Jumpstart the World (13 page)

She didn’t answer for a long time. Just sipped at her tea. I thought maybe it was a question with no answer.

Then she said, “Maybe he’d rather die with his dignity intact.”

I heard myself make a funny sound. A muffled noise. I think I started out to say Oh, God, but it ended up coming out as a grunt. It made me sick to think about that. So I closed my eyes and said nothing at all. And, as much as possible, thought nothing at all.

“I’ve got his back,” Liz said. “Which is better than nothing.”

I woke up on my back on the couch, with Gracie sleeping on my chest. It was hard to breathe all the way in, but I liked the warm weight of her, and she looked comfortable, so I didn’t ask her to move.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Molly sitting in a hard-back chair by the window. As if she was waiting for something. I wondered what she was waiting for.

I scratched Gracie behind the ears for a minute, and then it hit me.

“Oh shit!” I saw Molly jump. “I forgot Toto. I didn’t give him his afternoon pill.”

“You better go home and take care of your cat,” she said. Her voice sounded cool.

I eased Gracie off my chest and onto the couch. “If I do, can I still come back?”

“Maybe you should just stay with Toto and get some rest.”

I stood up. Humiliatingly, I had to fight to keep tears back. “Did I do something to make you mad?”

I thought it was brave to just spit it right out like that.

She sighed. Still looking out the window. Not at me. She didn’t answer.

“Are you just scared and worried about Frank, or are you really mad at me?”

“A little of both, I guess.”

I stood taking that in. Feeling a little woozy. Unsteady on my feet. Maybe because I had just wakened up. Maybe because I’d only had forty-five minutes of sleep all night. Maybe because of Frank lying in the other room, his brain about to bleed and swell.

Maybe because of Molly’s last sentence. Which, by the way, was a walk in the park compared to her next sentence.

“Don’t you think Frank has feelings?”

My mouth felt numb while I tried to answer. “Yeah. Of course he does.”

“He likes you so much. He really cares about you. How do you think it makes him feel when you treat him like he has an infectious disease? Don’t you think that hurts him?”

I lost my battle with the tears. They ran down my face. Dropped onto my shirt. I even watched one hit my boot. The same boot. That boot had seen a lot of life in the past few hours.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Then I slunk back to my own apartment.

The phone blasted me out of sleep. I opened my eyes, then winced them closed again. It was light. Too light.

Another ring.

I grabbed it up. It was Liz.

“Oh, thank God you’re there,” she said. “We have to get
Frank back to the hospital. Molly and I are going to bring him down the stairs. If you want to help, go down and get us a cab, okay?”

The line went dead.

I’d been sleeping on top of the covers with all my clothes on. So I just got up and ran. Grabbed my key off the table on the way out the door.

I took the stairs two at a time, even though I felt like I was doing it in my sleep. Like I was dreaming about running down the stairs.

But I had been asked to do something to help. And I was going to do it right. I was going to do such a good job on it that Frank would be okay. I was going to do my one little part so perfectly that Molly would forgive me. The pain I’d caused Frank would be drowned out and erased by the perfection of my ability to get a cab when one was needed.

I blasted out into the barely cool morning. Into the street.

I saw a cab coming immediately and raised my hands. Waved frantically. Jumped up and down like a fool.

He saw me. He was going to stop. He pulled up to where I stood.

Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

I opened the back door of the cab.

A man with a black trench coat and a briefcase jumped in.

At first, I just stood there with my mouth open. I did not let go of the door.

“Thanks, hon,” he said. “I’m in a hurry.”

“Get out of my cab.”

“I flagged him first. You just didn’t see me.”

I held the door more tightly. Leaned in. I caught the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Did you stop for him or for me?”

“I stop for you,” he said. He had some kind of African-sounding accent. Lilting.

“Get out of my cab,” I said to the briefcase guy.

“It’s really an emergency, hon.”

I almost screamed. I opened my mouth to scream. I was going to let him know what a real emergency looked like. For a second, I thought I might literally grab hold of him and drag him out onto the street. Or try, anyway.

But I didn’t. I was right at the edge of violence. But I didn’t commit any.

I left the door open. And I made my way to the front of the cab really fast. And I sat on the hood. Right on the driver’s side. Right in his view. Right where he wouldn’t be able to see the road if he drove away. Which was a moot point, of course, anyway. Because he wasn’t going to drive away.

Not now.

I felt the heat of the hood through my jeans, and the vibration of the engine. This steady thrumming under my butt.

A moment later, I turned around to see Molly and Liz helping Frank into the cab. They were really carrying more than helping. He seemed completely unconscious.

I watched them struggle to get him into the backseat. Which, by the way, was empty. I looked around and saw Briefcase Guy walking in the street, inside the row of parked cars, looking for another cab.

I jumped off the hood and into the front seat, next to the
driver. Before anybody could tell me not to. Before they could leave without me.

We had pulled away from the curb and driven two blocks before I consciously realized I was still in my sock feet.

Liz’s voice. “Have you lived in New York all your life?”

No answer. I thought she was talking to the cabdriver. Though, truthfully, it seemed like a funny time to be making small talk.

It took me a minute to realize she might have been asking me.

“Who? Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Yeah, I was born here. Why?”

“Remind me never to try to steal a cab from you,” she said.

ELEVEN
A Special Kind of Idiot

I
t was almost eight o’clock that evening when Molly found me in the hospital lobby.

I had been trying to stay out of the way without actually going home.

It’s not like I could really be with Frank anyway. First, he was in the OR for this procedure—which I had been working really hard not to visualize—where they drill a tiny hole in his skull and insert a drain. Then after that, he was in a recovery room.

I think about an hour earlier they’d put him in a regular room, and I think Molly and Liz got to sit in there with him. But I couldn’t bring myself to push my way into that scene. I felt like it was their moment, not mine.

I felt like I didn’t deserve it.

I was wrong to think that acing getting a cab would fix everything. It didn’t.

I instinctively jumped up when I saw her.

“Is he okay? Is everything okay?”

“It went well,” she said. Long pause. The energy surrounding the pause didn’t quite fit the atmosphere of good news. “But he definitely has to stay the night. At least one night. If we’re really lucky.”

“What did Frank have to say about that?”

“Nothing. He’s still unconscious.”

I sat down hard. I’m not sure how long I was staring at that weird pattern of linoleum floor—and my own ridiculous sock feet—before Molly sat down beside me.

“Poor Frank,” I said. “What if he wakes up in the night? He’ll be so scared.”

No answer. After a time, I looked over at Molly, and I could see she’d been crying. Why hadn’t I seen that before? Why hadn’t I looked closer?

“Maybe they’d let you stay with him?”

A snort of laughter. “We’ve been through it with them, Elle. For almost an hour. Bottom line, Frank and I can’t get legally married at this point, and I can’t stay past visiting hours if I’m not a spouse. I know it’s not fair and you know it’s not fair, but they obviously feel it’s not their problem. I have no legal connection to Frank. Like it or not. I tried reasoning with them. I tried shouting. Cajoling. Threatening. All it got me was the promise of a call to hospital security.”

A long pause. That linoleum pattern was so weird. Black and white. It burned itself onto my eyes so that when I squeezed them shut, I could still literally see the pattern on the insides of my eyelids. And I’d been staring at it for most of the day. But I only just thought about it now.

“You could sneak in,” I said.

Another bitter snort of laughter. “After the stink I made? They would never take their eyes off me.”

Another moment of silence. During which I knew something. Something that was important. That was real. It just took me a moment to form it into words and say it out loud.

“
I
didn’t make a stink. They don’t even know I’m connected to Frank.”

I looked over at Molly, but her face didn’t show much. Just wear.

After a minute, she said, “It’s possible that you could get arrested.”

“So?”

“Besides. What would you do? I mean, even if somebody did give him a hard time … what could you do about it?”

“She would sit on the jerk’s hood.” Liz’s voice, just out of nowhere.

It startled us both. I jumped, and I felt Molly jump beside me.

“Come on, Molly,” Liz said. “I’m taking you home. You need sleep.”

Molly rose heavily to her feet, and both women stood over me for a minute. I looked up into Molly’s face.

She said, “Liz, could you please get a cab? I’ll be right out.”

Unfortunately, I knew what that meant. Big talk. I braced for the worst. Like a fighter tightening up his ab muscles just before the gut shot.

“I owe you an apology,” Molly said.

I blinked. Too much, I think. I felt my gut untie its knots. “You do?”

“I feel I do, yes.”

“Why?”

“I shouldn’t have lost my temper with you. You know. Before. I don’t know if you can understand this. But Frank is so helpless right now. And I’m trying so hard to defend him. It’s like anybody who’s ever hurt him—anybody who’s ever even thought about hurting him—better watch out. But it wasn’t fair of me to take it out on you. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.” Long silence. I had no idea what else to say. And I was refusing to look at her face. At last, I thought of something that felt safe. “If I give you my key,” I said, fishing around in my pocket for it, “will you give Toto his pill tonight and in the morning? He missed another two today. I’m starting to get scared that he won’t get better. You know. If I keep skipping his pills.”

I held the key out to her. On the flat of my palm. I expected her to just take it. But instead, she took the whole hand. Held it a minute, and squeezed it.

“Frank’s in two twenty-three,” she said.

Then she let go. I looked at my palm and the key was gone.

When I looked up, so was she.

I had about half a dozen stealthy plans for how to do this. But it was all too easy.

I was almost disappointed.

When I got to Frank’s floor, there was still a good ten minutes of visiting hours left. So I just walked in. No one said a word to me, or even looked at me. I walked by a nurses’ station staffed by three female nurses—one of whom had probably threatened to call security on Molly—but none of them even looked up.

Frank lay unconscious in a double room. Thank God that
drain thing was covered completely in bandages. His whole head was covered in bandages. He looked small and frail. Younger than he usually looked to me. I’m not a motherly type, but he almost brought that out in me now.

In the next bed lay a strong candidate for oldest woman on the planet. She must have been a hundred and something. Her hair was just a faded wisp, barely covering her scalp, allowing a mass of dark age spots to show through. She looked at least unconscious. If not dead.

I had to swallow my irritation over the fact that they put Frank in a room with a woman roommate. I was beginning to see more of the point about the whole hospital and jail experience.

It wasn’t hard to find a place to hide. Not an absolutely perfect place, but the best I had available to me. It would do. It would have to.

The white curtain that divided the area between the beds extended most of the way around the head of Frank’s bed. Not all the way down to the floor. That would have been nice. But the gap wasn’t really all that huge.

I slipped into the bathroom and found a ridiculously white bleached towel. And then I disappeared. I slid under Frank’s bed, tucked myself behind the curtain, then used the towel to cover the parts of me that weren’t white. If I hadn’t been under the bed, it might have been pretty obvious. But to see me, somebody would have to pull the curtain all the way back on one side of the bed or the other and then look under the bed. And even then, once the lights went out, I’d be hard to spot.

I wondered when that would be.

And if it didn’t work? Well, then they could arrest me.

It was too cramped under the bed to sit up normally. I curled up as best I could. And waited. For what, I wasn’t sure.

It was dawning on me, I think, that it was going to be a long night.

I woke out of a sound sleep, hurting. My back hurt from sleeping at that weird angle. One hip bone hurt from the hard floor. My muscles felt locked into place.

But it was dark. And completely silent. I had no idea what time it was. But it was late. Night shift. And I had not been busted.

Yet.

I came out of hiding.

The oldest woman in the world was snoring. More loudly than I ever imagined it was possible for a real person to snore in real life. I thought only cartoon characters and old men in fifties sitcoms sounded like that.

On the plus side, it meant she was alive.

For about an hour, I sat in the chair next to Frank’s bed. In the dark. My eyes were pretty well adjusted to the lack of light, so I could just about make out the contours of his face.