“Yes, it’s on. We’re moving, aren’t we?”
“It’s so quiet!” She still yelled like she was trying to be heard over a revving engine.
“It’s supposed to be quiet. It’s electric.” Patrick stepped on the gas to prove they weren’t in neutral.
“I’m hot.”
“Okay, sit tight.” Patrick reached for the touch screen that housed the Tesla’s controls. His eyes focused on the road, he activated one of the car’s ridiculous Easter eggs, producing a video of a roaring fire on the enormous center console.
Maisie screamed. “The car’s on fire!”
“Oh, god. No it’s not. That’s romance mode. This is exactly why I Uber!” He pushed a few more buttons. The fire stopped, but he couldn’t figure out how to turn up the AC and stay focused on driving, so he cracked the windows instead. “Grant, what’s your name?” He hollered it over the howling wind, wondering if either of them would appreciate that he gave away the answer in the question.
“Maisie,” he muttered, and Patrick thought, Close enough.
The Eisenhower Medical Center lay ahead in Rancho Mirage. Patrick had been there exactly once, when a persistent flu masqueraded as pneumonia. You couldn’t miss the names associated with the hospital. Bob and Dolores Hope. Frank and Barbara Sinatra. George Burns. Lucille Ball. On buildings. On signs. In hospital literature. While all these people were like a thousand years old, Patrick reasoned they wouldn’t have donated to a hospital that didn’t have a pediatric wing. And there was another name on his mind: Greg. The main campus was not far from his brother’s rehab facility, should they need to enlist him for Grant’s treatment.
Patrick was relieved to see lights as they pulled into the hospital drive. Whether they had power or were relying on generators he wasn’t sure and didn’t care. He pulled the Tesla into a parking spot near the emergency entrance just as the first hint of pink appeared in the eastern sky; it was the first time in years he’d been awake to see the sunrise. This morning, it was a welcome sight. “We’re here.”
Inside the emergency room, orderlies produced a gurney for Grant and wheeled him into an examining bay. Patrick stumbled relaying their situation to the admitting nurse: Sara was gone, Greg was unavailable. The nurse tried to steer him toward the relevant facts as he mumbled and overexplained.
“Yes, I know the facility,” the nurse said when Patrick finally got through to her about Greg. She looked tired, her mousy-brown hair stuck to one side of her forehead as if plastered there by a hand propping her awake. An earthquake, he gathered, was more than one bargained for on the tail end of an already brutal shift. “We can call over there and speak to the father.”
Patrick looked at his phone to see if there was any word from Greg. There wasn’t. But he knew his brother, if Greg felt the quake (he wasn’t on pills—even sleeping ones, he presumed—so how could he not have), he was scaling the walls in an effort to escape. “The thing is, if you do that . . .” He glanced down at Maisie, who was snuggled up next to his side. “Maisie, would you mind getting us a seat over there?” He pointed to the waiting area. When she walked over, settled in a chair, and started staring blankly at a TV, Patrick turned back to the nurse and spoke in a hushed tone. “If you call there and tell him his son’s been injured, he will bust out of rehab. I’m serious. He will break down the front door if he has to. Like in the cartoons. There would be a hole through the wall in the shape of my brother. And I would prefer he not do that. Not leave his treatment, unless that was absolutely, one hundred percent necessary.”
The nurse looked up at him with a weary expression. Was he really putting her through this? She checked the watch on her wrist.
“I have his insurance card. I have a letter from him that he gave me. A power of . . . something or other. And I can pay any deductible, or sponsor a new wing, or whatever it takes.” Patrick fished his wallet out of his pocket, as if that made any difference. He was still wearing gym shorts but had managed to throw on a tee. He looked a half step above homelessness at best, which was not helping his cause.
The nurse unwrapped a peppermint from the dish on the counter. “Are you on TV?” she asked skeptically as she popped the candy in her mouth.
“I was. I was on TV, yes.” He smiled weakly. “If that helps.”
“They play your show here every night.” She pointed at the televisions in the waiting room. “The reruns.”
“That’s right. I think, what, they air back-to-back episodes between ten and eleven?”
“Eleven and twelve. That’s when I know to take my break.”
Patrick offered a weak smile.
“You got old.”
Ouch. He ran his fingers through his hair in an attempt to make himself more presentable; he’d have to find a bathroom to wash the serums off his face. “Can we just wait and see what the doctor says? I’m sure the boy’s going to be fine. I’m sure I’m here only in an abundance of caution. I’m new at this.” Patrick pleaded with his eyes. “I’m thinking of two people’s health here. Please.”
The nurse studied his face as if deciding if he were famous enough to break protocol. “Take a seat, Rerun,” she finally said with a sigh.
Patrick pressed his hands together like he was praying and mouthed, Thank you. He collapsed in the seat next to a sullen Maisie. He glanced in her direction, but she didn’t say a word. “You okay?”
Maisie looked at her feet; she was wearing two different shoes. “I don’t like hospitals.”
“Your mom?”
Maisie nodded.
“They’re not all bad, you know. Hospitals.” Patrick sighed, scrambling for an example. His head hurt; there was a tiny person inside his brain kicking the back of his eyeball. If he were going to have an aneurysm, this was probably the worst time but best place. “You were born in one. That’s . . . good. Right? It’s where we met.”
“You met me at the hospital?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t going to. Fly all the way across the country. Babies don’t really do anything, you know. I didn’t see the rush. But your mom insisted and the show was on winter hiatus. She said I was Dad’s brother. Her brother now, too. I was family. And that’s what family does.”
Maisie scrunched her features together in the center of her face. “What’s ‘hiatus’?”
“It’s a break. Like, a vacation from regular life until things start up again.” Patrick saw a connection. “You’re kind of on a hiatus right now.”
“And you met me and you were happy you did?”
“Oh, god no. It was a lot of pressure on me. A lot of people watching me, which—don’t get me wrong. I normally like. But everyone was looking at me like you might somehow change me, and no offense, but we had just met.”
“Change you how?”
“That’s just it! I don’t know. Get me to settle down with someone, maybe. Put me on a more secure path in the wake of . . .” Joe. “But babies are scary!”
“No they’re not.”
“They’re not?”
“No.”
Patrick considered this counterpoint, but didn’t find the merit. “Well, I beg to differ. They’re really small, for one. You have to support their necks. And they don’t talk to you, they just scream. I never knew what you wanted. Which was, as it turns out, just fine with your mom. I don’t think she really wanted to let you go.” Maisie took his hand and held it. Patrick swallowed hard to clear his throat. “But everyone else. They just looked at me, holding you.” Patrick glanced up at the television. It was tuned in to KMIR, a local station. They played the same shaky footage, mostly captured on cell phones, over and over on a loop. Traffic lights swaying. Jars and cans knocked off the shelf at Albertsons. That sort of thing. Occasionally they mixed in some footage of a needle going haywire on whatever the machine was at Caltech that measured seismic activity, and put up a graphic of a tweet from seismologist Dr. L
ucy Jones.
“Why are there earthquakes, anyway?” Maisie sounded completely depleted, like she was struggling to remain interested in something that terrified her an hour ago.
“You don’t like them?”
“No, I do not.” She crossed her arms in protest.
“Well, the earth is made of different shifting plates and they sometimes rub together. This creates tension, and every so often that tension is released as energy. Like when I make you and Grant go run around the yard to calm you down. And when they do, that energy release is an earthquake.” An older man in oversized glasses sat a few seats down in a row of chairs back-to-back with their own. Patrick grimaced. Was that right? Certainly it was sufficient enough for a child—even one as versed in science as Maisie. He hoped the man wasn’t a geologist; Patrick’s explanation might be lacking. But the man didn’t look up from his newspaper.
“People cause earthquakes by running around?”
“No, no, no. It’s the different-plate thing. I was saying it’s like that. Never mind. Forget it. Guncle Rule number twelve: Every now and again it’s good to relieve a bit of pressure.”
Maisie nodded. “My shoes don’t match.”
Patrick looked down at his T-shirt. “My shirt is inside out.”
The large swinging doors opened and they both strained their necks, hoping for news. Two doctors emerged, but they were deep in conversation and instead of approaching the waiting area, they walked away from it down a hall.
“How do you know about air pressure and not geology?”
“I think I was out that day,” Maisie offered, as if natural disasters were all lumped together and taught in one afternoon, never to be spoken of again. “We missed a lot of school last year.”
“Because of your mom?”
Maisie didn’t reply. Through the sliding doors Patrick could make out the soft pink glow of the rising sun and it filled the waiting room with new hope. Then a loud BEEP rattled their nerves anew.
“You’re right.” Patrick gave her a little nudge with his shoulder.
“About what?”
“I don’t like hospitals either.”
* * *
Well before the sun reached its full height in the sky, Grant had been moved to a room in the pediatric wing. They were lucky; Grant didn’t require anything more than a large bandage and a few hours of observation to see if he had a concussion. No one called Greg, as there wasn’t much treatment requiring authorization, and Patrick didn’t have to further play the celebrity card. The three of them seemed to slip through the cracks of an unusually busy night in the ER. Grant wasn’t even formally admitted, as far as Patrick could tell; doctors found him a bed simply because the emergency room was at capacity and it became difficult for the nurses to properly observe Grant in the midst of overwhelming stimulus.
A nurse arrived to take Grant’s temperature, sticking a thermometer in the boy’s mouth. “How’s our patient doing?” Her scrubs were aggressively happy, pink with little cartoon bears that seemed to be giving Patrick the finger. They weren’t, of course; on closer inspection the bears were holding balloons.
“Good. Good. Groggy, I think. Perhaps from being up half the night.” After they were first moved, Grant struggled valiantly to keep his eyes open, but his eyelids were unusually heavy. When he relented and closed them, Patrick would make a grandiose pronouncement—dinosaurs probably had feathers, some cats like to eat soup, sometimes sandboxes were filled with quicksand—to garner his attention, wake him up so that he could remain under strict observation. Patrick assumed Grant’s ears did most of the work to keep him conscious, listening for scraps of conversation, beeps from machines, announcements over the loudspeaker. Despite his weariness, he seemed desperate to be present for it all.
“Does he seem confused?” This woman seemed rested and alert, less spent than the staff last night. She was wearing fresh lipstick, something Patrick found at odds with the other weary faces they’d encountered. Perhaps she’d just started working, the day shift her normal rotation.
“He fell asleep in his bed and woke up in the hospital. That’s pretty confusing.”
The nurse smirked, perhaps masking a more frustrated expression. “Abnormally confused.” She took the thermometer out of Grant’s mouth and looked at the result.
“Grant, where are you?”
Grant turned his head away from Patrick. “Hothpital.”
“Which hospital?”
“Connecticut.”
Patrick shrugged. “Seems like the regular amount of confused to me.”
“Temperature’s normal. Any nausea? Vomiting?”
“No.”
“Irritability?”
“Yes, but that’s just my default disposition.” Patrick winked, hoping she’d be amused. She wasn’t. “Let me ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“This pediatric wing. It’s so quiet. Clean. More so than any other hospital I’ve ever been to.”
“That’s not a question, but thank you.”
Patrick scratched several day’s growth under his chin. “No, I was just curious. Is there an age cutoff to be a patient here? Like, would thirty-five be too old?”
The nurse shot Patrick a look as she tucked the thermometer in the pocket of her scrubs. Thirty-five?
Patrick cleared his throat, then whispered. “Forty-three?”
“Sir. The boy needs to stay until I can get a doctor in here for the all-clear. You, however, do not.”
Patrick smiled to ease the tension. “Can we get lollipops?”
Maisie perked up. They hadn’t had breakfast. Patrick had suggested they could sneak down to the cafeteria while Grant was dozing, but she wouldn’t hear of leaving his side.
“Behave yourselves and we’ll talk.”
There was a low rumbling, like a truck passing by, and the floor began to shake. Maisie’s face glazed with panic and Patrick took her hand. “It’s okay. Just an aftershock.”
The nurse grabbed the rails on the side of Grant’s bed. “Oh, we’re going to get a few of those.” She turned to Maisie. “They make you nervous, sweetheart?”
Maisie nodded. The rumbling slowed its roll and then dissipated like a wave hitting the shore.
“What’s your name?”
“Maisie,” she replied. Patrick was surprised by how frail she sounded; in his mind she had hardened as the summer progressed.
“Maisie, I’m Imani. Have you had breakfast? I think we have some muffins lying around here. And maybe some orange juice. Would you like to come with me and see what we can find?”
She nodded again, and Patrick offered a grateful Thank you over Maisie’s head.
After they were gone, Patrick sat with Grant. “Close your eyes, bud. It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.” He took the boy’s hand, and when Grant closed his eyes, and he thought it was safe, Patrick started to weep. It was next to a bed like this where he last held Joe’s hand. He didn’t remember everything, not even then, and certainly not now, time robbing him of a number of intimate and precious details. He didn’t ever have a memory of being pulled from the car wreckage, and he’d long ago given up hope of recovering it. Nor did he remember much about his first few hours in the hospital, when he was the one in Grant’s shoes, the one in the bed. Only his physical pain was seared into memory; even if it wasn’t, he had a lovely scar as tormentor.
Joe lived for four days after the crash. One hundred two hours and thirty-four minutes. Lived wasn’t the proper word. Survived wasn’t, either. His heart pumped and his lungs drew breath, at least one of those with the help of machines; he never regained consciousness. He was Joe one second and then he was not. His face bruised and swollen beyond recognition, as almost to prove that point. I’m unrecognizable. Don’t try to save me. I am not myself. Patrick was still Patrick, it would take months for him to change;
they were no longer Joe and Patrick once Joe’s family swooped in—they instantly took charge of all decisions. It was a male nurse, Seth, Patrick thought, although his name, too, was in danger of fading (Could it have been Scott? Or Sam?), who quietly ushered him in to sit with his love, to give them a last moment alone, while Joe’s family retreated to the cafeteria—without him—to decide.
He’d held Joe’s hand, he remembered that. It was warm; he was shocked. It fit in his, like it always did, even though the rest of him was misshapen. He traced Joe’s cuticles and then knuckles, tried to make contact with every last cell of skin. There was a scrape on the web between his thumb and forefinger. It had to have been from the crash, but the way it was scabbed over, already on the way to healing, maybe it was from before. He wanted so desperately to recall. If Joe was healing, then he had to still be there. His skin would mend and then his bones. His organs would follow, and maybe his brain would be last, but it, too, would heal. It would remember its work, controlling his vital systems. It would tell his heart to beat, to pump blood away and then pull it back. It would tell his lungs to expand, drawing in oxygen, and then tell them to contract, forcing out carbon dioxide. He held Joe’s hand until Seth or Scott or Sam returned, placed his own hand on top of his, on top of Joe’s, and slowly pried their fingers apart.
When he walked out of that room, he never saw Joe again.
Patrick wiped his eyes with the back of his hands and found Maisie standing in front of him clutching three containers of orange juice with foil tops.
“You okay, GUP?”
Patrick inhaled deeply and said he was, but he couldn’t hide his tears.
I want to be.
But he couldn’t do this again.
TWENTY
Patrick pulled the Tesla into his garage around five and, feeling no need to take it out again anytime soon, secured the car under the dustcover. Grant wasn’t in the mood for lupper; Patrick forced him to eat half a peanut butter sandwich anyway so that he could take the mild painkiller that had been prescribed, changed the sheets on the kid’s bed, and then tucked him in tight. After he was out, Maisie helped clean up the debris from the quake, holding a bag open as her uncle swept the remnants of some possessions with a broom and dustpan. The Jonathan Adler knickknacks from atop the piano. A vase from Takashimaya that lived on the coffee table. A few shattered picture frames, photos of him on various sets, mostly, with other recognizable faces. They straightened ornaments on tinsel branches and marveled how so many had refused to be shaken from the tree. Maisie, for her part, seemed equally reluctant to shake her uncle’s side.
The Guncle Page 22
