Adam thumped his forehead against Suzanne’s chest. “My ankles hurt. I need more medicine.”

The joint pain was new. Ankles. Knees. Wrists. Suzanne swung from being afraid that the pediatrician was missing something serious, if not fatal, to believing her when she said that pediatric headaches were more common than people thought. When Suzanne took Adam back with the news that the sinus medication wasn’t working, the doctor gave her a scrip for a refill and said, “Hang in there, Mom.”

Something about the wording, something about the casualness, the near cavalierness of her remark, lit a flame inside Suzanne. She stood up from the molded orange plastic chair, bumping her head into the clown mobile that hung from the ceiling tiles, and slammed her palm against the desk. She demanded testing! Immediately! The doctor—rational, unruffled—assured her they would begin tests if the second round of antibiotics was unproductive.

For better or worse, the second round, too, was useless. Suzanne had since taken Adam to a phlebotomist who had had to stick him twice to find a good vein, trauma that even a dinosaur Band-Aid could not assuage. The good news was that the standard workup had not shown anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t mean they were out of the woods, but it seemed positive. The bad news was that he still had headaches. A visit to the neurologist was the next stop, but the doctor, a woman of national renown, was booked solid for the next several weeks.

The baby was coming at a terrible time, in the midst of what might be deemed a family collapse. Suzanne wasn’t working—how could she, with Adam on her lap? And Grant was vague these days. He was present physically during dinner, but he was like a Stepford Wife, smiling and nodding even when it wasn’t appropriate to smile or nod.

Adam had a full-on tantrum at the grocery store today.

I got a flat tire and had to wait an hour for AAA.

Smile, smile. Nod, nod.

After rehearsal, he went straight to the TV instead of coming to bed. She could hear him laughing through the floorboards as she tried to sleep. She’d thought it was hard to sleep when he was in the same too-small bed with her, but his not being in the bed was even worse. He would take a shower right before going to sleep—he knew she was especially sensitive to smells when she was pregnant—but the noise woke her when she finally had managed to drop off.