Hothouse (15 page)

I would say I am, yes, is the answer that feels honest right now, so I say it.

“I would say I am, yes.”

“More importantly though, would
I
say you are?” the nurse asks. “Because, no offense, but you are not exactly conducting yourself in the manner of someone who is supposed to be here. Again, I mean no offense, but we are trained to take note of this kind of thing.”

Trained pretty well, it occurs to me. I feel weirdly, distantly reassured by this, by the nurse's protecting the patient from the likes of me.

I don't feel like jousting with her, don't feel capable of it, anyway.

“Can't I go in? For even just a minute?”

She turns her head, craning toward Mrs. Kotsopolis's door, steps back, looks in the small dark window. I inch up and peek over her shoulder.

I see her. That is her, I recognize. I see her eyes, and I swear she is looking right at me.

“What are you doing?” the nurse says when she swings back around to catch me.

“Just … having a look in, like you were.”

“Well, I'm
supposed
to have a look in. I work here. You don't work here, and you are not, I believe, a family member, so I think I'll have to ask you to leave and let Mrs. Kotsopolis get her rest.”

“She's not all burnt up,” I say, maybe too brightly.

“No,” the nurse says, “it was more about the smoke than the fire … and who
are
you?”

“Does that mean you are thinking of letting me in?” I ask.

“That means I'm thinking of calling security,” she answers.

Reflexively, I stick out both hands, offering the stuffed blue cat and the swirly shells of Belgian chocolate.

“I don't often get bribes,” she says with a skeptical grin.

“Can you see she gets these?” I ask.

She takes them, holds them like you would if you were going to keep them. I know she isn't.

“Who're they from?”

“Russell,” I say. “A friend of a friend.”

A friend. Of a friend.

I was afraid to tell somebody I was my father's son.

I back away, and the nurse eyes me suspiciously. Suspicious, but not mean.

I head back down, down the corridor the way I came, and down the stairs. I stop when I hit the landing, the one with the setup for County Hospital Radio.

Requests, right. They take requests. They
welcome
requests.

I'm feeling pretty much like an insider at this point as I navigate the corridors of the place, my request form in my hand and my head down so as not to attract attention. Most people around here seem to have badges.

I knock gently at the door that says it's the radio station. There is a pause long enough to cause me to knock again, and a bit louder.

“What are you doing here?” asks the face that is just about visible in the doorway.

“I have a request.”

“There are request boxes for that. Nobody comes here for that.”

He's thin and middle-aged, looks slightly nervous, slightly irritated, like he would prefer to be alone with his music and quiet talk.

“You do interviews, though, right?”

“Technically, yes. We don't tend to get celebrities or news makers through here often. Or ever, really.”

“Would you like to interview me, then?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I'm something like a news maker, you could say.”

“What news did you make?”

“I didn't make any myself, actually. Yet, anyway; I suppose I might someday. It was my dad who made the news.”

He sighs. I wouldn't say he was excited, quite, at the prospect before, but he is deflated now.

“Maybe you should send your dad down, then.”

“Can't. He's dead.”

That has a lot of power, when you say that to people. You can change tones and gears and temperature when you bring that into a conversation.

“I'm sorry. Jeez, I am sorry. Can I ask, is that how he made the news?”

I am anxious to tell this man that I am my father's son.

“Yes. But he made even more news after he died. You know about the fire? The one that took the two firefighters? And then the—”

“Holy smokes,” he says, opening the door wider and pawing my shoulder, “get in here.”

He calls himself Middleman Mike. Midday, midweek, man in the middle putting you together with great music.

There is a bank of long sliding knobs on a mixer, on a table. Middleman Mike slides one down and another one up and a red light goes on above his head as the music settles down.

“Folks, that was Shifty with a song that never fails to brighten things up, ‘Starry-Eyed Surprise,' dedicated to Roy from Lesley. She says, ‘Happy anniversary, love. We are going to get better and have many more starry-eyed surprises together.' Well, people, how lovely is that? Get better really soon, Lesley, from all of us here at County Hospital Radio.”

He has a soft and understanding voice that seems to come from a body older and heavier than his own. He is good at this, I think, and I am glad I'm here.

“We have a special and unusual guest here, now folks. This is Russell, who has a dedication he wants to make, and a message to send. Russell is the son of one of the two firefighters we lost in the tragic fire awhile back. And there is a certain Mrs. K. currently staying with us to whom he'd like to pass on his thoughts. Mrs. K., if you're listening, here is Russell.”

A second red light goes on as Middleman Mike slides another knob, and the microphone in front of me comes live.

“Um,” I say, surprised even though this is exactly what I asked for. “Hello. Well … I hope you are feeling well....” I have never been as nervous as I suddenly feel right now. “… And all I wanted to say was … and I remember when you came to my school, still, and your cat … and I am sorry, Mrs. Kotsopolis, about your cat. He was a great cat.... My dad was a good man, Mrs. Kotsopolis, and a great firefighter. Things went wrong, but not before things went really, really, really right for a lot of people over a lot of years. He spent a great deal of time being truly heroic, before he wasn't. I am sorry, for what happened to you and your cat when he wasn't heroic. I'm sorry, and I know my dad is sorry. Very, very, very sorry … Mrs. Kotsopolis …”

When I stop talking—anyway I don't stop talking so much as stuff just stops coming out—the silence I hear is so huge here in the little studio and in the waves of the air of the rest of the world. Middleman Mike just stares at me for several seconds with I-don't-know-what on his face. Could be sympathy, could be pity, could be irritation, but I am without a clue.

“Dedication?” he eventually asks me, live on air.

“Right,” I say, like waking up, “my dad had such a huge dedication, every day of his life, to helping—”

“Sorry, Russell, but I meant the song. You said you wanted to make a dedication to Mrs. K.?”

“Oh,” I say, absolutely flushed with embarrassment and empty of ideas. “I, ah, I'm sorry, Mike. I don't … really know music. Don't … know what she likes …”

“Sinatra,” Middleman Mike jumps in, “I am sure she likes Sinatra. So here you go, Mrs. K., from Russell to you, Frank Sinatra singing ‘Moonlight in Vermont,' and after that we'll come back with the man himself to talk about how he's surviving the tragedy.”

Mike does his soundboard thing and Sinatra starts his moonlight thing, and I begin a new case of nerves.

“I don't think I can do that, Mike,” I say.

“What?”

“I don't think I can talk about that, I'm sorry.”

“You say sorry quite a bit, huh?”

“Sorry.”

“Listen, this is why you are in here. This is why I let you in. People don't just knock on the door and stroll in here just because they feel like it. People will want to hear your story.”

Even that, just his mentioning of
people
who will be listening and judging what I say, makes me sweat. “How many people?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Couple hundred, including staff?”

“That sounds like a lot of people.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, at any given time probably a third of them are asleep.”

“Well, that doesn't really—”

The phone on the wall at Middleman Mike's shoulder rings. It's muffled, like a regular phone being suffocated under a pillow but he jumps anyway. He stares at it for a second. “That only happens about once every two months,” he says.

“Hello? Yes. Oh, hello. Oh, yes, yes, absolutely …”

He aims the phone at me. I take it, my head swimming now.

“Hello?”

“What happened to my cat?” Mrs. Kotsopolis asks. Her voice is not even a voice, it is so soft. It is more like just shaping words out of breath. “You know something about what happened to Omar?”

What have I done? Already, what have I done here? Nobody told her what happened, to blue Omar? For good reason, Russ, nobody told her what happened to blue Omar.

“I'm sorry, I don't know,” I tell her. “I just meant that I was sorry about him getting lost. I haven't heard anything. I'm sorry.”

There is what may be a long pause now. It could be other things. She could be catching her breath, or even still talking very weakly.

“Thank you for the gifts,” she says. “I smiled.”

I smile when she says she smiled. I smile broad and mad like an idiot, this is such uplifting news to me.

“I'm glad you liked them,” I say.

Middleman Mike makes himself work busy, playing more music without talking at all, without acknowledging that I am even in his room anymore. It helps.

“I forgive him,” she says, somehow even more softly.

I choke up at the words. I choke so much breathing is hard, never mind speaking. I pause even longer than she did. When I get it together, I say, “Can I come up and see you?”

She does not pause. “No.”

“Oh … right. Of course. I understand. Well, I hope you are feeling better.”

“Thank you, son.”

One more pause. One more deep breath and a run. “He was a good man,” I say. “My dad. And he tried. I know he tried.”

I hear her struggle with the breath, pull in as deep as she can, then release it in shapes of words. “I know. I saw.”

I open my mouth to tell her thanks, thanks, thanks, and how much better that …

But I get dial tone.

How can I say? How can I say just how much that means to me, what Mrs. Helen Kotsopolis said, all that she said. Forgiveness. Redemption.

She liked her presents.

I got more than I ever could have hoped for, coming here, more than I ever could have prayed for in making this journey to this hospital, and the gifts I brought were less than nothing compared to the infinity of gift I got in return from the wonderful Mrs. Kotsopolis.

She
knows
my dad was a good man. She
knows
he tried. Because she
saw.

“You sure you won't talk?” Middleman Mike asks me.

Won't? We are well past
won't
. I can't even speak to tell him I can't speak. I smile and shake my head and I think he understands but there's no way of knowing for sure. He hands me back the blank dedication sheet I brought in, points to the phone number at the bottom, and tells me, “If you change your mind. At any time, if you change your mind. I know people would be anxious to hear everything. You do owe me, after all.”

I take it and nod and feel like I do, in fact, owe him.

“Good luck, Russell,” Middleman Mike says earnestly as I head out the door. Just outside, I find the nurse, the same nurse who was defending Helen Kotsopolis from me. I smile at her.

“How dare you,” she says in a low and controlled and terrifying tone.

“What?” I ask, shaken. “What?”

“This explains why you were ashamed to say who you were.”

“I was
never
—”

“He is
not
forgiven, and he never will be. And you are not forgiven, coming in here and manipulating a poor, fragile old woman who has been through far more than enough for anyone to ever … She may forgive you, but I can assure you that God does not and neither do most of the people of this town.”

I don't do it on purpose, but I fall back, on what seems to be the only thing holding me upright. “I'm sorry—”

She slaps me right across the face, hard enough for the sound to carry clearly down the length of the corridor. She looks quickly off, since this is presumably not what nurses are allowed to do, but the radio station is tucked away. She is free, though, to address me as she sees fit.