Alternate Side(44)
“I’ve had a really long day. I’m going to bed.”
The lot is closed to all parking until further notice. Fees will be reimbursed at the end of the month on a pro rata basis. Any car found in the lot will be towed.
Sidney Stoller
New York hospitals were like telephone companies: they had started out smallish and local, and then merged and merged and merged so that they became behemoths. The greatest behemoth of all was the hospital in which Nora had given birth to the twins. From the bridge it looked like a small city, and inside it felt like one. Charlie had gotten lost in its hallways when Nora was recovering from her C-section and had somehow found himself entering neuro-oncology, which he’d only realized after he passed two rooms in which the occupants had shaved heads with railroad tracks of staples across them. It had taken directions from two nurses and an orderly to get him back to maternity.
It also turned out to be the hospital where Ricky was recovering from yet another surgery, which Nora had learned through various disapproving miming gestures from Charity. Nora was ashamed that she hadn’t visited sooner. She stood paralyzed in the gift shop: Flowers? Balloons? A teddy bear whose shirt said HOPE YOU’RE BEAR-ING UP? She settled on a large box of chocolates. She figured that even if Ricky didn’t have a sweet tooth, his children must.
“Eight-oh-two-B?” she said in one of the endless hallways, and someone hurrying in the other direction pointed.
It was a double room, but one bed was obviously unoccupied. Ricky was in the other, his leg encased in a cast to the hip, immobilized by equipment that looked not unlike one of the trusses on the bridge seen from the window of the hospital room. In the buzzing fluorescence of the terrible overhead lighting he looked waxy and slightly gray. She remembered that the doctors had wanted to keep Rachel for a few additional days after Nora had given birth because they said the baby had jaundice. “In this light, how can you tell?” Nora said to the doctors. “Everybody looks jaundiced. You look jaundiced.” They said it was clear in the blood tests, but she’d taken Rachel home anyhow, even though she had looked a little yellower than Oliver.
Ricky’s breathing was shallow, but he seemed to be sleeping soundly. A breakfast tray still held a plastic cup of that kind of orange juice that separated into watery top and bright, unappetizing bottom. “Like sunset in a toxic nuclear sky,” Ollie had said once when he was holding a glass of the stuff in a dining hall during a college visit. “That’s a little dramatic,” Nora had said, but she’d never forgotten the turn of phrase.
Nora remembered that when Charlie had gotten lost in the hospital she was furious because she was so hungry and he had promised her a pastrami sandwich and chocolate pudding. When he finally arrived at her room, where a lactation consultant had just tried to explain how to breastfeed twins—in succession, which had almost killed her over the months that she’d done it—Nora was in a fine postpartum rage state until Charlie opened a greasy white paper bag and took out a glazed doughnut. It was one of those just-made doughnuts that tasted like a cloud composed of sugar and fat. Nora had bitten into it and started to cry. “I can’t believe you brought me this,” she said around an enormous mouthful.
“I got the sandwich and the pudding, too,” Charlie said.
“No, no, this is perfect. It’s so good. It might be the single best thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.”
“Your hormones are out of control,” Charlie said, unwrapping the sandwich on her tray table.
“I love you,” Nora mumbled, stuffing the rest of the doughnut in her mouth.
“I love you, too.”
Looking at Ricky’s breakfast tray, she could almost taste that doughnut. Someone had told her that elsewhere in the hospital there were rooms with toile drapes, nice art, a menu from which you could choose your dinner. But she was quite sure Ricky’s insurance wouldn’t cover that. She had once thought hospitals were the great equalizers, but in New York even they could be stratified so that people with money seemed to be in a completely different place from people with none, or even people with less. She had once complained about how long it had taken in the ER when Ollie had cut the underside of his chin open on the edge of the tub. Another mother at school had said, “You took him to the ER? My pediatrician says to dose them with codeine and wait until morning to take them to a good plastic surgeon.” Now that Oliver was a head taller than she was, Nora sometimes saw the small pink line where he’d gotten five stitches and wondered if she should have waited until morning and taken him to a good plastic surgeon. In Manhattan, finding one must be like finding a good latte. Just walk down the street with your wallet out.
She put the box of chocolates next to the breakfast tray and stood silently, looking at Ricky’s face. He had a couple days’ growth of beard, the way male models and movie actors did nowadays. She supposed shaving was beside the point. On one arm he had an IV line attached to one of those little boxes that she knew, from visiting Jean-Ann after she had had her mastectomy, allowed you to dose yourself with morphine. She was just starting to wonder whether she should leave, when Ricky opened his eyes. It seemed to take him a minute to focus them.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Nora whispered.
“No, no, that’s okay. Sit down. It’s nice that you came. Charity said you might come by.”