Meyer Children's Hospital is the setting for the family’s account of Irene’s near-fatal fall in infancy. Her hospitalization interrupts her father’s routine of buying science-fiction novels, and the episode later shadows Marco’s response to Adele’s childhood perceptual disturbance: he briefly recognizes a connection to Irene, then suppresses what he has understood.

Irene’s Hospitalization

After Irene falls from a high chair in the kitchen of the family home in Piazza Dalmazia, she remains in a coma for two days at Meyer Children's Hospital. She survives and recovers, though the family story recalls that Irene later regarded the fall as the origin of her subsequent ailments. Her mother vows to stop smoking if Irene recovers but does not keep that promise.

A Pause in the Family Archive

The fall is also reconstructed through gaps in the father’s collection of Urania novels. The missing issues are dated May 10 and May 24, 1959; the narrative interprets the absent books as evidence that he neither bought nor borrowed them. With Irene hospitalized and then kept under observation at Meyer Children's Hospital, he misses two purchases, a break that the family treats as proportionate to the crisis.

Marco was not yet born during the fall. By comparing the novels’ dates with his own December 2 birth, he reasons that his mother was in approximately the second or third month of pregnancy. This corrects his earlier imagined picture of her heavily pregnant while tending to Irene and places the hospital episode within the family’s account of his own beginnings. About a month after the crisis, his father resumes buying novels regularly.

The Memory’s Return

Years later, when Adele is about three, she tells Marco that an invisible thread runs from her back to the nearest wall and that she must move carefully so others do not become caught in it. As he listens, he has a brief, frightening recognition connected to his sister Irene and to what Adele’s experience may mean. He immediately represses the insight; the narrative says it never returns, even after events unfold in the way he had momentarily anticipated.

Meyer Children's Hospital therefore enters the story through remembered family history rather than as the site of Adele’s treatment. The account links Irene’s crisis and Marco’s later failure to retain his recognition, showing how an earlier trauma can remain consequential even when its meaning is first glimpsed and then forgotten.