Unravel
Far out at sea, a small wooden fishing boat thrashes in a fierce storm. Lightning streaks across the sky and rain pounds. Waves crash over the boat’s bow and it capsizes, tossing a tiny human-like creature made of red yarn overboard. He’s cast ashore, sea-drenched.
I lean forward, game controller in hand, watching a fuzzy-toothed Yarny wobble upright. His stitched eyes blink with doll-like innocence as he inspects himself to ensure he’s whole.
“That’s me,” my fourteen-year-old son says, pointing at the screen with his IV tube trailing from the crook of his arm to the infusion pump.
Further up the beach is an old leather suitcase sunken into the sand. The suitcase cracks open and another Yarny, a blue one, peeks out. He climbs down and tumbles onto the ground.
“That’s you.”
The two Yarnys walk toward each other and the ends of their string rise up and connect like an umbilical cord. They are bound in this way for the entirety of the game.
*
It’s dark in the exam room. I sit in a chair next to my husband. A nurse presses an ultrasound wand on our son’s stomach. Blurry blobs appear on the monitor. I make a joke about looking for a baby in there. No one responds. Perhaps the nurse doesn’t want to be the one to tell us that our child’s infection is widespread and endangering his life. We watch the monitor. We watch our son. We wait.
*
The Yarnys look into each other’s eyes and press the palms of their hands together.
“Hold the stick to the right to run and press A to jump,” my son says. “Follow me!”
I orient myself to the controller and soon we are running across a dark seascape, past hazy impressions of driftwood and an old anchor. The patter of our tiny footsteps splash in tide pools, seagulls screech, and the mystical melody of a handpan drum surrounds us. Moonlight slices through thick fog illuminating only what we need to focus on—the path in front of us.
*
On the seventh floor of Children’s Hospital, I watch ice melt in my 7Up. Behind a set of heavy double doors, a surgical team works on our son.
“They should give an update soon,” my mom says. She rubs my forearm, then clasps her hand around mine—squeezes. My husband lets out the breath he’s been holding and glances at his phone for the hundredth time.
“It was meant to be thirty minutes and it’s been three hours,” he says.
I return to the refreshment station and fill the front pocket of my hoodie with mini packets of Goldfish. They’re our son’s favorite.
At the window, I press my face on the cold glass. It’s a relief to feel something other than terror. Far below, landscaped shrubs are shadowed by the hospital’s concrete columns. I watch a white butterfly flit between fruitless plants, a tiny flag waving surrender.
*
“Push the Z button.”
Red Yarny throws a lasso and scrambles to the top of the bank, making the string between us taut. I try but my rope falls short and I keep unraveling.
“It’s OK, Mom. Grab mine.”
He hoists me up faster than he means to and we both plop onto the ground and laugh. Our wide eyes blink at each other and we are off again, slipping through a crack between two boulders, entering a new world. One where water trickles and drips, moss spreads over fallen branches, and patches of orange mushrooms bloom. I can almost smell the wet earth.
*
“Do you want the TV remote?” a nurse asks a few hours after surgery.
We can’t stop looking at our son. We are watching his heavy eyes open and close, his jaw moving side to side, his lower lip jutting out. He’s clenching his tongue between his teeth. We are watching the IV drip, the antibiotic drip, the pain meds drip. We are adjusting his pillow. Dabbing lip balm on his cracked lips. We are letting him rest, watching for cues, like the raw first days of his newborn life.
“No thank you,” I say. We do not need a TV remote.
*
“What’s your level of pain?” the nurse asks our son.
He holds up five fingers. Unclutches the bed railing and adds two more. He’s giving his all for the smallest of movements.
“I’m here, baby.”
He grips the railing again. The tendons on the back of his hand arch. He folds into himself and moans. My breath catches. When the morphine enters his vein, his eyes flutter. He is only a child and I don’t know how to accept what is happening. I tell him I’m sorry. My boy, who is terrified of needles, of bee stings, who can’t stand tags on his clothes or crooked sock seams. He will have dozens of blood draws and IV insertions, a catheter, and a stomach tube for a week and his only complaint will be a sore throat.
How did this boy become so brave?
*
“What’s that sound?” I wring my knotted hands.
The tone of the music darkens and I fumble with the controller, pushing multiple buttons at once. In the top left, a wraith-like smoke slithers, weaves through trees.
“Quick, Mom! I know the way out. Climb on my back and I’ll carry you.”
We merge into one and he piggy-backs me through tangled brambles, away from danger.
I hold on tight.
*
At night, lights are dim and sounds turn up. The swoosh of air each time the door opens. Footsteps crossing a sticky floor. The snap of blue gloves. The infusion pump’s beep…beep…beep. Rhythmic slurps pull stomach waste making him nauseous.
“I can’t sleep. The screaming,” he says.
“I know, sweetheart.” I imagine the toddler’s mother in the next room—her panic.
“Ninja Nurse,” the stealthy one, clicks her nails on the keyboard updating his chart. She sets a handful of earplugs on the side table and continues typing, her face aglow.
*
Insects buzz at the edge of a pond.
“Where now?”
“Follow me.”
We jump across the water on a series of lily pads. The tempo of the light-hearted music picks up and behind me, the back of a trout pierces the water.
“Don’t let him catch you. Timing is everything.”
The trout surfaces again only this time his mouth is wide open and he gobbles me up mid-jump.
“Did I die?”
“No, Mom, you get a do-over.”
*
Daylight slants through the crack of the blackout shade. The nurse is here for a blood draw and I am angry that this is what he must be woken up for. I want a do-over, to reset before the rupture. I want to call the doctor sooner.
“Look at me,” my husband whispers to our son when the needle punctures his arm. I turn away on the blue vinyl couch and cry, silently, with my whole body.
*
“Did your guy just hug me?”
“Yeah, Mom, that’s an Emote. Hold the Plus sign to make him wave and hug and stuff like that.”
*
On day five, the nurse we call “All Business” offers to remove the stomach tube that snakes up our son’s throat and out his nose. The risk is that it will need to be reinserted if his body doesn’t process his waste.
She looks at my husband and me for a yes or a no. We’re both silent. Afraid to make a choice we could regret.
“One more day,” our son says.
I nod my head and watch him step one foot out of childhood and into his own grownup decision.
*
The surgeon stops by to check on our son’s recovery towards the end of our stay. He has never had such a complicated case and we have never been more grateful. Our son is drinking a smoothie and texting his friends. He is not going to die.
“One last go?” I ask.
He smiles and raises his headrest. I hand him the controller.
*
Before leaving the hospital, we wheel our son through the maze of corridors and elevators to the rooftop garden. The automatic doors open to a world beyond his illness. I stand against the wheelchair’s backrest and he gives me the full weight of his head as we take in the silhouette of the Olympic Mountains and the Space Needle. Toy cars cross Lake Washington bridge against a green swath of matchstick trees. We watch a miniature jet descend toward SeaTac airport.
Life unspools all around us and our son is eager to join in. I’m afraid to leave this place. To leave behind the call button, the nurses’ station. I’m afraid to lose the tenderness of these days, the warmth in my core. I want his suffering to end but to preserve my own.
I lean back and grasp onto this lifeline between us.
Theresa Marl’s essays on family have been published in ParentMap, Seattle’s Child, Red Tricycle, and more. Her work in the anthology Ōde: Orcas Island earned her a Pushcart Prize nomination. She was a founding board member of the Orcas Island Literary Festival and does her best writing in the treehouse she and her husband built for their two wild boys.
