16

JANUARY 1

Suzanne didn’t mean to destroy the house. She didn’t wake up on the first day of the new year thinking, Today I will wreck my house. In fact, she woke up thinking about spinach. She rolled out of bed at first light, turned up the thermostat, and ate cold, cooked spinach at the kitchen counter, straight from its BPA-free plastic container.

Allergies were to blame for Adam’s headaches. That was it, plain and simple, she told herself, her teeth sinking into the squeaky leaves. It was the thought that had kept her up the better part of the night. What else could be causing the headaches?

The neurologist had spent nearly an hour with Adam the day before Christmas, taking a family history, taking a history of his symptoms, making him walk a straight line and touch his finger to his nose, tapping his knee, giving him lists of items to remember in order, and quizzing him on the number of fingers she held up as if Adam were a circus poodle. She wrote up orders for a slew of tests and suggested Suzanne keep a headache diary.

“For me or for him?” she asked the doctor, who laughed, but it had been a serious question.

They’d spent the day after Christmas in doctors’ offices as well. Grammy, who had been in town for the holidays, had wanted to come to the appointments with them, but the idea made Suzanne want to jump out a window. She gave her mother a guidebook and a Metro card and told her not to come back till five o’clock. But her mother didn’t go downtown at all. Instead, she stayed home, wiping down the ceiling fans (You can’t imagine the dirt! I wish I’d taken a picture!) and cleaning out the pantry, throwing out the spices that had lost their pungency. This only added to the fury Suzanne felt at her for giving Adam a video-game console, in complete and utter defiance of her instructions.

Adam’s CT scan, thankfully, had shown nothing abnormal. The MRI, too, though it had been a terrible morning watching a terrified Adam sit strapped like an astronaut to an oversize machine that took pictures of slices of his brain. She wanted to unbuckle him, to spirit him out of the office and keep on running. Instead, she’d waited until the technician gave them the all clear, then took him back to the blood lab for additional testing by the sadistic phlebotomist. The results wouldn’t be back until later this week. Suzanne was convinced that they, like the tests the pediatrician ordered, would show nothing. It was the allergy tests that held the answers.

She’d spent last night on the Internet doing research. She missed the annual dropping of the mirrored disco ball in front of Lucy’s at midnight, an event Grant attended alone. He’d gone over to the Coxes’ afterward for champagne, returning blurry eyed and horny around two in the morning. Suzanne rebuffed him. She had work to do. There were so many allergies to consider: dust mites, dander, cockroaches, chemicals, pollen, peanuts, ragweed, eggs, soy, wheat, nuts, mold—and those were just the most common ones.