by Nina Solomon
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I let myself in,” he said. “The doorman buzzed, but no one was picking up. Grace—”
She looked at him and realized from his expression that something was terribly wrong.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Your mother called me from the hospital,” Kane said. “She tried calling here, but there was no answer. It’s your father. He’s had a heart attack.”
The room began to spin. Kane put his arms around her, and then they went downstairs to get a taxi to Lenox Hill Hospital.
27
VISITING HOURS
Grace was in the backseat of the cab with Kane, her faux-leopard coat over her shoulders. Even with the heat on, she was shivering.
At the hospital, they rode up in the elevator to the seventh floor, where they found Grace’s mother in the waiting room sitting on a nubby, purple armchair. Everything in the room was a different shade of either purple or green, even the huge abstract painting on one wall.
As Grace and Kane approached, Grace was struck by her mother’s complete lack of makeup and her unkempt hair. She was dressed in a flannel shirt that belonged to Grace’s father, and underneath she had on only sheer stockings and a pair of black snow boots. To Grace, her mother’s appearance was a clear indication that the situation was far more serious than she feared. Her mother rushed over as soon as she saw them, dissolving into Kane’s arms like a small child.
“He’s still in the emergency room,” she sobbed.
“Can we see him?” Grace asked.
Her mother shook her head. “Not yet.”
“Will he need surgery?”
“They’re not sure. They need to see the results from the angiogram first,” she said. Kane gave Grace’s mother a squeeze. Her eyes began to fill with tears. “My Milton.”
“Can I get you anything?” Kane asked.
“Maybe a cup of hot tea, that’s all,” she answered. “Earl Grey, if they have it. If not, a bottle of seltzer.”
Grace walked with Kane down the tiled hallway to the elevator. “I wish Laz were here,” she said, half to herself. “If only he were back from his trip.”
Kane didn’t respond. They stepped into the elevator, which stopped on each floor, although no one got on or off. They walked to the cafeteria in silence. Grace watched as orderlies pushed patients on gurneys down the corridor. The cafeteria was empty, except for one table at which a man and woman were bent over a turkey sandwich that was still wrapped in plastic.
Kane filled a Styrofoam cup with boiling water and picked up a foil-wrapped Earl Grey tea bag. He paid for the tea and handed the cup to Grace.
“I should go. Your family needs you,” he said.
“Kane—” she began, then fell silent.
“Don’t worry, everything will be all right. I’ll call you later,” he said, hugging her. Grace watched as he walked down the hall and into an awaiting elevator.
“Thanks for everything,” she called after him. He didn’t respond, and she wasn’t certain whether he’d heard her or not. She stood watching until the elevator door closed, and then she went back upstairs to the waiting room.
GRACE’S MOTHER WAS by the window. Two women in full-length fur coats sat holding hands on a small green couch. Bert had arrived and was in the process of trying to unwrap a bar of Toblerone without making any noise, when he saw Grace approaching and pretended he was just reading the ingredients.
“White chocolate has much more saturated fat than dark choc -olate, did you know that?” he asked, placing the bar back on the table.
“How’s your hip?” Grace asked, although she didn’t see even the slightest evidence of a limp.
“Much better, thanks. Cortisone is a miracle drug,” Bert said, giving his hip a pat. He paused and took a deep breath. “Actually, my hip’s fine,” he said, fumbling with the top button of his overcoat. “It’s just that I couldn’t bear to go without Francine.” Grace put her hand on his shoulder.
“You don’t need to explain,” she said. Grace could tell he seemed relieved not to have to say more.
“Kane brought you to the hospital?” he said, after a while.
“Yes.”
“He’s a decent guy,” Bert said. Grace nodded in agreement. Then they both sat down to await news about Grace’s father.
IT WAS JUST after two o’clock in the morning when the doctor finally came to give them a report, leading them down to the recovery room. “We’d like to keep an eye on him for a few days, just to make sure.” As Grace and her mother walked down the hall, the emergency room nurses looked at Grace strangely.
“Only members of the immediate family are allowed in the recovery room,” one of the nurses told her.
“I’m his daughter,” she said. Grace’s mother whispered something to one of the nurses, who nodded and let them go in.
“What did you tell them?” Grace asked.
“I said you had just come from a costume party. What else?”
“It wasn’t a costume party,” she said, sounding embarrassingly like a nine-year-old after an all-night sleepover party. She couldn’t help thinking that if the music hadn’t been so loud, she would have heard her mother’s call.
“Anyway, that coat is frightening. Now, which room did they say he was in?” Grace’s mother stuck her head behind several curtains before locating her husband, who was lying on his back, eyes closed, sucking on a green lollipop.
“He’s still a little groggy,” a stocky nurse said as she made some notations on a chart with a chewed pencil. Grace sat on the edge of the bed, her mother on the only chair in the room. Her father began to stir. He opened his eyes and smiled weakly.
“Gracie,” he said faintly, still sucking on the lollipop. He tried to raise his arms to embrace her, but with the tubes, he could only make a feeble attempt. “Would you like anything to eat or drink? There’s ice water and some tea biscuits,” he said, pointing to the nightstand. “They said later I can have some chicken broth.”
Grace was almost brought to tears by her father’s display of hospitality, as if he were hosting a party. Grace’s mother got up to examine the ingredients on the package of tea biscuits. She took out her reading glasses from her purse and went over to the light.
“These are fine,” she determined, opening the plastic wrapper and offering one to Grace, who shook her head.
“You look good, Dad,” she said, although his body looked small and frail in the thin cotton hospital gown.
“Sorry we couldn’t make it tonight,” he said. “You wanted to tell us something?”
“Another time,” she said, rubbing her hands together, even though she wasn’t cold anymore. “When you’re feeling better. You should rest now.” He closed his eyes again. He was wearing a pair of blue paper slippers on his feet. A plastic balloonlike instrument was wrapped around his calves, automatically filling with air every few seconds and then deflating, to prevent blood clots. Grace’s mother motioned for her to come near.
“You really should go home and get some rest, Grace. No need for all of us to stay. Bert’s here if I need him. Come back in the morning when your father’s feeling more himself. Visiting hours start at nine.”
“If you’re sure you’ll be okay. I can go by the apartment if you need anything.”
“Well, only if it’s not out of the way. Maybe a pair of slippers and a robe, for your father. And my makeup kit.”
THE FIRST THING that struck Grace when she walked into her parents’ apartment just before four in the morning was how dark and empty it was. The television was tuned to the Weather Channel, but the sound was muted. She’d become so used to conjuring Laz’s presence; but now, as she walked through the empty apartment closing doors and turning on lights, she realized that her actions weren’t done in order to conjure a life, they were to ease the pain.
Her parents had clearly left in a hurry. All the signs of panic were there: an overturned container of buttermilk on th
e countertop, pulled-out chairs, the refrigerator door left open.
She pictured her mother running to her father’s aid in the bedroom, where drawers were flung open and an empty bottle of medicine was on the nightstand. In the adjoining bathroom, she found cotton balls tumbling out of the medicine cabinet, a wet washcloth on the floor, and her father’s black comb with a few white hairs on it. Grace began to clean up. She stuffed the cotton balls back into the now-bulging box, threw the washcloth in the hamper, and went back to the kitchen. But even when everything was put back in order, Grace could do nothing to obliterate the emptiness that remained.
She found a small, black WQXR tote bag still wrapped in plastic underneath the coat tree, like a forgotten present on Christmas morning. Her father’s maroon bathrobe was hanging in his closet next to his beige and pale gray button-down shirts. With its pointed shoulders and slouched back, the robe looked only slightly less inhabited than her father had in his hospital gown. She folded it neatly and placed it into the tote bag along with his corduroy slippers. Her mother’s supersize, clear-plastic makeup bag was too large to fit, so she put it with a pleated skirt, a pair of shoes, and sweater set into a plastic grocery bag.
Walking aimlessly around the apartment, Grace found herself pausing in front of her old bedroom. She went in and knelt down on the soft green carpeting. In the fifth grade, Grace had brought home two gerbils, which in a matter of weeks had multiplied to twenty-eight. The plastic cage, filled with cedar shavings, had toppled over one afternoon, sending the gerbils scampering across the kitchen floor, running behind the refrigerator and stove, never to be seen again. As Grace opened the drawers underneath her bed, she half-expected to find a scene straight out of Miss Bianca— her long-lost gerbils sitting on silver swings and having a tea party in a white pagoda.
Inside the deep double drawers were her possessions, although none of them were even vaguely familiar to her as she inspected them. She waited for the memories to kick in, as if somewhere encoded in the fibers of the clothes or the books there was preserved a strand of her former self.
As she rummaged through the drawers, Grace felt as if she were invading someone’s privacy. The things she was looking for were no longer there and never had been. They were the things she’d lost along the way—the twenty-eight gerbils, the calculator pen, the holes in her grandmother’s afghan, Laz, and herself. The things unrecoverable. The unopened drawers had once held out the possibility of recovery, and now that was lost, too. She thought about her father offering her tea biscuits from his hospital bed. She couldn’t bear to lose him also. She closed the drawers and lay down on the carpet. Then finally, the tears came, silent and streaming down her face.
THE CLOCK ON the blue nightstand read six-fifteen when she awoke. Still nearly three hours until she could go back to the hospital. She went into the guest bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. On the marble pedestal sink, there were candles and beauty products arranged in neat white baskets. There were even products pour hommes, in case a male guest needed a bit of freshening up.
She applied some alpha-hydroxy moisturizer with aloe to her face and dabbed chamomile gel on her noticeably puffy eyelids, convincing herself that she could see changes occurring right before her eyes. The urge to improve herself was hard to resist. Suddenly, her mother’s makeup kit held out a kind of promise. She got the bag and unzipped it, looking at the array of products with confusion. What looked like mascara turned out to be a mauve eye stick, the tube of what she thought was lipstick was actually cream blusher.
After she was finished, she looked like a character in a black-and-white movie that had been improperly colorized. She washed the makeup off her face and zipped up her mother’s makeup kit. It would always be a bag of tricks that required a proper magician.
The clock on the nightstand in her bedroom still read six-fifteen. She went into the kitchen and stared at the clock on the wall in disbelief. It was nearly ten-thirty. She pulled on an old pair of Levi’s she’d found in her closet, a light blue turtleneck sweater (slightly moth-eaten) from the top drawer of her dresser, and headed back to the hospital.
WHEN GRACE ENTERED her father’s hospital room, it was as if her mother had aged ten years from the night before. Her hair was pulled back in a short ponytail and she had raccoon eyes from lack of sleep combined with crying. Her father appeared to be asleep, but as soon as Grace walked in, he began speaking.
“Is that you, Grace?”
“Yes,” she answered, bending down to give him a kiss.
“So good of you to come.” His voice sounded weak.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Just fine. I should be home by tomorrow. Friday by the latest.”
“I brought you your slippers and a robe.” He reached his hand out to touch her on the arm. His eyelids began to flutter.
“I don’t know what I would do without you and Laz. And mother,” he added. “It was so nice of Laz to come this morning.”
“This morning?” Grace turned to her mother for verification. Her mother was leafing through the current issue of The New York Review of Books. She looked back at her father and saw that he’d drifted off again. Grace had expected that he would be groggy, but delusional was another thing altogether.
“Did you say something, honey?” her mother asked.
“Dad says Laz was here.”
“Oh, yes. I guess I just missed him. I went down to the cafeteria for a cup of tea. I tried to make a manicure appointment at Pinky’s, but they weren’t open yet.”
“What time?” Grace asked.
“Around six-fifteen,” her mother answered. “They really should have all-night manicurists.” Grace’s heart froze in concert with all the clocks.
“I thought visiting hours didn’t start until nine,” she said. For all she knew, Laz might have been there—but just as easily not. Grace understood that this was a time when her father would have needed Laz. At his most fragile, he needed to summon his family to his bedside. Her father could tolerate Laz’s absence at Scrabble games, just not when it came to heart attacks.
“The nurses must have let him sneak in,” her mother said matter-of-factly. “You know how he charms people.” Her father began to stir.
“He read me a chapter of that Oblomov book you two like so much,” he said, not missing a beat. He was able to drift seamlessly in and out of conversations—even consciousness—while listening to a particularly soporific Debussy piece at Avery Fisher Hall, during one of Grace’s mother’s lengthy and detailed accounts of her shopping expeditions, or at a lecture at the Ninety-second Street Y, and yet still remain completely engaged. It was a talent that now seemed that much more precious to Grace as he lay recuperating in a hospital bed. “He says I’ll be back on my feet way before that Oblomov guy gets out of his robe.”
Grace looked around. There was no book in sight, only a tattered issue of Reader’s Digest on the nightstand. She guessed that the drugs must still be in his system, but whether Laz had been there or not was not important. He was there now just as much as he had ever been.
Bert walked in the room carrying a huge basket of what Laz liked to call bon voyages fruit—apples, pears, and mangoes fit for Gulliver. On his head, Bert sported a dapper fedora, around his neck a silk scarf. He looked well rested and in good spirits, better than Grace had seen him since Francine’s departure. He placed the basket of fruit on a table by the window and waited for some sort of acknowledgment, which when received, he quickly brushed off.
“It’s the least I could do,” he said, reaching into his breast pocket and taking out a travel-size Scrabble board. Grace was convinced that in some other pocket he had a miniature twin edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. “Anyone up for a friendly game?” he asked, assuming it was a rhetorical question and proceeding to set up the board.
Grace walked over to the window and stared out over the tops of low buildings that were all the same generic tan or white brick. Soon her parents’ bu
ilding would blend in among the rest of them, distinguishable only by slight design variations and the street address marked on the awning.
“Can we entice you to join us?” Grace’s mother asked. The game was already in progress. Her father had a tile rack and was shuffling his letters, but Grace could detect the faraway look in his eyes. She recognized the tendency in herself, too, her mind evaporating into utter blankness. She, however, had not perfected the ability to remain engaged while also being elsewhere.
“I’m sorry, what did you ask me?” Grace said.
“Do you want to join us?” her mother asked again.
“I think I need to get some air,” Grace said.
GRACE WALKED AROUND the corner to Le Pain Quotidien, a restaurant with long, rough-hewn tables and French country decor. Almost all the patrons in the restaurant wore large hats, their faces hidden behind newspapers. She pulled up her sleeves and leaned on the table. When her pot of Earl Grey tea arrived, the bergamot smell reminded her of Chloe. She poured a cup. Some loose tea leaves swirled to the bottom. She looked for some sign in the pattern, but none appeared.
In Chicago, everything had seemed so simple. She recalled the sight of herself in the mirror at the thrift shop. For some reason, she pictured herself unpacking a car filled with her belongings in front of a Victorian row house on a snowy street in Wicker Park. It all seemed so real—everything from the lime-green Volkswagon bug to the fuzzy purple hat on her head, until she remembered her father in the dreary hospital bed. She felt she’d never have the courage to leave.
Owning up to the truth, which in Chicago had come to her surprisingly easily, now seemed impossible. But the idea that her own father had succumbed to the power of self-deception was a far more unsettling prospect. It was like leaving her father snared in a web while she held a pair of scissors in her hand. She understood the impulse to believe in the status quo. They all wanted Laz to be there. Even in his absence, he still existed for them, as if it were as simple as slipping into one of his dove-gray T-shirts and waiting for sleep. Her father would be expecting Laz to visit again. More than anything, she didn’t want him to be disappointed. Even if Laz had been there, it didn’t mean he would come again. She couldn’t protect her father forever. The best she could do was cushion the blow.
