The Dutch House(53)

“If you’d called me first I could have told you not to come,” she said.

“And if you’d called me first I could have told you what time I’d be here.” I picked up the metal chart that hung from a hook at the foot of her bed. Her blood pressure was ninety over sixty. They were giving her Cefazolin every six hours. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“If you’re not going to pursue medicine professionally then I can’t see how you’re allowed to pursue it personally.”

I walked around the bed and picked up the hand with the IV. An angry red streak of cellulitis started at a cut on the top of her hand, then twisted up and around to the inside of her arm, then disappeared into her armpit. Someone had outlined it with a black marker so as to track the infection’s progress. Her arm was hot, slightly swollen. “When did this start?”

“I have something to tell you if you’d put down my goddamn arm. I was going to wait until the weekend but you’re here now.”

I asked her again when it had started. Maybe medical school had done me some good after all. It certainly taught me how to persist with a question that no one saw the point in answering. “How did you hurt your hand?”

“I have no idea.”

I moved my fingers up to her wrist.

“Get away from my pulse,” she said.

“Did anyone explain to you how these things go? You get blood poisoning, you become septic, your organs shut down.” Maeve worked at clothing drives, food drives, stocking the closets and pantries of the poor on weekends. She was always getting cut, some rogue staple or nail catching her skin. She was bruised by the boxes she loaded into the trunks of waiting cars.

“Would you stop being so negative? I’m lying in a hospital bed, aren’t I? They’re pumping me full of antibiotics. I’m not exactly sure what else I’m supposed to be doing.”

“You’re supposed to get yourself to the doctor before the infection that started in your hand gets to your heart. It looks like someone ran a paintbrush up your arm. Did you not notice?”

“Do you want to hear my news or not?”

The anger I felt when she was lying there was unseemly. She had a fever. She could have been in some pain, though I was the last person she would have admitted that to. I told myself to stop it or she’d never tell me anything. I went back to the other side of the bed and sat in the chair, still warm from Mr. Otterson. I started again. “I’m sorry you’re sick.”

She looked at me for a moment, trying to gauge my sincerity. “Thank you.”

I folded my hands in my lap to keep from plucking at her. “Tell me your news.”

“I saw Fluffy,” she said.

I was twenty-nine years old that day in the hospital. Maeve was thirty-six. The last time we’d seen Fluffy I’d been four. “Where?”

“Where do you think?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“It really would have been better if I could have told you this in the car. I had it all planned.”

We saved our most important conversations for the car, but considering the circumstances we’d have to make do with the hospital room, the green tile floor and the low acoustical ceiling, the intermittent alert over the public address system that someone was coding. “When?”

“Sunday.” The top half of her bed was tilted slightly up. She stayed on her back but had turned her head to face me. “I’d just gotten out of church and I thought I’d swing by the Dutch House for a minute on my way home.”

“You live two blocks from the church.”

“Don’t interrupt. Not five minutes later another car pulls up behind me and a woman gets out and crosses the street. It’s Fluffy.”

“How in God’s name did you know it was Fluffy?”

“I just did. She’s got to be past fifty now, and she’s cut off all that hair. It’s still red though, or maybe she dyes it. It’s still fluffy. I remember her so clearly.”

So did I. “You got out of the car—”

“I watched her first. She was standing at the end of the driveway and I could tell she was thinking it over, like maybe she was going to walk up and knock on the door. She grew up there, you know, just like us.”

“Nothing like us.”

Maeve nodded into her pillow. “I crossed the street. I hadn’t set foot on that side of the street since the day we left and it made me feel a little sick if you want to know the truth. I kept thinking Andrea was going to come running down the driveway with a frying pan.”

“What did you say?”

“Just her name. I said Fiona, and she turned around. Oh, Danny, if you could have seen the look on her face.”

“She knew who you were?”

Maeve nodded again, her eyes feverish. “She said I looked like Mommy did when she was young. She said she would have known me anywhere.”

A young nurse in a white cap came in and when she saw us there she stopped. I was leaning so far over my chin was practically on Maeve’s shoulder.

“Is this a bad time?” the nurse asked.

“Such a bad time,” Maeve said. The nurse said something else but we didn’t pay any attention. She closed the door behind her and Maeve started again. “Fluffy said she’d just been passing through and she wondered if we still lived in the house.”