The Hundred-Year Flood (15 page)

II

One night, after his parents had come and gone, Tee lifted the typewriter onto his lap tray and tried to write about Korea. He wondered how his father and his birth mother had communicated. When they went out to dinner, how did people treat him, the foreigner who couldn’t even understand the woman he’d impregnated? Was she sad? Happy? His father must have felt far from her then, from the baby and her. Though later, when her ribs hurt and she couldn’t breathe, she pulled him in with a closeness he’d never experienced, as if the physicality of their bodies could steady them.

Tee wrote, for a while, about sympathetic pregnancy, which he had learned about from one of the other rehab patients, a woman whose husband had left her after their baby died. He wrote about his father taking on his birth mother’s hormones and desires. Would his father have been that kind of man? His father grew rounder, too. He felt hungry and hot and emotional, too. Slowly he saw that this was a symptom of love. He stood at the mirror, rubbing his belly, his body comprehending what he did not. In the hospital they listened to the whir of Tee’s heart like the motor of an airplane. The baby was always there, always directing them with a hidden, mysterious force.

Tee wrote that when his birth mother was so big she could barely move, his father brought leftovers from a hotel party. She met him on the stairs, having waited up for the food. He lifted the bag to his nose and sniffed it, teasing her. But then her cheeks flushed and she lost her balance. He saved the food first, thinking of the baby ever ravenous, and almost missed her. She fell on top of him. At first he thought she was going into labor. He had one leg braced where the stairs met the wall, and he felt the snap as her weight landed. In that moment, maybe he sensed what the future held—he would snap everything to save what was inside of her.

Tee didn’t know. He let the rhythm of the clacking keys and the answering echo of the letters fill his head. He loved that sound of causation, of the tap tap tap making the words exist. Before he touched the keys, there was nothing but white space. He typed until he needed to stretch, to get the voice of his father out of him, to get out of Korea. He was far from his birth land, a country he knew nothing about. He knew nothing about his father’s relationship with his birth mother. He walked down the hall to the nearest window. The trees outside the rehab center, real trees, rustled in the wind. There was going to be a storm. He listened for the sound of rain or river, thinking about the iterations of names, Charles River, Charles Bridge, and the steady flow of water accumulating until it reached an ocean, or a sea, a place where it would be swallowed up by more of itself. In Korea his father had found a thermal spring deep beneath the ground, and turned it into pleasure baths. His father had broken a leg and decided to take Tee home. Had he broken it to save a hidden life, a life he might have changed for, if Tee’s birth mother hadn’t died? If she hadn’t died, where would Tee be now?

CHAPTER 6
THE POSSIBILITY OF SAINTS

I

Not until after Prague, when Tee was in a hospital himself, in Boston, could he ask the nurses and doctors the questions he’d wanted to know about Katka. “What would you do if a woman came in from a flood with a cut on her leg?” They humored him. They said they would examine the leg, check for a fever, and determine if the wound was infected, which, in a flood, it might be. Then they would put her on antibiotics and send her home.

“How could you tell if it was infected?” Tee asked. A fever, or redness, or swelling, or loss of blood pressure. Or sometimes they said, “Thomas, you need to rest” or “Thomas, I’ve answered that question a dozen times already. Do you remember?”

He asked what kind of antibiotics they would put her on. A wide spectrum. They would take a culture to find out what she had.

He asked would they really send her home. They would, unless the cut looked very bad and they saw signs of NF or other serious diseases.

He asked what signs they would look for. They asked why he was interested, and he shut up, or occasionally he pressed on. The leg might be twice its size, or beet red and the skin eaten away, or filled with pus.

He asked about NF. Necrotizing fasciitis, flesh-eating bacteria, rarely found. More common was sepsis, bacteria in the blood that could lead to shock.

He asked again about sending the woman home. If someone thought she had one of these diseases, the doctor might keep her overnight. Or sometimes, when Tee asked, they noticed his shifting eyes. Sometimes they grew awkwardly quiet. They would say, probably she would be sent home, especially if the hospital was busy, as in a flood. Or they would politely ignore him, which was easier, and simply do their jobs.

In Náměstí Republiky, the doctor did almost exactly what Tee would be told a doctor should do. The cut was stitched and dressed, Katka shot with antibiotics and prescribed a number of pills which Tee managed to get from the basement pharmacy.

When she took off her boots, her wound showed, at last, red and irritated, giving off a heat of its own. But not nearly as bad as he’d imagined. A nurse took a culture and Katka spoke to the doctor in Czech. They checked her fever, and it wasn’t high enough to keep her there, so they sent her home to return if needed.

Tee imagined Pavel pushing Katka over into the glass coffee table, or smashing a window, or throwing something sharp. He didn’t ask. They stepped out of the hospital and back into the square, Katka in hospital slippers, and they went through the options. The hospital had mentioned the university shelter.

“We could try it,” she said.

He pictured a mass of people disturbing her rest.

“We could check hotels.”

But he said what she knew, that the hotels would be booked by earlier evacuees.

“You were right,” Tee said. “We should have left before.”

She didn’t suggest the house in Malešice. She didn’t remind him she had a bed of her own. He knew himself where they had to go.

II

When they got there, the house was empty. Where was Pavel with a flood outside? Tee insisted on sleeping on the floor. Without discussing it, they faced the painting of her toward the wall, and she fell asleep instantly, her leg wrapped in gauze under the sheets. He blinked awake every hour or so, afraid that Pavel would return. The doctor had said her leg was infected. Tee had promised her safety.

He woke to her moans. He climbed out of the pit of sleep until he was back in her house. He pinched his neck to get his blood going, and knelt beside her. When he lifted the blanket, heat sighed from the wound. He wondered if he was still dreaming. Her calf was bright red, an apple dangling from her knee. As if he could slip the fruit out from under her skin and tuck it into his pocket. “God,” he said. “We have to go back to the hospital.”

She said immediately, “My leg.” She reached down, and when her fingers brushed the gauze, a cry escaped her. She gasped and cried—both at the same time. He searched the plastic bags for his cell. There were nine missed calls, all his mother. He dialed emergency. He held the phone for Katka, his hand trembling, and he worried that he would hurt her ear. She managed their address and a few details in Czech.

He asked if she needed water, ice. He would get some ice. “I’ll be back in ten seconds. Ice will help.”

He hurried into the kitchen. Thankfully, the power was still on. As he counted down—ten, nine, eight—he let himself cry. He took a bag of peas from the freezer, and returning, he heard her muffle a moan.

He hovered the peas above her calf. “This is going to hurt,” he said. When the bag touched her skin, she wept haltingly, deep wet breaths. Her hand reached for the peas and then stopped. She bit her lip. And he heard a door open.

The ghost, he thought hopefully. But he knew it was not.

She swiped the peas off her leg, gulping air. He waited for Pavel—when Pavel walked in, he thought cruelly, the affair was over. Her husband had kept her safe through a revolution. Her husband had made her art.

“I should have listened to you,” Tee whispered. Then the doorway filled with the giant frame of his neighbor. Tee’s back twitched, anticipating a blow. Why Rockefeller? Had the artist asked Rockefeller to stop by? Had they made up?

When Tee looked again, the door was empty.

“They are going to cut off my leg,” Katka said. “What if they have got to cut it off?” She’d noticed nothing. But he could smell Rockefeller’s sweat despite the sour gauze.

“No one’s going to cut anything off.”

“Tell me it will be all right,” she said.

He said: “Remember, stepping in shit is good luck.”

She frowned, and he realized it sounded like a joke. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ll be together. The doctors will fix it.”

After another fifteen minutes, they heard the ambulance. Tee hoped Rockefeller was far away now. He said he would go out to meet the EMTs, since it would be faster.

The ambulance parked on the curb. Two paramedics got out without the stretcher, and Tee shouted and pumped his fists up and down at his sides. He ran forward and pointed to the van and mimed again. Minutes wasted.

Back in the bedroom, he rocked on the balls of his feet as they asked Katka questions, as they touched her forehead and lifted her onto the padding. They carried her outside. Tee climbed into the ambulance beside her, but one of the paramedics waved him out. “Who—” the man said. Tee squeezed her hand. She said something in Czech to convince them.

He would have said they were married. Only he didn’t know how to say it in Czech, and he didn’t have a ring. He was his father, chasing a foreign lover into the ER.

Inside the ambulance, the paramedics gave her two shots and unwrapped the gauze. Tee made an effort not to gag. Her wound had split open, as if her calf had ballooned overnight until the skin had reached its limit and popped. Inside, he could see the layers of muscle, covered in a film of pus. At the edges of the hole, the skin had settled back like two rubber flaps.

Katka tried to sit up, but they pressed her flat against the stretcher. “What do you see?” she said. “Tell me what you see.” She spoke Czech to the paramedics, and they glared at Tee as they calmed her. The smell stuck to the walls of his lungs. He wanted to stop staring at the raw insides of her leg, but he couldn’t.

They arrived at a different hospital than before. The nurses took her away. He tried to follow, panicked that he would have no way of knowing what was happening. She mumbled something, yet they refused him. “It will be fine,” she told him. “They will show you in later.” Arriving at the hospital had eased her nerves, as he’d thought it would do for him. Instead he imagined parts of her falling out of the crack in her leg: her kneecap, her liver, her heart.

“How will I know if something changes?”

She said any doctor would speak some English. They rolled her away. A nurse blocked the hall, pointing to a waiting room where a dozen bleary-eyed Czechs sat in chairs along the walls, a cluster of TVs hanging down in the middle, as if no one could have his back to anyone else. Tee’s feet squeaked on the white tile. He should call Pavel. On the TV, zoo workers rescued condors drowning in a giant cage. Tee didn’t know if the footage was current. It was the third day of the flood. President Havel spoke into the cameras.

When Tee checked his cell for the time—nearly ten—he saw again the nine missed calls from his mother; then, beneath them, the one received call from his father. He didn’t remember that call. Had he rolled over in his sleep and hit a button before returning to his dreams? He could call back now, but it didn’t matter. Katka was in a room somewhere on the other side of the wall. He pictured a machine that could return her leg to its normal state, as if vacuuming the air from a zeppelin. In a hospital like this, his father had lied to him, his birth mother had asked a foreign stranger to take her baby to America. His entire life, Tee had believed hospitals to be places of love at first glance. New starts.

Katka had tried to give them a new start, and he had asked her to jump into a river of disease. Pavel hadn’t hurt her so badly. Before the flood the wound could have been stitched up and forgotten. Tee felt something in his back pocket—a coaster—and he plucked at it until the scraps looked like feathers of some dead bird. On the TV, wooden beams piled up like pick-up sticks in the water. Workers in a motorboat removed the rubble, wearing yellow waders as if to fish. One smiled into the camera; for a second he thought it was Ynez. A chart seemed to show the water receding. Maybe the flood would never have risen as high as the bed. Katka and he could still be making love, she in her protective boots. Though the buildings would still be falling.

As he rewound those hours in his head, a doctor appeared and spoke rapid Czech. Everyone turned at once. Tee heard his name.

He pointed to himself. “
Americky
,” he said, not sure he had the right word. “Do you speak English?”

The doctor muttered under his breath and said, “Little bit. You not look American. You are her husband?”

She’d had the same idea then.

The doctor shook his head. “You are too young,” he said. “She needs debridement. We take away bad tissue.”

Tee didn’t care what the doctor said about him—bad tissue they could surely remove.

“Bacteria eats her leg,” the doctor was saying.

“Eats?”

The man pursed his lips as if the English had soured. His face was stubbled and haggard; he probably had many other patients. He said her organs were losing a fight against the disease. They had put her on an IV, but now they had to cut away the sick parts of her leg.

Tee asked if he could see her.

“After. Maybe at night.”

He was about to ask if she would lose her leg when the doctor turned and left.

As Tee waited, more anxiously now, people came in with coughs and flood-dirty clothes and minor skin wounds. About an hour later, a nurse gestured for him to follow. He hopped up, thinking the doctor would have come if the news was bad. In the hall, the nurse asked, “Do you need for me helping you call her family?”

“What happened?”

The nurse shook her head. “I mean for if you have trouble talking them. I help.”

He understood. She was wondering why he hadn’t called anyone about the surgery. “I’ll call,” he said. “It’s okay. My wife’s family speaks English.” Yet he had no phone number for Katka’s mother, and the only other person was Pavel.

The nurse nodded and offered her assistance if needed.

At least, he thought as he turned back inside the waiting room, no one had recognized Katka from the paintings. They were too abstract. More real than life. He pretended to dial and raised the phone to his ear. “I have some awful news. Katka’s in the hospital. Hurry. Come right away.” In the doorway, the nurse smiled.

Tee wondered if there was anyone Katka did want to see. She was getting surgery. No one should be worried unnecessarily.

As the hours passed, Tee couldn’t stop thinking. He’d spent all his idle time in Prague so far drawing and taking things, a child carving his name on a tree. He hadn’t protected Katka, or himself. He had been more interested in the stories they told each other. He wanted to believe that at any minute she would wake and he would go to her. But then there was her leg, white pus squirming from her flesh like grubs.

The scent of disinfectant, and the sterile walls, and the absence of color, seemed to hypnotize him. After a while he found himself thinking about his non-adoption again, hating that his concentration wavered. He forced his thoughts back to Katka. But the longer the wait, the more his mind wanted to go elsewhere. He wondered how his mother had felt when she first figured out the truth about him. How had she kept it to herself for so long? What more did she and his father know? Did his father know his birth mother’s hobbies? her allergies? her extended family? All those questions he’d never thought could be answered. He wondered if his father blamed him for his birth mother’s death. Was that why his father had kept her from him?

Tee pictured his mother back in Boston, her familiar frown, patterned with freckles. In one of the oldest home videos, his father’s finger traces the constellations on her cheeks, one side and then the other. Once, they were drawn to each other’s differences. Before they found out they couldn’t have a baby.

It was Tee’s fault if he knew nothing about his birth mother. He had tucked his adoption into his pockets, another souvenir.

What he really wanted, of course, was to hear Katka say everything would be fine. He remembered she had wanted him to give her the same reassurances. Was that belief in their belief in each other love?

When his mother called, in the early afternoon, first thing in the morning for her, he answered the phone. Her tenth call.

“I’m here, Mom.”

“Tee! Oh, thank God you’re okay.”

“You almost killed me with that e-mail,” he said, unable to resist. He pictured her making coffee, cooking breakfast, the phone cradled against her pale neck.

“I heard there was a flood,” she said.

“I’m not okay, by the way.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “What happened?”

“What were you thinking, Mom? Why did you e-mail me that?”

She asked whether he was hurt. “We can talk about the e-mail later. Is everything all right now?”

He said later he would still be angry. He heard her teeth click together. He wanted something motherly from her, a reassurance that she really had sent the e-mail for his good.

“You’re not physically injured?” she said. “Your body is still intact?”

“My body is still intact. Why didn’t you tell me about her earlier?”

His mother said she didn’t have any facts. He heard oil sizzling. She was flipping an egg, or a pancake, her veined fingers tightening around the spatula. “I mean, I know,” she said, “but I have no proof. Your father would never talk about it. You must know, too.”

His phone slipped in his wet palm. He wished to reach through the line and shake her. He plugged his other ear to hear her better. She walked away from the oil, and her nose whined. “Mom,” he said, finally relenting, “I’m in some other trouble here. With a girl.”

“You got her pregnant,” his mother whispered, as if she, too, thought he had turned into his father.

“I’m trying to talk to you.” Before he could change his mind, he told his mother about the infection and the surgery and the swollen leg so big it was like a planet had split a fault. He said he didn’t know what to do.

“Where are you?” his mother asked.

“In the hospital.”

She asked again if he was okay, and he took his finger out of his ear. “You’re not listening. What’s debridement? Tell me something I need to know.”

“I’m not a doctor.”

She was right. He needed to talk to a doctor. His mother just wanted to know that he was okay.

“I didn’t get anyone pregnant,” he said. “But I am in love with a woman who is older than me, who is from another country. Whatever happened with Dad, those are my feelings. What’s wrong with that?”

His mother was silent.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Thank you for calling me.” He hung up.

He left the waiting room. He had to ignore the language barrier, stop being timid and ashamed. He had to act more American. At the desk, he asked for Katka’s doctor. The nurse replied in Czech, but Tee persisted: “Her doctor. Or tell me her room number. I need to see her.”

Another nurse came and spoke softly with the first, as if Tee was only pretending not to understand. He asked again whenever they paused. At last they made a call, and Katka’s doctor reappeared.

“We are busy,” the doctor said. “I have no time.”

“If you’re here, the surgery must be over,” Tee said.

The doctor said something in Czech, and the nurses averted their eyes. “She rests now,” he told Tee. “Her debridement is—later you see. We need more time with her.”

“I want to see her now,” Tee said.

“No. In this, no agreement.”

Tee stepped forward; a cold breeze rose from somewhere. Then he said, “She’s okay? She’ll be okay? There’s nothing to worry about?”