White Ivy(91)

“Tea, please.”

After he left, Ivy decided she had no choice left but to kill herself. When a young person dies, their love remains pure and everlasting. People go to their funerals and say poignant things about them. Call them angels. She could be Gideon’s angel. Perhaps Roux might even kill himself in repentance. The only thing Ivy knew with absolute certainty was that she would rather face death than betray Gideon’s trust, and what the hell was that sound—

Her phone was buzzing. Both hoping and fearing it was Roux, she lunged to see the caller ID. It was only Nan. Ivy ignored it. Nan called three more times in succession. Ivy was about to silence the call for the fourth time when the idea popped into her mind that somehow Roux had gotten in contact with Nan. Perhaps they were in on it together. She picked up.

“Now’s not a good time, Mama. I’m in bed with a cold… Hello?”

There was a clamor of voices followed by beeping sounds. “Hello? Hello? It’s Mama. Can you hear me? Grandma’s in the hospital. You should come home.”





19


MEIFENG HAD SLIPPED IN THE shower and fractured her hip. She’s fine, said Nan, but she needs hip replacement surgery. Gideon insisted that he drive Ivy to Clarksville. “You’ve been sick all week,” he said firmly, “and besides, your car’s always acting up. We’re supposed to be getting a lot of snow.”

“But your trip…”

“There’s time.”

The supposed storm brewing from the Atlantic hadn’t yet hit Boston, but Ivy could smell the sharp cold of something big coming when she rolled down the passenger window, somewhere in upstate New York. “I’m getting nauseous,” she said to Gideon, who sensed the emergency right away and pulled over. She opened the car door and threw up the soup, the oyster crackers. She rinsed her mouth with a bottle of spring water and Gideon kept driving.

They arrived at Presbyterian Hospital just past midnight. Nothing about the Jersey landscape had changed: the same potholes on Route 1, the smell of cow manure, the flat strip malls, the smog blowing over from the factories in Elizabeth. Nan met them at the elevator on the fourth floor. Her face seemed to have aged a decade, two ashy streaks of hair pulled back on either side of her head like bleached straw, the broken green veins pulsing under her pallid skin. She seemed flustered by Gideon’s presence, touching her neck often as she spoke in Chinese, glancing over her shoulder as if expecting Shen to translate her awkward explanations to fluent English. “Grandma just came out of surgery,” she informed Ivy. “She’s still under sedation, but you can go in. They said only one person can be in the room at a time.” Gideon tactfully left to fetch them some coffee. Ivy went in. Meifeng was asleep with an oxygen tube in her nose. Her lips were slightly opened and cracked. Occasionally the devices attached to her arms made strange beeping sounds, but no nurses came hurrying in. The heart, that wondrous heart, continued to beat on.

She held her grandmother’s dry palm until Nan stuck her head in the room in a state of overblown panic—“The doctor’s here, come, come! Oh, your baba had to go use the bathroom now. His weak stomach…” Ivy went back outside to translate for her mother. The attending said everything went smoothly, it’d been a fairly standard procedure. He launched into a detailed, convoluted medical explanation neither women could follow. Nan kept tugging Ivy’s hand—“What’s he saying, what’s he saying?”—and Ivy would hush her mother. “He said she’ll be fine… let me listen…” Indeed, Ivy gave every appearance of listening intently, but blossoming under her relief for Meifeng’s well-being was the furtive, murmuring observation that this doctor was young and handsome, with curly, light brown hair and a cleft on his chin, like Superman. Standing in a deferential line, two feet behind him, was an entourage of nurses, residents, students. Every place where humans gathered, there would be a food chain. Someone had to be on top.

The blue scrubs the doctor wore were the same ones Ivy had seen on Roux a week ago. She tried to picture Roux here at Presbyterian, a surgeon, giving them reassuring updates on Meifeng. If she married Roux, Nan would be pleased. “My son-in-law is a surgeon,” Nan would brag to her sisters. Ivy would massage his shoulders after his operations. She would organize hospital fundraisers, like Liana Finley, and open gift baskets Roux’s grateful patients would send to their house. This pretty scene made Ivy’s heart lighten for a second. Then she remembered. Roux wasn’t a doctor. On him, the scrubs had been a costume. Roux hadn’t even finished high school. Roux’s mother had died in the apartment her married lover paid for. Roux was the opposite of a healer, he inflicted violence.

She felt like being sick again, but there was nothing left to puke up.

“Considering her age,” the doctor concluded, “we’ll have to monitor her here for a few days. Not to worry—we’ll do our best to get her home as quickly as possible. The longer her stay, the higher the risk of infection… I’ll just take a quick look…” He stepped into Meifeng’s room and performed his perfunctory checkup while the rest of his entourage crowded at the threshold of the door, scribbling down every word he said. Soon after, the horde of white coats departed like the tide pulling back to the sea, leaving behind an emptiness that was not yet relief, only the deflation of action. Nan asked Ivy if she and Gideon had eaten yet.