Ghosts by Daylight by Janine di Giovanni Page B

coming into his room.
    ‘Leave your father alone, he’s resting,’ my mother would say. ‘Go out and play.’
    And it was February and my sister added, rather cheerfully: ‘February is suicide month. Everyone kills themselves in February.’ She went on to list our aunts, our cousins, and various family members who had died in February. ‘And Sylvia Plath stuck her head inside an oven,’ she added. ‘Because of the cold.’
    The taxi dropped us outside the hospital, and Bruno bought a coffee in a small plastic cup from a machine. As we rode up the elevator, he turned to me and there was such happiness on his face. He said, ‘The next time I go up in this lift, it will be to see my baby.’
    But inside the maternity wing, the Zen doctor was not at all happy. He sat frowning behind his huge desk, fingering his pen. The African sculptures suddenly looked menacing.
    ‘You are very, very fragile,’ he said. ‘Not in good shape to give birth.’ Frankly, he added, he did not know how I was going to push to get a baby out with my ribs broken. And he was perplexed. The cough, he reckoned, was some rare thing I had picked up on my travels: an amoeba, a bug, something infiltrating my system like al-Qaeda infiltrates weakened villages in Pakistan. Perhaps from the dirt in Iraq? He stared at my chart while the muscles in Bruno’s face tensed. They spoke in rapid French.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ the Zen doctor said at last, ‘but I want you to stay here.’
    ‘For how long? I want to go home.’
    ‘Until the baby comes. I’m sorry, I know it’s not pleasant,’ he said. ‘But it’s for the best. I have to watch you.’
    He filled out papers and ordered a battery of tests. He sent me down one floor to the pulmonologist who tapped my chest and back and looked confused. ‘Possibly TB? When was your last visit to Africa?’ he asked, and sent me to the bowels of the hospital for chest X-rays.
    The X-rays came back clear on tuberculosis and cancer, and then I was sent for more blood work: for HIV, malaria, and other infectious diseases. ‘Sorry, I know this hurts,’ the nurse said, seeking out my collapsed veins to slide a large needle under my skin. ‘What terrible veins!’
    ‘It runs in my family,’ I said miserably. Like the melancholy and the depression, that too – deep veins that resisted every blood test, making taking a vial of blood agony – were a gift from my family, inherited. My mother and I had simple blood tests and emerged with bruises the size of oranges.
    The tests went on all day. Whooping cough, polio, cholera, cancer of every part of my body. I was tested for diseases that I thought had disappeared in Victorian times. An immunologist came to interview me, to try to find the bug hiding somewhere in my system. I climbed on to and off five or six examining tables that day, and everyone poked my ribs and touched my stomach and took my blood pressure and made me cough so that my breath was short.
    ‘Cough!’
    ‘Cough again!’
    ‘Move on your side. On your back! On your side!’
    ‘Give me your arm for a little blood test. This one won’t hurt, promise. A little scratch.’ Everything in French. Medical French. Clinical French. I yearned for someone to speak English to me.
    After all the tests came back, and all the doctors conversed and decided they did not know what it was, they put me in the isolation ward. It was at the end of a long, dark corridor and there was no one else there; I felt terribly lonely.
    Bruno left for a few hours and came back with a new tea kettle because when I asked the nurse for a cup of tea she stared back at me blankly.
    ‘No.’
    ‘What do you mean, no?’
    ‘We bring drinks at mealtimes. You must wait.’
    Bruno also brought me a pillow, a pale green silk pillowcase I loved, some chocolates and my computer and books.
    ‘I’m not supposed to eat sugar,’ I said.
    ‘Oh, fuck that, you’re pregnant.’ He went down to the reception and argued with the staff to get