Moment, momentous, momentum

From far away, some time later, I surmise that the metal stirrup—remnant of a broken swing—that hit my daughter Sara in the left temple carried with it a momentum of roughly eight kilogram-meters per second as it traced its arc from my daughter Adriana’s hand as she followed it with her widening eyes as she realized its trajectory would intersect her younger sister’s. Given that Sara’s mass, even at age three, was substantially more than the swing’s, the momentum would have been easily conserved in simply knocking her a half meter or so in about a second, but given that she may have sensed the impending collision and thrown herself backward, the calculations would be nearly impossible. In any case, I wasn’t there to witness the event or to take measurements. And, ultimately, this is not so much a question of momentum as of force concentrated in a narrow shim of iron cutting bluntly into centimeters of flesh over bone.

This was our last day in Uruguay, visiting Karina’s family. We were to have a feast, attended by the whole clan. My father-in-law and Fernando tended the grill, shoveling coals, adding wood to the fire, turning the ribs, while David and I stood around chatting. Inside, Karina and her mother and sisters readied the table with plates and empanadas. Most of the children were at the nearby playground, squeezing out every last moment. Then my oldest, Pato and Adi, ran breathless and crying around the gray corner under the broken ombú tree:

• “Sara!”

• “Bleeding!”

• Amidst a string of unintelligible overtalking.

I bounded past the ditches, over the low brick wall, to the sight of my baby stunned, standing silent in the middle of the concrete playground, holding her scarlet head above a growing pool.

I swept her up, cradled her in the crook of my arm, and bounded back, past the chimney, into the house, to grab a towel, to wash the wound, to call a taxi, to rush us to Saint Bois. Karina and David came along. Fernando and his parents stayed at home with the other children, to calm and console them. By the time the taxi arrived, minutes later, we still had no real idea what had happened.

Sara was calm, mute, wide-eyed, the whole ride. Our driver was safe and fast, taking corners without a downshift, taking traffic signs as suggestions. The hospital staff, seeing the blood and stillness, and thinking Sara more gravely injured than she was, took us right in and assessed her injury, eventually, as superficial—deep and wide enough to require stitches, but nothing eternal, nothing visible to the future. It was behind her hairline, just barely.

Our own assessment required a quick phone call home to ask once more, calmly, what happened. Fernando, acting as intermediary, pieced together from Adriana’s sobs what I’ve told you above: that she’d thrown the broken swing just as Sara happened by. It was thus Fernando’s job to comfort Adi, to let her know that Sara would be fine, that we’d all be home and happy soon.

Not so soon, it turned out, as we were sent downtown to Pereira-Rossell after the stitches, for a CAT scan. So David went home to eat with the rest of the family, while Karina and I traveled in the ambulance beside our daughter, Karina whispering lullabies and I staring ahead, imagining the day 30 years ago when my mother-in-law left the water boiling on the stove awaiting the evening’s pasta, and in only a moment of turned back, mind-on-somethingelse, her son Fernando toddled into the kitchen and tipped the pot onto his right side, scalding the skin off his face, arm, and leg. Of course, the scene I construct takes place in their current home, because I’ve never seen the house they lived in then, so I already know somewhat of the limits of imagination when it butts up against the horror of a mother’s momentous guilt at knowing she’s caused her son everlasting...