The Dutch House(52)
“No.”
“And Mommy said, ‘What girl?’ Like on top of everything else she now has a slave.”
“Fluffy.”
“God’s truth,” Maeve said. “Our father was a man who had never met his own wife.”
Chapter 11
It fell to Sandy to call and tell me Maeve was in the hospital. “She had plans to get in and get out without you knowing, but that’s ridiculous. They say they’re probably going to have to keep her in two nights.”
Asking Sandy what the problem was, I could hear the doctor in my voice, that studied calm designed to soothe all fear, Tell me what’s been going on. What I wanted to do was run out the door, to run all the way to Penn Station.
“She’s got this awful-looking red streak going up her arm. I saw it on her hand, and when I asked her what it was she told me to mind my own business, so I called Jocelyn and Jocelyn straightened her out. She came right over and took Maeve to the doctor. She said if Maeve didn’t get in the car she was calling an ambulance. Jocelyn’s always been a better bully than me. She could make your sister do things I never could. I couldn’t even get Maeve to brush her hair.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“He said she had to go to the hospital right that minute, that’s what he said. He didn’t even let her go home to pack a bag. That’s why she had to call me, so I’d go get her things. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell, but I don’t care. Does she think I’m not going to tell you she’s in the hospital?”
“Did she say how long she’s had the red streak?”
Sandy sighed. “She said she’d been wearing sleeves so she wouldn’t think about it.”
It was the middle of the week so Celeste was at her parents’ house in Rydal. I called her from a pay phone when I got to Penn Station and told her what time my train was getting in. She picked me up in Philadelphia and drove me to the hospital, dropping me off in the circular driveway out front. Celeste was irritated with Maeve for not pushing me to set up a practice in internal medicine, as though I would have done it if Maeve told me to. She still thought it was Maeve’s fault that I’d broken up with her years before and ruined her college graduation. Celeste blamed Maeve for everything she was afraid to blame me for. For her part, Maeve had never forgiven Celeste for insisting I marry her in my first year of medical school. Maeve also believed that Celeste had contrived her appearance at Mr. Martin’s funeral, knowing full well she’d run into me there. I disagreed with that, not that it mattered. What mattered was that Celeste didn’t want to see Maeve and Maeve didn’t want to see Celeste, and I just wanted to get out of the car and find my sister.
“Let me know if you need a ride home,” Celeste said, and she kissed me before she drove away.
It was the twenty-first of June, the longest day of the year. Eight o’clock at night and still the sun came slanting in through every window on the hospital’s west side. The woman at the information desk had given me Maeve’s room number and sent me off to do my best. The fact that I had spent the last seven years of my life in various hospitals in New York in no way qualified me to find my sister’s room in a hospital in Pennsylvania. There was no logic to the way any hospital was laid out—they grew like cancers, with new wings metastasizing unexpectedly at the end of long tunneled halls. It took me some time to find the general medical floor, and then to find my sister in that undifferentiated sea. The door to her room was ajar, and I tapped twice before walking in. She had a double room but the divider curtain was pulled back, revealing a second bed that was neatly made and waiting. A fair-haired man in a suit sat in the chair beside Maeve’s bed.
“Oh, Jesus,” Maeve said when she saw me. “She swore to me on her sister’s head that she wouldn’t call you.”
“She lied,” I said.
The man in the suit stood up. It took me just a second and then I placed him.
“Danny.” Mr. Otterson held out his hand.
I shook his hand and leaned over to kiss Maeve’s forehead. Her face was flushed and slightly damp, her skin hot. “I’m fine,” she said. “I could not be more fine.”
“They’re giving her antibiotics.” Mr. Otterson pointed to the silver pole from which an ever-collapsing bag of fluid was hung, then he looked at Maeve. “She needs to rest.”
“I’m resting. What could be more restful than this?”
She looked so awkward in the bed, like she was trying out for the role of the patient in a play but underneath the blankets she would have on her own clothes and shoes.
“I should be going,” Mr. Otterson said.
I thought that Maeve would try to stop him but she didn’t. “I’ll be back by Friday.”
“Monday. You think we can’t even make it a week without you.”
“You can’t,” she said, and in return he gave her a smile of great tenderness.
Mr. Otterson patted her good hand then nodded to me and left. We had met many times over the years, and I’d worked in his factory in the summers when I was home from Choate, but I never had a sense of him as being anything other than shy. I could never understand how such a man had grown such a business. Otterson’s frozen vegetables now shipped to every state east of the Mississippi. Maeve told me that with no small amount of pride.