There is usually something oddly soothing about the emergency room of a large New York City hospital. There is nothing that can come through the double doors that the doctors and nurses there have not seen, and for that matter saved. A man with his leg in a plastic bag filled with ice in the ambulance next to him. A woman whose hair has been caught in a meat grinder, effectively scalping her. A child catatonic after being placed in scalding water. We social workers can hear the indictment before the mother actually opens her mouth: she wouldn’t stop crying.
In New York you can measure how badly a person is hurt by how quickly they take him into a treatment room. If you’ve hammered a nail through your palm or broken your leg in a fall, you will have to wait. People with AIDS are bleeding from head wounds suffered in lovers’ quarrels, yet behind the scrim of their surgical masks the staff appear unruffled, even unmoved. There is an abbreviation for gunshot wounds: GSW. It is all over the charts on the receptionist nurse’s battered metal desk. Those are the only people not required to immediately provide insurance information, the ones on bloodied gurneys that sweep through the doors and move forward like planes poised to land, to disgorge mangled cargo.
Leo had apparently gone right in, surrounded by an honor guard of emergency medical technicians and police officers. He’d been shot in the back as he locked the van outside the Tubman projects. When Irving came inside, he flashed his badge and demanded we be taken into the treatment area. But all we could see was the curtain of the cubicle where they were treating him. I heard doctors barking orders and could see on the greenish linoleum floor a pair of shorts and a T-shirt scissored into sections. It was the black T-shirt that said “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.”
“No,” I said without meaning to say it.
“I’m sitting you down,” Irving said, and he pulled a chair from another cubicle where an elderly man was crying softly. I dropped down and leaned back against the tiled wall. I listened for the sound of Leo crying, screaming, talking, but all I could hear were the medical people. Their jargon sounded as though it was part of a television show. One of the nurses came out and looked through narrowed eyes from my face to my belly.
“You with us, Mom? You okay?”
“My nephew. Leo. Leo Grater. Is he alive?”
She knelt in front of me. She was wearing a smock with lollipops printed on it. Our aunt Maureen had had one like it before she retired. “We’re stabilizing him. They’ll talk to you soon. We don’t know exactly what’s going on yet. They’re going to run some tests. How old is he?”
“Nineteen. Do you need his social or date of birth?”
She patted my hand. “There’s plenty of time for that.”
Irving made a tight circle, into the waiting area, back to the treatment area, outside to answer the phone, back to the waiting area. He was juggling a crisis: a personal heartbreak, a police matter, a public relations nightmare, all in the same package. I knew there was some part of him that was happy he could get through the first two before the third hit because Leo’s last name was not Fitzmaurice.
The gurney flew by, a wild tuft of auburn hair waving from a junk pile of tubes, bags, even paperwork stacked atop his chest on a clipboard. “CT scan,” the nice nurse said, riding shotgun with her hand on one of the rails. Irving pulled one of the doctors aside. “Commish,” a detective in an old seersucker suit called. Irving began the circuit again, talking in a low voice to the police, carrying his cell phone out onto the pavement, laying his hand on my shoulder. Each time he returned he had something from the vending machine. There was a stack in my lap: Milky Way, Gatorade, Cheez Doodles, M&M’s peanuts. Slumber party food. I felt a dead weight in my midsection and wondered if I’d harmed the babies with adrenaline. Then one stirred, a soft fishy U-turn of a movement. I would call him Leo Jr. I would call her Meghan Jr. I would reconstruct the entire fractured landscape of my life out of spare parts. I would not cry because that would mean things were every bit as bad as I knew they were.
When Evan came in, he looked like a completely different person from the one I had seen just the night before in the restaurant. He was gray and drawn, and I wondered if I looked the same way.
“How is he?” he asked Irving.
“They don’t really know anything yet. They’re not holding out on us, the doctors don’t really know. He got shot in the back pretty far down. I think they’re trying to figure out where the bullet is and whether they can get to it.” He put his hand on his chest where his own scar was. “A bullet wound is not as bad as it sounds.” He had his TV voice on.
“Who did it?”
Irving shook his head. “We don’t know that, either. We got cops all over the project. Apparently there were a group of thug wannabes who had been giving him a hard time.”
“I know,” I said. “I know those guys. They called him Bus Boy. Tequila knows who they are.”
“He never said anything to me about guys giving him a hard time. He made it sound like he spent all his time driving women to doctors’ appointments and teaching kids to play chess.”
The nice nurse was back. “Is this Dad?” she said, leading Evan away. We use titles to establish the pecking order, those of us in the so-called helping professions. In the title department, Evan outranked me. He disappeared through yet another set of doors, rooting through an inside jacket pocket for his wallet, looking for his insurance card. I had handed him the M&M’s. I drank the Gatorade.
“One of the guys is Tequila’s son,” I said softly to Irving.
“I’m on it,” he said. It looked as if he had gag toys in his pocket: all of his cell phones were vibrating, ruffling the fabric of his gray slacks. The reporters probably already knew that a white kid, a freshman at Amherst, a Central Park West resident, had been shot at a Bronx housing complex. That was a good story for them. Soon one of them would figure out whose son he was. That would turn it into the lead of the local news. It would probably be a while before the officers at Tubman knew who had done the shooting. A man could be shot in the middle of the complex on a summer day with kids playing in the dirt, mothers talking by the lobby doors, old people leaning on the windowsills looking out. When the cops arrived, it was always the same: no one had seen anything. If you saw bad things, you made the people who did the bad things angry. And when they were angry, they would do bad things to you. Or, as Charisse told me once, her hand on my shoulder, explaining how come no one had given up a guy who stabbed his wife two days after he got out of prison upstate, “Karma is a boomerang.” I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the need to keep quiet or the inevitability of retribution, which had led the husband to take a header off the roof of a building the following month. Everyone knew the dead woman’s brother had pushed him off, but no one knew a thing.
I didn’t know what time of day it was. The hospital lighting made a constant sickly overcast daytime. After a while everyone seemed to have forgotten about me. Irving was outside somewhere. Evan had not returned. A nurse’s aide bundled up the gauze and wrappings and other trash from the cubicle. A police officer came in and put what was left of Leo’s shorts and T-shirt in an evidence envelope. I wondered what had happened to his big guy sneakers, his size elevens. Sometimes when I looked at his bony feet and hairy legs propped on my coffee table, I thought of the small bowed pink parentheses that had confounded me when I first tried to change him as a baby. My throat seized and I opened my mouth, looking for air, and a thin high wail came out. No one seemed to notice as they wheeled another gurney into the cubicle Leo had occupied, this one with a large elderly woman in the throes of what sounded like an asthma attack, her face obscured by the oxygen mask.
“You’re going to need to get out of the way,” one of the EMTs said.
I wandered back out into the general waiting area, past two little kids playing with action figures on the floor and an old man answering the questions of the woman with a clipboard. The clock told me I had been in the hospital for nearly six hours. I sat down in the waiting
area and paged through a tattered women’s magazine without seeing a thing. The place was nearly full. It looked like every other waiting area for poor people, a little grubby, a little stuffy, no pictures on the walls except for placards identifying the first signs of heart disease, the routine for breast self-examination, and the Heimlich maneuver. The girl next to me was using a stubby pencil to draw her way out of a maze in a copy of Highlights for Children. They’d had the same magazine in the dentist’s office when Meghan and I were kids. It didn’t look like it had changed at all.
Through the doors I could see the silver shimmy of headlights on the asphalt and a slate-colored night sky. There were two police cars at the far curb, and Irving was sitting in one of them talking on a cell phone. I watched him for a long time. Once he threw one of the phones across the asphalt, and a young cop got out of the squad car and picked it up. Irving made some notes on a narrow notebook he always kept in his breast pocket, then took the phone back from the uniformed cop without even looking up. Once he came inside to check on me. “I’m just waiting,” I said. “Do what you have to do.” Irving handed me a box of animal crackers from the vending machine and went back outside.
“Do you want these?” I said to the girl next to me.
“I’m not supposed to,” she said.
“I know I’m a stranger, but I’m not a bad stranger. You can take them.”
“I have sugar diabetes. My grandmama says I got to watch what I eat.”
She finished the maze and started some sort of word puzzle. I left the animal crackers on a chair and a little boy carried them off. When his mother looked up, I nodded at her, and she nodded at him. I looked back out and suddenly saw Irving swivel in the seat of the patrol car, the door open, and then he vanished because a limousine had pulled up and blocked my view.
She stepped to the front desk and said, in a way that was undeniable and could not possibly be ignored, “I am Meghan Fitzmaurice.” It had been months since I had seen the look the nurse got on her face as she stared up at that wiry figure, brown and freckled, untidy and painfully upright. My God, the look said. You really are.
“Can we not turn this into a photo op?” I heard Irving say, and then I noticed the silver stars pulsating through the glass doors and realized they were flashbulbs, like sharp little bullets of bright light. My sister has an uncanny ability to turn herself into the person the public thinks that she is, as well as what’s perhaps an even uncannier ability to turn it off. That’s why we can often do an entire six-mile loop in Central Park without anyone looking at her twice. The phrase she uses is apt: she puts out the light. The spotlight is something that shines from within at least as much as the glare from without.
She had never looked less like the woman that nurse thought she knew so well than she did at that moment. Her hair was still a rough reddish nimbus of choppy curls, and her freckles were so dark that she looked like a member of some unknown race. The brown of her skin meant that the scar on her forehead shone as though fluorescent. Her arms jutted, muscular, from the sleeves of a cotton dress she’d gotten in an outdoor market, laundered so the pattern was almost indecipherable. I had always joked that Meghan was the knife and I was the spoon. It had never been more true.
But my sister had turned the light on through sheer force of her blinding will, and the nurse was on her feet, and everything was about to change, as everything always had.
Meghan saw me across a row of plastic chairs, and put out her hand. In just a few minutes we were down a long corridor and into a room that looked like someone’s office, with a conference table to one side and a couch. “Lie down, Bridget,” she said. “You look exhausted.”
“How did you get here so fast?”
“Private jet,” she said.
A doctor I hadn’t seen before came into the office through a side door, and when I squinted at his name tag I knew why. He was the president of the hospital, and as he shook hands all around I realized we were in his office. On a credenza was a big photograph of a boy in a blue and white soccer uniform, one cleated foot up on the ball. I hated the doctor and his kid with a feeling not unlike heartburn. Perhaps it really was heartburn; my stomach was empty, and the babies were restless. After having given up coffee and wine, after having eaten yogurt and fish—but only fish low in mercury—I was probably delivering a chemical cocktail made up of equal parts fear, guilt, and rage.
“We have our neurosurgery team working on him right now,” the doctor was saying, playing nervously with a stethoscope. I wondered if he normally kept one in his pocket or if this was a special occasion. I thought of the day Leo was taking some of the families to Orchard Beach and helping one of the boys change into his trunks. The kid had a thick ropy scar in the shape of a cross that stretched from one end of his belly to the other, from his sternum to his pubis. It looked as though it had been done with a blunt scalpel by a blind man.
“Jerome, what’d you do, man?” Leo had asked, trying to keep his voice soft.
“When I was little I had a thing called a hernia and the doctors had to fix it up,” Jerome replied.
“No, dude, I had hernia surgery, it doesn’t look like this. You must have had something else.”
“Leo!” I’d called from the office. I remembered Leo’s surgery. He’d been two years old and his anesthetic was delivered by a woman wearing a Power Rangers mask after he’d had a strawberry sedative lollipop. Meghan sat through the surgery in one corner of the operating room. His scars looked like the faintest of pencil marks, each barely an inch long, each tucked into the fold of his groin, as though the surgeon was worried that someday he’d want to pose nude for a Calvin Klein commercial.
“Dude,” I’d said quietly in my office. “That’s what a hernia scar looks like if you have surgery in a public hospital after the thing has strangulated and they let a resident learn the ropes on you.”
“Doctor, let’s cut to the chase,” Meghan said, pacing in front of the doctor’s desk. “First of all, are you the same person I was talking to on the car phone?”
“I believe that was our chief of staff, Dr. Patel.”
Megan looked down at her palm. She’d taken notes on her hand, something she does from time to time. “That’s right. He was polite but not terribly informative. He told me that my son was likely to live, that he was unconscious, and that he had suffered what appeared to be a spinal injury. I asked if he was going to be a quadriplegic.”
“It’s too soon to tell, but that seems unlikely,” the doctor said. “The injury to the spinal cord is lower. Quadriplegia results only from an injury high up.”
Meghan stopped and leaned forward on his desk. She knows obfuscation when she sees it; she’s slashed and burned it enough on national television. “Paraplegia?” she said.
“We’re not certain yet.”
“But it’s possible.”
“It’s possible.”
I covered my face with my hands. Irving put his hand atop my head.
Evan came in then, and he took Meghan in his arms and put his chin atop her head as I’d seen him do so many times before. How soothing he must once have found it, that she was so much smaller than he was. Was it when he realized that that was an optical illusion that he had begun to look elsewhere?
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Ev,” she murmured.
“I know, Meg, I know. It’s going to be all right. They’re still trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Sort of. You can’t really see that much of him, between the doctors and the nurses and the equipment. And he’s not conscious. I mean, he doesn’t know whether we’re there or not.”
“I need to be where he is.”
Evan looked over her head at the doctor. “They’re going to be working on him for a while,” the doctor said. “It might be easier for you to make yourself comfortable here. I’ll send for something to eat.”
Meghan shook her head. It made Evan’s chin move as though he was a ventriloqu
ist’s dummy.
“As close as we can possibly get,” she said into his shirtfront.
They left the office hand in hand. That was the deal she’d talked about as we looked at the stars, the one you hear about in songs growing up, the one in the books and in the movies. If you’re hurt, your mother and father will be there together, holding on to each other, holding you, holding everything together. And they were.
“You’re welcome to stay here,” the doctor said.
“I have to make some calls,” Irving said. “But the lady definitely needs a more comfortable place to hang out than the waiting room.” Irving eased me back on the office couch and took off my shoes. He covered me with his jacket, but a moment later a nurse appeared with a blanket and a pillow, and Irving put his jacket back on. We were interrupted again, this time by an aide with a hospital meal on a tray. Irving lifted the metal dome. “Mystery meat,” he said. “They never let you down in these places.”
“You know, don’t you?” I said. “You know how bad.”
“It’s what the doctor said. Maybe paralysis. It seems like he’s concussed, too. They’re not clear on why he won’t come to. Although if he can’t move his legs I’d just as soon he stayed out for a while longer.”
“You’ve got to get these guys,” I said.
“We’re on it. Believe me, we’re on it. In a couple of hours the mayor, the governor, maybe the president will be on it, too. It’s going to be really bad. I got to get way out in front of all that. And I gotta get downtown because somebody’s going to want to have a press conference soon. Your sister walked into the hospital and the stealth phase was over.”
“Go. I’m fine. I’m just going to lie here. Just do one thing for me?”
“You want a Three Musketeers?”
“The soccer picture over there? Turn it around so I don’t have to look at it.”
Irving put it in a drawer of the credenza. “I love this kid as much as you do,” he said.