Remembering, Greta became immediately kinder. She put her hand on Ned's arm and squeezed. It was a wonder any child made it to school age with all the things that could happen. But still, Greta thought as she sniffed the air around him, drunk at four o'clock in the day. If there was one type of person Lily couldn't stand, it was a drinker, and Big Tom used to want to kill her for giving coins to Nell Bourke in town, whose husband had it bad. Every time Greta laid eyes on Ned's big red drinker's face she thought of Lily turning her back on Mr. Bourke when he passed her on the road. Lily, gone by now except for bones. Greta often wondered what dress they'd buried her in and if the land next to Big Tom had held up well enough for Lily to be buried beside him.
"I'll show you to the waiting lounge," the head nurse said, and Greta turned her back on Ned to follow the nurse's brisk pace down the hall, past patient rooms, to a corner door that led to a room with a pair of mismatched couches and a stack of magazines.
"Mrs. Ward," the nurse said as Greta looked at the couches and decided she didn't feel like sitting. "That man has been drinking."
"Drinking?" Greta said, looking around the empty room as if trying to figure out what she could possibly be talking about.
"That man," the nurse said, tilting her head toward a vague spot somewhere over Greta's shoulder. Greta turned to find Ned making his way down the hall toward them, touching the wall every few steps to find his balance, his boots leaving dried pieces of dirt behind him like a trail of bread crumbs. "We suggested he go home, but he wouldn't listen. Now that you're here, perhaps...?"
"I just want to see Michael," Greta said, lowering herself to the very edge of the closest couch, her back to the hallway.
"Of course," the nurse said. "I'm sending Dr. Medina right in." The nurse pulled the door closed behind her.
***
Greta had tried to picture the tunnels many times, but always, when she imagined Michael going about his day, she came up against a blank that represented a piece of information she didn't have. Where did the men change their clothes? Were there stalls or were they all naked together? Did they have so many lights going down in the tunnel that they forgot they were underground? Where did the lights plug in? Were there hills and valleys underground, or were the tunnels built level so it always felt like a flat surface? What would happen if the cage didn't work one day? Did the water ever get so deep or rush so fast that the men got afraid it might fill up the whole tunnel? And if it did, would they be drowned? Or could the water possibly sweep them out of the tunnel and up the shaft to the top, like the piece of potato that sits at the bottom of the pot but rises to the top again when you fill the pot with water?
Michael had answered all of her questions, amused that she found it so interesting, amused that she forgot his answers sometimes and asked the same question a few months later. Some of her questions were about details so small she didn't even know what to ask. Others were so familiar to him that he didn't know how to explain. No, he'd said just a few weeks earlier, throwing back his head and laughing. They never got afraid the water would fill up the tunnel, but then they both remembered him wondering about this very possibility his first week on the job, 1970, Julia sprawled on the kitchen floor practicing her letters, trying on the ink pen Greta had given her as if it were a new accessory, tucking it, finally, between her first and second fingers and holding out her hand to admire it from a distance. Michael, who'd been to Bloomingdale's many times and then to Macy's where Greta now worked, knew exactly what Greta's day looked like, where her register was, what an impression the racks of clothes made hanging there in the wrong season—wool coats in August, bathing suits in March—the piles upon piles of garments that went in and out of the dressing rooms every day, most of which had to be inspected, turned right side out, returned to the correct rack. The disagreements over how to dress the mannequins.
Now and again, hearing of some politician or writer who went down into the tunnels for a look, Greta would get it into her head that they should have a day when family could go down to see what's what. "Never," Michael always said. "It will never happen."
"Because the bosses wouldn't allow it or because you wouldn't allow it?"
"Both."
Now, waiting for Dr. Medina to come in and tell her what Michael's injuries were, Greta wished more than ever that she could fill in the blanks of his day. He'd been to sixteen sandhog funerals in sixteen years, all men killed on the job, but the details of those accidents were as vague to Greta as the details of the construction, digging the shaft, bracing the walls, mixing the concrete and laying it down. All of this before the first foot of tunnel was blasted. Suddenly, in this quiet room that had a distinct whiff of oranges, Greta became furious with herself. Like an idiot, like the soft-minded goose that she was, she'd just packed his lunches, sent him off, bought him new long johns and thermal socks faster than he could go through them. Worse, she'd often reminded Michael that they were lucky to have the tunnels to depend on. The Carpenters Union, the Scaffolders Union, even the Bus Drivers Union—all notoriously difficult to penetrate without a connection, and none paid as well as the tunnels. So he'd stayed on, year after year. And now this. Again she thought of calling Julia and telling her to bring the little ones up to Mrs. Kraus and take a cab to Brooklyn. She looked around for a phone but found only more piles of magazines. She sat down once more and began to feel as if she'd already spent a week in that room, a month, that her whole life had been pointing to this moment—alone in a room with blue walls, blue carpet, the sickening smell of oranges gone too ripe—expecting a doctor to walk through the door. A thought skittered through her mind: I've known him my whole life.
"Mrs. Ward?" Dr. Medina said, crossing the room in two long strides. He held out his hand, but instead of shaking it, she squeezed it and let go. He looked around the room. "Are you here on your own?"
"Yes," she said, flashing briefly to Ned, who was still in the hall.
"Your husband was lucky," the doctor said, and Greta felt the invisible man who'd been choking her all afternoon loosen his grip. "He broke two ribs, and one punctured his lung. Considering the amount of time it took them to get him down the tunnel and up the elevator—is it an elevator?—he was very fortunate. He has a large tear in the rotator cuff of his left shoulder. He also has a very deep cut on his left leg, which we're going to have to keep a close eye on. He's scheduled for shoulder surgery tomorrow morning, and I'm keeping him under until then."
"Can I look in on him?"
"I already have the nurse getting you a mask and a gown. I'm worried about that leg. It should be fine, but I want no chance of infection. Traffic in and out of his room must be kept to the absolute minimum. You understand, I'm sure. Listen," he said then in a different tone, and placed a hand on her shoulder. "The bottom line is, if all goes well, he could back on his feet in no time. He'll need therapy, of course, on the leg and the shoulder, but he's strong as an ox, your husband. Is that a brogue I hear?"
Greta nodded.
"Him too?"
Greta nodded again.
"Beautiful place," Dr. Medina said as he escorted her down the hall to the nurses' station. "It's completely untouched, isn't it? Like a time capsule."
"If this happened in Ireland," Greta said, "he'd be dead. I'm sure of it."
Michael filled the narrow bed from corner to corner. He was naked to the waist except for the bandages around his ribs, and from the navel down he was only partially covered, the sheet twisted and tucked around his injured limbs in such a tidy way that Greta realized there must be a point to the arrangement. He was bruised above his bandages and below, and though she cringed to see it, she reminded herself that it could have been worse. He could have been broken in two. He could have been crushed to bits. The room was warmer than the hall, much warmer than the waiting lounge, and Greta figured this must be because they couldn't put a proper blanket on him. It was disorienting to see him sleeping on his back, which he never did, and to see him so neat in sleep, wh
ich he never was. His uninjured arm lay parallel to the right side of his body, his injured arm folded across his chest. His right leg was covered by the sheet, but his left leg was uncovered except for the bandages that circled his thigh from knee to hip. Even from the door of the room Greta could see that they'd stripped him bare, and when she approached the bed, she saw that his entire hip was exposed on his left side, his skin almost the same sterile color as the sheet, a few dark hairs underlining his basic whiteness and drawing her eye forward like signposts that grew darker and denser as they gathered at his crotch. She bent to look closer and saw that there were more angry bruises on his hips and legs. She took the very edge of the sheet between her first finger and her thumb and lifted. His good leg was black-and-blue from the hip to the knee.
She looked back at the nurses through the window in the door and saw them watching her.
"Hello, Michael," she said, standing clear of the bed as she'd been instructed. "It's me. Greta." Just as the words were out, his lips parted and his jaw fell open. He never slept with a pillow, but they'd tucked a pillow under his head. They'd cleaned him up for surgery and cleaned him again after. His face, she noticed, had been completely untouched. Not a scrape, not a single bruise. Apart from the bruises and the bandages and the sling, he looked scrubbed enough to step into a freshly ironed shirt and go to a party.
"Michael?" she said, stepping closer and placing her hand on his chest. She pressed down lightly and felt his heart beating wildly in its recently repaired cage.
The knob turned on the door, and a young nurse pushed it open. "Please don't touch him, Mrs. Ward. It's just a precaution for these first few hours. The doctor—"
"He's cold," Greta said, holding her hand out to the nurse as if she were holding up the evidence. "He doesn't like to be cold. He slept outside all his life and doesn't deserve to be cold now. He slept out in the cold and the wet, then he worked in the cold and the wet, and now this. Please, isn't there a blanket?"
"I'll get him a sheet," she said. The nurses at the station were listening to every word. "But we ask you..." she added before turning away, looking at Greta's culprit hand. When she departed, another nurse took her place.
"Is there anyone you'd like to call?" the second nurse asked. "Someone to keep you company?"
Greta remembered Ned, asked if the nurse had seen him.
"That gentleman left. Would you like to use our phone to call someone in the family?"
Greta shook her head and turned back to Michael. She should call Julia, she knew, but she couldn't get herself to walk out the door into the hall. He'll be fine, she told herself, fighting the urge to take off her jacket and drape it over him. He once asked her what she would do if anything happened to him. It was just after that electrical fire where one man had died and another was left not right in the head. "Do?" Greta had asked, never once having thought of the question herself. "I wouldn't do anything."
"I mean," he'd said, "would you go back?"
But Greta had refused to answer, had refused to even let the possibility settle into her thoughts. And now, looking at Michael's chest rise and fall, she unbuttoned her jacket in the warm room and knew she had been right not to let herself think about it. He was—as she had told him so many years before while they sat on the front stoop with Julia on her lap—her best friend. She had never said that to anyone, not to Johanna, not to any schoolmate. Johanna had left, and Greta had survived. Had thrived, even. But Michael was different. Without Michael she'd be like the child on the low end of the seesaw, no partner to lift her up toward the sky.
When the nurse came back with the sheet, she also had a metal folding chair that had been sterilized by the cleaning staff, and she opened it for Greta in the farthest corner of the room. No sooner had Greta sat down on the chair and slid down so that her head rested against the wall behind and her legs extended out in front of her, than she began to feel the tension of the day drain out of her. Out in the hall, a monitor beeped in a steady rhythm that Greta found soothing, the wheels of a gurney rattled as they passed. He would be fine. Up and about in no time. The temperature of the room really was very warm, Greta thought as her head lolled down toward her shoulder. I can't go out now and ask if it might be too warm, not after the stink I made about him being cold.
Just a few seconds later Greta was surprised to hear Michael laughing at her, laughing with her, telling her to shush so he could listen to a patient playing a fiddle down the hall. Ned Powers was at the nurses' station doing a jig, waving to Greta from the other side of the window to get up, do a dance, live a little. Didn't Greta know the Seige of Ennis? Didn't they teach them anything out there in Ballyroan? He pulled an amber bottle from the gap in his wellies, but Greta discovered that she didn't mind, poor thing, all he wanted was a nip. It was the old habits brought to a new place that made them seem so wrong. The smell of salmon cooking on a grill Dr. Medina had set up in the waiting room set her stomach rumbling. Will we go for a swim? Michael asked as he bent and straightened first his right arm, then his left, to test them out. Last one in is a three-legged donkey, he shouted, leaping up from the bed and, still naked, his bandages unwinding with every stride, he ran down the hall, down the stairs, out the front door of the hospital, and using that sixth sense of his, lifting his nose to the air and taking a long sniff, he turned and made for the river.
12
BECAUSE MICHAEL HAD come so close to dying but had lived instead, Greta felt that he would be safer in the tunnels from now on. It wasn't rational, exactly, but it felt like the truth. Greta and Michael discussed it, sheepishly at first, it was such a silly idea, but then with more conviction. Where sixteen others had died, death had taken its shot at Michael but had missed. The next accident on the job would be someone else's turn.
The day Michael came home from the hospital was hot, getting hotter every minute, and felt to Greta more like August than June. Even the sidewalk outside was quiet in that August way, older children in groups and younger children with their mothers or their nannies over at Carl Schurz park on the East River or, if they had the energy, west to Central Park, where there was more room and where they imagined they felt a breeze stirring the leaves of the trees. The only sound from outside was the beat of a ball being bounced along the sidewalk, the supple smack of rubber against concrete moving closer and closer despite the handler's drowsy pace. Greta listened as it passed, counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, kept listening as the sound faded away toward Third Avenue. The smell of spoiled milk wafted up from the garbage piled on the street and slipped through the iron bars of the Wards' first-floor window gate. For twenty years now, the tenants of 222 East Eighty-fourth had been promised a large container for the garbage cans, something made of wood with a hinged door on top to trap the smell and hide the cans from view. For twenty years Greta had been wondering when the handsome wood container was going to arrive.
She stared at the tiny kitchen she'd used for twenty-two years—first the rack of drying dishes, then the sheer cotton curtain as it moved toward her in the humid air. Her look fell upon the calendar, and with her index finger guiding the way, she ran her eye down the column of Wednesdays. June the twenty-fifth. Not possible. Was she looking at May? No, there it was at the very top, June 1986, month and year correct. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and leaned against the counter. Somehow, that afternoon, she had to accumulate as many boxes as she could carry from twelve different liquor stores if she walked down Second Avenue to Fifty-ninth, then back up along Third. Liquor store boxes were best for moving—they were strong, the right size, and they were unlikely to carry roach eggs. If only she'd learned how to drive. There was Michael's car, just sitting there at the curb until Julia came home and moved it to one of the Tuesday/Friday spots on the other side of the street. Julia could drive her from stop to stop, but only if Greta waited until after six o'clock. No, Greta thought. I've already left it too long.
In the next room, Eavan and James were constructing models of their n
ew house out of Legos. Twice now Greta had heard faint sounds of demolition, pieces bouncing and skidding along the scuffed hardwood floor. Twice she'd heard Eavan tell James to cut it out or else. On Saturday, when she lifted the mattress in there, she would find red and yellow Legos along with socks, clips, hair bands, notices from teachers meant for Greta to read and sign. Eavan's voice came through the thin wall again. "You think I'm kidding?" she said, then a thump, something hard—a knee, a head—against the floor. "Oh, go tell," Eavan said a few seconds later, and then whispers, silence, back to the business of building houses.
"What's going on in there?" Greta called, rapping her knuckles on the wall. "If I hear any fighting you're going to be sorry. Your father is trying to rest."
"We're not fighting!" Eavan called sweetly, and then—Greta imagined the nudge—James shouted, "We're being quiet!"
In the dim living room, Michael lay sweating on the soft velour of the couch they'd inherited from a woman who used to live down the hall. His leg was propped up on pillows, his injured arm in a sling across his belly. When James had come along seven years earlier, Michael had cut the room in half with a wall of Sheetrock to make a third bedroom. He didn't see why it was necessary; they could have just put a cot in Julia and Eavan's room, but Greta had insisted. At home, he'd pointed out, the girls and the boys were often mixed and nothing wrong came of it. Plus Julia was so much older, it was like having a parent in the room. You're not at home, Greta told him, as she'd told him a million times before. He reminded her of the same fact just as often. Sometimes they joked about making a tally, who mentioned home most often. Since Lily died, and after getting over that first year or so of silence, it seemed that Greta had decided to fill the mute space left behind with more stories than ever, stories he'd never heard, about the boys, about Big Tom, about raising chickens and selling salmon. And somehow, the more she talked about it, the farther away home seemed to both of them. For Greta, home was not a place that coexisted with America, a place that went on and grew and changed at the same time New York was growing and changing. It felt more like Ireland had ended where America began, as if it were something out of America's past.
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