't doing anything dramatic. It wasn't an emergency."

In a little while she was asleep, and Step headed for the waiting room to start calling people. But first he saw Dr. Vender in the hall. She waved him over. "I'm sorry if I was a little short with you," she said. "I was afraid you were worrying Mrs. Fletcher."

"If I saw something wrong with the baby Dr. Vender, and I didn't tell her immediately, she would never trust me again."

"Well, some people need the truth and some people need anything but," said Dr. Vender. "I didn't know your wife or you, and so I did the safest thing. Or rather I tried to."

"Sorry," said Step. But he wasn't sorry, and she certainly knew it.

"Torwaldson is the best in Steuben," she said. "And he's on the phone right now with a neuro in Chapel Hill."

"Neuro?" asked Step.

"Neurosurgeon," she explained.

"Yeah, I know what a neuro is. I just wondered what it meant that he was calling one."

"I would guess," said Dr. Vender, "that it means he's run into something he hasn't seen before, or else he wants a corroborating opinion."

"Is the baby in danger of dying?"

"As far as I can see," said Dr. Vender, "no."

That was when Dr. Keese came bustling out into the hall. "Dr. Vender!" he called.

"This is Mr. Fletcher," said Dr. Vender.

Dr. Keese held out his hand, and Step shook it. "Nice to see you, I met you when I poked my head into the labor room, remember?"

Step shook his head. "Must have been before I got there."

"No, you were there," said Dr. Keese. "But I think you only had eyes for DeAnne. Sorry I couldn't be in there, but I can assure you that Dr. Vender did everything I would have done, and probably better."

How nice, thought Step. Doctors covering each other against a lawsuit.

"Mr. Fletcher," said Dr. Keese. "Dr. Torwaldson and I and Dr. Vender all agree that we need to stop the seizure activity, and for that we're giving your baby phenobarbital. We've given a fairly massive dose, for his body weight, but we've got to stop the seizures. Once we've got that under control, we'll step the dosage down to the minimum for maintenance. He's going into intensive care now, but I truly don't think he's in any danger of losing his life. So I urge you to go home. It's after midnight and you'll want to be up here in the morning. We'll know more then, and DeAnne will want to see you. All right?"

What choice did he have? He waited until he knew what room DeAnne was assigned to and where to find Zap the next morning, and then he went out to the car. He was just getting into the Datsun when he realized that there was no reason to leave the good car at the hospital. DeAnne wasn't going anywhere for a while. The rusty old two-door could keep its vigil here tonight. As he drove home, he couldn't stop thinking: My baby was born having a seizure and the doctors have never seen it before. Something's wrong with my youngest child, and I can't do anything but pray, and I can't think of a single reason why God should exclude the Stephen Fletcher family from the normal vicissitudes of life and so I don't think my prayers are going to be answered. Not my real prayer, anyway. The "thy will be done" part will certainly be answered, but the part about "Make this all go away so that nothing is wrong, so that the doctors say I can't understand it, there was a seizure last night but now there's not a trace of a problem, and he'll definitely be brilliant and healthy and live to a hundred and four"-I don't think God's going to adjust his plan for the universe to make room for accommodating that particular prayer.

When he got home, DeAnne's mother, Vette, met him at the door. "Oh," he said. "I hoped you'd be asleep."

"And I hoped you'd call from the hospital," she said.

He had forgotten to call. "There were problems. They sent me home. I decided to call from here."

"Problems?" She looked stricken.

"DeAnne is fine. But the baby seems to have something wrong and they don't know what it is. He was trembling. They called it a seizure. Well, actually, they called it 'seizure activity.' But they said it didn't look life threatening."

"Oh, I hate this," said Vette. "I hate not knowing."

"You and me both," said Step. "I guess I ought to call everybody now. It's only eleven P.m. in Utah, right?"

"Also Mary Anne Lowe said to tell you to call her no matter how late."

"OK," said Step. "I'll call her first."

He went into the kitchen and suddenly found himself sur rounded by tiny whining insects. He brushed his hands around his head but they wouldn't go away.

"Oh, aren't those gnats awful?" asked Vette. "I found a can of Raid and I've been spraying them, but new swarms just keep turning up. Do you get them all the time?"

"Never," said Step. "Where's the Raid?" The gnats all seemed to want to zoom right into his ear. "This is all I needed."

"I think they're coming from the laundry room," said Vette. "I haven't found any in the kids' rooms yet."

"We have this weird bug thing," said Step. He went into the laundry room and started looking around for where the gnats might be getting in through. As he looked, he told Vette about the crickets and the June bugs.

"We don't have any regular bug problem, I guess," he said. "It just comes in waves. Every couple of months or so some group of insects decide that our house is ready to go condo."

He found that the dryer hose had come partly away from the outdoor vent. He tried to push it tight, but the pressure jostled it and it fell completely away. Suddenly another swarm of gnats arose. Only they didn't come from the vent-they came from the hose. As if they had been spawned somewhere inside the dryer.

"Here, give me the Raid," he said.

Vette gave it to him, and he first sprayed the swarm that was orbiting his head. Then he sprayed up into the dryer hose and then out through the vent and when he thought he had dosed them enough, he slipped the hose back over the vent and then got a screwdriver from the laundry room cupboard and tightened the collar over the hose so it wouldn't slip away again.

"What are we doing in this house?" he said, when he got back into the kitchen.

"Getting by," said Vette. "Doing what you must for your family."

"We should never have left Vigor."

"Step, you know that I think you never should have left Utah! But you are not having problems with little Jeremy because you moved to North Carolina."

"How do you know? Maybe the doctor did something wrong. In Salt Lake they have a billion babies every year, they've seen everything. Out here there just aren't as many babies and so they're learning on Zap."

Vette winced. "Do you really call him Zap?"

"Well, the first thing Robbie said when he heard the name Jeremy was 'Germy, Germy Germy' so maybe Zaps the lesser of two evils."

"Step, things go wrong sometimes no matter where you live, and sometimes things go right, and you know something? Most things that happen aren't anybody's fault at all, so it's really kind of vain of you to think that your moving to North Carolina caused your newborn baby to have a seizure. You didn't do a single thing to cause it. For all you know whatever problem he has was determined at the moment of conception."

"Yeah, well, I was there for that, too." Then he was appalled that he had said such a thing. He and DeAnne's parents got along really well, but still, you don't talk about the conception of your children to your wife's mother.

"Better call people," said Vette. "I'll keep watching for the gna ts."

Step called Mary Anne first. It took longer than such calls usually did, because he mentioned that the baby was in intensive care and then he had to answer, "We don't know yet" to about fifty questions. It went that way with every call, but he couldn't very well not tell them the baby was having trouble, or when they found out they'd be deeply hurt. Besides, if prayer was going to be of any help in this situation, he wanted all the people praying that he could find.

He didn't finish the calls until nearly three. He had already sent Sylvette to bed, persuading her to go by pointing out that she'd be needed to take care of the kids in the morning while he went up to the hospital, and then she'd take her shift at the hospital while he stayed home with the kids-she'd need her sleep.

"So will you," Vette retorted.

"Yeah, but 1 can take a nap while I'm driving back and forth to the hospital."

She laughed and let him pull out the sofa bed, which DeAnne had already made up for her mother that morning. Then he moved his phone operations into the bedroom. When he finished the calls and took his last patrol through the house, she was asleep.

He looked in on each of the kids. Betsy, cuddled up to the stuffed Snoopy that- for reasons passing understanding-she had named Wilbur. Robbie, holding his real-fur stuffed bunny, which had been named Mammalee since his infancy. And Stevie, holding on to nothing.

You're all safe here in my house, Step thought silently, and yet I really can't keep you safe at all, can I?

Because there's that new one, not six hours old yet, and his life is in danger and I'm not even there because I'm completely useless. And here you are, asleep, safe in your beds, only something's going on inside your head, Stevie, and I can't reach in and find out what's happening and make it get better. I can plug up one hole and sweep the crickets out, but then the june bugs get in somewhere else, and then the gnats. Even when you have a perfect child, nothing stays perfect. Something always gets in. The good things are always, always at risk.

In the bedroom, undressed and ready for bed, he did what he hadn't done in years, though DeAnne did it every night. He knelt down beside the bed, the way he had done on his mission, the way he had done as a child.

He poured out his heart and asked for mercy for his new baby. Let him live. Let him have a good life. If it's within the power of my priesthood to heal him, then let me heal him when I give him a blessing tomorrow. I don't want to lose him. I want all my children, this one as much as any of the others, and all the children yet unborn that you might have for us. Don't take him away from us. Whatever he needs, we'll give it, if we have it to give.

Later, lying in bed, it occurred to him that he might have been praying for the Lord to grant him and DeAnne sixty years of caring for an invalid child. That perhaps what was wrong with Zap was so severe that it would be cruel to keep him here if the Lord was willing to take him home. So he re-entered the prayer that he thought he had closed, and added the phrase that he had deliberately left out when he was on his knees: Thy will be done.

DeAnne had recovered enough to go home, but she didn't want to. "I've never left the hospital without my baby," she said.

"You'll see him every day," said Dr. Keese. "And so will Step. And so will your mother. But you're not on insurance, I understand, and this is going to eat up your savings. You need whatever money you have to take care of Jeremy."

She said nothing.

"Good," he said. "They'll have you ready to go at noon."

To fill the empty time, she went back to the book. She had forgotten to pack it, and yet it had turned out to be the only thing that could keep her mind off Jeremy. She could read about the family in the book and say, We may have problems, but at least we'll never be like them.

No, it was more than that. The book kept speaking to her, characters kept saying things that echoed in her heart. Like when the nice son in the story said something about how life is like a cliff that's eroding away and you spend your whole life just shoring it up. It was the nightmare of her life, the one that lived always at the back of her mind, and he had named it. Only it wasn't him, of course. It was the author. Tyler wrote those words for me, she thought, so I'd know that I wasn't alone going through these fearful days.

This last morning in the hospital, she reached the passage where the mother in the book speaks of her "three lovely pregnancies" and how she counted down the months, waiting for something perfect to happen. "It seemed I was full of light," the mother said. "It was light and plans that filled me." DeAnne let the book fall onto the blanket and turned her face into the pillow and wept.

She must have cried herself to sleep, because when she next opened her eyes, Step was sitting there, leaning forward on the chair beside the bed, his chin resting on his hands, his elbows on his knees. He was looking at nothing, staring at the wall.

"Hello," said DeAnne.

"Hi, Fish Lady, " said Step. At once the somberness left him, and if she hadn't had that moment of watching him unawares, she would never have known that he was anything but bright and confident. "I understand the doctor wants to kick you out and send you home. And I've got to tell you that I hope you come."

"I will," she said. "But please not yet."

"DeAnne, you'll be up here at least twice a day to nurse him. I'll drive you here, or your mother will. But in between those times, you need to be back home."

She reached out for his hand. "Step, I don't want to leave without the baby."

"He's doing better all the time," said Step. "And we couldn't very well give him all these tests at home."

"I don't like what they're doing to him here," said DeAnne. "I don't like the way he's drugged all the time."

"I don't like it either," said Step. "But we're not doctors."

"They don't know everything," she said.

"But they know something," said Step. "And sleeping in a hospital bed isn't going to make you or me any wiser about what we ought to do. Please-you've spent too much time here alone."

"I hardly have any time alone," said DeAnne. "I think every sister in the Steuben 1 st Ward has been up here twice."

"At church this morning the bishop asked everybody to fast and pray for Zap next Sunday. The whole ward."

It filled DeAnne with emotion to hear that. They really weren't alone. And maybe with so many people fasting and praying, God would hear.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would be like in the book. Maybe things would always be just a little bit out of control, just out of reach.

Step reached down onto the floor. "You dropped your book," he said.

"I don't want to read it anymore," she said.

"Oh? I thought you liked it. Yesterday you even read me a passage from it."

"She knows too much," said DeAnne. "It hurts too much."

"Fine, I'll put it up on the shelf here-"

"No," she said. "No, give it to me."

"So you are going to read it."

"No," she said. "I'm just going to hold it. Is that all right?"

He looked at her strangely.

"I'm not going crazy, Step. It just ... it's an anchor. It's another woman telling me she knows about things going wrong, and I just need to hold the book, OK? I mean at least it's not a Barbie doll or something."

"Fine," said Step. "I just wondered if this is going to become an icon to you. Like scripture. The fifth standard work?"

"Don't make fun," she said. "This is very hard for me, you know. I've always prided myself on making perfect babies. Now all I've got left that I make perfectly is my pie crusts."

"I wasn't making fun," he said, as he reached down and embraced her awkwardly "And he is a perfect baby DeAnne."

"You can't just deny it and make it go away," said DeAnne.

"He has the perfect body for the life God intends him to live. For the life he intends us to live."

God's plan. Nothing we can do about it. Might as well stop praying or trying or anything.

No, he doesn't really believe that, she realized. Because when we've talked about this sort of thing before, it was me who argued that God must plan all our lives or it wouldn't be fair, and he's the one who said, God doesn't have a plan for our lives, he just put us all into a world where no matter what our life is like, we can still discover how good and strong we are, or how weak we are, or how evil or cowardly. He's saying this about God's plan to make me feel better.

"I keep thinking," she said, "that we shouldn't have made love so soon after I used the spermicide the last time."

He shook his head. "It wasn't all that soon, DeAnne."

"You're supposed to wait longer. A week."

"DeAnne, the doctors don't even know what the problem is, let alone what caused it."

"And Bendectin-all these stories about Bendectin and birth defects--"

"In the National Enquirer, DeAnne, not in Scientific American or the Journal of the AMA."

"Step, I don't want to come home without my baby."

"But you will come home without him, DeAnne, because you know that's what's best for him, and best for you. And you always do what you know is right. That's who you are."

She thought about that for a while. "OK," she said. "Call for the nurse."

Later that afternoon, Step dropped by the pharmacy to pick up DeAnne's pain medication. While he was waiting for the pharma cist, he wandered over to the magazines. A woman was standing there, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that she glanced at him and stepped away. He scanned the covers of the newsmagazines, and then, out of sheer boredom, the professional wrestling fan magazines.

"You just can't give up, can you," said the woman.

Step glanced up, trying to see whom she was talking to. She was looking at him.

Did he even know her? She looked familiar, but he couldn't place her.

"At Kroger's, at the mall, I turn around and there you are. Can't you give me any peace?"

Step was baffled. "Excuse me, but I think you have me confused with somebody else."

"Wasn't giving up my job enough for you? Are you trying to hound me into suicide?" Her voice trembled; she sounded genuinely distraught. Whatever she imagined he was doing seemed real enough to her, though he could not think of why she would have fixated on him.

"Ma'am, nobody wants you to commit suicide."

"Then just stop it," she hissed.

Suddenly he made the connection. She hadn't chosen him out of madness; she really had given up her job because of him.

"Mrs. Jones," he said.

"You're a vile man," she said. "Whatever I did, I don't deserve to have you stalking me."

"I'm not, I swear it. This is the first time I've set eyes on you since--"

"Don't lie to me," she said contemptuously. "You every time. At the mall you laughed out lo ud at me."

"Mrs. Jones, how would I know you'd even be at Macy's? I'm here picking up a prescription for my wife."

"I won't go on with that tape hanging over my I won't. It's worse than blackmail, it's torture."

It sickened him to have her, Stevie's tormentor, complaining about torture. But he didn't want to argue with her. She was a closed chapter. "Listen, Mrs. Jones. I just brought my wife home from the hospital and our newborn baby is still there because nobody knows why he's having seizures but he's in intensive care at a hundred dollars an hour and I don't have insurance and the bank is foreclosing on our house in Indiana and you know something? I don't care about you. I'm not following you. I'm living my own life, and you go live yours and forget about me, because until this moment I had completely forgotten about you and I'd just as soon leave it that way"

He turned to go back to the pharmacist's counter. She snatched at his sleeve. "Give me the tape," she said.

"I don't even remember where it is," Step said. "Look, Mrs. Jones, we both live in the same town. We're bound to end up in the same store or me same fast-food joint or the same movie every now and then, and it doesn't mean anything."

"Is that how you plan to defend yourself when I ask the court for a restraining order?" she said. "That's what my lawyer suggests."

"Right now I think my prescription is ready and my wife needs it. Have your lawyer write me a letter." If there was a lawyer.

He picked up the prescription, had the clerk put it on his account at the store, and left. He was half afraid that Mrs. Jones would follow him out of the store, chase him all the way home, and beat on his door, insisting that he had to stop following her. But when he returned home with the medication, the only people who knocked on the door were more Relief Society sisters, coming by to help encourage DeAnne about Zap. Whatever happens will be part of Heavenly Father's plan, they said. After they left, DeAnne couldn't help but voice her exasperation to Step and Vette. "Of course it'll be part of God's plan, but God hasn't exactly been famous for planning nice things for all of his children."

Even though she was annoyed, Step could see that their visit had been good for her. In familiar surroundings, some parts of her life seemed finally to be under control again. She was back to being Relief Society spiritual living teacher instead of a helpless mother trapped in a hospital surrounded by doctors who didn't know what they were doing with her baby and wouldn't admit it.

On Monday morning, DeAnne arranged for Mary Anne Lowe to come over and tend Robbie and Betsy so that Step could take Stevie to the psychiatrist while Vette took DeAnne to the hospital to nurse Zap.

"We've been taking him to Dr. Weeks for two months," said Step. "Nothing's getting better."

"I know," said DeAnne. "But these things take time."

"After two months, we deserve a progress report," said Step. "We ought to be getting at least a diagnosis.

Something. I mean, we're going through the same thing with Zap, the doctors searching to try to find out what's wrong, but they at least keep us posted. They explain what they're doing. And they learn things about the baby every day-at least they learn what isn't wrong with him."

"Psychiatry isn't precise," said DeAnne.

"Exactly my point. The hospital bill is already getting up around six thousand dollars for Zap alone, and who knows how much longer he'll be in there? We're putting in ninety bucks a week to the shrink-almost four hundred a month, almost as much as we're paying in rent-and we don't know what we're getting."

"So you don't want to take him? You want to give up? Stop cold?"

"I want to leave him home today. I want to go in myself, talk to her, find out what she's been finding out."

DeAnne looked at him suspiciously. "I think you want to pick a fight with her. I think you want to get rid of her the way you got rid of Mrs. Jones."

"If you want, I'll take the tape recorder and let you hear everything that's said."

"No," said DeAnne. "You can handle it."

"I promise that I won't do anything to antagonize her," said Step. "I wouldn't want to make it harder for Lee to continue in the Church."

"Or for Stevie to continue seeing her," said DeAnne.

"If that's in Stevie's best interest," said Step.

DeAnne just stood there, looking at him.

"I'm glad you decided not to say it," said Step.

"Say what?" asked DeAnne.

"That you don't think I'm capable of fairly evaluating whether Stevie should continue or not."

"That's not what I was going to say."

"No, but it's what you were thinking."

"Well, you can't get mad at me for what I thought and didn't say!"

"I'm not mad at you. I'm just reminding you that in all our years of marriage, I've never snuck off and done something about our family that you were against. Have I?"

"No," she said.

"So maybe I deserve a little trust here. You're not the only parent Stevie has who loves him."

"That is so unfair," she said. "I never said that, I never thought it, I never would—"

"I actually go through every day doing pretty well, DeAnne. I dress myself now, I carry on whole conversations with strangers, and I almost never have to call home for help. I've even used a credit card without confusion, and the grocery store lets me cash checks as long as I have a permission slip from my mother."

"Are you trying to make me cry?" asked DeAnne. "Are you trying to make me feel guilty because this is the first time you've taken Stevie to Dr. Weeks and I worry that you'll do something or say something to-"

"You see?" said Step. "You really don't trust me. For five months you've been in charge of everything at home, and now I'm back home again and you think that unless you program every word I say, unless I stick to your program every single moment, without deviation, without side trips, without thinking for myself, then everything will fall apart."

"Let's not fight," she said. "Please, please, please."

"We're not fighting," said Step. "I'm just expressing my resent ment about the fact that you don't trust my judgment. Don't you remember that we decided together to send Stevie to Dr. Weeks? Or do you still think it was because you manipulated me into it and you don't dare let up on the manipulation?"

"Don't do this to me!" she said. "I have to go up there to the hospital and hold my baby who is so drugged up that he hangs like a rag doll in my arms and we have to suction the milk out of my breasts and force it into his throat in his sleep! I have to deal with all those doctors who think that I can't even understand English and force them to tell me what's going on so that I can have some idea of what's happening to my baby, and now you attack me like this—"

"Well if you're so tough and rigorous about finding out what the doctors are doing to Zap," said Step, "then why the hell have we gone two months sending Stevie to Dr. Weeks and you don't even know what goes on in the sessions? And when I say that I'm going to go up there and do with Dr. Weeks exactly what you're doing with Zap's doctors, you think that I'm too stupid or too emotional or too bigoted to do it. Well, I'm trusting you with Zap's life when you handle things up there. Don't you think I deserve the same respect in dealing with Dr.

Weeks? Or am I the vice-president in this marriage? Will I just get trotted out for funerals?"

DeAnne gasped. "Don't say that!" she cried. "Oh, Step, you really think he's going to die!" She burst into tears.

Step was horrified. "It was just a figure of speech. I was just saying-Reagan sends Bush around to funerals, that's what I mean. Lik e when Sadat was assassinated. I wasn't saying anything about Zap. Really."

He put an arm around her. She turned toward him and wept into his shirt for just a moment. Then she lifted her head. "I'm not going to do this," she said. "I'm not going to cry. I'm not going to let go. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," he said.

"If I let go, then I won't be there for Zap. Or Stevie, or anybody. I'm just walking along the edge, Step.

Right along the edge. You mustn't push me. You just mustn't. You're the one I've got to hold on to."

"So hold on to me," said Step. "Don't push me away. Trust me. Trust me the way I trust you."

"This whole argument, this is just because we're upset, that's all. We're upset and worried about Zap."

"And Stevie," said Step.

"Yes," she said. "And Stevie. I have to go."

"DeAnne," he said, "I have to know. Are you with me on this?"

"On what?" she said.

"On finding out from Dr. Weeks what's happening with Stevie."

"Yes," she said. "Do what you think is right."

"I won't do anything," said Step. "I'll just find things out. The way you find things out about Zap. All right?"

She looked at him steadily "If you can see that Dr. Weeks isn't helping, you can discontinue the sessions.

Without asking me or anything."

"But I won't," said Step. "Not without discussing it with you."

So it was that Step drove alone to Dr. Weeks's office, following the directions DeAnne had given him.

When he went inside, Dr. Weeks stood up and greeted him warmly. "Mr. Fletcher," she said.

"Please, call me Step."

"Step, then. I've been thinking that it was about time I had a session with you and your wife."

"She's at the hospital. Our new baby is in intensive care."

"Oh, I'm so sorry. What's wrong?"

Step explained, briefly, and then said, "That's why I'm here today. We're coasting along without insurance.

The bills for these sessions are quite steep, and we thought it was time for us to evaluate where we stand-what exactly you've found out about Stevie's problems and what you think it looks like for ... you know, down the road."

"Well, we've been making good progress, Stevie and I. He talks quite often during the sessions now. I think he's getting used to me."

Step wanted to say, He talks quite often? You mean we've been paying for sessions in which he hasn't talked at all? After two months he's only now getting used to you? But he remembered DeAnne's concerns about him and curbed his tongue.

"Beyond that," she said, "I'm still in the process of diagnosis. His reticence to speak is, of course, one of the symptoms of his disorder, but it also makes the process of diagnosis rather slow. I think that in another month or two I may be prepared to give you a prognosis. In the meantime ..." She turned over a couple of sheets of paper on her desk.

Trying to keep his voice calm, Step interrupted. "What I'm interested in today, Dr. Weeks, is not a final statement, but an explanation of what you know so far, or what you suspect so far. DeAnne and I have to decide now, not two months from now, whether to continue treatment."

"I'd be happy to work out a payment schedule with you," said Dr. Weeks. "But I can hardly discuss an ongoing process, especially when you are not the patient."

"The patient is eight years old," said Step. "And if I were a fellow psychiatrist, you would have no trouble at all talking with me about what you think the diagnosis might turn out to be."

"But you are not a psychiatrist, Step."

"I have a Ph.D., Dr. Weeks. It's in history, which isn't an exact science like psychiatry, I know, but it does mean that I'm an educated human being, and I think that if you try to explain to me what's wrong with Stevie, I'll understand you." Thinking of what was going on at the hospital with Zap, he added, "For instance, you must have some idea of what his condition isn't. Things you've eliminated."

"It would be much more helpful to the whole process, Step, if you and your wife came in for some sessions with me yourselves. In fact, I suspect that your insistence on hurrying the diagnostic procedure may suggest possible sources for Stevie's abnormal reaction to stress."

I should have expected this, thought Step. The very fact that I want to hold her accountable is proof of my disorder. Well, he was not going to let Weeks establish a doctor-patient relationship with him. "Fine," he said.

"If you explain to us what you think the problem might be and why our coming in for sessions might be helpful, then we might well agree that our joining in the therapeutic process might be the indicated course of action."

"Step," she said, "you seem to feel some hostility toward psychotherapists, along with an apparent fascination that has caused you to learn some aspects of psychological jargon. I wouldn't be surprised if you have unconsciously communicated this hostility to Stevie."

"Dr. Weeks, my efforts to find out what's going on between you and Stevie did not cause his problems."

"I wasn't implying anything of the kind," said Dr. Weeks. "Why do you think you felt a need to defend yourself just now?"

"Dr. Weeks, I think you misunderstand our relationship. I'm here as Stevie's parent. If I had brought him to a pediatrician with a bad cough, I'd have a right to expect the pediatrician to tell me what he thought might be causing the cough and what he intended to do about it, and he wouldn't give me any crap about how I couldn't possibly understand the ramifications of pulmonary function and, by the way, have I been short of breath myself lately? Stevie's been with you for two months, and apparently all you've observed about him is that he's morose and has imaginary friends, which is strikingly similar to what we already knew when we brought him here. I hope you'll understand that I'm not trying to interfere with Stevie's treatment. I simply have a responsibility to know what that treatment consists of and what it's designed to accomplish."

"Let me tell you why I'm reluctant to discuss this with you, Mr. Fletcher. Given the importance of parents in a child's life, it is inevitable that Stevie's parents are involved in the source of his problems. This idea is obviously threatening to you, and I fear that you may withdraw Stevie from treatment in order to protect your own ego. This might cause the boy great harm."

Step recognized that she was attempting to manipulate him into backing off- any objection he raised to her diagnosis could be dismissed as ego protection. But he held his temper and said none of the vicious retorts that came to mind. "Dr. Weeks," he said, "DeAnne and I knew from the start that solving Stevie's problems would almost certainly mean us changing our lives somehow. We're willing to do whatever it takes to help our son, and I'm not afraid to find out flaws in my own parenting. But I can promise you that if you don't tell me what you've learned about his condition, then we certainly will withdraw Stevie from your care."

She regarded him for a while, her expression aloof and uninvolved. She must have spent hours in front of mirrors during graduate school, Step thought, practicing that detached, I'mabove- emotional-engagement-with-mere-humans-and-their-pettyproblems look.

"All right, Mr. Fletcher," she said, "I will tell you what possibilities I am currently considering as diagnoses for your son's condition. First, we may be seeing a simple factitious disorder. Second, we may-

"Factitious disorder?" asked Step.

"Factitious means the opposite of what it sounds like, Mr. Fletcher-"

"I'm aware of the meaning of factitious," said Step. "It's the meaning of the phrase factitious disorder that I'd like you to explain."

"In layman's terms, it means that Stevie might be lying about these imaginary friends because he knows it upsets you and he's hungry for the attention that ensues."

Step stifled his desire to say Stevie doesn't lie, he has never lied, he tells the truth even when it causes him to be embarrassed, even when he's sure that he'll be punished for it. If Stevie says that he's playing with imaginary friends, then that's because he really thinks he's playing with these friends, and it's not some damned cockamamy factitious disorder. Instead, he merely said, "And your second hypothesis?"

"It is possible that this is a mere adjustment disorder with depressed mood and withdrawal."

"And what would that mean?" asked Step.

"That he was seriously disturbed by your move to North Carolina. That he felt dislocated from his friends, from a familiar and safe setting, and instead found himself plunged against his will into a terrifying environment where he is incapable of making sense of what is going on and feels himself unable to protect himself from others. In that case, these imaginary friends would be a hallucinatory effort on the part of his unconscious to re-create the safe environment of the past, while his depression would be a sign that in fact the hallucinations are not successful in masking his unhappiness. He does not quite believe the falsely happy reality that his unconscious mind has created for him."

Step kept himself from saying, That's precisely what DeAnne and I thought before we ever brought him to you. "What do we do about it?" he asked.

"That was a hypothesis," she answered, "not a diagnosis, and therefore we will do nothing about it."

"But if it turned out to be the true diagnosis, what would be the right course of action?"

"We are getting into dangerous territory, here," said Dr. Weeks. "Highly speculative."

"I understand that, and I'm not proposing that you do anything improper. I just want to have some idea of what the treatment might consist of if this turns out to be the diagnosis."

"Well," she said, "we might begin by having you contact the parents of some of his former friends back in Indiana, to get them to write to him or telephone. However, that may not be effective because at his age children are not very adept at making meaningful emotional contact through indirect media like the telephone or letters."

"And?" asked Step.

He meant for her to propose other possible treatments that might be used if Stevie's condition really was adjustment disorder with depressed mood and withdrawal. But she took it as a request for the third hypothesis.

"The third possible diagnosis, and the one that I think is most likely, is also the one that will be most difficult for you to hear impartially, and therefore I ask you to keep an open mind as best you can."

Step nodded, even though it was clear that she didn't think him capable of it.

"I think we can best account for Stevie's behavior if we view it, not as a new condition brought on by the move to North Carolina, but rather as an exacerbation of a preexisting condition of some severity, one which remained unobserved because it had gone on so long that you thought it a part of Stevie's underlying character."

"So why would we only have noticed it since-'

"Please," said Dr. Weeks. "An open mind. The stress of the move changed his pattern, you see, and it was the change you noticed, not the actual onset of his condition."

"And the condition would be..."

"Atypical dissociative disorder," she said. "This has been primarily documented in people who have undergone int ense brainwashing experiences, but it is my belief that it shows up far more commonly and merely remains undiagnosed."

Step was baffled. What experience could Stevie have undergone that would produce the same effects as brainwashing?

"Actually, most children in America are subjected to a particular form of indoctrination from their earliest years, in which they are repeatedly reinforced in their belief in a powerful figure who does not actually exist.

However, evidence is given to them to sup port that belief, accompanied by stories to make the child believe that the whole world believes in this particular mythic figure."

"You're saying Stevie's problems are because we taught him to believe in Santa Claus?" asked Step, incredulous.

"On the contrary. I think Santa Claus is, by and large, quite beneficial, for when the child is finally allowed-or forced-to recognize the nonexistence of Santa Claus, then the child is able to go through the vital intellectual process of reconstructing reality in light of new evidence, complete with back-forming new stories to account for past events. This prepares the child for many other disillusionments and gives her vital and well-supported experience in maintaining her grip on reality independent of the stories told to her at any given time."

"So Santa Claus is good," said Step.

"Santa Claus is usually not maladaptive," said Dr. Weeks, "and can be turned to a good end. I doubt many parents actually have that outcome in mind when they tell their children the ludicrous chimney story."

"No, I imagine not," said Step.

"Santa Claus is certainly not at the root of Stevie's problem. He has a healthy skepticism toward that story already."

We paid you ninety bucks an hour to find out whether Stevie believed in Santa Claus?

"Stevie has been subjected to another nonconsonant belief system whose implications are far more all-pervasive in his interpretation of events in his life. He feels an enormous weight of pressure to demonstrate his loyalty to this belief system, and therefore has for a long time been forced to come up with sup porting personal experiences to tell you and your wife about. However, Stevie also has been taught to have an absolute commitment to truth, and cannot do as many children do and simply lie, claiming to have experiences that they do not have. Nor, being a child of a rather placid temperament, has he been able to work himself up to a level of emotion in which hysterical phenomena appear, which is the most common means of satisfying these expectations."

"You're talking about religion, aren't you?" asked Step.

"And the Mormon religion in particular, since yours is, as I understand, a somewhat, though not extremely, charismatic sect. As I have learned from Lee, there is considerable emotional dis play at your testimony meetings once each month, at which many people stand up and weep while they speak. This is clearly a hysterical phenomenon, and is not unhealthy- many churches throughout the South have long had a similar tradition and it has served them well as an emotional release. However, Stevie is one of those unfortunate enough not to be able to produce the appropriate hysteria, and he is also unwilling or unable to lie or pretend. Therefore, he produces hallucinations."

"Dr. Weeks, the only hallucinations Stevie has had are his imaginary friends, dating from our arrival in Steuben."

"On the contrary," said Dr. Weeks. "Stevie has told me that he had several experiences in early childhood in which he sensed a very evil presence, threatening to destroy him. I immediately recognized this as the father- fear that is not unusual in boys of that age and which they usually outgrow. However, he says that he told you and your wife about these 'frightenings' and 'bad feelings,' as he called them, and you both informed him that these feelings were from the devil."

"We said they might be," said Step. He was trying to stay calm, but it made him feel invaded, to have her skeptical eye turned on those tender moments from Stevie's childhood, when he and DeAnne had tried so carefully not to impose their own interpretation on Stevie's dreams.

"To a child of his age at the time, of course, there was no meaningful distinction between 'might be' and 'is.'

But I would not have expected you to know that, since you are also caught up in the same belief system. In any event, Stevie began to associate all spiritual phenomena, about which he heard much but of which he experienced nothing, with this oedipal anxiety from his earlier childhood-"

"When he felt afraid at night," said Step, "I would lie by his bed for an hour or two hours, until he fell asleep, singing or humming to him. It wasn't me he was afraid of."

"Of course he did not know it was you he was afraid of. He had displaced the fear and shifted it to a nameless imaginary entity which you conveniently named for him. From that point forward, then, his response to the pressures of your culture was to hallucinate, and in every case you labeled these hallucinations as spiritual experiences. Thus he was able to be part of the culture. He was brainwashed."

"I'm surprised that you allowed Lee to join our church if that's what you think we're about," said Step.

"I'm a scientist, Mr. Fletcher, " she said. "I mean no offense by this. I simply feel that we would be doing Stevie a disservice if we did not recognize that he has long had hallucinations unconnected with the move to North Carolina, and therefore treating only the symptoms that arose since your move here would leave his basic underlying condition unresolved."

"1 f it turns out that this is the correct diagnosis," said Step.

"As I said, I only lean toward this interpretation. But you must understand that when he told me about his baptism, and how during that experience he saw a bright light in the water, which entered him and drove all the darkness out of his body, well, that shows me that he is hallucinating more than just imaginary friends."

Stevie had told no one about this experience, no one but Dr. Weeks, who thought of it as madness. "Do you know that it was a hallucination?" asked Step.

"You were there, Mr. Fletcher," said Dr. Weeks. "Did you see that light?"

"No," said Step.

"When one person in the midst of witnesses sees something that no one else sees, we are generally safe in identifying these experiences as hallucinations."

"Or maybe he has clearer sight than the others," said Step.

"Oh? You think there really was some underwater light source that no one else was able to see?"

"I think," said Step, "that it's possible for something to be both subjective and real at the same time. Just because only one person sees something doesn't necessarily mean that what he sees isn't there."

"But by that standard, Mr. Fletcher, I fail to understand why you have even brought Stevie to me. After all, what worried you and Mrs. Fle tcher was the fact that Stevie was seeing imaginary friends that no one else could see."

Step had never thought of the imaginary friends this way. It made him angry, her linking spiritual experiences with Stevie's delusions. But she had linked them, and if she was right, if they really were alike, then all of Stevie's extraordinary sensitivity to other people, his ability to perceive good and evil, his aliveness to the spiritual side of life-all of that was also imaginary, hallucinatory.

On the other hand, it might also mean the opposite. That just as Stevie's sensitivity to spiritual things was real, so also his ability to see imaginary friends was real. In which case Dr. Weeks was right, and they had made a colossal mistake bringing him to her. Just as he had been telling them the truth with his absurd-seeming story about Mrs. Jones's mistreatment of him, so also he was telling them the truth about these imaginary friends.

Which meant there really were invisible boys playing in their yard whenever Stevie went outside.

No, thought Step. No. The reason this is not true is because Dr. Weeks is wrong from the start. His imaginary friends are not the same thing as his spiritual sensitivity. The other thing she said-adjustment disorder with depressed mood and withdrawal-that was enough to account for all his symptoms, or at least all of them that Step and DeAnne thought were symptoms. Dr. Weeks simply hated religion, and so she was going to read psychological disorders into the cosmology of Mormonism.

Of course, if she hated religion, why was she driving Lee Weeks to church every week?

"Is there any other possible diagnosis?" asked Step.

She spoke briefly about residual-type schizophrenic disorder, but it was clear she didn't think much of the possibility. "But I can see that you would prefer almost any diagnosis to the one that casts doubt on your cherished belief system."

"I prefer whatever is best for Stevie," said Step. "I'm perfectly able to see how our religious beliefs appear to those who don't believe in them."

"Do you intend to let Stevie continue receiving treatment?"

"I don't make such decisions alone," said Step. "I'll have to confer with my wife."

"Bring her in," said Dr. Weeks. "I think it really is time for you to join in the treatment process. I think that if the constant insistence that Stevie demonstrate loyalty to your belief system were toned down- note that I do not say they should be stopped-he might be able to relax back into more normal strategies for dealing with these parental and societal expectations. We may be able to extinguish the hallucinations in a year or two, provided that the entire family cooperates."

"Thank you for your willingness to tell me all of this, Dr. Weeks," said Step. "I can see that you've been doing your best to understand our son's situation."

"Then there is hope that I can continue working with this very sweet boy?"

"I don't know what will happen," said Step. "As I told you from the first, money is a serious concern for us right now. But if we discontinue Stevie's treatments, it won't be because we think you've been doing less than your best with him as a doctor."

Dr. Weeks nodded graciously. She was too professional to allow herself a smile-but Step was reasonably sure that he had left her feeling good about him and about Stevie, and good enough about the Church that she would not stop bringing Lee. Why she was bringing Lee to church, given the attitudes she had toward religion, was difficult for Step to understand. But she was doing it, and he didn't want it to be his fault if she stopped.

At the receptionist's desk he even confirmed next week's appointment with Stevie. Then he walked out of the office, switched off the tape recorder, and headed home. DeAnne would listen to the tape with him tonight, and he seriously doubted that Stevie would ever go back to Dr. Weeks again.

DeAnne had a frustrating morning with the baby. He simply couldn't be roused enough to eat anything at all. A nurse helped her pump her breasts, something that she had never done with the other three kids, and stored the milk in the freezer to feed to little Jeremy later, but it did nothing to calm DeAnne's anxiety.

When she expressed her worries about the baby's excessive sleepiness to the neonate, he simply nodded patiently and then said, "Of course you know that you can hardly expect a baby who's taking seizure-control medication to be as responsive as your other children were. And until we know what is causing the seizure activity, we would be irresponsible to remove the medication. Seizures can lead to serious brain damage or even death."

"Can't too much phenobarbital cause problems, too?"

"It could if he were getting too much," said Dr. Torwaldson. "But he's not." And that was that.

But DeAnne couldn't get her worries out of her mind, and so when Dr. Greenwald, the pediatrician, came by, she explained it all over again. "He's losing weight, isn't he? More than the normal amount. Isn't that one of the things we're worried about? And if the pheno is making him so sleepy he won't eat ..."

"Well, I'll tell you what," said Dr. Greenwald. "Let's just happen on down to the ICU and let me take a look at the dosage. It never hurts to doublecheck."

So DeAnne and Vette followed him to the ICU, where he stopped and looked at several of the babies before finally getting to Jeremy. "Hey Zap," he said. He reached his hand into the builtin gloves in the side of the incubator and began probing a bit, touching the baby here and there, lifting his arms and legs, lifting an eyelid.

"Some of these babies here just break my heart," said Vette. "So tiny or so-wounded."

"Ah," said Dr. Greenwald. "But they don't break my heart, because on this particular day all my babies in here are doing quite well. I think we're going to keep them all. Especially Zap here. He looks downright husky."

DeAnne noticed with resignation that everyone was picking up the name Zap, despite her resolute use of Jeremy. But as long as he was telling her that her baby was doing well, DeAnne really didn't care all that much what Dr. Greenwald called him.

"He's pretty nonresponsive, isn't he?" said Dr. Greenwald.

"Like a rag doll," said DeAnne.

Dr. Greenwald looked at the chart. "Hmm," he said. "Quite a dose of pheno, too."

"Is it too much, do you think?"

"No," said Dr. Greenwald. "It's a normal dose."

"Oh," said DeAnne. "I just thought-it can't be right that he's so sleepy that he doesn't eat."

"No, it isn't right. In fact, I'd say he's got way to much pheno in his system right now."

"So it isn't a normal dose?"

"Phenobarbital's a funny kind of drug. Everybody's body uses it differently. I'd say that it looks like your little boy's system just isn't flushing that drug out of his body as fast as most people do, and so it's getting built up inside him. Normal dose going in, but then it's building up, you see."

"Can you do anything?"

"Well, it isn't very hard. We just cut way back on the dosage until we find it maintaining at the right level in his blood. It means a few more blood tests."

"Do they have to keep taking the blood out of his head like that?"

"Oh, don't you like his haircut? Kind of punkish, I'd say. You see, this is a newborn baby. It isn't like his veins are particularly big or easy to find. Heck, we've got needles bigger around than his finger."

"That's all right, I know it can't be helped, it just looks so awful. Dr. Greenwald, would you mind telling me what his current dosage is?"

"Would the numbers mean anything to you?" asked Dr. Greenwald.

"No," said DeAnne. "But if the number's not lower tomorrow, that will mean something to me."

He grinned. "You're pretty stubborn, aren't you?"

She didn't smile back. "This is my baby," she said.

"Dr. Greenwald," said Vette. She was over at one of the other incubators. "Is it right for this one to have liquid dripping from this needle?"

Greenwald immediately went to the incubator where Vette was standing. "Not one of my babies, but I'll say that it doesn't look right. Hasn't been going on long, though, the sheet's not even marked yet. Dana!" he called.

One of the nurses immediately came toward him.

"Have a look at this while I call Dr. Yont."

The nurse named Dana came and immediately shook her head. "Have you been a bad girl again, Marisha?

Pulling out your needles. We're going to have to staple this next one on." She looked up at Vette. "Thank you for noticing this. We check every baby every five minutes, besides constantly checking the monitors, but every moment counts. This one is so small we have a very hard time finding a vein, don't we Marisha? And when she makes some sudden movement, out it comes."

"She's so tiny," said Vette.

"Yes," said Dana. "We're probably going to lose her. She's not getting any better, and sometimes she's a bit worse."

"Her poor parents," said DeAnne, thinking of the anguish she'd feel if someone had just said that about Jeremy.

"I don't know," said Dana. "If Marisha lives, she'll be severely brain damaged. Not much of a life.

Sometimes God is merciful and lets them come home without going through this vale of tears."

It was at that moment that Step came into the ICU. "Oh, good," he said. "I hoped you'd still be here."

"Is Mary Anne still with the children?" DeAnne asked.

"When I got home, her husband was there and he offered to come up and help me give Zap a blessing."

She saw now that Harv Lowe was walking with awe among the incubators. "These must be some tough kids," said Harv, "if they had to stick 'em with all these needles just to keep 'em quiet."

Dana laughed. "Oh, they're the toughest."

Step asked the nurse, "Do we have to use these gloves with Zap? He's not got a contagious disease or anything, and he's a fullweight baby. We don't absolutely have to touch him with our hands, but it would be better."

"You'll have to clear this with Dr. Torwaldson if you're going to break open the box," said Dana.

At that moment Dr. Greenwald came back with, apparently, Dr. Yont, who immediately started giving orders and working on the baby whose needle had come loose. It seemed that more than a loose needle was going wrong, and all the medical people were quite intense about what they were doing. DeAnne was content to wait. There was no emergency for Jeremy, and that was good.

A few moments later, Dr. Torwaldson came in, and at that point Dr. Greenwald withdrew and came over to the Fletchers. "Not my baby," he said, "and I'm not a neonate, so I'm one pair of hands too many, now that Toes here."

"Is she going to be all right?" asked Vette. "The little one?"

"Doesn't look like it to me," said Dr. Greenwald. "But sometimes they surprise you. Sometimes they really want to live."

"Do you think they really have desires? When they're so small?"

"It all depends," said Dr. Greenwald, "on whether you think of them as having a soul or not. I happen to think they do, and so I think that yes, that soul can have desires even if the body isn't yet ready to put them into words. I've seen babies hold on to life with all their might, and I've seen others just give up and slip away. They don't talk about it, but that's how it feels to me."

"And is that what Jeremy is doing? Slipping away?"

"Why don't we wait to answer that," said Dr. Greenwald, "until we see what he's like when he's conscious?"

"Dr. Greenwald," said Step. "I think you'll understand-we want to give a blessing to my son, and we'd like to be able to lay our hands directly on him. We also anoint him with a single drop of pure olive oil, on the brow or the crown of his head. Would that be all right?"

Greenwald glanced over at Torwaldson. "Oh, I can't see why not. Zap is really a husky little kid. Compared to these others, he's a regular Larry Holmes."

Dr. Greenwald opened the incubator, and Harv took the oil, anointed Jeremy's forehead with a drop of it, and then said the short prayer that went with it. DeAnne noticed that Dr. Greenwald watched, bowing his head respectfully. Then both Step and Harv touched the baby gently, and Step sealed the anointing, which was the longer prayer, the one that changed according to the needs of the person receiving the blessing, and according to what Step felt impressed to say.

Only a couple of mont hs ago, thought DeAnne, Step was confirming Stevie, and now he's giving his newest son a different kind of blessing. It felt good to know that her husband was able to do this, was able to call on the powers of heaven on her children's behalf. I can give him milk from my body I nurtured him inside me for nine months, and Step couldn't really share in any of that. But he can give this to our baby.

The blessing felt powerful to DeAnne as it was going on, and yet when it was done she realized that Step had said nothing about healing. He only blessed Jeremy that the doctors would recognize their own limitations and make no mistakes with him, and that he would soon be home with his mother and father and sister and brothers.

Dr. Greenwald shook Step's hand after he had sealed up the incubator. "Are you a minister?" he asked.

"No," said Step. "I'm a computer programmer. Harv's an accountant."

"Well," said Greenwald. "It still felt good, to see a father do that with his own child. Never seen that before."

From the other incubator, where the other doctors were gathered, they heard a voice, a soft one, but clear.

"She's gone." And a moment later, the doctors started moving away. DeAnne heard Dr. Yont murmur, "I'll call the parents."

DeAnne put her arm around her mother, who seemed quite shaken by this. She noticed, too, that Dr.

Greenwald took out a handkerchief and wiped his glasses, after which he also brushed at his eyes with the cloth.

"I never get used to it," he said. "Even when they're not one of mine. Don't like to lose 'em." Then he visibly straightened himself. "Why don't we step on out of the ICU. We don't need to be part of what's going on in there now."

As he ushered them into the corridor, Dr. Greenwald reassured them. "Your little boy doesn't seem to be in any danger right now, and as for that lethargy, well, I'll have a talk with Tor this afternoon. You'll see some improvement, I promise, once we get the dosage right for his system. Nice to meet you, Mr. Fletcher. Mrs. ..."

"Brown," said Vette.

"Nice to meet you," said Harv, shaking his hand. And Greenwald was gone.

"I feel good about Zap being in his care," said Step. "It has to help, that he really loves these babies. And that he ... you know. That he takes us seriously."

"Thanks for coming," DeAnne said to Harv.

"I have an idea," said Vette. Her tone was suddenly bright, leaving behind the somberness of the ICU. It was a gift she had, to know the right moment to turn the mood of a group of people, to get them moving again.

"I'll have Harv drive me back to the house and you two ride home together in the other car."

"Fine," said Harv.

"Thanks," said Step. "I need to talk to DeAnne anyway."

"One condition," said Vette. "I get the Renault. Air conditioning, you know."

"We'll open the windows on the Datsun," said Step. "We'll still be just as hot, but our sweat will help water the lawns on either side of the road."

Once they were alone in the Datsun, DeAnne asked first about the blessing. "Couldn't you have blessed him to be healed?"

"You think I didn't want to?" asked Step. "You think that wasn't what I planned to do?"

"You were so fatalistic about him the other day," said DeAnne. "Yesterday I mean. Was that only yesterday? I thought maybe you'd given up on him."

"I tried to talk about Zap getting better and having a perfectly normal healthy body and I just couldn't say it.

Maybe it's a lack of faith on my part, or maybe I was being told not to bless him that way. Either way, what could I do? I said what I was able to say." Then he gave one short, derisive laugh. "My atypical dissociative disorder apparently isn't as efficient at providing me with appropriate hallucinations as Stevie's is."

"So," said DeAnne. "How did it go with Dr. Weeks?"

"First tell me how you are," said Step. "Pain still bad?"

"I had a little bleeding, too. I need to lie down more."

"So now I've got you in this rattly car, vibrating you six ways from Tuesday."

"It's all the going back and forth to the hospital."

"So you're saying you should have stayed."

"I'm not dying, Step, I just hurt and I bleed a little. Tell me about Dr. Weeks, Step. Did you quarrel?"

"Just listen to the tape," said Step. He pulled the microcassette recorder out of his pocket and pressed the play button.

For the first while, listening to the conversation in Dr. Weeks's office, DeAnne wanted to shout at him to stop it, he was doing it all wrong, he was deliberately provoking the doctor. But then she realized that for Step, he was actually being quite controlled. And Dr. Weeks really was resisting talking to him. So the fact that he got her to tell her speculative diagnoses was probably quite an accomplishment, as was the way he sat still and listened, so that Dr. Weeks finally did explain adjustment disorder. It sounded exactly like what was going on with Stevie.

"I can do that," said DeAnne. "Write to friends in Indiana. The school can give me the addresses of the parents, or forward my letters to them, anyway"

Step pressed stop. "That's not the diagnosis she believes in," he said. "And that's not the condition she intends to treat." Then he pressed play again.

She listened to the rest of the tape without comment, until it was over. "Well, Step," she said, "I can hardly believe you didn't say anything snotty to her at all as you left."

"I didn't want to sour anything, in case you wanted to continue the treatment."

DeAnne was startled. "You mean you think we should?"

"I didn't know what you'd think," said Step.

"Yes you did," said DeAnne. "You knew perfectly well what I'd think. Here she is declaring that anybody who believes in a religion is marginally or totally insane-I mean, that's most of human society through most of history"

"Yes," said Step. "But maybe true sanity didn't exist until people like her emerged."

"From under a rock, you mean," said DeAnne. "We know a lot of Mormons, Step. But not many hysterical ones, and not many crazy ones, either."

"Well, there's Sister LeSueur."

"She's conniving, not crazy," said DeAnne. "The only really crazy Mormon I've known recently is Dr.

Weeks's own son, and she can't blame that on us."

"Give her time," said Step.

"It makes me so mad that she would dismiss what we believe as if it wasn't even worthy of consideration."

"Well, she believes in a competing religion," said Step. "If ours is true, then hers is kind of silly."

"Well, ours is true, you know," she said.

"And hers is kind of silly."

"As you said all along."

Step shrugged. "This isn't about I-told-you-so. It's about Stevie. We can try another psychiatrist later. But I don't think he should continue going to a psychiatrist who firmly believes that the only way to help Stevie is to cure us of our religious delusions. Even if she could succeed, it certainly wouldn't help Stevie, since that's not his problem."

"I agree," said DeAnne.

"So Dr. Weeks is toast, right?"

"Right."

"Only for Lee's sake we tell her that we're going to hold off on continuing treatment for a few months, while we watch Stevie to see if he improves by himself."

"Excellent," said DeAnne.

The radio wasn't on very loud, but it happened to start playing "Every Breath You Take" during a momentary pause, and they both noticed it. "They're playing our song," said DeAnne.

"Weird stuff is happening to us all the time," said Step. "Makes me feel special."

"Jeremy's problems sure put things in perspective, though, don't they?" said DeAnne. "I mean, it's hard to get excited about Sister LeSueur's silliness when you've seen your baby in a glass box like that. And that anonymous record-"

"Still bothers me," said Step.

"Me too," said DeAnne. Then she reached out and put her hand on Step's leg, feeling the muscles flex and move as he moved his foot from the brake to the accelerator. "Step," she said, "thanks for seeing Dr. Weeks. I don't know if I would have been able to get her to come forward with her diagnoses. It was obvious she was trying to keep us from finding out what exactly it was that she was doing to Stevie. If you hadn't kept pushing, we wouldn't have known."

"I only did it because I knew you were with me on it."

She squeezed his leg. "I love you, Step."

"I love you too," he said. "I'd love you even more if you'd remember that I'm very ticklish on my leg and when you squeeze just above the knee like that I'm likely to have a fit and lose control of the car."

She squeezed his leg again, repeatedly, but even though he was very ticklish there, he had learned how to relax his stomach muscles and resist laughing-a technique that had allowed him to sur vive childhood with an older brother who was a merciless tickler. "You're no fun," she said.

"Try it again when you're in shape to do some serious tickling."

"I hope it's soon," she said.

"So do L"

When they got home, they found Stevie in the family room sit ting on the couch, and told him the news right away: He wouldn't be going back to Dr. Weeks.

"Oh, OK," he said. "She was kind of stupid anyway."

"Oh?" asked DeAnne.

"She said that Jesus was just like Santa Claus," said Stevie. "Only everybody knows that Santa Claus is just a story."

"Well," said Step, "she believes that Jesus is just a story, too."

"That's only because she doesn't listen when he talks to her," said Stevie.

"I guess not," said Step. He glanced at DeAnne, caught her eye. "Clearly dissociative," he said, grinning.

She shook her head at him. He shouldn't try to joke like that around Stevie- he was likely to catch the drift of what he was saying.

"Does this mean I can still play with my friends?" asked Stevie.

DeAnne sighed. It was one thing to realize that Dr. Weeks was simply playing out her own prejudices, and quite another to sup pose, just because Weeks was no help, that Stevie didn't still need help.

"I'd rather you played with your brother and sister," said DeAnne.

"But when I'm not playing with them, I can play with Jack and Scotty and those guys? Cause we got a new kid."

DeAnne wordlessly got to her feet and left the room. Stevie watched her go in silence.

"Do what you need to," said Step. "Do what you think is right." Then he, too, left, following DeAnne into the bedroom, where she clung to him in silence for a long while.

They brought Zap home from the hospital after two weeks in intensive care, with a bill for more than eighteen thousand dollars and no diagnosis. It had finally come down to a day when Step and DeAnne were standing there listening to a doctor who had come in from Chapel Hill. He was describing several procedures and drugs they could try "in case" Zap's condition was caused by this or that, until Step said, "I don't think I want my son being treated for an undiagnosed condition." The Chapel Hill specialist looked at him in surprise; his whole demeanor changed; he was more respectful, almost apologetic for his early tone. "Oh, I didn't realize you were a doctor," he said. There was not a trace of irony in his tone, and so Step realized that this specialist really was proposing things that he might not have so confidently proposed if he had thought Step and DeAnne actually knew anything. That was enough for them.

The hospital was very good about things. They accepted two thousand dollars and a promise to pay at least half the balance as soon as Step got his option money from Agamemnon-or else the completion money for the

64 version of Hacker Snack, whichever came first.

Then they brought Zap home and began the slow process of discovering just exactly how much was wrong with him, and how little they could do about it.

The only really good thing that had come out of Zap's long hospital stay was that they realized how much they could depend on people in the 1 st Ward who they had thought were merely acquaintances, and now discovered were true friends. Vette remarked on it, too. You have a good ward, she said. They really care about you.

If only there were something about Stevie's condition that could evoke the same community response that Zap's had brought forth, thought DeAnne. If only they could rally around Stevie, and fast and pray for him.

Maybe they should tell people about what Stevie was going through, and give them a chance to help him. But no. There was too great a chance that in the case of a mental illness and not a physical one they'd shy away, they'd shun the boy and make his isolation even worse, his descent into madness steeper and faster than ever.

And could we really blame them? thought DeAnne. If I were a mother of a normal child and I heard that a little boy of his age was seeing hallucinations of imaginary friends, would I really be willing to let them play together? Would I feel so much compassion for someone else's child that I would put my own child at risk of being hurt in some outburst of madness? No, the hurts of the mind were too strange, too invisible, too magical to hope for the same kind of tolerance and help from even the best of people.

It frightens me, thought DeAnne. Why should I expect others to be better than I am?

So Stevie's problem remained a matter for their family alone. Until a newspaper article forced them to see things another way.