33.

On the subway with Ian I overheard a woman in a fitted white shirt and piles of cool, long, gold-chain necklaces talking to someone about a miraculous all-natural sweetener.

“I’m serious, I cut out all sugar,” she said, fingering her chains. “I don’t miss it one bit. Whenever I need sugar for tea, or whatever, I just use this. Now I’m never tired.”

When I got up out of the subway, Ian was overdue to eat, but I had to get that sweetener. It was the key to quashing my unrelenting, insatiable sweet tooth and therefore the key to losing my baby weight. We trekked against the gusty October wind, a few blocks to a health food store on Twenty-Third Street, and once we were inside, Ian started with his trapped squirm thing, puffing his chest out from his stroller straps like a fat Superman. Then I moved down the aisle and the stroller got wedged in between a stack of boxes. I shoved it through hard, and Ian lost it, big bubble tears bursting out of his eyes, his mouth eating up the rest of his face when he opened it and screamed. I gave the counter lady a bunch of singles for the sweetener and bolted without getting the change.

I was pissed when I got home, the usual thing, how Ian ruled and how I couldn’t do something I wanted to for three seconds without him flipping out, how I was stuck with him all the time while in the meantime everyone else on the planet had a life. It was harder when Will went back to school—school felt more threatening to me than his dumb summer job, maybe because his job seemed like real life and school seemed more like a “lifestyle.” Everyone shuffling around in their flip-flops, off to class with their Clif Bars. I put Ian in his bouncy seat on the kitchen counter and filled a pot of water to boil some penne. I dumped some butter in a plastic container of leftover peas and nuked it. When the pasta was done, I reached across Ian with the pot in one hand to get the salt, because Dad always throws salt on pasta when he drains it. Then my cell phone rang in my coat, making me stop short. The pasta water spilled all over Ian’s leg and seeped through the bouncy seat, a steamy puddle rising on the counter.

Whenever his screams get too loud in my head, and they still do, even now, I try to remind myself that I actually dealt that day and that we didn’t just both fall down and die right there. I remembered Dad was a paramedic after college and called him at work. I had to run into the bathroom to hear him. The thought occurred to me that maybe I could just go downstairs, out into the street, away.

“Run the shower and put him under it,” he said. “Not too cold, or he’ll go into shock. Keep him there for a few minutes if you can. Then get him to the hospital.”

I held Ian under the shower by the armpits, almost grateful he was screaming and crying so much because it meant he wasn’t dying. At the same time, I noticed a weird thing happening to me, which was that I wasn’t panicking. It couldn’t have been more black-and-white to me: he was going to be okay. The driver turned off the radio the second we got in the taxi and got us to the hospital. I had no money. He took us anyway.

They pried Ian out of my arms when we got there and disappeared, which was a huge relief. I stood in the hall, pinching the skin on my neck, saying to myself, Please God, please God, please God, please God. The doors swung open and it was Dad.

We followed purple footprints down the hall and around a corner, over to a woman in green scrubs standing by a cot with metal rails.

“I’m Dr. Lyons,” she said. “I’m a resident here. Have you given him anything?”

“I tried to get him to swallow some, you know, liquid aspirin,” I said.

“You gave your baby aspirin?”

“Tylenol, I mean.”

“Good,” she said. “You should never, ever, give your child aspirin. It can really mess with the growth of their brain, not to mention it can cause them to bleed internally. So no aspirin. Acetaminophen only. Tylenol is fine.”

Ian wailed and writhed on the cot. I waited for the doctor to stop looking at me.

“Got that?” she asked.

“She gave him Tylenol, did you hear her?” Dad shouted. He pushed his hands together, breathed. “Let’s have a look at the leg, shall we?”

“What about the pain?” I asked, pinching my neck. “Is there something stronger you can give him?”

Dr. Lyons straightened Ian’s leg. They’d stripped him naked.

“Easy,” she murmured. She grabbed some gauze pads off the counter and started dabbing. “It looks like the burns are second degree. That’s good news. But I want to have someone else check.”

Ian started screaming like he had screamed at home and trying to bend his leg under her grip.

“Is there something you can give him for the pain?” I asked again, frantically.

“We can give him something, yes.” She pulled a tube out of a drawer. “This is a topical analgesic. It will numb the area for a while, as well as disinfect it.” Ian screamed bloody murder, but as soon as Dr. Lyons was done, he calmed down. She looked up at me again.

“Can you tell me exactly how it happened?”

“Well, I was boiling some …”

“On second thought,” she said, raising her hands to stop me, “I think I should go find someone who can talk to you … privately.”

“I spilled water on him,” I said. “Boiling pasta water.”

“Let’s wait, please.” She tried to smile, but her smile was urgent and then gone immediately and that’s when I realized she thought I did it on purpose.

Dad cleared his throat. “That’s fine,” he said. “We’ll speak to whomever you need us to speak to.”

“Are you nursing him?” she asked.

“I am.” I picked him up as carefully as I could.

“I’ll be back in a flash,” she said.

“I’m going to step out there and call Will,” I said, reaching into my jeans for my phone.

“Go ahead,” he said, pulling out his BlackBerry.

“We had an accident,” I said, the hallway doors swinging behind me. “But he’s going to be all right.”

“What happened?” Will asked.

“I was making dinner and a pot of pasta water banged against something and some of it spilled onto Ian’s leg,” I said.

“Thea, Jesus Christ,” he said. Something in his voice said he was expecting this to happen, as though it were inevitable. “What the hell.”

“It was an accident,” I said.

Dr. Lyons walked past us with an older guy in a white coat. “Whenever you’re ready,” she mouthed, pointing to the room I’d just left.

“Where are you?” Will asked. “I should call my parents.”

“Just come. You can call them later. Dad’s here.”

“Your dad?”

“Yeah. I called him first because I thought he’d know what to do. He was a paramedic in college.”

“Your dad was a paramedic?” he asked, disbelieving.

“Come soon,” I said.

When I hung up, Ian was sleeping in my arms. The gauze pads on his leg were soaked through with a mix of ointment and pus. It hit me how badly I’d screwed him up, but I pushed the thought away. I went back into the room where Dad and Dr. Lyons and the guy in white were talking.

“Thea, this is Dr. Evans,” Dad said, as if he were introducing someone who had arrived at his house. “I explained to him what happened.”

“Hi there.” He winked at me. “Maybe it’s a good idea to have a look while he’s asleep.” He craned his neck to look at Ian’s leg as the rest of his stout body stood erect. Ian flinched but didn’t wake.

“Yes, folks, that’s a burn,” he said cheerfully. “But I’m happy to report we’re not going to do anything drastic about it. No scary surgeries. We’re just going to hang out and watch it and swab it with cream and let the skin do its magic tricks.”

Dad exhaled like he’d been holding his breath. “Okay,” he said.

Dr. Lyons moved behind me and must have made a gesture directed at me.

“So tell me what happened,” Dr. Evans said. “Some kind of freak accident with a pot of something?”

“I don’t know how it happened, I really don’t,” I said, scared that they were going to haul me off. “It just spilled over while I was bringing it to the sink. I feel so stupid.” I shook my head while Dad and the doctor hung their heads to the floor. “You understand that it was an accident, right? That’s all it was. An accident. I made a mistake. I’m very careful with him, you know. I am. Dad?”

“I know you are, Thea.” He sighed, shaking his head. “You just have to be more careful.”

I thought of all the hours with Ian, the endlessly repeating, looping thoughts about whether he was eating enough or pooping too much. I saw myself tiptoeing and holding my breath when he slept in the morning. How I walked down the street with him in the stroller, seeing nothing else but his face in front of me. The thanklessness of it all numbed me. I burst into tears.

Will came into the room. “What’s the word?” he asked, panting.

“I’m Dr. Evans, and I take it you are the father.” The doctor held out his hand. The room we were in was full of computers on carts, and a nurse sat nearby reading CNN and watching us. “He’s going to be okay. We’re looking at second-degree, superficial burns. Lots of blistering and clear fluids, not pleasant to look at, but he’ll be okay.”

Will hovered over Ian’s leg. “Poor thing,” he whispered. “Mama’s gonna order in from now on. Don’t worry.” He smiled and looked up at me and squeezed my arm. It was the last time I remember him being on my side.