Tachycardia

Before going to sleep, I slog through research papers with my back against the headboard. Tina brushes her teeth. Between going from her upper to her lower row, she comes to the bathroom door. In her eighth month, her nakedness is enthralling, her bulbous belly sexier than any negligee. A thread of white foam slips down her chin. “The one thing I didn’t tell you about what Dr. Hawkes said today is that the baby is going to be big.”

“I’ll be there for you. I’m your coach. I’ll bring a whistle. If the baby doesn’t do what I tell him, he’ll do laps up and down the birth canal.”

“It might be a hard delivery.”

“We’ve been to Le Mans. I know the racetrack.”

“Lamaze doesn’t do drugs. If I need drugs, don’t talk me out of them.”

“If Forthcoming doesn’t cooperate, I’ll birth the baby for you through transferal of psychodemiopolis.”

“That doesn’t exist.”

“Don’t tell Forthcoming.”

Next morning, pouring food for our Bearded Collie, Tina says, “I had a dream last night the baby wouldn’t fit in our bassinette, and Len and Sherri haven’t given us their crib yet.”

“I’ll call Len today.” I pour us a glass of orange juice to share. “Maybe he and I could take in a movie after school, and he could bring it then.”

Later, during my free period, I use the English department’s phone. “Want to catch The Long Riders this afternoon? It’s at Stratford, halfway between you and me.”

Len checks his calendar. He can reschedule a couple of non-suicides. He will take an early Metra train out of Chicago. I ask him to bring the crib.

“You could have called this morning. I could have put it in the car. Now I’ll have to drive home from the station before meeting you to pick it up. I might miss the beginning.”

“Nothing exciting happens in the beginning of Westerns. A guy rides across a desert. It sets him up to be the independent loner who never settles down with wife and kids.”

“Something exciting always happens. A bank robbery. A stagecoach holdup. A schoolmarm raped or kidnapped.”

“I promise to fill you in. There’s the bell for class.”

The movie delivers enough action to keep us entertained. If not about brotherly love, it’s about brotherly cohesion. After it’s over, Len opens the trunk of his Escalade and pulls out the collapsed crib and mattress. May’s evening sun bakes the asphalt.

“Worked for us,” he says. “Runt’s already three. We don’t bother with prayers at night like Mom and Dad. Remember?”

“I remember reciting prayers with one or both sitting on the bed, yeah. Had no idea what the words meant. ‘Forgive us our trespasses’? ‘Hallow-ed be thy name’?”

“I never told you this.” Len closes the trunk. “When Mom and Dad left our room at night, they expected us to continue saying prayers, especially that Swiss-German one we all said together.” He opens the driver’s door, drops in, and starts the car, the whoosh of air conditioning loud as a vacuum. “You stopped saying them as soon as they left. I kept on. I never told on you.”

The crib felt heavier than expected. With guardrails, wheels, and mattress, the weight was oppressive. “I don’t remember any of that. I don’t remember being told to keep praying.”

“I doubt they ever told us to. I just know they wanted us to.”

“It wasn’t a religious thing. I probably just fell asleep.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing.” He closes the door and zooms down the window. “Now I realize it was blind, stupid obedience. A waste of time. I could have been sleeping.”

“Take it up with your shrink.” Len is in psychoanalysis because he wants to be a psychoanalyst.

“It came up last session,” he says. “That’s what prompted me telling you.”

“Thanks for the crib,” I say. “Thanks for coming out early.”

He backs out and screeches away. I haul the crib and mattress to my ancient sedan and can barely fit it in. Something cracks when I’m pushing on it, but I keep going. It must fit. I can’t leave it here in the parking lot.

At home, Tina is in the small kitchen she hates because she learned how to be a gourmet cook from her mother but feels claustrophobic in this early twentieth century space not much bigger than the downstairs half bath. Like her mother, she married someone in the arts, not business, engineering, medicine, or law, occupations that lead to second homes and country club memberships. She suffers a peeling tile floor and small counter space.

“Want one?” She holds out a half-empty column of cellophane-wrapped Oreo cookies. When I shake my head, she takes one off the top and bites off half.

“Brought home the crib. There’s a thing on it plays lullabies. Must have jostled it putting it in the car. Listened to ‘Hush, little baby, don’t you cry…’ all the way home. Hideous tune. Worse lyrics. ‘Dreams always come true’? I don’t think so. If they do, they’re nightmares.”

She finishes the Oreo and takes out another. “I’m giving Forthcoming his first sugar high.”

I wonder about the chocolate, caffeine, and sugar, but she’s carrying precious cargo, so I’m not about to question her.

Tina pulls down the oven door and with hot pads pulls out a golden chicken speckled with a confetto of spices and wreathed with tiny carrots and sliced red potatoes. “Set the table, if you have the strength after sitting for two hours in an air-conditioned theater. Then grab a knife and start carving. I’m going to bed right after dinner.”

She does. I grade a few papers then join her. Her snoring does not disturb the dog, nestled beside her. I put in earplugs. When I feel a hand on my arm, the digital clock says 10:10. Tina is standing beside our bed.

“Can you wake up?” she says. “My heart. It’s racing. I tried sleeping on the carpet. Can you feel my pulse?”

She turns on the bedside light, blinding me. I look at my watch and hold her pulse. After a minute I tell her what she already suspects. “Faster than two beats per second.” Because this has occurred before, we know a rapid heartrate threatens a stroke or heart attack.

“We need to call an ambulance,” I say, wanting someone professional here as soon as possible.

“No, no,” she says. “Let me talk to someone.”

Tina calls the hospital and speaks with an emergency room nurse. “Okay. Okay. Okay,” she says, hangs up, and tells me we need to go in. I pack my American literature textbook, my journal, and one section’s research papers. These visits can last hours.

Half an hour later we walk through the Emergency entrance sliding door. One person sits in the waiting room, a middle-aged woman wearing a black formal dress you’d wear to a wedding or funeral. Her head is bowed, maybe in sleep or in prayer.

“Is he with you?” the woman at registration asks Tina. She’s maybe in her mid-fifties and has lovely white hair pulled back. Her badge says Shelly.

“Most of the time,” Tina answers.

Shelly continues her rapid-fire questioning for what seems like eternity. I’m fretful that they haven’t rushed Tina inside, laid her down, hooked her up, and shot her up. Fretful she hasn’t seen a doctor who could prescribe something to make her heart stop beating fast. Fretful she is not being cared for.

I’m about to ask Shelly why my wife isn’t already connected to an EKG machine when the woman asks, “Is he paying for this?”

“I always make him pay,” Tina answers.

Shelly looks at me. “Social?”

“When forced to be,” I say with derision, then give her the number.

“Yours?” she asks Tina.

Tina begins well, but goofs up the last four digits and is forced to check her card, buried in her wallet, buried in her purse.

“Can this wait?” I ask Shelly. “She has a rapid heart rate.”

“Tachycardia,” Shelly says. “I know.”

“Yeah, and you’re not helping to slow it down.”

“Maybe you should wait over there,” Shelley directs.

“Maybe my wife should wait in a hospital bed before she has a stroke.”

“Sir…”

“I’m okay,” Tina says.

I take a seat across from the inert woman and fish out a fistful of papers.

“It has long been known,” the first double-spaced, Times New Roman page begins, “that several American masterpieces include the theme of the American dream in which a male figure goes it alone, either by choice or by circumstance, whether in the woods, the suburbs, or city. These include Thoreau’s Walden, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.”

“Sweetie?” Tina’s voice wakes me from a veil of sleep. I look up, surprised by my surroundings, and see her waiting by a set of open double doors. Beside her stands a man in green scrubs maybe in his late twenties. Walking over, I read his laminated tag, Hal. He leads us past a long line of beds cordoned off with curtains. Hal tells me where I can sit, a no-brainer because there is only one chair. Once Tina lies down, Hal starts a flow on the back of her left hand and attaches a blood pressure cup on her arm. A woman with a man’s haircut rolls in an EKG machine.

“I’m Carol,” she says.

The blood pressure cuff beeps. 183/112. Through invisible speakers, Bruce Springsteen sings, “Is that me, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?”

When Tina closes her eyes, I read about Thoreau not living like a hermit, but like a camper who goes into town for supplies, or like a city dweller who entertains friends at his lake house. When an Indian or Pakistani doctor comes in, he asks Tina some questions and orders a CBC and thyroid study. While they talk, I watch my wife, looking lovely lying there among all the cords and digital readouts, the white blanket pulled up to her neck, Forthcoming’s promising lift halfway down her body the best thing that has happened to me, to us.

I nap. When the blood pressure sleeve beeps again, I wake and look around. Nothing has changed. Ceiling light still falls like a harsh blue-gray mist on the bed, on the cobweb of wires, and on a myriad of small electrical machines. Every few minutes a uniformed figure passes by the slit in the curtain. Tina’s heart monitor beep-beep-beep-beeps at a rate still faster than mine. Then I see a red digital 142/87, lower and more in line with the nearly normal.

I look at Tina. Her mouth has fallen open, and she is snoring softly.

I know I don’t have to, it’s not expected, but I lower my head like the woman in the waiting room to make it look like I’m going back to sleep and begin to mouth words that might be interpreted by some as prayer.

RICHAR HOLINGER’S work has recently appeared in Chautauqua, SIR, Cleaver, Whitefish Review, Cutleaf, and elsewhere. Nominations include the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction 2025, included in the latter. Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays). His chapbook, “Not Everybody’s Nice” won the 2012 Split Oak Press Flash Prose Contest. His 2025 poetry chapbook, Down from the Sycamores, is available from www.finishinglinepress.com, and a short fiction collection, Unimaginable Things, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publications. He holds a doctorate in creative writing from UIC, taught high school and community college English for decades, and lives in rural northern Illinois. More at www.richardholinger.com.

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