The dashboard was updated, pudgy. The Camry of my teenage years had been lean. I could barely afford this rental and would have to return it early the day I left, two days from now. Meanwhile there would be lots of free food at the hospital. I buckled up, I enjoyed my seat; Tulsa’s traffic map came together in my head. I rolled down my windows once I got out of the garage and I breathed in the fresh, unremembered air—had I been a better person, when I lived here? It was just out past this access road that Adrienne and I had gone to that gay bar. Now I got up heading south on 169 in the early-afternoon glare, keeping the downtown skyscrapers to my right, and accelerating. From the plane I had spotted the Booker—the car shuddered with my window down, the air buffeted across my mouth. My high school was already miles behind me when I became aware of the neighborhoods of my middle school crushes ahead: A spray of feeling around Forty-first street. And then Fifty-first street. The whole time it was almost like someone was watching me—I had to jerk hard right, scudding across a median to make the St. Ursula’s exit lane.
I had not had time to think. The flight had been too short. Only seven hours ago I had stopped to check my email, oblivious of fate. I slowed down, and tried to prepare. I had been going over it on the flight from Dallas: “I heard what happened, and I wanted to come.” But there would be other people there, wouldn’t there? I had to act casual: “I got this for you at Kennedy. I was getting ready for work when I got the email.” Always I had imagined Adrienne would seek me out, or fate would deliver her to me at random. I hoped she would just understand. Maybe it would go like this: she would see me and smirk, and I would smirk, and then I would approach the bed with the necktie sack: “I brought you a tie, Adrienne.”
St. Ursula’s Hospital was built on a rise, a modern pink V-shape, bending at a shallow angle, looming up against the highway like one section taken out of a pale pink Pentagon. Bradford pears were planted around. Against the pink wall the leaves looked black.
Once I parked I suddenly relaxed. Here I was. I knew my way around. In line at the water slide out south I had used to gaze up at St. Ursula’s—the distant landmark, the futuristic castle striped with windows. I locked my doors. Once I entered the hospital I knew I’d lose Adrienne in a certain way, as a mental prop—I ought to take a deep breath. At the desk, I had to pronounce her name. It was hard to do. An ex-girlfriend, by definition, is a memory improperly possessed. But it was out of my hands now.
The elevator down suspended me, and then the floor dinged. I was grateful to know that Chase wouldn’t be there. Maybe Edith? Maybe Adrienne’s aunt Lydie? Whatever happened, I was armored, sombered—the doors rumbled apart and revealed a vast waiting room, filled with families. You could tell they were families. I proceeded in, dragging my huge green bag behind me, angling into the recesses of the waiting room, nine or ten couchlengths deep. People before me had come bearing gifts: I saw care packages, baskets of fruit, and paper bags thoughtfully stashed with blankets and Gatorade and crossword puzzles. Most people were on the phone, giving a report to someone somewhere else. They were mothers and aunts and sisters: they all had full rights to the stories they were telling.
A man I definitely recognized as Rod Booker was there. He was off to the side. But I rolled on, pretending not to know him. I barreled around the perimeter of the waiting room, dragging my bag on its side to slip between various encampments, lifting my necktie sack clear. Eventually I came up behind him and dropped my bag. When he didn’t turn, I poked his shoulder. It was like poking a ham.
So this is your father: he stood; he reached his elbow back and reared himself up. He was slow in his bulk, but finally turned out to be taller than me. A furry-faced buffalo with wide blue eyes and a nose like Adrienne’s. There were moles and other kinds of spots falling down into his snow-white beard.
He wouldn’t make eye contact.
“Mr. Booker? Jim Praley.”
“You’re here to see Adrienne?”
I nodded.
“Well, come on.” His passage through the couches was slow and deferential. He let a kid making realistic spluttering sounds drive a Hot Wheel on the carpet ahead of us. I was carrying the necktie sack under my armpit.
“Have a lot of people been around?” I asked.
“There were a lot of you last night,” he said. Exiting the waiting room we seemed to enter a maze of lonely laboratories, but Rod knew the way. He stopped and depressed a wall-mounted plunger, and down the hall two oversized doors unlocked and began to swing apart. I kept telling myself how I would look right at Adrienne and not look away no matter how disfigured she was: that she was badly hurt, and that holding her eye and carrying on a conversation might be a real achievement.
And what would Rod think when he witnessed this reunion? After all, I probably knew his daughter better than he did. This must be the most time he had spent with Adrienne in a decade. But he went on ahead of me, like a humble bear.
He led me into a small bay commanded by a nurses’ desk and cluttered with empty gurneys and beds. Five or six units opened off of it; all were occupied except the one that Rod stopped in front of. It was lit up extra-bright, like a nightclub after close, with a worker inside, mopping.
Rod hollered out, “Did you move her already?”
The janitor looked up, frightened—he didn’t understand English.
I veered off into the flotsam of loose beds, as if I knew something Rod didn’t. And here she was.
2
They had her out in the hall, on a tallish gurney about level with my diaphragm.
Her eyes were masked, her neck was braced, and the rest was sheeted.
A seam of white spittle, like fat on a refrigerated roast, lay between her lips. Under the edge of the eye mask, her skin had swollen up the color of graphite and then was drawn, in awful melting rills, to her ear. She was unconscious, but her lips were grim and full of knowledge.
It was by her nose that I recognized her.
Rod went to the head of the gurney and tried his hands on its corners. He puffed up his cheeks and gazed down at Adrienne, and then sighed ever so gently, blowing on her cramped hair.
“Is she awake?”
“She won’t be awake for days, my friend.”
I was shocked. It maybe made sense that Adrienne be blindfolded, as if she couldn’t face her fate. But the rest of it—the snarl of bedsheets, with intravenous bladders resting between her legs—I could not believe that it was so real. I could not believe that Adrienne was fundamentally, internally hurt.
Rod had walked around opposite me, and spread his arms out along the length of her bedrails. “She’s a fighter,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Where are you coming from?”
“New York. Are you still in Rhode Island?”
He glanced up, surprised. And then he nodded.
“She used to show me a video. She made it when she was like twelve.”
He thought for a second, and then nodded. “That’s right. She visited me—”
“It looked like a beautiful location—”
“But you came all the way from New York?”
“Yes.”
“That’s amazing.” He shook his head, and seemed to return to his study of Adrienne’s condition. “That’s really a tribute.” He began trying to manipulate the gurney. Its wheels were locked. He was idly fumbling at them with his big blunt boot when a male nurse appeared, carrying a roll of blue tape.
“Sorry, Kevin and I are going to do this.” He stepped into Rod’s space, and started taping down the wires that led out from Adrienne’s monitors, also bundling together the IVs and something else—a catheter or something.
“Let me help,” Rod offered.
The nurse ignored him.
I was thinking about the time Adrienne and I went shopping for a block of marble. There was a home-and-garden place that had some. But Adrienne insisted on hefting each piece in her own hands, and the clerk almost wouldn’t let her. He kept easing each piece
back out of her hands. Adrienne finally told the man, “You have to just go away for ten minutes, and when you come back I’ll buy something.”
Rod had come over to my side. With the nurses right there, he put his lips up to my ear and whispered, “My sister doesn’t think she should be moved.”
“Is it tricky?”
“Well, she shouldn’t be bumped. My sister thinks they need this bed, is why they’re moving her.”
“And—your sister, that is Lydie?”
“Mmhm.” Rod was approaching the gurney again.
“Watch the mask,” said the nurse, “the mask is important. Would you hold this?” the nurse asked me.
“Yes,” I said, not expecting the bag of milky fluid he was already handing me. When I lifted it to clear its tube from the others, I discovered the tug of resistance that came, I hated to think, from some part of Adrienne’s skin. So I held it resolutely, overhand, arm unwavering.
There were now four men matching pace as we launched into the corridor, Adrienne floating between. The mask pressed around her eyes, its padding like a lovingly folded washcloth. I loved her. The radiating wires and IV sacks floated after her like a train, and only Rod had nothing to carry. I wondered if I should feel sorry for him.
Crowding everyone else to the walls, we pushed Adrienne into the elevator, where her gurney stood like a raised banquet table. But everyone looked away. Only one woman, an African-American woman with a diplomatic bearing, looked at Adrienne with steady sympathy—and forcefully, as if Adrienne needed people to look at her. I myself looked at the parts of Adrienne that weren’t hurt, her good skin, the normalness along her nose, the total normalness of her now-uncovered arm. I really didn’t know where to look. I tried to smile at the woman who was being so nice; I looked up and away, at the counting numbers above the door. But it was taking a while, I had to relent, and swung my eyes back along Adrienne’s bed. Her one arm was in the cast, but the arm near me had come uncovered somehow and was bare, palm-up, soft, clammy, the fingers curled. I asked myself if I ought to take Adrienne’s hand, if that might be the thing I had come all this way to do: to take just that liberty. I would fly away before she ever woke up or was cognizant—I would just squeeze her hand, and go. But then the elevator dipped on its cable. The doors started to shake, and were pulled aside with an almost insidious swiftness.
Lydie stood there. Her hands were linked in front of her, hanging, and she smiled impatiently as we paraded to Adrienne’s new room. The nurses relieved me of my milky bag and brushed us away; the transfer was swift. From the doorway I watched as four or five nurses managed to scroll Adrienne sideways, without bumps. I noticed that one of them reached for a cord dangling from Adrienne’s leg and immediately plugged it in. A loud ticking sound ratcheted up, and was relieved by a whoosh. Lydie stepped forward, also curious, and lifted the sheet—Adrienne had been fitted with white plastic leggings, each divided into pouched sections, each pouch alternately deflating and then inflating, moving up and down the patient’s legs like a slow, plastic massage. “To prevent blood clots,” the nurse said.
Once Adrienne had been straightened in her bed and the nurses left, Lydie turned on Rod: “So here we are.”
He took off his hat and scratched the back of his head; he gave me a look.
Lydie was an impressive woman. Tall enough to support a mane of silvery black hair that didn’t quite overrun the bounds of seriousness, her stance was mannish, with one foot pointed out and her fist on her waist like a Shakespearean player. Her ankle-length shift was unbelted. The way she looked at Rod, balefully, seemed very much in character with her features: a blunted nostrilly nose, and wrinkles indicative not of tiredness but of warm endurance, running down in swoops from her eyes and nose. Her lipstick was frankly and neatly applied, and she wore eyeliner that, in an owlish way, worked. “We’re never going to get transferred back down, you know. The only way back into ICU is in an ambulance.”
Rod lowered himself into a chair. “That’s what you do—if the doctors screw up, you call and get a new ambulance and you start over.”
Lydie shouldered her purse and made ready to leave.
“I’m pretty sure they know what they’re doing here,” said Rod.
“But what they are doing is running a business, Rod. I have total confidence that they know what they are doing. They’re shuffling beds.” She turned to me. “Were you going to come with me to get hamburgers?”
Lydie and I left the hospital via skybridge. I had not yet reintroduced myself, yet she seemed to have me well in hand. She was a regal walker with long strides, and her shift beat against the backs of her ankles. At the end of the skybridge she raised her hands against the door in front of us, relying on her momentum to open it:
And everything changed. The hospital’s bright air-conditioned interior shrank to nothing. It was like walking out of a movie: The garage darkness was damp and fresh. The gasoline opened my nostrils. You could hear the muttering of one or two cars moving on the floor below; there was a drip someplace, far away, all around us.
Lydie stopped, and glanced keenly into the darkness. Then she raised her key chain and fired, and in the darkness a car winced and blinked its lights.
We strode forward.
“I hope I’m not stepping on your toes,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Being here today.”
“I fight with Rod because if you don’t, he’ll drag everything into the ditch. You have to fight him.”
Out of politeness, I pretended to be confused: “He’s the patient’s father?”
“He fathered her.”
With my hand on the door handle I waited for her to get in, but she was fishing for something in her purse. “Well,” I said, “I really hope she recovers.”
“Uh-huh. Listen—”
I had to get in the car to keep up with the conversation. The car reeked of cold leather.
“She’s going to recover.” Lydie depressed the cigarette lighter. “She doesn’t have any other choice. We do have to be careful though. I don’t think neuroscience is the strongest branch of medicine. Do you? And St. Ursula’s isn’t the Mayo Clinic. I can’t believe they had you carrying that IV pouch. I’ll be able to sue them for that alone. And her father goes along with everything they say…”
“He has a doctor’s-orders mentality.”
“Uh-huh. But sometimes you have to press.” Lydie held up both hands, heavily bejeweled, and shoved gingerly into the air between us.
“The path of least resistance,” I added.
Lydie smirked, and the cigarette lighter popped. She produced a pack of cigarettes.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Mrmm.” She held the unlit cigarette in her lips and brought the red-hot coil up, and sucked at it with the cigarette like a straw. She puffed. “Adrienne’s worst injury is so low that, even if she didn’t recover, she’d be able to walk. She’s S2. Are you familiar with this terminology?”
“I’m not.”
“Well, S means sacral.” Lydie backed out and then paused, with her long car crooked in the lane. “Anyway, the sacrum. That’s the term for the end of the spine, the triangular piece of bone there.” She measured it with her fingers, and then snapped them. “That’s shattered. And the cord there is bruised.” She leveled her eyes at me. “It’s the part that controls the bowels.” Lydie shrugged and stared, seemingly distracted, into the windshield. “Above that, however: T7. The seventh thoracic vertebra. Controls the legs. The bone there didn’t shatter, but was snapped in two, and one of the pieces is slicing down and pinching the spinal cord. We want to slide that piece back up before it slips further, and staple it to the other piece—to keep it from doing any further damage. We want to take the pressure off that section of the spinal cord. In time, it should come back to life, and she’ll be able to walk. Anyway, they’re going to do surgery tomorrow, to stabilize the bone there, as well as parts of the neck where she has hairline fractures. It’s just
a preliminary surgery—to stabilize her. But until then they should be keeping her in ICU. She needs to be constantly monitored.”
Was I supposed to have spoken up when they came to take Adrienne away? I wondered if Rod had secretly wanted me to. Somehow in coming here I had assumed that Adrienne was ultimately okay, that paralysis was just a matter of being knocked out and then waking up. “How did it happen?”
“In the first place Adrienne should have gone to St. Luke’s—that’s where we would normally go. But of course I got the call in the middle of the night, that they had her here on life support. I called Rod. ‘Your daughter has been hospitalized,’ I told him. And he did come. However he’s still the most passive person I have ever dealt with.”
“Right.”
“We have to decide on surgeons here. Then we have to decide on rehab programs. And that means researching different therapies.”
“Huh. Is there anything exciting there?”
“But Rod takes no interest. You do. You take more interest than Rod does, and he’s her legal guardian. I’m the one”—Lydie pressed her fingertips into her sternum—“who is going to take care of Adrienne if she doesn’t get up. While my brother, as I’m sure he told you, is devastated.”
“Well it’s pretty traumatic.”
“It’s a nightmare.” She raised her eyebrows intimately. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”
Lydie had straightened us out and reversed, executing an eccentric but practiced maneuver, backing the car quite elegantly past the ramp, backing against the arrows until she was lined up with the exit and could sail right out. It was efficient, high-handed, and fluid. I thought Lydie used to have a driver. But she drove for pleasure, apparently.
Lydie followed the hospital’s landscaped drive, snaking up to Sixty-first Street, and we sat there with her blinker on, clicking for a turn. New York loomed in my imagination, the work I was missing, a drinks date I had tonight at one of my favorite bars—a thought as sticky and glamorous as New York itself but impossible to superimpose on this boulevard of green corporate lawns, Sixty-first Street. I remembered my green bag with my clothes in it, still down in intensive care’s waiting area where I had dropped it, rattled.
A Map of Tulsa Page 11
