Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,96

and reaching down to pick my daughter up to hold in my arms. “She goes by Mia.”

The woman neither acknowledged what I said nor that I opted to carry my three-year-old. She just told us to come with her. After a brief pause to stand Mia on a scale, we sat in another chair to wait.

“What seems to be the problem here?” the nurse asked, her attention on the file she held instead of looking at me.

“My daughter has had a bad cough at night for the last week,” I began, trying to remember how long she’d been suffering, how many times I’d sent her to day care when she should have stayed home. “I think it might be a sinus infection or allergies, maybe? Her eyes get really red sometimes, and she complains of her ear hurting a lot.”

The nurse, a larger, gruff-looking woman, continued to somewhat ignore me, but now she had a look of pity for Mia, who sat in my lap. “Oh, sweetie, your ear hurts?” she said in a baby voice.

Mia nodded, too worn out to be shy or argue. She let the woman take her temperature and clip a plastic thing on her finger to check her pulse and oxygen levels. Then we sat there to wait. I leaned my head back to rest on the wall, closing my eyes, and tried not to think about the work I was missing. It was the Plant House again, whose owner became so annoyed over my having to reschedule that Lonnie said she all but threatened to cancel her service. Mia coughed her guttural bark again. She was too young for cough syrup, and it wasn’t like I could afford it anyway. Mia woke up twice a night, crying out in a howling sort of way with her hand grasping the side of her head, and coughed in her sleep.

The pediatrician who opened the door wasn’t our usual one, since I’d called that morning for a same-day appointment. This woman was smaller, boyish, and had her black hair bobbed like Mia did. “Okay.” She looked at the chart, squinting. “Mia.” So the nurse heard me after all, I thought, while Mia lifted her head at the sound of her name.

“Why don’t you have her sit up here,” she said, patting the papered seat on the examination table. She looked at Mia’s face while I talked, then in her eyes. “What are your living conditions like?” she asked. I frowned at the question, fighting off an urge to feel incredibly hurt and offended. She could have said “How are things at home?” or “Is there something that could be making her sick?” or “Are there any pets in the home?” or anything but asking what our living conditions were like. Like we lived in a…then I thought of what we lived in, and my shoulders fell.

“We live in a studio apartment,” I said softly, admitting some kind of secret, part of me afraid she’d call child protective services if I indulged what our living conditions were actually like. “There’s a lot of black mold that keeps showing up on the windowsills. I think it’s coming from the basement. There’s this shaft that comes up into our bedroom, and you can look down it and see the dirt floor.” The doctor had stopped examining Mia and stood with her hands clasped in front of her. She had the tiniest watch with a black band. “It has a lot of windows.” I looked down at the floor. “I have a hard time keeping it warm and dry in there.”

“Your landlord is required by law to do what he can to get rid of the mold,” she said, looking in Mia’s ear. “That one’s infected,” she mumbled, shaking her head, almost like it was my fault.

“He cleaned the carpets,” I said, suddenly remembering. “And painted before we moved in. I don’t think he’d do anything else.”

“Then you need to move.”

“I can’t,” I said, putting my hand on Mia’s leg. “I can’t afford anything else.”

“Well,” she said, nodding at Mia, “she needs you to do better.”

I didn’t know what else to say. I nodded.

I looked at Mia’s hands where they rested in her lap, fingers laced together. They still had that chubbiness to them, dimples instead of knuckles. I felt my failures as a parent every time I opened the door to our apartment, but it was nothing like the burning shame I felt in that moment.

As I carried Mia out