Emergency Room (13 page)

Roo’s brief plan to run away from home evaporated. How pathetic. She couldn’t go anywhere. Mothers never got to go anywhere. Even if you were a drug addict and had AIDS, which meant you had two very consuming things to think about — your next fix and your death — you had to put your baby first and come to the Emergency Room.

Roo was even more jealous of Diana now — the way the black woman had comforted her.

Roo needed it more, she knew she did. Roo didn’t have a mother who intended to comfort her; she had a mother who was going to go on scolding her forever; making her pay every possible price for dumb judgment.

The male nurse carried the little AIDS baby back to the Pediatric ER. He kissed the tiny forehead over and over and crooned in that singsongy voice people always used with Roo’s twins. She had the odd thought that she would like to date a man like that. A man who sang to sick babies.

My babies aren’t sick, she thought. They don’t have AIDS. They’re here on a pretense.

The door closed behind the nurse and the sick baby, and Roo was aware of a deep relief within herself.

Her babies were beautiful and healthy and quick to learn new things. People loved to snuggle her babies, and they loved to sing to her babies, but not to comfort them in terrible illness. Because they were beautiful and healthy and quick.

Roo turned to look at her own children. She needed to see them, solid and safe and strong, the way they had been born and the way she was raising them.

I’m raising them!
thought Roo. I’ve pulled it off. It was stupid to get pregnant and it was even more stupid not to give the children up for adoption. But even so, stupid as I am, I’ve pulled it off.

She began remembering things — funny minutes, silly times, giggly afternoons, snuggly hours. Good things about these twins who were so relentlessly
there
.

All these memories swelled her heart in the short, short time it would take to swivel in her chair and see Callum and Valerie, asleep in their double stroller.

W
HEN THE CITY POLICE
, rather than the security guards, strode through the great glass doors, it was different. In this terrible heat, the cops nevertheless wore all their layers. Uniform piled on uniform, hips enlarged from leather belt, pistol, stick, radio, gloves, keys. Their suits were dyed a deeper, stronger blue, as if they were also deeper and stronger cops.

Hands splayed below their waists, like western sheriffs about to grab for guns, their eyes surveyed the room. People shrank down, trying to look invisible, or at least ordinary. They lifted magazines before their faces, or carefully studied the television on the wall, or decided it was time to concentrate on filing their nails.

The cops separated slightly, forming a net.

They knew who they wanted.

For a moment the dealers radiated insolence. They could get away with anything, always had.

But Dunk’s nerves clocked in, on the timer of his drug use. He could not meet the cops’ eyes without blinking too much. Then his muscles blinked, too, and he was standing there twitching, and knew his impotence, and hated the cops and himself and every witness in the room.

“N
OW, SIR,
”
SAID THE
police, trying to be relaxing and firm and in control.

Ridiculous. The person in control was the person whose gun was out. Dunk. He was back in control and he knew it and he loved it…and he waved it around.

It looked like a squirt gun.

But Anna Maria knew dealers, and this was a dealer who had become an addict. Not a good sales plan. She knew the odd staring blaze in his eyes, the off-center confusion that would make him do anything without warning. She knew the gun would not squirt water.

Anna Maria prayed to the Lord Jesus not to let José cry or throw his bottle again. She had had her chance to run and she had screwed up. Nothing could be done now.

The thing was not to move. Like a little animal when a hawk flies overhead, the thing was to freeze, and not be seen.

The cops were also frozen. They saw the flutter in Dunk’s brain and muscles and knew they were not dealing with sanity. Anna Maria saw the cops spreading their minds as well as their hands, trying to think about her and Yasmin and José and all the other kids in the Waiting Room at the same time they thought about armed dealers.

They didn’t call it “hopped up” for nothing. The man with the gun was hopping around, his wires crossed so that his feet moved whether he meant them to or not.

Dunk kicked the double stroller.

Cal slept on, but Val awakened with a scream. It was the kind of scream that makes parents crazy; the kind of scream that turns a cute kid into the most annoying, obnoxious creature alive.

Dunk’s nerves split like pieces of wire about to be spliced; he came apart at the sound of the screams and jerked Val out of the stroller to silence her.

The patients and families packed into the Waiting Room had a lot more to worry about now than just waiting. Waiting looked pretty good from here.

H
IS HANDS WERE TOO
full. He did not know what to do next and everybody knew it. He was going to drop something, either the baby or the gun. Or he was going to shoot somebody, either the baby or whoever else the gun happened to be pointing at. He wasn’t aiming. He was just holding.

The cops needed to give him choices, help him figure out what to do with those arms that were too full. “Now, sir,” said the police. “You don’t wanna mess with no baby. Babies are a pain. Let’s just put the baby back in the stroller and talk about this.”

The other dealer had sat down. Carefully. He was as afraid of the gun as everybody else. He held himself pointedly, like a rocket about to blast into space and leave this mess behind.

Dunk had no secure grip on anything — not the gun, not the baby, and certainly not himself. He was about as hopped up right now as the mother eating the cracker packages. Fear and adrenalin had pushed him even farther than the drugs.

The baby he held under his arm like a newspaper flopped back and forth. It never stopped screaming, its sweet little face all peeled back like an orange into one great shriek.

The police had to shout over the baby’s racket, just when they wanted to be all soothing and friendly.

“So, sir,” they yelled, as if Dunk deserved a title of respect, as if when they thought of Dunk, they thought “sir.”

Scum, thought Anna Maria. Very good thing Dunk had not grabbed José, who was a biter. If José had bitten a drug dealer, he would get shot.

The cute little teenage mother did not seem to fathom the situation. She got up from her toddler chair, and stood right between the pointed gun and the police. “May I have my baby please?” she said, like somebody from a suburb, like somebody wanting the grocery boy to get a can off a high shelf.

The gun and the hand holding it went back and forth as if Dunk were playing Ping-Pong. But it was no soft little white ball that would go bang.

The mother looked like a high school girl.

She dressed the way Anna Maria wanted to dress when she was in high school. She held out her arms as if she actually thought Dunk would just give her her baby back.

Dunk stepped back, and then stepped back again. Anybody would have shifted anyplace for him, but people were sitting down and had nowhere to go. He pressed up against the black woman whose son had the broken bone.

Any semblance of control and power had vanished. Whatever the drugs and the nervousness might be doing in Dunk’s system, they had turned him into total panic; total consuming panic.

“Now let’s not get all excited here,” said one of the cops. He was trying to keep his voice slow, but he had as much adrenalin pumping in him as the dealer, and his voice ripped as frantically across the room as the baby’s. “Let’s just not get ourselves all worked up.”

This was absurd. The cops and the dealers were so worked up now they were practically on the ceiling.

The cop edged forward. “You wanna let me hold the baby? How about you let me hold the baby?”

Yet again, Diana listened to somebody tell somebody else where to go. It seemed to be an Emergency Room favorite, this sentence, consigning people to hell. It struck Diana that the creep holding the baby, like the girl in CIU, already lived there.

The dialogue did not sound like anything in a movie. The cops forced themselves to back off physically. They were panting, as if they had been working out in the gym for hours, been on the StairMaster and the treadmill and lifted weights. All they had done was face a gun for a few seconds.

None of the cops did much. One of them actually took a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and opened a stick for himself, chewing noisily. “Want a stick of gum?” he said to the guy with the baby.

Gum? thought Diana incredulously.

The ploy worked, unfortunately, with the wrong person.

“I do,” said Yasmin, getting up.

Yasmin loved gum. She, too, walked right between the gun and the police. The cop gave the Juicy Fruit to her, smiling as if this was what he had had in mind. “Honey, you go sit over by the nurse, okay?”

A
NNA MARIA COULD TELL THE
cops hated having kids around. It terrified them that they could not protect the kids; that the most likely to get hurt, as always, were the smallest and weakest.

Yasmin went over by the nurse, where she was scooped up and removed. Good. Anna Maria’s only responsibility now was José. She was sorry about the baby girl, but Val was not her problem.

The police tried to talk the gunman into setting the baby down.

They tried to talk the young mother into backing off.

They tried to talk the dealer into getting his buddy to hand over the gun and the baby.

The other dealer claimed he’d never seen the guy in his life.

Dunk’s eyes, flared wide with terror, flew toward Anna Maria, and she realized that she was the only one in the room who could actually name him.

Well, she wasn’t dying that way.

In school tomorrow they had Art, and Anna Maria loved Art. She would take her crayon drawing in to show the Art teacher. He had promised they would make papier-mâché, and Anna Maria thought those were such pretty words: papier-mâché. What pretty things would they make out of papier-mâché?

Dunk began backing up again, waving his weapon.

He was going to get himself pinned in the narrow corridor at the back of the Waiting Room.

That was fine with Anna Maria. She would grab the stroller, go out the other way, grab Yasmin, and beat it for home.

The gun went off, tossing its hot shell back against the baby’s back while the bullet itself spun harmlessly across the room. The baby girl screamed horrifically when she felt the burn. The whole Waiting Room took this as a signal to start screaming, and the place erupted in howls of fear, one of which, Anna Maria was sure, was Dunk’s own scream.

But he had the baby, and nothing else mattered.

He leaped backward down the corridor, ripped open the door that said
STAIRS
and was gone. The police launched themselves after him, yelling into their walkie-talkies, bumping into each other and leaping over sprawled legs. As television went, it looked more like a football game than a cop show.

T
HE BULLET HAD GONE
into the wall.

The boy whose leg was broken said, “Wooo-oooo! Ma, let’s dig it out! I want it for a souvenir.”

“Boy, you crazy,” said his mother. She was fanning herself with exhaustion and relief that the gunman was out of the room. Her son hobbled over, disregarding his pain, and used his penknife to dig out the bullet.

“Don’t do that,” said a grumpy patient. “The police will need that for the trial.”

Street-smart people laughed. “Ain’t never gonna be no trial. That man, he got off before, he get off now.”

The young mother scooped up her remaining baby, staring at her little son with wonder; as if they had never met; as if the baby were some strange and wondrous creature from Mars.

The volunteer sat with her jaw hanging open, as if she had never seen anything like this in her life.

Anna Maria grabbed the stroller and beat it.

M
Y BABY GIRL, THOUGHT ROO.

She could not move. She could not even go to hold Cal.

I’m no good, she thought. A good mother would run after him, screaming and beating on him. A good mother would shoot him dead or break his kneecaps.

She tried to figure out who in this Waiting Room was a good mother. That addict, coming down, her whole body and mind collapsing into one big, trembling, chaotic mess? But who knew enough to know her baby needed a doctor? Was she a good mother?

No.

Nobody that far gone could be a good mother.

But she loves him, thought Roo.
She loves him.

Roo was swamped with needing love: needing to see it, needing to feel it. Needing to hold the two people on earth who loved her: Callum and Valerie.

I forgot that part of it, thought Roo. They love me. No matter how much they drive
me
crazy, I don’t drive
them
crazy. They go right on loving me. There is plenty of love in my house.

She found that she had peeled Cal out of the stroller, and draped him on her shoulder where he lay in that heavy clingy way that babies had, melding right onto Roo, his little hot cheeks one with her neck.

She found that she was sobbing, but not talking.

She found that the police were telling everybody to stay calm, especially her.

She found that the black woman was pulling her down. “Here, honey, here’s what we’ll do,” said the woman. “You hold your little one, and I’ll hold you, and we’ll wait, and I just know the other baby will be fine.” Roo lay deep inside the blessed comfort of somebody else’s hug. Somebody else’s unjudging love. “Just fine,” said the woman. Singsongy, crooning a lullabye. To Roo. “Ju-uu-st fine,” she repeated, rocking and comforting.