The Visit - continued, page 4

      Peggy turns to me and says, over the horrible noise:  "Maybe she is hurt, maybe you didn't know what you did, I'm not blaming you, but maybe she is hurt.  I don't know why she won't stop crying.  I don't know!" while Brian alternately shakes his head at her and bounces the baby who cries hard and harder and louder and louder.  "Oh!" she yells, "This is awful.  Maybe we should take her to the hospital.  Where is your emergency room?"

      "Oh!"  I say, shocked. "It's close.  Real close.  Not five minutes." I feel happy I can say this but sick at my stomach, the spaghetti rising in my throat.  I have hurt her baby!  Me a mother who has never spanked her own. Of course, my kids are used to noise.  Tim, Sr., and I yell a lot.  Play music, and stuff like that.  We're loud people. Maybe too loud.  Certainly too loud for Clara.  She's been overstimulated since she came in and now I've gone and hurt her. Or something.   "Let me go with you and show you."
      Brian, Peggy and I climb into my stationwagon, Peggy not even bothering with the car seat but just clutching Clara to her chest. Brian is still looking at his wife as if she is crazy, his hands are clutching at the legs of his blue jeans and his knuckles are white.  He looks as if he is angry and sad and confused all at once.  "Don't worry about all this," he says to me, "We have been in the emergency room several other times."
      "Whatever for?" I ask.
      "Well," he shrugs helplessly, "you know."
      The child is still crying to beat the band.  The bottle of formula hangs from Peggy's fingers.  I drive slowly and carefully, wanting not to even startle myself at this point.  I pull up in front of the Emergency Room door and drop them off.  "Leave me a cigarette," I ask Brian, although I haven't smoked since I got pregnant with Timmy. I park the car and then sit in the dark and smoke the cigarette down to the filter like a penance.
     Finally, when I can stand it no longer, I go in.  I wander up to the window, casually, not like the criminal I am, and I ask the nurse:  "The young couple with the crying baby? Are they back in one of the rooms. How is everything?"

      She eyes me critically.  "Are you the friend?" she says and I suddenly realize they all know, everyone in the waiting room, the nurses, doctors, anyone else hurt or dying in the back:  I am The Friend Who Hurt The Baby.
      "Why don't you go on back?" she says and I decide that surely I'm wrong; they wouldn't let the perpetrator go back to the scene of the crime.  Maybe Peggy just told them that she and Brian are visiting friends who had sent them here with their baby.  After all, would they send the known child abuser back to find out how her victim was?
      I push open the doors and make my way down the hall.  Peggy is standing outside the door of one of the rooms, her arms around her in a hugging gesture.  When she sees me she rushes to me and throws her arms around me. "I'm so sorry," she cries, "I'm so sorry.  I'm such a terrible mother. I overreacted so!"
      "What are you saying?" I ask, almost in tears and ice cold at the same time.  I feel sicker to my stomach than I did even when I was three months pregnant with Sandy.    
      "It's nothing," she says, although I can hear Clara still whimpering in the room behind us.  "She's not hurt at all.  I knew she wasn't.  I saw you, I saw you didn't hurt her. She was just scared to death, I guess, and I couldn't comfort her.  I thought she had to be hurt."

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