The Nest(41)

One of the nurses gently interrupted. “We don’t have much time to decide if you want to reattach. We’d need to prepare the foot.”

Bea could hear Matilda’s mother address the doctor and her husband in heavily accented English. “What is a life without a foot?” she said. The anguish in her voice was harrowing. “What kind of future will she have? How will she walk? How will she work?”

“No, Mami, no.” Matilda spoke from the bed, her voice slurred and dreamy, from shock and morphine. “The man from the car is going to help me. He knows people. Music people. It was just an accident. A bad accident. He is going to help me. No more waitressing.”

“Your music?” the mother said, incredulous. She reverted to Spanish, her tone bitter and scared. “You lose your foot and this man is going to make you a star?”

“I need to get out of here,” Matilda pleaded.

The translator was speaking to the doctor, but Bea couldn’t make out what they were saying. Bea walked over to Leo, who was still clutching a bloody piece of Matilda’s white blouse in his hands. The nurse had cleaned the wound and left to get sutures so she could stitch Leo’s chin. George pointed to the curtain. “Pick up anything interesting?”

Bea hesitated. What she’d just heard wasn’t her business; the information was not hers to pass along. She knew George.

“Bea?”

“Kind of,” Bea said. “They’re deciding whether to amputate.”

George sighed. “Not great news.”

Bea turned to Leo. In the fluorescent light of the ER, chin split, eyes bloodshot and watery, gaze unfocused, he looked beaten and scared. He tried to smile. He looked, for a minute, like a little boy, and she took his hand.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said to her. “One minute we were going—”

“Shhh.” George stopped Leo by raising a palm. “Time for all that later.”

Leo held Bea’s hand so tightly her fingers were numb. “Careful, Superman,” she said, wriggling her fingers and loosening his grip a little.

“Superman. Right.” Leo lightly touched his chin and winced. “I could use Superman right now. Have him fly and reverse the earth’s rotation to go back in time.”

“Before the really dry crab cakes were passed?” Bea said, trying to distract Leo from the crying she could hear on the other side of the curtain.

“More like to early 2002,” he said.

That sounded good to Bea—2002, the year before he sold SpeakEasyMedia and met Victoria; Tuck still alive; her book newly published. The year that was the dividing line, in Bea’s mind, of the Leo she loved, the Leo who was one of her closest friends, gradually disappearing and morphing into someone unrecognizable.

Leo looked like he might cry. She was scared for him. “How did I get here?” he said. She was trying not to stare at the split in his chin. He was going to have a scar. “How did I f*ck up this badly?”

In spite of the circumstances, Bea’s heart billowed to hear something approaching self-reflection and regret, something hinting at an apology coming from Leo. It had been a long time.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said, feeling helpless.

“I don’t know about that,” Leo said. There was a slight commotion on the other side of the curtain. The parents seemed to be arguing in Spanish, and the translator was trying to intervene. “I think it might be the furthest thing from okay,” he said.

Bea put her hand on Leo’s back, and he leaned into her a little. She motioned George closer and spoke softly and quickly, before she could change her mind. “I heard something else.”

“What?” George said.

“The parents are undocumented.”

George smiled for the first time since arriving at the ER. “That is much better news. Good work.” He pointed a finger at Leo. “This is still going to cost you a f*cking fortune, but I can use this.”

From the other side of the curtain, Matilda’s voice rose above the ongoing bickering, louder and more insistent. “Tómelo, Mami, tómelo!”

Tómelo. Take it. Take the foot. Then the translator speaking to the surgeon: “They want you to amputate.”

“I think that’s the right decision,” the surgeon said. “We’ll get a clean cut. Leave as much bone as possible.”





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


Morning, West Seventy-Sixth Street. Bea was sitting in the pre-sunrise dark, holding a cup of chamomile tea with both hands, waiting for the heat from her favorite mug—the one she’d gotten the lone year she’d capitulated during the public radio fund-raising drive and pledged a premium—to warm her stiffened fingers. The kitchen table was in its winter location, awkwardly wedged into an interior corner, partly blocking the doorway to the living room but well away from the exposed wall and the two battered windows that looked out onto an air shaft populated by a disturbing number of pigeons and God only knew how many rodents. She knew she was lucky to have windows in the kitchen, was lucky, in fact, to have a kitchen big enough to house a table, but the rope-sash windows were as insulating as a piece of ClingWrap. The abraded wood would swell in the summer heat, and the layers of old paint and putty would become malleable and gummy, making the windows impossible to open. In the winter, the wood would shrink, letting in preposterous amounts of cold air. Sitting wrapped in a bulky sweater over her nightgown, she waited for the telltale hiss and bang of the radiator pipes, signaling 6:30 A.M. and only ten more minutes until the room was decently warmed. She was up too early; it was cold.