Playing With Fire (7 page)

“Shut up.”

“But in case you weren’t paying attention, that will soon be illegal. Didn’t you see the latest bulletin from the Grand Council? They’re writing a new law that forbids mixed marriages. All these changes, and you never noticed it happening. While the world collapsed around us, you mooned over your music and Laura. If you really care about her, you’ll forget her. Otherwise, it’ll be heartbreak for you both.” Marco placed a firm hand on his shoulder. “Be sensible. Forget her.”

Lorenzo swiped at tears that suddenly clouded his eyes. He wanted to fling aside Marco’s hand, wanted to tell him to go to hell because
sensible
advice was not what he wanted to hear. Yet everything Marco said was true. Laura was beyond his reach. Everything was beyond his reach.

“There’s a way out for us,” Marco said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

Marco’s voice dropped even lower. “We leave Italy. Other families are going. You heard what Balboni said. We should emigrate.”

“Papa will never leave.”

“Then we have to go without him. Without any of them. They’re stuck in the past and they’ll never change. But you and I, we could go to Spain together.”

“And leave them behind? You would do that, say goodbye to Mama and Pia and not look back?” Lorenzo shook his head. “How can you even consider it?”

“It might come down to that. If we’re left with no other choice, if they refuse to see what’s about to happen.”

“That’s not a choice I would ever—” He stopped at the sound of the door slamming shut.

Their sister called out: “Lorenzo? Lorenzo?” Pia ran in and threw her arms around him. “They told us what happened to you! My poor brother, how can they be so mean? Are you hurt badly? Are you going to be all right?”

“I’m fine, little Pia. As long as you’re here to take care of me, I’ll be just fine.” He wrapped his arms around her, and over her bent head he met his brother’s gaze.
Look at her, Marco. Would you leave Italy without her?

Would you leave our sister?

Waiting rooms and more waiting rooms. Since my daughter stabbed me with glass, that’s what our lives have come down to: Lily and me, sitting on a series of sofas in doctors’ offices, waiting for a nurse to call her name. First we see her pediatrician, Dr. Cherry, who seems a bit put out that he might have missed a serious brain disorder. Then there’s an afternoon with Dr. Salazar, the pediatric neurologist, who asks me the same questions I’ve heard again and again.
Has Lily ever had febrile convulsions? Has she ever fallen and lost consciousness? Has she been in any accidents or hit her head?
No, no, and no. While I’m relieved that no one thinks I’m the one who needs a psychiatrist, now I face a possibility that’s even more frightening: that there is something very wrong with my daughter’s brain. Something that made her twice go berserk. At only three years old, she has already massacred our cat and stabbed me in the leg. What will she be capable of when she’s eighteen?

Dr. Salazar orders a battery of new tests and this leads to our sitting in yet another series of waiting rooms. Lily has X-rays, which come back normal; blood tests, which are also normal; and finally an electroencephalogram.

It is inconclusive.

“EEGs can sometimes miss a lesion, if the abnormal electrical discharges involve only subcortical regions,” Dr. Salazar tells me when I visit his office late on a Friday afternoon.

It has been a long day, and I have trouble focusing on what he’s telling me. I don’t think I’m a stupid woman, but really—what the hell did he just say? Lily is out in the waiting room with Val, and through the closed door I can hear my daughter calling for me, and this distracts me even more. I’m annoyed at Rob for not being here beside me and my head still aches from that bump against the coffee table. Now this doctor won’t speak to me in plain English.

He tosses out other words that sound like a foreign language.
Neuro-developmental defects such as heterotopic gray matter. Neuroimaging techniques. Cortical electrical activity. Complex partial seizures.

That last word leaps out and instantly grips me in its jaws:
Seizures
. “Wait,” I cut in. “Are you saying Lily might have epilepsy?”

“Although her EEG appears to be normal, there’s still the possibility that both incidents were manifestations of a certain type of seizure disorder.”

“But she’s never convulsed. Not that I’ve seen.”

“I’m not talking about classic tonic-clonic seizures, where you fall unconscious and your limbs shake. No, it’s her
behavior
that might be the manifestation of epilepsy. These are what we call complex partial seizures, or CPS. They’re often misdiagnosed as psychiatric disorders, because the patients appear to be awake during the seizure, and may even perform complex acts. They’ll keep repeating a phrase, for instance. Or they’ll walk in circles or tug at their clothes.”

“Or stab someone.”

He pauses. “Yes. That could be considered a complex repetitive act.”

I’m suddenly struck by a memory. Blood running down my leg. The sound of a voice, flat and mechanical. “ ‘Hurt Mommy,’ ” I murmur.

“Excuse me?”

“After she stabbed me, she kept saying two words. ‘Hurt Mommy,’ over and over.”

He nodded. “That would certainly count as a repetitive act. Since these patients are completely unaware of their environment, they can get into dangerous situations. They’ve been known to walk into traffic or fall out of windows. And when the seizure’s over, they have no memory of what happened. It’s just a gap in time that they can’t explain.”

“Then she can’t control it? She doesn’t
mean
to hurt anyone?”

“That’s right. Assuming these
are
seizures.”

How strange it is to feel so relieved that my daughter might have epilepsy, but that’s exactly how I feel right now, because it explains these last terrible weeks. It means Lily can’t help what she did. It means she’s the same sweet daughter I’ve always loved, and I don’t have to be afraid of her.

“Can this be treated?” I ask. “Is there a cure?”

“Perhaps not a cure, but the seizures can be brought under control, and we have a wide range of anticonvulsant drugs to choose from. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m not yet certain this
is
the cause of her behavior. There’s one more test I want to order. It’s called a magnetoencephalography, or MEG for short. It records electrical currents in the brain.”

“Isn’t that what the EEG did?”

“MEG is far more sensitive to lesions the EEG might miss, lesions located deep in the folds of the brain. To do the test, the patient sits in a chair and wears a type of helmet. Even if she moves around a little bit, we can still record the electrical currents. We’ll introduce various stimuli and see if that changes her brain activity.”

“What kind of stimuli?”

“In your daughter’s case, it would be auditory. You said that both times she showed this aggressive behavior, you were playing a particular violin piece. Something with very high-frequency notes.”

“You think the music brought on these seizures?”

“Theoretically it’s possible. We know seizures can be set off by visual stimuli—blinking lights or repetitive flashes, for instance. Maybe Lily’s brain is sensitive to notes at certain frequencies, or in specific combinations. We’ll play that piece of music through her headphones while we monitor her brain’s electrical activity. See if we can induce the same aggressive behavior.”

What he suggests sounds perfectly logical and of course it must be done. But it means someone must record
Incendio,
and I dread the thought of playing those notes. I now associate that waltz with blood, with pain, and I never want to hear it again.

“I’ll schedule the MEG for next Wednesday. We’ll need a recording of the music before then,” he says.

“There isn’t any recording. At least—I don’t think there is. It’s a handwritten composition I bought in an antiques store.”

“Then why don’t you record yourself playing it? You can email the digital file to me.”

“I can’t. I mean…” I take a deep breath. “I haven’t mastered the piece. It’s quite demanding. But I can ask my friend Gerda to record it. She plays first violin in our quartet.”

“Fine. Ask her to email the file by Tuesday. And bring Lily to the hospital next Wednesday, eight
A.M.
” He smiles as he closes Lily’s chart. “I know this has been a rough time for you, Mrs. Ansdell. I hope this test will give us the answer.”

This time Rob also comes to the doctor’s appointment, which for some reason irritates me. In the days leading up to this, I’m the one who’s done all the driving, all the waiting, shuttling Lily to doctors’ offices and labs. Only now, at the main event, does Rob finally decide to show up. After the MEG technician takes our daughter into the next room to be tested, Rob and I settle onto a hideous plaid-upholstered sofa in the waiting area. Though we’re right beside each other, we don’t hold hands, we don’t even touch. I open one of the women’s magazines on the coffee table, but I’m too nervous to read, so I aimlessly flip through glossy images of leather purses and high heels and models with dewdrop-perfect skin.

“At least this is something we can treat,” Rob says. “If one anticonvulsant drug doesn’t work, there’s always another one we can try.” He’s researched all the drugs, of course. My husband has compiled pages and pages of printouts on epilepsy medicines, their dosages, and their side effects. Now that he has a name for Lily’s problem, he’s prepared to tackle it like any man of action. “And if none of the drugs work, there are neurosurgical procedures they can try,” he adds, as if this is comforting news.

“They haven’t even made the diagnosis,” I snap. “Don’t talk about surgery.”

“Okay. Sorry.” At last he reaches for my hand. “Are you feeling all right, Julia?”

“I’m not the patient. Why are you asking me?”

“Dr. Cherry told me that when a child’s sick, the whole family becomes a patient. I know this has been really tough on you.”

“And it hasn’t been for you?”

“You’ve had to bear the brunt of it. You’re not sleeping, and you’re hardly eating anything these days. Do you think it might help if you talked to someone? Michael recommended this psychiatrist, a woman who specializes in—”

“Wait. You’ve been talking to the guys at work about me?”

He shrugs. “It just came up in conversation. Michael asked how you and Lily were doing.”

“I hope you didn’t tell him all the humiliating details.” I pull my hand away from his and massage my head, which is aching from this conversation. “So your colleagues now think I need a shrink?”

“Julia.” Sighing, he drapes his arm around my shoulder. “Everything will be fine, okay? No matter what happens, whatever the test shows, we’ll get through this together.”

The door opens and we both look up as Dr. Salazar walks into the waiting room. “Lily is the perfect little patient,” he says, smiling. “The tech’s keeping her busy with some toys right now, so let’s talk about the results.” He sits down facing us, and I try to read his expression, but all I see is that bland smile. I have no clue what he’s about to tell us. “During the test, we challenged her with a number of different stimuli, both visual and auditory. Flashing lights, different acoustic tones. Loud and soft, high frequency, low. Nothing we tried elicited any seizure activity whatsoever. Her brain appears to process and react in perfectly normal ways.”

“You’re saying she
doesn’t
have epilepsy?” Rob asks.

“Correct. Based on these results, I’d have to say she does not have a seizure disorder.”

I feel as if I’ve been whipped into another turn of the roller coaster. I’d already accepted that epilepsy was the cause of Lily’s behavior; now I’m left with no explanation at all, which is even worse than epilepsy because I’m back to my daughter the cat killer, the mom slasher. The monster who chants
hurt Mommy hurt Mommy
as she plunges broken glass into my leg.

“At this point, I don’t see any need for further testing,” Dr. Salazar says. “I think Lily is a perfectly normal child.”

“But what about her behavior?” I ask. Yes, that pesky little issue that first brought us here.

“Now that we’ve ruled out neurological abnormalities, it might be appropriate to consult a child psychiatrist,” says Dr. Salazar. “She’s very young, but her behavior might be significant, even at only three years old.”

“And you tried
everything
during the test? Did you play the waltz for her? I know Gerda sent you the recording.”

“Yes, we did play it. It’s a beautiful piece, by the way, very haunting. We played the entire recording three times, through Lily’s headphones. All we saw was some increased electrical activity in the right prefrontal and parietal cortex.”

“What does that mean?”

“Those particular regions of the brain are thought to be associated with long-term auditory memory. When you hear something for the first time—a random series of tones, for instance—it stays with you for only a few seconds. But if you hear it repeatedly, or if it’s something with personal significance, then it recycles through the hippocampus and the limbic system. It picks up emotional tags and gets stored in the cerebral cortex. Since it’s stored in Lily’s long-term memory, clearly she’s heard this waltz a number of times before.”

“But she hasn’t.” Bewildered, I look back and forth at Rob and Dr. Salazar. “I’ve only played it for her twice.”

“Even in utero, fetuses register voices and music. She probably heard you practicing while you were pregnant.”

“I’ve had the music for only a few weeks.”

“Then perhaps she heard it somewhere else. In preschool, maybe?”

“It’s an unpublished piece.” As my agitation mounts, both Dr. Salazar and Rob appear maddeningly calm. “I don’t know of any recording, anywhere. How could it be in her long-term memory?”

Dr. Salazar reaches across to pat my hand. “This is nothing to get excited about, Mrs. Ansdell,” he says in his soothing
I have all the answers
voice. “You’re a professional musician, so you probably process sounds in a different way than most people. If I played a new tune for you, I’m sure you’d pick it up right away. Maybe you’d still remember it next month, because your brain’s primed to send it straight to long-term memory. It appears you’ve passed that remarkable skill on to your daughter. Also, there’s the fact your husband is mathematically inclined.” Dr. Salazar looks at Rob. “Math and musical ability seem to be strongly linked in the brain. Children who learn to read music and play an instrument at an early age are often gifted in math. So your genes probably contributed as well.”

“That makes perfect sense to me,” Rob says.

“I read a biography of Mozart that said he needed to hear a piece played only once, and he could write it all down. That’s true musical talent, and your daughter’s clearly wired for it. Just like you are.”

But my daughter is
not
like me. While I can hum the first bars of the melody, I have certainly not memorized
Incendio.
Yet in my three-year-old daughter’s brain, the waltz has somehow embedded itself as permanent memory. An old memory.

We’ve got a little Mozart on our hands
is the message that Rob took away from our visit with Dr. Salazar, and he’s smiling as we drive home. Instead of a daughter with epilepsy, it turns out we have a golden-haired musical genius. He’s forgotten about the reason why she had the brain test to begin with, and how this cycle of doctor visits and X-rays and EEGs all began. He doesn’t have the painful reminders that still plague me: the dull headache that persists after my fall against the coffee table. The healing laceration on my thigh that still throbs even though the stitches have been removed. He’s already moved on to thinking about his genius daughter, and has skipped past the question that no one has answered: Why did my daughter attack me?

By the time we arrive home, Lily’s fallen asleep and she doesn’t stir as Rob lifts her from her car seat and carries her upstairs to her room. I’m exhausted as well, and after Rob leaves to go back to work, I stretch out on our bed for a nap. But when I close my eyes, all I see is Lily’s face, which looks so much like my own.

And so much like my mother’s. The mother I don’t remember. The mother no one ever wants to talk about.

According to aunt Val, my mother was a gifted musician who sang and played the piano. My father was certainly no musician. He sang off-key, couldn’t read a note, couldn’t keep a beat. If musical talent is something you inherit, then mine came from my mother, and through me, those genes were passed to Lily. What else did I unwittingly pass on to my daughter?

When I awaken from my nap, I find the sun has already fallen behind the trees and the room is cast in shadow. How long have I slept? I know Rob is home from work, because I hear a kitchen cabinet thump shut downstairs. He must have found me still asleep and decided to start cooking dinner.

Groggy, I climb out of bed and yell from the doorway: “Rob, I have pork chops defrosting in the refrigerator. Did you find them?”

Downstairs, a pot lid clatters.

Yawning, I shuffle to the stairway and call down: “I’m up now. I can take over. You really don’t have to—”

My foot suddenly shoots out from under me. I try to catch myself on the railing, but a chasm seems to open up beneath me and I tumble into its jaws, falling, sliding.

When I open my eyes, I’m lying at the bottom of the stairs. I can move my arms and legs, but when I try to turn onto my side, pain stabs my right flank, sharp as a spear. Sobbing, I collapse flat on my back and feel something roll away from my foot and skitter across the wood floor. It’s something small and pink and it collides with the wall a few feet away.

A little plastic car. A toy.

“Rob!” I cry out. Surely he heard me tumble down the stairs. Why doesn’t he answer? Why doesn’t he come out of the kitchen? “Help. Rob, help me…”

But it’s not Rob who comes out of the kitchen.

Lily crosses to the toy car, picks it up, and examines it with the detached gaze of a scientist studying some failed experiment.

“It was you,” I whisper. “You did it.”

She looks at me. “Time to get up, Mommy,” she says, and walks back into the kitchen.