Finn

by Matthew Olshan

  Marian came back to the shed to say goodbye. She made me practice her signature a few times. She said that sometimes they checked the signature when a young person made a big purchase. Then she kissed Silvia on the cheeks and slipped me a wad of cash, saying, “God speed!”, as if we were about to board the Titanic. I didn’t count the money until after she left. Somehow, she had managed to scrape together almost two hundred dollars.

  Silvia was against taking a cab, because she wanted to have some money left when we got to L.A., but I was in charge of the money. I knew for a fact that we wouldn’t find any public transportation to the airport, at least not around here, where everybody had a car. It was even harder to find a cab than I thought it would be. When we finally managed to flag one down, the cabbie kept telling us how lucky we were because cabs almost never came out to Marian’s neighborhood. “Out here,” he said, “mainly you got your limos.”

  All during the ride to the airport, Silvia talked about Roberto and the life that they would make in L.A. It was good to see her so happy. I let her go on and on about it, wondering where I fit in her plan. I started thinking about a new life in California for myself, but for some reason I couldn’t picture it. I wondered what was holding me back.

  The cab ride cost twenty-two dollars. When I paid, the cabbie looked over his shoulder and said, “No luggage?” as if he was noticing for the first time. “Just what you see,” I said. It took both of us to pull Silvia out of the back seat.

  All that was left was to buy the tickets. When we got up to the counter, a chubby airline man with a high voice and moussed hair asked me if “the lady,” meaning Silvia, would be flying with me. I said yes, of course. The airline man said he was very sorry but he wouldn’t be able to sell me a ticket for her, at least not for a flight today. I could see he was serious, so I did what my grandmother would have done. I made a big show of studying his name tag. I used his first name— Patrick—when I asked to see his manager. Patrick said he was the manager. Then I got angry. I said it was deplorable—I actually used that word—the way his airline treated Mexicans. I said it loud enough for the other people in line to hear.

  Patrick got all embarrassed. He made a general announcement to the people in line: his airline didn’t discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or color. The problem, he said, turning back to me, was how pregnant Silvia was. “So you’re saying that the airline discriminates against pregnant people?” I said triumphantly. The people in line laughed quietly and started to mind their own business. Then Patrick got very snotty. He explained that it was the airline’s policy not to fly a very pregnant woman. What if the baby decided to be born in the middle of the flight? That would be dangerous for the lady and her baby, and extremely inconvenient for the other passengers, now wouldn’t it?

  I was all out of answers. I took Silvia away and sat her down on one of the plush leather and chrome airport benches. I told her we wouldn’t be going to California after all.

  You can imagine how she took the news. For once, I was glad of the noise of planes. Anything was better than Silvia’s sobbing. Usually I’m embarrassed by people crying in public, but Silvia had an impeccable reason. I tried my best to shield her from all the curious travelers. My grandfather says it’s human nature to be curious about other people’s tragedies. Of course, he’s not exactly the most compassionate man on the planet.

  Suddenly, something warm seeped under my leg. Silvia doubled over and gave a low moan and said she couldn’t hold the baby inside any longer. Her water had broken, for real this time!

  I screamed “Call an ambulance!” but people just stood by as if Silvia and I were a TV show. I kept screaming. Finally, Patrick came over with some paramedics and two policemen. They came running up with a gurney and rolled Silvia onto it.

  I held Silvia’s hand and told her she was doing fine, even though she looked pale and was shivering. She kept saying, “Call Roberto.” I told her I didn’t have his telephone number. Every time she tried to tell me, the paramedics pushed me away. From the look on their faces, I could tell that something was wrong. One of the policemen, a tall one with a walrus mustache, asked me to please step aside, but I kept coming back. I had to get Roberto’s number.

  The policeman grabbed me by the shoulder, but I pulled away. They were wheeling Silvia down a long glass corridor and I was running along with them. Silvia was writhing on the gurney and the paramedics were saying tense things to each other about her condition, which was apparently deteriorating. They were shouting at people to get out of the way. Outside, airplanes took off and landed as if nothing was happening. A luggage train down on the tarmac was keeping pace with us. We all seemed to be accelerating. The emergency was pushing us forward like a cannonball.

  At least that’s the feeling I had until the walrus policeman took me by the wrist—the bad one—and yanked it behind my back.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  They say you don’t remember surgery, but I remember plenty about mine, including some of the things leading up to it. I remember waking up in the ambulance and looking over and seeing Silvia. She looked awful. Her face was puffy and there was an oxygen mask over her mouth. Tubes and needles were jammed in all over her body. A doctor was giving the paramedics instructions over the radio. The walrus policeman was crouching awkwardly between me and Silvia, his gangly arms and legs constantly getting in the way. The paramedics were silently annoyed with him. The policeman was apologizing for just doing his job.

  I remember wondering what his job was, exactly, and then I was out again. I remember the ceiling tiles in the hospital hallway. A lot of them were stained, as if someone had spilled coffee on them. In my drugged state, I got to thinking that the ceiling was the floor of a cafeteria. It made me wonder what were we doing upside down, rolling across the ceiling. I tried to say something about it, but someone had cut the wire connecting my tongue to my brain.

  I remembered a series of distant pops, which at the time I thought were gunshots, but which they told me later was probably the I.V. needle going in. They said they had to try several times before they found my vein. The sound reminded me of King D and the hooded man. I must have said, “Call the police!”, because a nurse told me the police were already there.

  And then I was in a bed with cold sheets, the kind that are so stiff they seem more like cardboard than fabric. The TV was on. The people on TV were laughing and laughing. My room had a window. I was surprised to see that it was dark the next time I looked out. A nurse stuck her head in the door and said that my parents were here and that she would send them in after the doctor had a chance to fill them in on my surgery—which, by the way, had gone really, really well, she added.

  Her shower-capped head disappeared again, and the room was dark except for the TV, and suddenly I was full of anxiety, because I thought that Bobby and my mother had somehow figured out where I was. The nurse had definitely said “parents.”

  A handsome couple in evening clothes stuck their worried heads in the door. They looked at me, and then at each other, in confusion. Before disappearing, they apologized for bothering me. The woman looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. Still, I was relieved. Anybody was better than my mother.

  Then the handsome couple reappeared, this time with the doctor, whose wild gray eyebrows I suddenly remembered from the operating room. At some point, I guess right at the beginning of the surgery, I had seen him, and imagined that I was being operated on by an owl who was replacing my hand with a wing, which I found both funny and deeply disturbing.

  But now he just looked like a doctor. He acted like one, too. He asked me how I was doing without even looking at me. Then he picked up the chart at the end of the bed, turned to the couple, and said, “According to this, Marian’s doing fine.” The man and woman looked at each other, then at me, and at each other again. The woman nudged the man, who finally cleared his throat and said, “Doctor, there must be some mistake. This isn’t Marian.” The doctor looked at the chart again and said, �
�Are you sure? According to this, her name is Marian Williams.” The woman said she thought she was qualified to identify her own daughter.

  It was Marian’s mother! I had seen her once or twice at Field, but always through tinted glass.

  The doctor apologized and called in the nurse, who was very embarrassed. The nurse defended herself by saying that the only identification I had had on me was a credit card. She had called up the credit card company, read them the name on the card, and they had released the parents’ work numbers.

  I didn’t want to get Marian in trouble, so I finally introduced myself. I said I was a classmate of Marian’s, and that she had lent me the card. Marian’s father, who was handsome but very stiff, started to lecture me about how inappropriate it was to borrow a credit card. He said he was quite sure that Marian knew better—implying that I had weaseled the card out of her! That’s how well Mr. Williams knew his daughter.

  Then the doctor did a very doctorly thing. He asked Marian’s father to please remember that I was a patient and that the first thing I needed was rest. He herded Marian’s parents out of the room and closed the door quietly behind himself, but not before giving me a friendly—if patronizing—wink.

  I was almost asleep when it finally occurred to me to ask whether Silvia had had a boy or a girl.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I woke up to the sound of my grandfather clearing his throat. My grandmother had pulled a chair up next to the bed. She was fussing with my bedsheet, folding and flattening it, as if the edge of her little hand was a hot iron. My grandfather was over by the window, fiddling with the air conditioning. My wrist was throbbing, but I didn’t mind the pain so much. The nurse had warned me. Besides, now I knew I was healing.

  My grandmother pulled herself together and made a sort of speechy announcement, which was punctuated by my grandfather’s throat-clearing. She said they both had missed me terribly and hoped I could put behind me whatever anger I had about the “situation with the girl.” She said she wanted us to be a family again. Then she paused and stared at my grandfather until he said, “Needless to say, that goes for both of us.”

  I said something noncommittal, like “We’ll see.” I knew my grandmother would take that as a “yes” to being a family, but, in my mind, the matter was far from settled. I asked about Silvia. You’d have thought she was dead from the way my grandparents looked at each other. My grandmother said that there was a police officer outside who wanted to talk to me about that. The fact that my grandmother couldn’t just come out and say things was a disappointment. I was learning a lot about her limits as a person.

  On their way out, they sent in the policeman. I was all set to take a hostile attitude on Silvia’s behalf, when who should walk in but the cop from the Krispy Kreme! He said, “Remember me?”

  And I said, “Of course I do. You’re the jerk who didn’t believe me.” He laughed. He told me he was sorry about that, but one of the first rules of dealing with kidnappers was not to surprise them, at least not when they can harm the parcel. I liked the sound of that, being called the “parcel.” I imagined myself wrapped in brown paper and stamped “fragile.”

  He introduced himself as Officer Josh and told me that he had taken me very seriously that night. He had written down the license plate number of Bobby’s van. Later on, he had put everything together —the report of a girl matching my description being kidnapped; the explosion at my grandparents’ house; descriptions of an airbrushed van from my grandparents’ neighbors. He said that finding Bobby and my mother had been pretty easy, but they were refusing to talk. The police needed my help with the kidnapping charge.

  Essentially, Officer Josh was asking me to rat out my mother. I was still furious at her, but I wasn’t sure I could sit in a courtroom and testify with her staring at me.

  Officer Josh said that he understood it would be a difficult decision for me to make and that I could take some time to think about it. He said that there was still some confusion about what had happened. For instance, there was the involvement of the illegal alien to clear up. Some of his colleagues thought she might have been involved, both in the kidnapping and the explosion. I scoffed at that. Silvia was the most innocent person in the world, and I told him so. He asked me for my account of the kidnapping and the business at my grandparents’ house. I told him everything.

  When I finished, he whistled and said I sounded like a very resourceful person. He asked me to please not be offended by the question, but was I making anything up to protect Silvia? I said, “I swear to God,” and for once, I had the feeling I was telling the truth as convincingly as I told the very best lie.

  I got a chance to see Silvia later that day. Josh—I abandoned the “Officer” part fairly quickly—brought in a wheelchair and rolled me to a different part of the hospital. It wasn’t the maternity department. I think it was some kind of psychiatric ward. You had to be buzzed in by a security guard. The doors were all bolted from the outside. A policeman sat in a folding chair at the end of the hall, reading a magazine and sipping a cup of coffee through one of those tiny straws. He snapped to attention when he saw Josh and said that there wasn’t a whole lot to report. Josh asked if we could go in. He was just asking to be courteous. The other policeman was obviously below him in rank.

  I asked if I could see Silvia alone and Josh said he was sorry, but no. He stood in the doorway and told me to go in. I was reluctant to, until he promised not to eavesdrop. In movies a lot of times, conversations that people think are private get used against them at trial. Josh seemed to know what I was thinking. He put his hands over his ears like a “Hear no evil” monkey and said, “Go on in.”

  I shouldn’t have been paranoid about being overheard. Silvia and I barely spoke. She was lying with her back to the door. Her hair was a mess. It upset me that the room was stale. Silvia was a fanatic for fresh air. I didn’t even bother to try the window. It was welded shut.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, trying to find a natural place to put my arm with its clunky cast, but I couldn’t get comfortable. I didn’t talk right away. I pulled Silvia’s hair out of her face and hooked it behind her ear. Her pillow was soaking wet. It smelled sour.

  She was silent, even after I asked her how she was doing. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye like a wounded animal, as if I was the hunter that had just shot her. I hated seeing her like that as much as she hated being seen. I kept trying to convince myself that she appreciated my being there.

  I sat with Silvia for about ten minutes before Josh cleared his throat and said it was time to leave Ms. Morales alone. I told her I was sure they’d let her see her baby soon, but I doubted it was true. My lie was strictly amateur hour.

  I couldn’t wait to be out of that ward with its buzzing locks. When we were out in a brighter hallway, I asked Josh if Silvia’s baby had died. I could tell he was a little startled by the question, but he was used to telling people hard things. He told me that Silvia had given birth to a very healthy baby girl, but that the policy in criminal cases was to separate the mother and the baby at birth, for the welfare of the child.

  I made Josh take me to see Silvia’s baby. She was very tiny and beautiful, wrapped up like a white cigar in her baby blanket. The name on the crib said “Baby Morales.” I asked a nurse why Silvia’s baby didn’t have a first name like all the other babies. She told me that Silvia had named the baby “Chloe,” but in cases like this, the mother’s wishes weren’t generally taken into account.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Seeing baby Morales clinched it. On the way back to my room, I told Josh I’d be willing to testify against my mother. Josh said he appreciated that, but there was also the matter of Silvia’s being an illegal alien. He said that even if she were cleared of all the charges against her, she’d still be sent home to Mexico. I said that was okay, as long as she got to take her baby with her. Josh said, “Of course,” and I believed him. “Hey, look,” he said, bumping my door open with the wheelcha
ir. “You’ve got a visitor.”

  It was Marian. She was wearing all black, including a black beret. I asked her if someone had died and she said no, that she was wearing black in honor of Silvia’s tragic circumstances, as a sign of respect. The more I learned about the world, the less Marian amused me. I told her that Silvia didn’t need people wearing black. What she needed was help staying in the country.

  “Oh, really?” Marian asked, in a kind of drawl, the kind she uses when she has something up her sleeve. She wouldn’t answer any of my questions. She said she needed to see Silvia before she’d explain herself.

  I took Marian over to the psychiatric ward—which is where she really belonged—but they didn’t let us in, even after Marian pretended to be from the Mexican embassy. Marian’s Mexican accent sounded like a taco commercial, but even a perfect accent wouldn’t have worked. The Mexican embassy had just called to say that Silvia’s case was a matter for the police and that she would have to deal with it on her own.

  I tried to take Marian to see Baby Morales, but there was a new nurse at the desk and they wouldn’t let us in because we weren’t family. I didn’t tell Marian about the baby’s name. That’s just the kind of information she would have abused.

  We had struck out. Even the cafeteria was closed for construction. We wound up in the lobby, sliding around on hard plastic chairs. Marian pretended to be interested in my cast for a while, but she kept looking towards the hospital entrance. I asked if she had someplace better to be.

  “Whatever gives you that impression?” she said. Her haughtiness only confirmed my suspicions.

  Then, of all the people in the world, Roberto walked in. His gold teeth flashed in the flourescent light. He stopped in front of the Information Desk, looking anxious and lost.