Alternate Side(46)
“How you think they are? You want to explain to them why some crazy person beat their father up so bad he put him in the hospital?”
Put that way, it sounded as though Nora had wound up on the wrong side of some battle line. She said, “All of us on the block like Enrique and miss him.”
Nita pushed past her, and though the hallway was wide, she came much too close, elbowing Nora aside. Nora felt stupid for coming in the first place. “How many more worthless assholes from where you live coming here to pretend they care whether he lives or dies?” Nita said over her shoulder.
“He seems like a nice man,” said the nurse behind Nora at the nurse’s station in a low voice. “She’s a piece of work, though.”
Nora took the subway back downtown afterward. She remembered taking it up there when she was pregnant, to visit her doctor, to tour the hospital. It had been terrifying. It wasn’t just that she was so big that she felt she might pitch forward off of the platform, onto the tracks. The subway was scarier then. The twins and their friends rode it now at all hours. “Every once in a while you get a weenie wagger, but if you pull out your phone to take a picture, they usually stop,” one of Rachel’s friends had said.
The train was the great equalizer now, not the hospitals, not the neighborhoods, the way they’d been when she first came to the city. The Upper West Side had had students and old people, Puerto Ricans and Orthodox Jews, strollers and shopping carts filled with the ersatz acquisitions of people who lived on the streets. Now it had black cars waiting for corporate pickups at the curbs, and expensive mountain bikes in the park. No one tried to steal car radios nowadays, and no one feared having the bikes stolen. Nora supposed this was an improvement. She was packed tightly into a subway car with medical students still wearing their scrubs, hipsters in short, tight pants, a few of what looked like Columbia professors carrying leather book bags, brown girls, black guys, a man who said he was collecting for the homeless and looked homeless himself and played a harmonica. It was like a casting director had said to herself, Something for everyone. Like a diorama of New York City life. A teenage girl with cornrows and a City College sweatshirt offered Nora a seat, and she shook her head, and felt old because of the gesture, and stupid for going to the hospital in the first place.
As she came down her block, she saw a young man pick up a black trash bag from in front of the Fisks’ house and hoist it over his shoulder. “Reporters go through people’s trash now?” she said, enraged, while the man blinked behind his glasses. “Is that what journalism has come to? Do you people have no shame?”
“This is my laundry,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“My laundry. I’m taking my clothes to the Laundromat.” That’s what the renters did. Laundry in trash bags, boxes of empties after parties.
“Whatever,” Nora said as he looked at her quizzically. It was the rudest she could remember being in years. Nita had undone her. How pleased she would be to know that.
“Are you nuts?” said Charlie that night when she told him about the hospital visit. “Those people are going to sue the Fisks, and you went up there to see how they’re doing?” While Charlie’s face was normally ruddy, it had turned practically purple.
“He’s a person who worked in our home,” Nora said. “He’s a good person and I like him. Jack is a bad person and I don’t like him. So, yes, I went up there to see how he’s doing. And, by the way, he’s not doing very well. That leg is a mess, which is what I suppose happens to your leg when someone keeps hitting it with a golf club.”
“Nora, Ricky is a person who did odd jobs for us. He’s not our friend, he’s the neighborhood handyman. Jack is our friend.”
“Jack’s not my friend. I think he’s a terrible person and he deserves whatever he gets.”
“What are you thinking? Are you trying to take sides against our neighbors?”
“Aren’t you interested in doing the right thing, Charlie? You talk all the time about Jack’s version of events. Aren’t you interested in the truth? What about the truth?”
“Oh, Jesus, Nora, you’re on such a high horse with this I don’t know how you’ll ever get off. Just don’t drag me into whatever crazy liberal guilt thing you’ve got going on.”
“I don’t have a crazy liberal guilt thing going on,” Nora said. “I have a human thing going on.”
Sherry Fisk was annoyed, too. Nora felt sorrier about Sherry’s reaction than Charlie’s, but not sorry enough to regret what she’d done. “I just wish you’d mentioned it to us, Nora,” Sherry said when she ran into her on the block. “Apparently Ricky’s wife told their attorney that you said Jack was to blame for what happened.”
“I absolutely did not say that, or anything like that.”
“She says you told her you were sorry for what Jack did.”
“I said I was sorry. I never mentioned Jack’s name or the particulars of what happened.”
“She also said you gave them money.”
“I gave him a Christmas card with his Christmas bonus in it, Sherry. That’s all. He shouldn’t have to lose his Christmas bonus.”
“Well,” Sherry said, sighing, “it’s just unfortunate. We’re in the middle of trying to work something out with them so that this whole thing can be nipped in the bud. The timing of your visit wasn’t great in terms of those negotiations.”