lot more likely to hurt her finger in them, or cut it really badly, than she is to fall down the stairs. And why three of them? Are you planning to lock her in her room?” Zoe looked disapprovingly and instantly critical of him.
“No, but now that you mention it, if she wakes up before we do, and ever gets out of her crib, she could wander all over the apartment and hurt herself. A gate on her room would be a good idea.” In the larger apartment they’d moved to when Zoe was pregnant, there was lots of room for her to move around, and get into trouble if unsupervised.
“I won’t allow a gate. We have to respect her as a person, we can’t treat her like a prisoner,” Zoe said angrily.
“We need to treat her like a one-year-old with more mobility than sense,” he said firmly, irritated by Zoe’s take on everything, that schedules were abusive and gates were for dogs. For someone so obsessed with safety and Jaime’s well-being, she was ridiculous sometimes, but he didn’t say that to her. Instead he installed the gate on the stairs that night, after telling Zoe that he couldn’t get the flat kind, which wouldn’t have been the right size for their doorways anyway, as they were unusually wide. He put the two extras in a storage closet in case they needed them later.
Zoe was furious when she saw the already installed gate on the stairs, got out a screwdriver, and took it down, which made Austin even angrier, and led to a fight. The first bad one they’d had in a while, maybe the worst one yet.
“If she falls down the stairs and gets hurt, you’ll be calling me crying from the emergency room. We don’t even have carpeting on those stairs, she could really get hurt. And God knows what she’ll do if she gets out of her room before we get up. She could cut herself, or bang her head, or anything.”
“I’ve childproofed the house,” she said confidently.
“Not entirely. You can’t, she could knock a lamp down on herself by pulling on the cord. We can’t live in an empty bomb shelter, Zoe, the gate makes sense.”
“They’re offensive, they disrespect our daughter,” she said fiercely. “I’ll get carpeting, if you want.”
“Until you do, I want that gate up,” he said angrily. “She’s my daughter too.”
“Then treat her like one, and not your dog. I won’t have those things in my home.”
They went to bed angry at each other that night, after she called him abusive, insensitive, and disrespectful, and he called her unreasonable and nuts. But he didn’t put the gate up again, he knew she’d just take it down. And they were chilly with each other when they left for work on Monday. The battle of the gate had been a bad one, and neither of them had recovered yet.
Fiona called Zoe at eleven-thirty, while she was in a finance meeting with a city official. Fiona sounded flustered at first, which Zoe had never heard before. Zoe was surprised and Fiona cut to the chase, knowing she was busy. “Jaime’s all right, nothing serious, but she got hurt. I was putting the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, and she ran away from me. I went to find her immediately. I think she was looking for you. She got up your bedroom stairs, and before I could get there, she fell. She’s cut her lip, and I think she hurt her arm. The lip might need a stitch, though. I’m going to take her to the hospital now. I called Dr. Clark first, she’s meeting me there in five minutes. I just wanted to let you know.” By the end of her recital of events, Fiona sounded cool and efficient again, although apologetic. Knowing how extreme Zoe’s reactions were, she hated having to report an accident to her, even a minor one.
“I’ll get there as soon as I can,” Zoe promised, feeling terrible. Austin was right, the stairs were dangerous for her, more so than Zoe had realized, or had wanted to admit to him. Being right had seemed more important at the time. But she’d been wrong and now Jaime was injured.
Zoe excused herself from the meeting, explaining that her daughter had had a minor accident. They’d almost concluded their business and agreed to finish without her. She rushed outside to hail a cab.
Fiona had called Austin too. He got to the hospital