Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  Breathless after a few minutes, and awed by her energy, I sat down on the floor, and she charged into my lap. It wasn’t until she moved close enough for me to smell her talcum-y little body that I realized I had actually forgotten about Juno for a few minutes, even while I was in her own home, playing with her dog.

  But what was I supposed to do next? Shit! I’d been so focused on Juno’s puppy that I’d forgotten to call Stefan—or had I been delaying the moment when I had to launch into recounting what I’d seen?

  I scooped Turandot into my arms, carried her to the

  living-room couch, and sat next to the phone on the lamp table. Whether she was allowed up on the couch or not didn’t seem to matter now. I took up the receiver and dialed home.

  “Juno was in a car accident,” I told Stefan without

  preamble. I explained what happened, where she was and where I was, feeling numb again.

  “Nick, do you want me to come over or meet you at the emergency room on campus?”

  “I don’t know what to do about her dog. I don’t think we can take her with us—and if we did, I don’t even know where her collar and leash would be.”

  “Where was the dog when you got there?”

  “Some kind of crate in the bedroom.”

  “Put it back.”

  “But for how long? What if Juno has to stay at the

  emergency room for a day or two? Won’t her dog get hungry and need to go out again?”

  Stefan mulled that over at the other end.

  “I can come over and watch the dog until we know

  what’s happening.”

  I sighed out a “Thanks” and gave him the address and

  directions.

  After I hung up, I got acquainted with Turandot, looking into her eyes, feeling how surprisingly soft her thick white coat was, letting her sniff my hands, and trying hard to think positively about Juno’s condition. Seeing Juno loaded onto a stretcher and hoisted into an ambulance had been a profound shock. She was so vibrant, so dynamic, that being reduced to immobility had been more than bizarre—it had frightened me.

  Much more so than Sharon, Juno was not a person I’d

  associate with hospitalization.

  Sitting there waiting for Stefan, scratching Turandot’s furry neck and ears while she closed her eyes in mute ecstasy, I thought of lines from the opening and closing of Carmina Burana, about the wheel of fortune turning and melting both poverty and power as the sun melted ice. When I was younger and studying medieval and Renaissance literature in college, the whole idea of fortune turning on people without any warning had struck me as quaint and mildly superstitious, but now that I was middle-aged, I thought that bleak

  worldview was as accurate as any other. Hadn’t I seen proof of the world’s sudden, crazy mutability over and over in my own life, and Stefan’s?

  Turandot rolled over in my lap, legs up, tongue lolling, and I scratched her belly. I was flattered that Turandot seemed to accept me so readily, though I could imagine my parents, who disliked dogs, deflating my pride by saying that there was no reason for this dog not to like me since I’d satisfied some of her basic needs right away.

  And I mused over the murkiness of Stefan coming over

  to take care of Juno’s dog while I went to stand by her hospital bed. It was not quite deception, but it was close enough to unnerve me. Yet how could I change what had happened? The SUV that had bashed into Juno’s car had hit me, too, in a way. I was more than just a witness to the accident, I was implicated, connected, involved. Yet the event was already as blurry to me as the red stoplights had become in town—a jumble of impressions more than a clear set of details.

  When Stefan arrived in under ten minutes, I realized it had been barely half an hour since the doors had closed on Juno and her ambulance had shrilled off from behind Parker Hall. So half of that so-called “golden hour” was gone.

  “Are you okay?” Stefan asked, while Turandot sniffed at his shoes and seemed to wait for the tribute of busy hands.

  Stefan kneeled down and stroked her back, while glancing up at me with concern.

  “I feel stunned. I was right there, almost.”

  “It could have been you,” he said flatly, standing up with Turandot wriggling in his arms. She licked his chin, and he agilely slipped off his dark green corduroy car coat, tossed it onto a chair with his free hand.

  “I didn’t think of that. I just feel guilty.”

  “Why? How’s it your fault?” Turandot wriggled in

  response to his raised voice, and he set the dog down; she headed for the kitchen. Stefan waited for my response.

  “I know it’s not rational. I feel helpless.” I expected him to say something cynical about how life was always like that if you took your blinders off, but he didn’t. He just nodded, and surprised me by saying, “Give Juno my love, and call me as soon as you know how she is.” He handed me my cell phone. “It was in the kitchen,” he said, and he gave me a kind of ceremonial hug as if I were heading into a hazardous encounter.

  “What will you do while I’m at the ER?”

  “Interview the pooch, and read.” He fished his copy of The Betrothed out from his coat and brandished it at me.

  “There’s a lot more skullduggery left.”

  I drove recklessly back to campus, not caring if I was stopped, and headed south on Parker Road, one of the main avenues on campus, down to where the Medical School’s strangely castle-like building loomed over enormous fields of experimental crops. It was a perfect, eerie setting just right for an X-Files episode. Though constructed in the 1980s, the sprawling glass and concrete structure had a weirdly crenellated roof, perhaps to remind people of the ceaseless battle against disease. The recent addition of a high-tech glistening emergency room right out of Gattaca did nothing to humanize or soften the building.

  I pulled into the side parking lot, lined with scraggly new maples, where a huge red neon sign advertised EMERGENCIES

  as if luring people into a diner. There were hardly any cars in sight. Immediately to the right of the double electronic doors —framed in polished granite—several of those plastic boards with the hand grips leaned up against the dark gray concrete.

  One of them looked bloody. High above the doors were twin security cameras pointed at me and the lot behind me. I felt somehow on the defensive, even though I had a totally legitimate reason for being there.

  As the automatic doors slid open, I entered a small azure-floored, pale-blue-walled corridor. I was stopped by a uniformed guard standing outside a glass-walled cubicle glutted with security monitors, who moved forward as if ready to take me down should I attempt to go any farther without permission. Jeez, was there that much threat of infiltration on campus?

  Ahead of me were more sliding glass doors with a big

  red ST OP: NO ADMIT T ANCE sign. To the right of the doors was a keypad, and behind them stretched a gleaming corridor lined with wheelchairs and wheeled wire shelving units filled with what looked like medical supplies. The guard looked as big and mean as a bouncer, and seemed unimpressed when I said I was there to check on a patient.

  “Name?”

  The atmosphere felt more than sterile, it was forbidding and a bit anxiety-provoking—as if there wasn’t enough oxygen in the small space, made smaller by the guard’s broad shoulders, huge chest, and dead-end blue eyes. Those lungs probably sucked in twice what a normal person breathed. If I stood there too long, would I pass out?

  Nervously, I said, “I’m Nick Hoffman, I teach in—”

  “Not your name.” I could hear him add a silent “moron.”

  “I meant the patient’s name.”

  I told him, and he called inside, apparently disappointed that I wasn’t inventing a reason to sneak in and steal gauze for a Mummy party. He pointed to my right, and someone buzzed me into a small square waiting room like any you’d find at a doctor’s office, only with even less personality. It was filled with vaguely Scandinavian-style chai
rs and magazine tables, all of which looked unappealing, unwelcoming in the brutal fluorescent light. The royal blue carpet and blue plaid vinyl wallpaper looked new and as deliberately, expensively unimaginative as the paint-by-numbers seascapes framed in chrome. I suppose it was all meant to reassure you, keep you from panicking. It made me feel hemmed in.

  “Juno Dromgoole,” I said to the slim redheaded

  receptionist seated at a teaming desk behind a glass window.

  “Is she okay?” Behind her stretched a jumble of counters and chairs and shelves. I saw nurses bustling in and out of doorways, but I was alone in the waiting room, which had another door to the right of the window with a keypad for entrance. Why wasn’t there a retinal scan? I wondered.

  “I don’t think they’re done with X rays yet. You’ll have to wait.” Unlike the guard, her voice was warm, but it somehow managed to fend me off as efficiently as the

  guard’s stance or the glass windows she sat behind. It was an official voice that drew clear limits—the voice of someone who had been yelled at, pleaded with, probably threatened.

  Angular and bland, she held herself back from the desk even as she claimed it.

  I sunk into a completely uncomfortable chair and added more nervous energy to a room that must have been soaked with it. Two more security cameras took in my every

  movement. I couldn’t imagine relaxing enough to disappear into any of the Time or Newsweek magazines around me, so I called Stefan on his cell phone.

  “No news yet,” I said. “They’re still doing X rays.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I could feel Stefan hesitating, and then he said, “I like Juno’s dog a lot. It doesn’t look like a poodle or like one of those bichon frises. It seems sturdier. More solid.”

  “A man’s dog.”

  “Well—”

  “A small man’s dog? No, a man’s small dog.”

  “Better.”

  I smiled and told Stefan I’d call back.

  “Why? You have something better to do than talk to me?

  You need both hands free to chew your fingernails?”

  “Not really. But it costs so much.” That was the voice of my parents, who had plenty of money for phone calls (and anything else) but cautioned against spending too much anyway. Perhaps it was also some kind of old European aversion to the impersonality of the phone, I sometimes thought.

  “It’s not expensive with the new plan,” he reminded me.

  “We’re both still inside our hundred free minutes. You can even read me to sleep if you want.”

  I laughed, and the receptionist coughed as if to remind me this was not a fun house.

  “Sorry,” I said to her, and explained sotto voce to Stefan what I was apologizing for.

  “So you like Turandot?”

  “I thought Juno would have a dog with leopard-print booties or something like that, or even dyed with leopard spots. I’m relieved it’s just white.”

  “But it has a nice personality,” I said.

  “Sure,” Stefan teased. “We’re guests. She’s on her best behavior.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Okay, it’s a nice dog. Do I want a dog? I don’t know.”

  He sounded a bit testy.

  “If you wanted a dog, would you want one like Juno’s?”

  Stefan quoted our favorite play, The Importance of Being Earnest: “Well, that is clearly a metaphysical question and as such has no relation to the facts of life as we know them.”

  “I’ll call that a qualified yes.”

  “You know,” he said, his voice suddenly serious. “I love you.”

  “What? Why now?”

  “Because you’re so worried about Juno. You’re a good

  friend.”

  If only it were that simple!

  “Call me when you know how she is.”

  I hung up, and felt instantly transported to the nearby hospital where we had been waiting for Sharon’s endless surgery to be over. People always say there are scenes they’ll never forget, but I wondered if it wasn’t the other way around, if when something horrible happens to you it can take over, and it remembers you, remembers to haunt and stalk you—when you might expect it to, and when you might not.

  Maybe that’s what ghosts are—the return of our worst

  memories in a perverse disguise that makes them harder to recognize, but no less frightening.

  I didn’t know what to do. The room I was in filled me with unease, but I couldn’t block it out; I felt like Byron’s Manfred: “These eyes but close to look within.” If only I knew how to meditate.… Why hadn’t we quit our jobs and forged new identities for ourselves? None of this would have happened, and we would be free.

  Freedom, the great American obsession. I could imagine my parents smiling with kind cynicism at my thoughts. And D. H. Lawrence had seen it with perfect clarity—all this American shouting for freedom was nothing more than “a rattling of chains,” he said. And who the hell did I think I was, anyway, to imagine I could change my life? Lawrence had also said that none of us are ever “the marvelous deciders and choosers we think we are.”

  The door to the right of the secretary swung open, and instantly the whole room shifted. The round-faced, freckled, chunky, red-bearded doctor wearing jeans and T-shirt under his white coat approached me with his hand out. Smiling broadly, he had his eyes slightly hooded and his face up as if taking in glorious music or sunshine. If the receptionist was skilled at keeping people away, this fiftyish man brought them close and loved doing so. His handshake was as hearty and comforting as his soothing tenor voice, and I felt instantly at ease with him.

  “Dr. Vinciguerra,” he said. I read his chest pocket tag: his first name was Lars-Erik, though he didn’t look

  particularly Scandinavian—or Italian, for that matter. He gestured to a seat, and we sat side by side.

  “How is she?”

  He crossed his legs and nodded without making me feel he’d heard that same question thousands of times. We could have been sitting in a park, about to discuss some fascinating movie we’d both seen. Looking into his gentle eyes, I thought I would not be embarrassed to cry in front of him, or lose control, which conversely made me certain that I wouldn’t.

  Some steely-eyed robot would have thrown my emotions into higher relief and made them more volatile.

  “I’ll take you back in a few minutes. She’ll be okay—it’s not too bad,” he said. “Because her breathing was difficult, we had to make sure there were no fractures. She’s got some bruised ribs, and she’s going to be in pain. We’re prescribing Motrin and Vicodin—that’s a narcotic to help her sleep.” He spoke clearly but conversationally, without making me feel he was dumbing down his assessment of Juno’s condition.

  “Does she stay here?”

  “No—we can release her soon.”

  “What do we do?”

  “It’ll be important to observe her for twelve hours for any changes, and a few times a day she’ll have to take nice deep breaths to expand her lungs.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s always the danger of pneumonia after this kind of injury.”

  “Is she being wrapped up or something? I mean, her

  ribs?”

  He smiled. “We don’t tape ribs anymore—it’s too

  constricting.”

  I took some nice deep breaths myself, feeling a bit

  lightheaded with relief. Dr. Vinciguerra reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “All right?”

  I nodded.

  “She’s lucky. Please don’t think I’m bragging, but we have some of the best emergency care in the country here.”

  “At SUM?”

  He grinned. “In Michigan. This is the home of

  emergency medicine as a specialty. This is where it first took off, well, here and Ohio.” He seemed honestly proud, and I relaxed even more, suddenly remembering a news report about how people with
medical emergencies in smaller cities did better after a 911 call because there was so much less traffic to slow ambulances down.

  “Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Good—let’s go back.” He hadn’t asked what my

  relationship was to Juno but seemed to assume it was close— or maybe nowadays no one asked? He rose and tapped out a quick code on the keypad, opened the door, and led me through the corridor-like area behind the receptionist to an enormous high-ceilinged room with operating lights and equipment and supplies bristling in every corner. I felt overwhelmed until I focused on pale-faced Juno lying on a hospital bed, wearing a blue papery-looking gown covered with white and blue cornflowers, oxygen plugs still in her nose, and cords running from under the chest of her hospital gown to a black monitor on the wall above her head. There were numbers and two red lines running across the monitor— one in peaks, the other in waves. As I approached her bed, Juno seemed very frail until she snarled, “These fuckers cut off my clothes!”

  “With possible injuries to the chest, we can’t waste any time,” the doctor explained amicably to me and to her, but they’d clearly had this exchange more than once already.

  “And we try cutting along the seams so they can be repaired.”

  “Am I supposed to go home in tatters?” Juno wailed.

  I moved to her bed and looked down at her contorted,

  exhausted face. “Juno,” I said softly. “You’ll be going home in one piece. You’re not badly hurt.” I wanted to lean over and stroke her face, something, to calm her down.

  “Then why am I in agony!?”

  I turned to Dr. Vinciguerra, who assured me she’d be

  feeling much better soon. “We’ve given her a shot, and it should be taking effect soon. Demerol and Phenergan. It’ll last for about four to six hours, and she’ll be woozy. We’re just waiting for her reaction to the shot. Did you bring her some clothes?” He must have assumed I lived with her. I shrugged helplessly, and told Juno I needed to go back to her place.

  “What do you want me to bring back for you?”