The Chair by the Window
At the hospital, Oliver kept asking whether he had done something wrong.
“No, sweetheart,” I told him as a nurse checked his temperature. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Then why is everyone looking at my tummy?”
I pulled the blanket over his legs.
“Because we want to find out why it hurts.”
He moved his hands to his stomach and held them there.
Doctors examined him and reviewed the scan.
Later, one of them asked David and me to step into the corridor while a nurse stayed with Oliver.
“There appears to be a mass near one of his kidneys,” she said. “It would explain the swelling and some of the pain. We need further tests and a specialist to determine exactly what we’re dealing with.”
“A mass?” I repeated.
She nodded.
“I know that’s frightening. We aren’t going to make assumptions before we have the answers.”
I looked through the glass at my son, lying small beneath a hospital blanket.
Patricia had laughed at the size of his stomach in front of 20 people.
All that time, something had been growing inside him.
When I returned, Oliver was tugging the hospital gown across his belly.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then why are you pulling it down?”
He shrugged.
A nurse came in to adjust a monitor.
Oliver twisted away and whispered, “Please don’t look.”
The nurse paused.
“I only need to check this little sticker, okay?”
He nodded, but kept one hand pressed against the gown.
I had seen that movement before.
At the dinner table.
In photographs lately, when someone asked him to stand up straight.
I had thought he was becoming shy.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
That night, David brought Oliver’s favorite dinosaur in from the car.
I sat beside the bed and held my son’s hand.
“Do you remember how Grandma used to let you sit in her big chair?” I asked.
Oliver’s eyes moved toward me.
“The one by the window?”
“Yes.”
He nodded.
“She’d read those dinosaur books until you both fell asleep.”
“She doesn’t do that anymore.”
“Have you asked her?”
“Once.”
“What did she say?”
He rubbed the corner of the blanket between his fingers.
“She said I was too big for her lap.”
I tried to smile.
“You’re growing up, honey. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t want you close.”
Oliver looked down at himself.
“She says my tummy’s getting bigger too.”
My throat tightened.
“Grandma shouldn’t say things that make you feel bad.”
“She used to call me Teddy Bear,” he said. “Even when I was really little.”
“I remember.”
“Now she calls me her big boy.”
He said the last two words so quietly that I almost missed them.
“Do you miss sitting with her?”
He nodded.
I wanted to tell him Patricia loved him.
I wanted to promise that everything would be fine.
But he was watching my face, waiting for an answer that meant something.
So I said, “You can miss that. And you can tell her it hurts when she jokes about your body.”
May you like
He didn’t answer.
Instead, he asked, “Will she be mad?”
