The Dutch House(55)
My sister yawned extravagantly and pushed her face deeper into the pillow. “I’m tired now.”
“You’re not getting out of this.”
When she looked up at me, her blue eyes rimmed in red, I remembered where we were and why we were there. The overwhelming need to sleep had hit her suddenly, and she closed her eyes as if she had no choice in the matter.
I stayed in the chair and watched her. I wondered if I needed to be closer to home. Now that my residency was finished, I didn’t have to live in New York. I owned three buildings but knew for a fact that perfectly good real estate empires had been made outside of the city.
When the doctor came in later to check on Maeve I stood up and shook his hand.
“Dr. Lamb,” he said. He wasn’t much older than me. He might have even been my age.
“Dr. Conroy,” I said. “I’m Maeve’s brother.”
Maeve didn’t stir when he lifted her arm to run his fingers down the track that disappeared into the sleeve of her gown. At first I thought she must be faking it, that she wanted to avoid the questions, but then I realized she really was asleep. I didn’t know how long Otterson had been there before me. I’d kept her up too long.
“She should have gotten here two days ago,” Dr. Lamb said, looking at me.
I shook my head. “I was the last to know.”
“Well, don’t let her snow you.” He spoke as if we were alone in the room. “This is serious business.” He rested her arm at her side and pulled the sheet up to cover it again. Then he made his mark on the chart and left us there.
Chapter 12
The completion of my brief medical career had filled me with an unexpected lightness. After I finished my residency, I went through a period in which I was able to see the good in everything, especially the much-maligned north end of Manhattan. For the first time in my adult life I could waste an hour talking to a guy in the hardware store about sealant. I could make a mistake fixing something, a toilet say, without mortal repercussions. I sanded the floors and painted the walls in one of the empty apartments in my building, and when I was finished, I moved in. By the standards of all the dorm rooms and efficiencies I’d lived in since my extravagant youth, the apartment was generous in size—sunny and noisy and my own. Owning the place where I lived, or having the bank own it in my name, plugged up a hole that had been whistling in me for years. Celeste made the curtains in Rydal on her mother’s Singer and brought them in on the train. She got a job at an elementary school near Columbia and started teaching reading and what they called Language Arts while I went to work on the other units in the building and then the brownstones. I had no reason to think she’d made peace with my decision, but she had the sense to stop asking me about it. We had stepped into the river that takes you forward. The building, the apartment, her job, our relationship, all came together with irrefutable logic. Celeste loved to tell a softened version of our story, how we had gone separate ways after she graduated from college, victims of timing and circumstance, and then how we had found each other again, at a funeral of all places. “It was meant to be,” she would say, leaning into me.
So Fluffy was not on my mind. She was not on my mind until the phone rang months after Maeve got out of the hospital, and the voice on the other end said, “Is that Danny?” and I knew, the same way Maeve had known when she saw Fluffy there on VanHoebeek Street. I knew that she had taken so long to call because she was trying to work up her courage, and I knew that we would have coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop whether I wanted to or not. Any energy I expended trying to fight it would be energy lost.
There was never a time that the Pastry Shop wasn’t crowded. Fluffy had come early and waited to get a seat in the window. When she saw me coming down the sidewalk, she tapped on the glass and waved. She was standing up when I got to the table. I had wondered if I’d recognize her based on Maeve’s description. I had never considered that she might recognize me based on the four-year-old I had been.
“Could I hug you?” she asked. “Would that be all right?”
I put my arms around her because I couldn’t imagine how to say no. In my memory, Fluffy was a giant who grew taller over time, when in fact she was a small woman, soft at the edges. She was wearing slacks and the blue cardigan Maeve had mentioned, or maybe she had more than one blue cardigan. She pressed the side of her face against my sternum for just an instant then let me go.
“Whew!” she said, and fanned her face with her hand, her green eyes damp. She sat back down at the table in front of her coffee and Danish. “It’s a lot. You were my baby, you know. I feel this way whenever I see any of the kids I took care of but you were my very first baby. Back then I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to give your whole heart to a baby that isn’t yours. It’s suicide, but I was just a kid myself, and your mother was gone and your sister was sick and your father.” She skipped his descriptive clause. “I had a lot of reasons to be attached.” She stopped just long enough to drink down half a glass of ice water, then touched the paper napkin to her lips. “It’s hot in here, right? Or maybe it’s me. I’m nervous.” She pinched the rounded collar of her blouse away from her neck and fanned it back and forth. “I’m nervous but I’m also that age. I can say that to you, right? You’re a doctor, even though you look like you should still be in high school. Are you really a doctor?”