The Impossible Fortress(70)

At the hospital, Mom waited in the car with a Sidney Sheldon paperback while I went inside and got directions to Mary’s room. The maternity ward at Wetbridge Memorial Hospital was full of balloons and stuffed animals. There were grown-ups laughing and babies crying and grandparents carrying enormous video cameras that required two hands to operate. Every room was packed with visitors. People spilled out of doorways, talking and smoking cigars and eating food off paper plates. I felt like I’d wandered into a surprise party in the Twilight Zone.

I asked another nurse for Mary, and she pointed down the corridor, to a stretch of dim rooms far from the streamers and celebrations. Zelinsky and the Reverend Mother were seated on folding chairs at the very end of the hallway. Zelinsky saw me coming and stood up, crossing his arms over his chest.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

“I came to see if Mary’s all right.”

“She’s not all right. Do you think she’d be here if she was all right?”

“I’m all right,” Mary called from inside the room. I couldn’t see her from the hallway; I could only see the foot of her bed. “Can you let him in, please?”

Zelinsky didn’t budge. I sensed that part of him wanted to drag me kicking and screaming out of the maternity ward. But another part of him was ready to let Mary have anything she wanted.

The Reverend Mother spoke to him in a whisper. “He’s the first friend to visit,” she said. “I think Mary could stand to see a friend? Just for a short while?”

Zelinsky didn’t answer. He sank into his chair, shaking his head, and buried his face in ink-stained hands.

“Ten minutes, love,” the Reverend Mother told me. She placed a gentle hand on the small of my back, guiding me through the doorway. “Mary’s had a long day, do you understand?”

“Thank you,” I said.

I stepped cautiously into the room. I didn’t know anything about babies—I’d never even held a baby—so part of me was scared to go any farther. The room was divided into halves by a curtain: The front half was empty. The back half had a bed and a chair and a window overlooking the parking lot. Mary was sitting up in the bed, chewing on a pencil eraser and reading a large binder full of computer code. Her hair was pulled back in a headband, and some of the color had returned to her face. If she hadn’t been dressed in a hospital gown, you might not have realized that anything was wrong.

“You’re all right?” I asked.

“All the gory stuff is over,” she said. “Be glad you weren’t here five hours ago.”

I looked around the room. There was a dresser and a television, but I didn’t see any cribs or boxes or containers that might be holding a baby.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“Where’s what?” she asked. “The baby?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s down the hall. With her parents. They just got here from Scranton.”

I took a moment to process this, to understand what she meant.

“Are they nice?”

“Super nice. They’re music teachers. And they already have a daughter, so she’ll have a sister. They have a house with three bedrooms, and they live across the street from a park. My father and I drove out there a month ago so we could see exactly where she’d live. It’s really nice, nicer than Wetbridge.”

A month ago. And all this time I had no idea. A month ago, I had walked into the store to buy hearing aid batteries, and Mary gave me a flyer advertising a computer programming contest. And I had no idea.

All this time she’s been fooling you right back, Zelinsky told me. You don’t know her at all.

“Scranton’s not very far,” I said. “I guess you could visit?”

Mary shook her head. “It’s not going to work like that,” she said, and her voice cracked. She looked at the open binder in her lap. “But look what they brought me. As a gift.” She closed the binder and showed me the cover. It was the operating guide for the new IBM PS/2 computer. “No more messing around on 64s for me. I’m moving on to the big time. VGA graphics and a twenty-megabyte hard disk.”

It’s crazy: In spite of everything she’d been through, I felt a pang of envy. With a PS/2, Mary would rocket into the big time. Nothing would hold her back now.

“Do you want to sit down?” she asked.

The only seat in the room was a hard-backed metal folding chair, but I took it anyway. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Me too.”

“I thought you were dying.”

“Dying of embarrassment, maybe.”

“I didn’t know,” I said. “I really had no clue.”

“God, it was so obvious,” Mary said. “Did you notice how many times I went to the bathroom?”

I shrugged. “I thought that was normal. In movies, girls are always running to the bathroom.”

“I guess I did a good job of hiding everything.” She gently patted her hips. “The perks of having a full figure.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“At the end of this month,” Mary continued, “I was supposed to visit my aunt in Harrisburg. Have the baby out there. You never would have known.”

“You could have just told me.”