The Nakeds (7 page)

It had been nearly a week since the last time he’d hurried away from Penny. Now he stood at the nurses’ station trying to get the chubby nurse’s attention. He could have sworn that she’d spun around in her chair when she saw him coming down the hall. She was talking on the phone with her back turned to him, laughing, obviously flirting with whoever was on the other end.

What about the sick people on your floor? Someone might be dropping dead this very minute
.
Penny would never ignore someone,
he thought.

She twirled the phone cord around her finger and said, “You didn’t, did you? You did!” and then she laughed. Martin watched her fat finger going white. He shuffled around in his shoes. He sighed. He coughed. He cleared his throat.

“I gotta go,” the nurse said into the phone. She hung up the receiver and spun the chair around, staring at him. “Can I help you?” she said, all put-out.

“Is Penny working tonight?” he asked.

“Nope.” She stood up and snatched some charts from a shelf. “What do you want with Penny?”

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“She’s working tomorrow—the night shift.”

“How’s Hannah Teller?”

“Are you her brother?

“A friend of the family.”

“She’s still in ICU.”

“I’m sorry,” Martin said.

Something buzzed—two lights at once were flashing red. “I gotta go,” the nurse said, turning and rushing off, her ample hips teeter-tottering away.

After peering in and seeing Hannah with the woman he assumed was her mother and a young doctor at her bedside, Martin went to the ICU waiting room and sat down. No one was there—the many couches empty, the TV on but so quiet you couldn’t hear what the newscaster was saying. Damn it, fuck it. He wanted to die. His miserable sister was right. Hannah wasn’t going to survive. She was still in ICU. Wasn’t that where they took people right after a horrible fucking trauma, like when they were shot or had a heart attack? She’d been doing so well. He was a murderer. He was a fucking killer. A monster. He knew it. He’d known it all along. He’d known it from the beginning, he’d felt it, and now it was happening.

He’d been sitting there, berating himself for nearly an hour when he saw Hannah’s mother coming down the hall with her purse over her arm, wiping her eyes with a tissue. The young doctor was next to her and they were heading toward the elevator. The doctor held a clipboard at his chest and spoke to her out of the side of his mouth. She was nodding as he talked, agreeing. Martin thought they knew each other better than they should and wondered where Hannah’s father was.

•  •  •

Martin tried to obey his hospital rules, but the night after he’d seen Hannah’s mom and the doctor go into the elevator together, he broke one. After drinking three beers alone in the park, he showed up at the nurses’ station. He’d had a roast beef sandwich, an apple, and half a bag of potato chips, and he’d sipped the beers slowly, over the course of a couple hours, so he wasn’t really drunk, but mildly buzzed, which ended up giving him the confidence to approach Penny, to ask her things. He’d walked down the bright hallway and popped a mint in his mouth.

“What’s your name? I’m not talking to you until you tell me your name,” she said.

“I’m Marty Kettle,” he said.

“You’re pretty like a girl, Marty Kettle,” she said, softening.

“I’m a mess,” he said.

“You know Hannah, don’t you?” she said.

“I don’t know her,” he said. “My sister used to sit with her at lunch sometimes, that’s all.”

“Then why—” she began.

He lowered his voice and looked at her solemnly. “I live a few houses away from her. And I heard the whole thing,” he tried. But he could see it wasn’t enough.

Penny’s arms were crossed against her chest.

“OK,” he said. “You want the truth?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I have another sister, I mean, I
had
another sister,” he said, and as he lied, his eyes welled up. “She’d never eat and no one said anything. Not my mom or dad—it was like they couldn’t see her. And I didn’t help. And then she died in a car wreck.”

“I’m so sorry,” Penny said, looking like she meant it.

“It’s been very hard,” he said. “She and I were close. I feel like I lost my best friend.”

Penny uncrossed her arms, dropped them to her sides. “I don’t think Hannah likes the snow globe because, you know, she grew up here, by the beach,” Penny told him.

“Oh,” he said.

“I guess she doesn’t care about snow.”

Penny told him that Hannah’s parents had mostly given up on finding the driver, who they’d heard was a very old man. “He probably couldn’t see where he was going,” she said. “Old men get cataracts.”

“Yeah.”

“Old women too.”

“All of us,” he said.

She nodded and stared at him hard. “Their eyes cloud up and they can barely see.”

SHE’D BEEN
hooked up to the machine that was draining the abscess from her liver for just two days and her fever disappeared and her cheeks were pink and her appetite was back. She ate plates of unrecognizable meat and the palest, softest vegetables and blue Jell-O or red Jell-O and little cups of ice cream that she opened herself, pulling the tab. They had moved her downstairs to the floor where the kids were just sick, not necessarily dying, her mother said.

“Katy had her tonsils taken out yesterday and she’s going home today—isn’t that right, Katy?” Nina pulled the curtain that separated the two girls to one side and popped her head around.

There was a fruit cup and a carton of milk on the tray in front of Hannah. A stale roll left over from lunch and a little ball of butter in a glass dish. She used her fingers to pick up a chunk of pineapple and ate it.

Nina turned back to Hannah and let the curtain fall behind her. “Katy can’t say much just yet, but she was nodding. I imagine she’s still in pain. Poor her.”

Poor me
, Hannah thought.

“Very nice girl, though—sweet as sugar,” she continued. “Billy down the hall had a terrible case of the flu—I met his mother in the elevator.”

Hannah used her fingers again to pick up a slippery slice of peach.

“Use your fork,” her mom said.

Hannah ignored her. She wanted her mom to stop talking about the other sick kids and focus on her—she was the one who nearly died, not Katy with her sore throat or Billy with his flu.

When a nurse brought Katy a wheelchair, Hannah leaned over and whispered in her mother’s ear. “Why does she need a wheelchair if she can walk on her own?”

Nina explained that leaving in a wheelchair was hospital policy and that when Hannah was discharged she too would sit in a wheelchair and be pushed out to the parking lot. She looked at Hannah’s leg then, and Hannah followed her mother’s eyes and looked at her leg as well, and there it was, still in traction, still hanging there. They looked at the exposed toes that Hannah still couldn’t wiggle. Her mom gave her a weak smile that neither of them believed and then they sat in silence, listening to the sounds on the other side of the curtain. A drawer opened and closed. A suitcase snapped shut. Someone coughed. The nurse said, “Easy now, careful, sweetie. That’s right.” They heard Katy situate herself in the wheelchair she didn’t need, and the squeak one of the toys made as someone gathered it in his or her arms.

Then they were leaving, all of them, the nurse pushing Katy, and her cheerful parents following, stuffed animals and dolls spilling from their folded arms.

“Get well soon, Hannah,” the mother said.

“Take care—both of you,” said the father, his eyes on Nina.

And the toy, wherever it was, squeaked one last time.

Although they hadn’t had time to bond or even talk to each other, Hannah felt abandoned. When Katy turned around at the door and waved good-bye, Hannah kept her hands under the blanket and barely mustered up a smile.

“When do
I
get to go home?” she whined as soon as they were gone.

“Dr. Seth needs to remove the tube first. You wouldn’t want to go home with that, would you?” Her mom looked over at the machine.

Hannah said nothing. Of course she didn’t want to take the horrible thing home.

They were quiet for several minutes until her mom said, “The kids at school were worried about you and they’re all so relieved you’re getting better. Oh, and I almost forgot,” she said, excited. “Everyone in your class signed another card.” She reached down into her bag and pulled out a big envelope, handing it over.

On the front of the card, monkeys swung from trees, and on the inside, it said
Get Well Soon. We want you up and monkey-ing around.
Hannah looked at the signatures and messages, spending an extra moment on Eddie Epstein’s words. He’d written
I like you
or
I bite you,
Hannah couldn’t be sure.

When she was finished reading the card, she handed it back to her mom, who immediately pinned it to the board alongside the others.

“Who brought you this?” Her mom picked up the snow globe and gave it a shake. “I love these things,” she said. “The snow reminds me of Philly. Where did this thing come from?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah said. And she
didn’t
know. The snow globe was like the paper dolls and the purple flowers—things that had appeared out of nowhere.

“I think the nurses are secretly giving you presents. Or even the doctors. Everyone likes you so much. You’re such a brave girl.”

“I’m not brave,” Hannah said.

“What are you talking about?” her mother said, still shaking the snow globe. “Of course you’re brave.”

Just then Dr. Seth arrived and startled Nina. She quickly placed the snow globe on the nightstand and stood to greet him. She stared up at his face, smiling, fixing her hair with her fingers again. “Good to see you, Dr. Seth,” she said, using a voice Hannah didn’t recognize.

“Good to see you too. Good to see you both,” Dr. Seth said, but he was looking only at her mom and her mom was looking only at him and they were talking only to each other. Dr. Seth asked Nina how she was holding up, how she was doing on her own now, and Nina shot him a look that told him Hannah didn’t know her father had left yet. But she did—of course she did.

“Oh,
oh,
” Dr. Seth said, wincing.

“It’s OK. You saved Hannah’s life. You saved my baby,” Nina said, not looking at her baby at all, but into Dr. Seth’s eyes.

“I’m happy I could help. Your daughter’s a gem,” he said.

“We’re lucky. I was just telling Hannah how lucky we are.” And then her mom was again poofing her damn hair.

Hannah couldn’t look at the two of them anymore. She looked at the silent television hanging from the ceiling and turned up the volume and switched channels, impatiently, madly, until her mom finally looked at her and asked what was wrong.

“I want to go home,” Hannah said. “I want to see Dad.”

“Soon, honey,” her mother said, sweetly now, attentive again.

Dr. Seth moved closer to her bed then. “I certainly hope so,” he said. He checked under the sheets, making sure the tube was secure. He asked if anything specifically hurt Hannah, if she needed pain medicine, if she was able to sleep through the night. “That tube’s nearly done its job. She’s just about all cleaned out,” he said, smiling.

“I want to see Dad,” Hannah said again.

“Look at those pretty flowers. Look at that big card!” Dr. Seth said, walking over to the corkboard. “Who sent you these monkeys?”

“Where is my dad?” she wanted to know.

FOR THE
last week, Martin had preferred his parents’ den to his own apartment. Before hitting the couch, he’d go to their kitchen, where he’d lean into the refrigerator’s cold and pull something from a shelf or he’d stand in front of their well-stocked liquor cabinet, pouring vodka or gin into a coffee cup. The shag carpet in the den was bright orange. The TV was a box with rabbit ears. The couch was brown and plaid and gave way under his body, the springs underneath him squeaky and unforgiving.

Sometimes he went to their new restaurant even though it wasn’t open yet and he only took up space, walking around the two rooms, staring at things: the six ovens all in a row, the soda machine, the knives lined up on the wall.

Or he was at the hospital.

Martin knew he should go upstairs to his studio and try to sleep in his own bed, instead of sitting in his dad’s recliner, listening to his sister chatter on, but he didn’t want to be alone. Alone—even stoned alone or drunk alone—meant alone with his thoughts and his thoughts inevitably turned to the girl.

Sandy sat on the couch with her bare feet up on the coffee table, painting her nails. Even her fingers were skinny. She was focused, deliberate, and slow, as if those skinny fingers were the most important things in the world. It was four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, game day, and his sister was still in her stupid black and gold skirt and sweater, her pompoms on the coffee table next to her feet and an open, uneaten bag of pretzels, and what looked like a Slurpee. “You know the girl who was hit by a car?” she said.

“I don’t know her,” he said, startled.

“You know what I mean.” Sandy rolled her eyes.

“What about her?”

“Billy Judson says that she’ll never walk again. And that her leg is all deformed.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear. Billy Judson’s not a doctor.”

“I’d rather die than be deformed,” she said.

Martin decided that secretly drinking was almost like drinking alone, especially in front of his idiot sister. He sat with a folded map of the United States in his lap, sipping his vodka and orange juice and trying to ignore her. She was oblivious, so self-involved, he thought, he could take out a needle and shoot some heroin and she probably wouldn’t even notice.

“The kids at school say the girl’s going to be crippled.
If
she lives,” she said.

Martin was glad his parents were working late and was looking forward to Sandy leaving soon for the game. He’d have the house to himself. He could drink, beat off, and sleep as much as he wanted to. He unfolded the map and smoothed it out.