“Whatever it is, he passed out from the pain,” I said. “Please, how soon can he see a doctor?”
She smiled like she hated me and all of my kind. “We’ll try to get him seen as soon as we can.”
As gently as possible, I helped him settle back onto his improvised chaise lounge.
“Ty,” I said, “I’m going to get your ID and your insurance card out of your wallet, okay?”
His face was buried in his arm, his answer unintelligible.
I slid his wallet out of its niche in the back right pocket of his jeans. It was worn, brown leather, warm with his body heat.
“I’m looking in your wallet now, Ty.” I did not want to look in his wallet.
Pennsylvania driver’s license. Frayed Social Security card.
Photographs: A graduation portrait of a scowling, red-haired girl. Bogue, kneeling on a playing field in his football uniform.
A small stack of Ty’s business cards, printed with a recent, brooding publicity photo on one side, his contact info on the other.
Paper-clipped other business cards. Among them Peg’s, his manager Dave Silva’s, and assorted club and record label people.
Seventeen dollars.
Three guitar picks.
“Ty,” I asked, “where is your insurance card?”
He squirmed around on the plastic chairs, unable to get comfortable. He mumbled something.
“What?”
He put his arm over his face. “Don’t make me talk right now.”
“You don’t have health insurance?”
“Grace, I’m dying, and you’re yelling at me.”
“I’m sorry.” I stuffed everything but the license and Social Security card back into his wallet, hoping for his sake this was just a stomach bug. The admissions lady, looking grim, brought a clipboard over with a stack of papers for Ty to sign. Shortly after that we were called and I helped him walk slowly back to a curtained cubicle. A nurse handed me a hospital gown.
“Should he leave anything on?” I asked hopefully.
“Everything off,” she ordered.
I pulled off his sneaks and helped him take off his flannel shirt and black T-shirt.
“Let’s leave these on,” I said, of his mismatched black and gray socks.
He was shivering, hugging himself, eyes bleak with pain. I had only seen him cheerful or happily drunk. The way he looked now made me feel afraid.
“Grace,” he said, “I’m fucking freezing.”
“Let’s get the gown on.”
He stood slowly and I noted that, actually, he wasn’t as skinny as I’d thought. He had some biceps going on. And pecs. His nipples were the same pale pinkish terra-cotta color as his lips. I wasn’t staring. Just some flash observations.
I slid the gown up his arms and went around behind to tie it at his neck. The skin on his back was creamy pale but felt hot where my knuckles brushed his nape. He shuddered and I saw goose bumps rise. I went back around front.
He pushed the gown aside and fumbled with the fancy brass buckle on the beat-up Western belt he always wore. His fingers were shivering, like the rest of him. I pushed his hands out of the way and took hold of the buckle to figure out how to disengage it.
His breath, a small, laughing exhalation, stirred the hair on top of my head. I didn’t look up, much as I wanted to see that flash of humor in his eyes. I got the buckle undone and loosened the top button of his jeans. The hair trailing down his lower belly was the same reddish brown as the hair on his head. And apparently he was going commando. I stepped away to study a Heimlich maneuver poster while he took care of the rest.
I heard the jeans and heavy buckle hit the floor and the mattress creak.
“Fuck!” he said.
Ty finally settled on his left side, knees drawn up, eyes closed. I tucked the sheet and blanket around him and folded his jeans and shirts and stacked them neatly on a chair. Tucked the Converse away beneath the chair.
“I’m so cold.” His teeth were actually chattering. “Come sit next to me.”
I perched on the edge of the bed. He drew his thighs up firmly against my bum, hooked his left arm under my bent knees, and curled around me.
“Is this comfortable for you?” I asked.
He buried his face in my skirt.
“Ty, um, am I hurting you, sitting this close?”
The moist heat of his exhalations was seeping through the fabric, scalding my thigh. I was afraid there was going to be a big wet spot. I vaguely noted that his hair and skin tones looked great against my pink, beige, and brown paisley print. And my new mocha tights had runs in both knees, probably from when I knelt beside him on the concrete.
I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
He shivered again and I pulled the blanket over his shoulders and placed my left arm around his back, carefully cradling him.
His hair had grown out a lot. It moved in rich, rusty waves. I went ahead and touched it, pushed my fingers through the thick softness.
Ty turned his head and came up for air, sighed, and slept, on and off. More than two hours passed, during which I barely moved. By the time the doctor came in, every muscle was burning and I was desperate to pee.
She was a pretty intern, about my age, Indian-American. I moved to the chair and listened to him retell the whole story he’d told the nurse in triage.
The doctor pressed gently on his lower belly. Ty recoiled and said, loudly,
shit, fuck, motherfucker, son of a bitch, son of a fucking bitch, get away from me, I hate you,
etc.
“Right,” Dr. Pallava said. “We need to get a CT scan.”
I waited in the hall outside Radiology. A nurse with a kind face came out and told me to go back to the ER and get his clothes. He had acute appendicitis and they were calling a surgeon.
“He’s having surgery?”
“Yes, as soon as the doctor gets here. We want to get that appendix out before it ruptures.”
I stared at her.
“Get his things and meet me at the fifth-floor nurse’s station.” She gave me a gentle shove in the right direction.
When I got to the fifth floor, they told me the surgeon couldn’t get there till three o’clock.
“That’s more than two hours!” I said to the nice nurse.
“We’ll try to make him comfortable till then,” she said.
“But what if his appendix bursts?”
She patted me on the arm. “We hope that won’t happen.”
She took me to his room. He was in the bed nearest the door. I couldn’t see who was on the other side; the curtain was drawn. There was another nurse, an older man, putting an IV in his arm.
I piled all our stuff on the chair and sat on the bed and held his hand.
“I have a cute appendix,” he said.
“You would.”
“The doctor can’t come take it out till three.”
“I know. Let’s call your parents, and Bogue.”
“Yeah, get my phone, it’s in my jeans.”
I found the phone and brought it back to the bed.
The nurse finished inserting the IV and said, “I’ll be right back.”
“Hurry, man,” Ty said to the nurse. To me he said, “He’s going to give me morphine.”
“Good.” I wanted that desperate look in his eyes to go away.
He rested a weak hand on my shoulder. “Thank you for taking care of me.”
Tears came, surprising me. One rolled down my face before I got myself together. I wiped it away fast. “Of course.”
“I’ll be all right, darlin’.”
“Oh yes, I know.”
He laid his head back and closed his eyes. His hand slipped down and came to rest momentarily with his palm lightly cupping the side of my left breast. He was dangerously ill and still trying to cop a feel.
The nurse came back in and inserted a syringe into the IV line.
“Ty,” I said, “why did you come to walk the dogs? Why didn’t you just go to the hospital?”
“I don’t know. It
hurt
, Gracie. I came to you.”
I laid my hand over his. I didn’t know what to say.
His eyes opened wide, looked at me in surprise, and rolled back in his head.
“How’s that? Better?” the nurse asked.
“Unnnnnhhhhh,” Ty said blissfully.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” the nurse said.
Ty floated away. I stepped out in the hall to make calls. I scrolled through his phone book, found Bogue, and left him a message that Ty was going to be all right, but to come to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt ASAP.
Then, looking for his parents, I scrolled through numbers for Cathy, Celia, Cindy, Denita, Felicia, Gina, Giselle, Gita, Hannah, and Hosafeena (yeesh, his spelling) before coming to ICE: Mom.
I was impressed that he was that organized. I’d been meaning to reprogram my In Case of Emergency numbers with the ICE prefix and just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
I hit Send. Four rings, and a woman answered cheerfully. “Hi, son!”
“Hello, Mrs. Wilkie?”
Hesitation. “Yes?”
My heart was pounding, I was so nervous about how sick he was, and how to tell her without scaring her.
“I—my name is Grace Barnum, I’m a friend of Tyler’s.”
“Is he all right?”
“Well, I think he’s going to be, but he’s going to have to have his appendix taken out this afternoon.”
“Where is he?” Now she sounded steely.
“St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, on Tenth Avenue and West Fifty-ninth.” “What time is his surgery?”
“Three o’clock.”
“We’re leaving now, but we can’t get there by then.”
“No, I know. I’ll be here, and I’ll call you and tell you how it’s going.”
“Thank you. What did you say your name was?”
“Grace Barnum.”
“Grace, is Tyler able to speak with me?”
“Let me see. They gave him something for pain and he’s been a little loopy.”
I opened the door and peeked in at him. He was watching TV.
I went to the bed. “It’s your mom.”
He took the phone from me. “Hey, Mama! Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, great! Yeah. Okay, see ya. Oh, hey—when you come, can you bring me the shiny purple thing? From the front yard. I need it. You know, it sings? Yeah. It’s purple. Okay. See if you can find it.”
He gave me the phone and I stepped back out into the hall to speak further, but she had already hung up.
Just for kicks, I scrolled through his phone book and found Keely, after Jennifer. Good to know he was staying in touch, since she had knitted something for him. It showed gratitude. She was followed by Maria and Nancy. I wondered what they did for him?
I flipped the phone shut. Grace the Stalker. Not my finest moment.
The surgeon finally arrived. He was tall and blond and reminded me of a TV weatherman. He talked to Ty for a few minutes, described the surgical procedure. It would be laparoscopic, and didn’t sound all that bad. I just wanted them to hurry.
The morphine seemed to have worn off some. He was in pain again and a lot more lucid. I gave him a careful hug.
“Will you be here when I come back?”
“Of course! I’ll be right here, the whole time.”
“Give me a kiss, Grace. It might be my last.”
I leaned over again and pressed my lips against his for a few seconds.
“You’re going to be all right,” I said firmly.
They started rolling him out of the room.
“Ty?”
“Yeah?”
I didn’t want to scare him, but I needed to know: “What’s your favorite song?”
“ ‘Maybe I’m Amazed.’ I’ll play it for you.”
Tyler’s first word after the operation was “OW!”
The surgeon came in and told us that the appendix came out just in time—it was gangrenous and “about one minute away from exploding.”
I thanked him. While the nurse gave Ty a shot of Demerol, I called his mom and told her he was in recovery and doing fine.
“We just arrived,” she said. They must have driven a hundred miles per hour from eastern Pennsylvania.
Moments later they were waiting at the door of his room watching me approach, a man and a woman in faded jeans and tees, probably in their mid-fifties. She was lovely in a Nordic way, tall, no makeup, her graying blond hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. He had a beard and graying brown hair, longer than hers.
I held out my hand. “Hello, I’m Grace Barnum.”
Ty’s mom pulled my hand until I was in her arms. She smelled like rosemary, perhaps from puttering in their garden. She kissed my cheek and let me go and smiled at me. “Grace Barnum, thank you.”
“Oh, no problem!”
“I’m Jean, and this is Nathan.” I shook his hand and he gave me a gruff hello.
“He’s doing great,” I said. “They’re going to bring him up here in a few minutes.”
“I’m gonna go have a cigarette,” Nathan said. “Be right back.”
He gave me the package he was carrying. It was the weight and shape of a basketball, wrapped in several plastic grocery bags.