Authors: Ann Patchett
“I really hate hospitals,” Kenya said.
“Everybody hates hospitals but that doesn’t mean they just stand outside all night.” The truth was that Teddy had no issue with this hospital at all. This was not the place where his mother died. This was not the place they took Uncle Sullivan when he needed Lasix.
No one he had ever loved had been sick at Mount Auburn. He thought the place was fi ne.
Doyle wasn’t in the waiting room and so they went to the main lobby where there was a coffee shop with a wide bar trimmed in chrome. They ordered hot chocolate in big Styrofoam cups and brought it back downstairs to sit and wait. Kenya was wearing thick white tights and running shoes with her winter coat. She stretched out her long thin legs as far as she could and then slumped back in her chair taking small, quiet sips of her chocolate. Then she took off her mother’s green hat and held it in her lap.
“Isn’t there somebody you ought to call?” Teddy said. “Somebody who could come and get you?”
“I’m going to stay here,” she said. Her eyes went around the room. She was looking at the sick people, the ones who were waiting to be seen and the miserable people who were waiting to hear the news about somebody else. Emergency-room waiting rooms were never nice like the ones they had in other parts of the hospital. Those were for the people whose families were already checked in and had a room. This place made its message clear: Don’t get too comfortable. You’re only passing through.
“Shouldn’t you call your dad?”
“Nope,” she said.
Teddy took a sip of his chocolate and then tried again. “Then who are we going to call?”
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Kenya shook her head. “Nobody. I’m going to stay with my mom.”
“I don’t think they’ll let you,” he said tentatively. “You can’t sleep out here.”
“I’ll sleep in the bed with her. I sleep with her at home.” It wasn’t Teddy’s place to tell the child what she could and couldn’t do, but he didn’t want her to be disappointed either. Any system that wouldn’t let her ride in the back of the ambulance surely wasn’t about to let her sleep in the hospital bed alongside her mother. “You really may not be able to.” He was looking right at her. Another ambulance had just come in and there was a great flurry of activity around the electric doors, so many people coming in and out that for awhile they just stayed open, letting in all the cold air. They brought a very old woman into the hallway on a gurney. She was hardly any bigger than Kenya but she was white, dead white, her hands and blanket and thin white braid. Her blue eyes swept past them and did not see them there.
“Do you have a friend from school you can call?”
“It’s too late,” she said, pointing up to the clock on the wall. Half past ten. “Everybody’s already in bed.”
“You can wake somebody up. Nobody’s going to mind.”
“They aren’t going to make me leave.”
“But what if they do?”
Kenya looked at him for a minute, weighing out the situation, weighing out him. “If they make me leave I’ll go home with you.” Now there was a thought, a little girl climbing heavily up the staircase to Sullivan’s empty room. Did you brush your teeth? Say your prayers? “You don’t know us,” Teddy said. “I don’t think your mother would let you.”
Kenya was never allowed to speak to the Doyles, or speak about the Doyles, but if it was a real emergency, then where else would r u n
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she go? And if this wasn’t a real emergency then what was? “I know she’d say it was fi ne.”
Teddy had planned to try again but his father came through a swinging door beside the nurses’ station that said NO ENTRANCE in big red letters. He was talking to a doctor who was wearing a lab coat over his blue scrubs, and when they looked up and saw Teddy and Kenya sitting there they both let their sentences end in the middle of a word. Doyle introduced them to Dr. Ball. Teddy started to stand up, but then he thought better of it and sat back down again.
If he stood up then everyone would be too tall. Doyle and the doctor both had such serious looks on their faces that for one awful minute Teddy wondered if they were coming out to tell this child who had no place to go for the night that her mother was dead.
Kenya asked the doctor if her mother was fi ne.
“I don’t imagine she’s feeling well at all right now,” he said. He was what some people would call a dark-skinned man, but he wasn’t black. Kenya wasn’t sure where he was from, India or Pakistan, maybe Lebanon. He pronounced each of his words very, very clearly and made every one of them beautiful regardless of what he was saying. “It is a terrible thing to be hit by a car.”
“Yes,” Kenya said. “I saw it.”
“And so you know,” he said.
“But she’ll be okay,” Teddy said, because to him this was the piece of information that needed to be set out right away.
Dr. Ball looked down at the file in his hand as if to search for that particular piece of information. “She has broken her hip—”
“The car hit her on her side first,” Kenya said, though she ought not to have interrupted.
“Yes, exactly. For that she will require surgery. It will be performed in the morning. Dr. Zhang is an excellent surgeon. You may have great confidence in him. Also she has a broken rib, a fractured a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 60
left wrist, and a concussion. She has been through a great ordeal, your mother.”
“But she will be okay.” This time Teddy spaced the words out ever so slightly, making his voice crisp and distinct like the doctor’s.
The doctor gave Teddy a hard look, perhaps because he thought he was being mimicked. “For someone who has been hit by a car I would say she is a promising case.”
Kenya smiled, showing her straight white teeth. None of them had seen her smile before and each was surprised by the charm she had, by what an exceptionally pretty little girl she was with all those teeth to light up her face. “And Tip?” Kenya asked charitably.
“It is a very bad sprain with a slight fracture to the fi bula.” The doctor shut his file now and smiled back at the girl. “It seems the car went right over his ankle. Clearly the boy has iron bones.”
“It was a huge car,” Kenya said.
“Exactly,” the doctor said. When Teddy asked if his brother would have to spend the night, the doctor said they would fi nd the proper boot for him to wear and let him go.
“And my mother?”
“Your mother we are planning to keep, but you may come and see her before you go home.”
“That’s good,” Doyle said, and patted Kenya on the shoulder.
“You go back and see your mother and I’ll check on Tip.”
“We have given her something for her pain after all the X-rays.
I’m afraid she will be sleeping now.”
“I can see her sleeping,” Kenya said.
Dr. Ball nodded and Teddy and Doyle and Kenya followed behind. It was even colder in the back than it was by the door. The nurses in their brightly colored jackets did not look up from their stacks of paperwork when they passed by the desk. The emergency room had the feeling of a busy bus station, everyone was restr u n
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less, waiting to be taken on to some other place or let go. There were people waiting in the halls on gurneys. They stared up at the ceiling or kept their eyes closed. The old woman with the blue eyes was there and she looked at Kenya. “Where’s Jeannie?” she said, or at least that’s what Kenya thought she said. It was very hard to hear her.
“I don’t know.” Kenya reached out to pet the old woman’s hand.
She was not afraid of very old people the way most children were.
Her mother worked with very old people just like this and some days she took Kenya along. The woman’s skin was cool and dry and she could feel all the little bones of her fingers so easily. Teddy put his hand against Kenya’s back and steered her away.
“Here,” Dr. Ball said, and Teddy and Doyle turned into the fi rst room to see Tip, while Kenya went farther down the hall with the doctor to find her mother.
“So does this mean you won’t be going back to work tonight, or are we going to drop you off on the front steps of the museum and let you hobble in?” Teddy said.
“Can you believe I was run over by a car?” Tip was improbably giddy, glad about everything: glad to be warm again, glad not to be dead, not crushed, glad that his brother was there, and his father. If they moved one step closer in this tiny space he could have touched them.
Teddy shook his head. “Not nearly as run over as some other people around here. Does it hurt?”
Tip looked down at his ankle. It was wrapped in a white bandage and lifted up on two foam blocks while he waited for his boot cast.
His jeans had been cut back to the knee and he was sorry about this.
He didn’t like the waste. “I have been so thoroughly medicated I could probably go dancing right now.”
“Which is saying something,” Teddy said.
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Doyle dropped himself down in a plastic chair beside the narrow hospital bed. He didn’t listen to the boys, who gave the evening a tone of adventure. A sudden, sickening bout of vertigo washed over him. The room tipped forward, then left, then to the back. Doyle let his head fall forward into his hands. There was an awful tightness in his throat and a tremor came up through his shoulders. Why was it now, more than an hour later, that all of this was on him? How was it possible that this woman, a stranger, could act so quickly when it took him more than an hour to cry over what he himself might have lost? If Doyle had her instincts he would be the one flat on his back now, waiting for surgery.
“Oh, Da, stop,” Tip said. “Look, I’m fine. I was barely run over at all.”
He still had the wallet in his lap. Doyle took off his glasses and wiped at his eyes, but now that he was crying he found it diffi cult to stop. It was embarrassing. He was grateful that it hadn’t happened out in the waiting room in front of the girl. Teddy was standing right up beside him, leaning into him slightly the way a dog will lean, as reassurance. Doyle would have been glad to keep them there, the three of them just like this, no arguing, no danger unless it was a methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
. Doyle had read too much about those.
“Tell me about the woman, the girl’s mother,” Tip said, hoping to change the conversation. He didn’t want to think of how this had started: his walking away, his raising his voice to his father for the right to get back to the basement of the MCZ, some poor woman getting hit by that behemoth because he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. “Is she all right?”
“She has a broken hip,” Doyle said, clearing his throat. He found a handkerchief in his pocket. “I think that’s the worst of it.
There was a broken rib, a slight concussion, something else, I can’t r u n
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remember. The doctor says she’ll have surgery in the morning.”
“A fish wouldn’t have done that for you,” Teddy said.
Tip shrugged, looking dreamy in his light coating of Demerol.
“The question is, would I have done it for a fi sh?”
“You would.”
“I don’t know if I would have done it for anyone,” Tip said. “I might have wished I had in retrospect, but I don’t think I could have gone from thought to action so quickly. Or maybe she didn’t have time to think. It all happened so fast.”
“I would have pushed you,” Teddy said. “So would Da.” Tip raised up awkwardly on one elbow and smiled at his brother.
“Ah,” he said, “but you didn’t.”
“I didn’t see the car,” Doyle said. And yet he must have. Even in the snow he would have seen the headlights. He tried to remember the moment. He wanted Tip to come to the party at the Simonses’
house. Tip was walking away. They were arguing. The snow was coming down so hard. Doyle squinted his eyes. He did not see the lights behind his son. All of a sudden he felt quite certain that there were no lights. The driver did not have his lights on. For the rest of his life he would tell himself this and it would help to ease his grief.
“The little girl was very brave, I thought,” Tip said.
Teddy slid his back down along the wall until he was sitting on his heels. There wasn’t another chair in the room as it wasn’t meant to hold three people anyway. “I’m not sure she has anyplace to go.
She said she didn’t have anyone she wanted to call. If they won’t let her sleep here she said she wants to come home with us.”
“I don’t think they’d let us walk out of here with a random little girl,” Doyle said.
“Not a random little white girl,” Tip said from his hospital bed.
“But a random little black girl? I don’t think anyone’s going to stop us at the door.”
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Doyle stared at his second son. “Why would you even say such a thing?”
Tip turned his empty palm up towards the ceiling. He meant no harm whatsoever. “Because it’s true. When will we get out of here, midnight? One? I’m just saying there probably isn’t a child-welfare agent parked at the front door of the emergency room. The ambulance driver was happy to turn her over to us, as were the cops. If she wanted to come with us I don’t think anyone would stop her.”
“I’d stop her,” Doyle said, lowering his voice. “We can’t bring home a child we don’t even know.”
“You’ve done it before,” Tip said.
“If she really doesn’t have anyplace else to go, we might just have to take her,” Teddy said.
Doyle shook his head. “It wouldn’t be right.” Tip moved his toes slightly but it hurt him. “More right than leaving her in the waiting room to work it out for herself, I suspect.
We do owe her a favor.”
“Then it may be right but it wouldn’t be legal. I don’t mean it wouldn’t be legal the way double parking isn’t legal. Walking out with somebody else’s child is kidnapping, even if there’s no one at the door who wants to stop you.”
Neither Teddy nor Tip said anything to that, and so they con-ceded the point to their father. Doyle slid the rubber bands off either end of the wallet and looked at the driver’s license. “Tennessee Alice Moser. Five feet seven inches tall, born September 16th, 1966.
Lives in Roxbury.”