Owchie

     Last week Clara took a header in front of the Y.  I was on my way in to work out, and trying to hold her hand through the parking lot. To Clara, my hand is an unnecessary tether that keeps her from fun. Accordingly, she made her paw stiff and straight like a wooden paddle so I had to grasp her at the wrist.  Then she did the old "splay and twist," flexing her fingers apart and swiveling her wrist back and forth.
     The snow and deep freeze we had in January was thawing.  Engine grease, old de-icer, sand and dirt mixed with ice water to form a soup that puddled in low places on the asphalt.  Clara briefly wrested her hand free from mine. In that moment, the toe of her toddler sneaker hit an edge of ice and she went face-first into the soup.  Black goo was smeared from her forehead to her lips.  It covered her hands, the fronts of her jeans, the entire front of her coat.
      An idling Land Rover, waiting for us to cross the parking lot's main thorough-fare, witnessed the fall.  I dared not look into the face of the driver as I futilely tried to clean my tarred, squalling baby's nose with my spit-covered thumb.  
     Finally I hustled Clara inside, where every person from the front lobby to the childcare center stopped us to gasp and asked what happened.  Clara kept her head on my shoulder, lips quivering, tears spilling onto her cheeks.  But the time we got to the Y's childcare center, she was convinced of two things: first, that she had been in a terrible, horrible accident, the likes of which should befall no one--not even the lowliest of the lowest carrion-chewing hyenas; and second, that her courage and resilience were so great the Nobel Prize committee should seriously consider her.
     And she was pretty brave.  I told her as much as I scrubbed her face and hands clean with soapy paper towels and then kissed her on her soapy red lips.  When everything was clean, and she was changed into clean pants, I examined her skin and found a tiny bit of road rash, about half the size of a pencil eraser, on her right palm.
     "OWCH!" she yelled as I dabbed it with paper towel.  "I need a band-aid!" I supplied her one from the Y's first-aid kit.  A big, important-looking band-aid.
     That night, when Simon got home, we touched briefly on the fall, and he made an appropriate amount of noise over her band-aided owie.
     As I drifted off to sleep at about eleven, I heard disgruntled sounds.  I wanted to believe it was only air circumventing the mucus stalagmites, warts and hairs of Wilbur the dog's treacherous sinuses as he slept on his dog bed below me.  But pretty soon the sounds became distinct:
     "Ow, owie, owie, ow, ow!"
     I sighed and got out of bed, wondering if Clara's tiny wound had metastasized into something disastrous in the two and a half hours since I'd put her to bed.  Maybe she'd developed flesh-eating streptococcus or gangrene.  I groggily wondered if I should cut an X over the wound and suck the poisoned blood out.  Then I remembered that you're only supposed to do that for snake bites.
     "Do you want me to turn on the light and look at your owie?" I whispered to her over her crib railing.
     "Yes," she whispered back.
     When the light was on, I saw the problem immediately.  It wasn't the wound--as is the case with most toddlers, Clara's little cells divide and multiply so quickly the wound was visibly more healed even since bedtime.  The problem was the band-aid had slipped off and was twisted around her wrist.
     "I need another band-aid, Mommy," she whispered.
     Thankfully, the new band-aid lasted until morning.  She allowed me to take it off just before breakfast.  Then, she held out her hand and said softly, "Mommy, this is my owie."