My Brother's Keeper (20 page)

Maggie walked through the sliding glass doors ahead of her father, who nodded at the uniformed security guard. He got a cold stare in return.

‘Nice place to visit.'

‘Check in at the front desk.'

‘Just like at the Marriott.'

‘You can't afford this hotel.'

‘I'm still covered under your insurance, compliments of the City of Philadelphia.'

‘Don't pay your bill here and they check you out in a body bag.'

‘You're morbid.'

‘Hey, don't say anything about Franny Patterson. They may not let me see her. We're here to see Catherine Waites. That's it.'

‘You got it, Chief.'

Maggie spoke to the guard so Lou wouldn't have to, so they wouldn't get into that whole cop thing, Lou wasting half an hour getting on this guy's good side, one ex-cop to another.

‘We're looking for Catherine Waites.'

He typed the name into a computer and directed them to the third floor and pointed toward a bank of elevators against a far wall. Maggie thanked him and Lou smiled and the guard went back to his coffee and morning paper.

They waited by the elevator doors with a man and a woman and their three small children. There were two girls and a boy, scrapping with each other like a litter of puppies, each one taking a turn pressing the elevator button as they ran past. They had light brown skin and jet black hair and they spoke Spanish in short melodic phrases that Lou couldn't understand. Lou had the feeling that the two girls were teasing their brother, making him chase them around the lobby while their parents stood conspicuously quiet. The elevator door abruptly opened and they all piled in. Lou got on last, pushed three and asked the man what floor he wanted.

The two parents exchanged a desultory glance, neither of them speaking, as if they'd forgotten what floor they were going to. Maybe they didn't understand English any better than Lou understood Spanish. But the glance that passed between them was grave, as if it didn't matter how many children they had at their feet. There was one missing.

The woman said something to her husband in Spanish and he turned to Lou.

‘
Quatro
.'

It sounded like some lonesome bullfrog croaking in the night.

The elevator grew warm and stifling and when the doors slid open to the sound of pinging in the ceiling, Lou practically fell out into the hallway. He was hyperventilating, sucking air in through his mouth and wiping a layer of sweat from his forehead. He looked down at his wet fingers and wiped them repeatedly on his pant leg and then began to tuck his shirt in his pants and adjust his belt and his jacket.

‘What's wrong with you?'

‘Claustrophobic.'

‘You never were before.'

‘I just really don't want to be here.'

‘Then let's leave.'

‘Let's just get this over with.'

The nurses' station bustled with activity. Everybody seemed to be talking at once, on the phone, to patients, to each other. They were talking and writing at the same time, opening and closing drawers, putting away files, bumping into each other in the cramped space behind the counter. It was a perfect square centered between three long corridors with patients' rooms on both sides. A fax machine whined against the back wall and Lou followed the sound, thinking that he must be the only one that could hear it.

About halfway down one of the hallways an old woman was screaming. She was down on one knee and Lou could see blotches of red beneath her thinning white hair. She appeared to have fallen and was having some difficulty pulling herself to her feet. She was clawing at the hand rail that ran the length of the wall, screeching like a bird as she screamed for help. She'd managed to get up onto one knee and could go no further, either from exhaustion or weakness. She was so thin, Lou thought, her legs looked like popsicle sticks poking out from under the hospital gown.

Lou turned his head toward the woman and back toward the nurses, who all seemed to be focused on the computer screens in front of them. It was Maggie who got their attention.

‘Isn't anyone going to help her?'

There was no answer at first, the nurses in their blue smocks and white sneakers busy ignoring her question and still ignoring the screaming from down the hall. One of the nurses did look up and spied Lou over the top of her glasses.

‘Lock up the med room, girls. We got the law here.'

‘Hey, Betty.'

‘Hey yourself, Lou.'

‘Hey the both of you. There's a lady that needs help down there.'

Betty looked from Lou to Maggie and back to Lou.

‘This one belong to you?'

‘My daughter.'

‘Congratulations. She full grown?'

‘Almost.'

‘Hey, honey. She does the same thing every day. She lays on the floor and cries until one of us walks down there, picks her up, puts her back to bed and tucks her in.'

‘But isn't that your job?'

‘No, honey, it's not. That old girl can walk just fine. There's not much more we can do with her here. We could strap her to the bed but she'd scream even louder. Once she's cleared –medically, they'll ship her to a rehab facility.'

‘You mean an old-age home.'

‘Not necessarily. Assisted living, maybe.' Betty turned her attention back to the computer screen. ‘Wonderful girl you have there, Lou.'

‘Thanks. She reminds me a little of you.'

‘I don't even know why I'm talking to you. You show up once a year, make nice, promise to call and then disappear.'

‘I never thought you really wanted me to call. I thought you were just being polite.'

‘Stop it. When you're ready, you know where to find me.'

‘Behind those thick black glasses?'

‘Yeah. Ya like 'em? A buck at the dollar store.'

‘With them or without them, you're still beautiful, Betty.'

‘Sure, Lou. And if I had a buck for every time I heard you say that . . .'

‘I mean it.'

‘You know what, I think you do mean it. You just don't know what to do about it.' She pulled the glasses off her face and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Now tell me what you're here for. 'Cause I know it's not to see me.'

Maggie had already gone down the hallway and was helping the old lady to her feet. They seemed to be hitting it off pretty well.

‘We're here to visit a girl. Catherine Waites.'

‘She's here. Hasn't regained consciousness yet.'

‘That's what I heard.'

‘It's a sad state of affairs, Lou. A young girl like that. She may end up brain-dead.'

Lou didn't appear to be listening. He was looking down the hall at the old lady, who was now smiling a toothless smile at Maggie and hanging tightly onto her arm. And watching them together, Lou thought what a good nurse Maggie would be.

Her youthful enthusiasm was evident. Rookie cops brought the same thing to the job, Lou remembered. He had it once upon a time, too long ago to remember now. Both jobs also came with a promise, an oath that in the long run was often impossible to fulfill. Nurses and cops seemed to have always walked hand in hand. Half the cops Lou worked with had married nurses. Most of them were divorced now but that wasn't the point. They'd helped the weak and they'd helped the sick and dying, cops working the street and nurses in every hospital in the city and for all their efforts, death only laughed in their face.

‘I'm sorry, Betty. What was that?'

‘I said you're goddamn brain-dead and you should wake the hell up.'

‘Yeah, you're right. What room did you say Catherine Waites was in?'

‘I didn't say.'

Lou spun and faced Betty and looked into her eyes, at the dark circles below her eyes still puffy with sleep and the thin nose and full lips of a once beautiful woman, older now but still in possession of those qualities that make a woman attractive at any age. And something passed between them, an acknowledgement of sorts, a recognition of who each of them had become since they'd last seen each other. They had changed and yet they were still the same in many ways. They had taken different paths but seemed to have moved through the stages of life, arriving at the same place. And what had attracted them to each other all those years ago was still there.

Neither one of them was smiling, both of them wondering what to say to the other. The few seconds that their eyes had locked seemed to pass like an eternity and in the next second they looked away and the moment was gone.

‘She's in room 310. The end of the hall.'

‘Thanks.'

He took the long walk down the hall, letting his hand rest lightly on the railing. He stayed close to the wall as he passed where the old lady had fallen. Though she was gone now, back in her room under an extra blanket, he could still smell her. It was a sour smell, a strange combination of too much medicine and body odor, the kind of smell found only in the very old. It lingered in the hall like some chemical by-product of the life and death struggle being waged in that old woman's body. Then again, he thought, maybe all hospitals smelled like that.

He thought he saw a couple spots of blood on the floor where the old woman had lain. It could have been old blood but, whether it was old or new, there was no mistaking it. It was definitely blood, just a few scarlet drops left to congeal on the cold floor. The janitor could go over it with his mop a dozen times, knowing that if he really wanted to get the floor clean he would have to get down on his hands and knees with a bucket of hot water and a strong dose of ammonia and a good stiff brush and scrub it away.

Maggie came out of the old lady's room at the precise moment Lou was walking by. They almost ran into each other.

‘Good timing.'

‘For another errand of mercy?'

‘Is that what this is?'

‘Why, what would you call it?'

‘I don't know. A deathwatch?'

They continued down the hall, a red exit sign over a fire door marking the end of the line.

‘I got a question for you.'

‘Shoot.'

‘Do you believe in fate, like something is meant to be?'

‘Yeah, I believe in fate. I also believe in chance. Sometimes they're one and the same. Why do you ask?'

‘Well, like, I think I was meant to be here, to help that lady and to see for myself what I'm capable of. I think stuff like that happens and it's a way we discover ourselves.'

‘If you believe it then it's true. You asked if I believe in fate. Maybe it's the belief that makes it real. Fate couldn't exist if there wasn't someone to believe in it.'

‘Well, now we know I believe in it. The question is, do you? You never really answered the question.'

‘I guess I wouldn't be here if I didn't.'

NINETEEN

C
atherine Waites lay motionless on her back. A white bandage covered half her face and most of her head, which looked oddly misshapen under the bandage. Her mouth hung open and a thick gray tube ran out of it and snaked along the side of the bed to a machine that hummed and hissed like a copy machine with a paper jam. The arm with the IV had already begun to bruise and her complexion had grown perceptibly jaundiced.

Lou closed his eyes and tried to picture the girl he'd met more than ten years earlier, the girl from his dreams, thinking that she bore little resemblance to the girl lying here on this bed and that perhaps he was mistaken in thinking that it was really her.

There was a chair in the corner and Lou sat in it while his daughter walked around the bed and leaned over the girl and looked at her face, studying Catherine Waites as if she might recognize her too from her father's descriptions. And though they'd never met Maggie didn't see her as a stranger. She gently stroked the back of the girl's hand as a mother might do to wake a sleeping child.

‘She could be just resting, you know. Isn't that what a coma is, the mind trying to heal itself?'

Lou's eyes were closed again and he was rubbing the thick skin on his forehead as if he was shielding his eyes from the sun.

‘I don't think anybody really knows.'

‘Then it's possible she can hear every word we say.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Then say something to her, Dad. Let her hear your voice.'

He took his hands away from his face and shook his head.

‘I wouldn't know what to say.'

‘Say anything.'

‘There's nothing for me to say.'

They stayed there for a while, Lou looking at the floor and Maggie taking the chart out of a plastic bin at the bottom of the bed, trying to pronounce the names of the medications on what seemed like a very long list. The textured drop-ceiling diffused the fluorescent light in the room and the flat, white walls were the color of eggshells. All that artificial light beat down onto the face of Catherine Waites as if she was in a tanning bed, her pallor turning a sickly yellow instead of golden brown. It reminded Lou of the bare bulbs on the cell block at Eastern State Penitentiary that never went off, day or night.

Lou rose slowly from his seat in the corner and, giving Catherine Waites one last glance, he pushed hurriedly through the door. He made his way back to the nurses' station where he dropped his elbow onto the counter and spoke without looking down, his vision still lingering in the direction he'd come as if he expected Maggie to be following right behind. But she wasn't and Betty hadn't yet noticed him standing there.

‘You know, I meant to ask you. How are your kids doing?'

‘Back so soon? That was a quick visit.'

‘I wanted to see her. That's all. Nothing I can do.' A young doctor in green scrubs stood across the counter, holding a clipboard and scribbling notes onto a lined pad. ‘You have two, don't you?'

‘My daughter is still in high school. My son's in Afghanistan. The Marines.'