Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital (45 page)

“Isaac, it has been a long time. It’s nice to see you. We have a lot to catch up on.” I gave him a hug and motioned to a black swivel chair around the large oblong table in my office. “What’s up?” I asked as he settled in and swiveled around while he surveyed the office pictures, art, books, and piles of articles and projects and the reflecting wall of glass that had become my view. From staring at the UN rectangle I had been reduced to a faux Narcissus, looking at myself courtesy of the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

“You lost your view, Doc.” He didn’t miss anything.

He had on jeans, new white Nike sneakers, a designer T-shirt, and facial hair Dominican-style. It had been cut with an electric razor to millimeter sideburns threaded to a trimmed beard. Every hair was gelled in place. Tight. I expected merengue from the white ear pods draped over his shoulders connected to the smartphone on his belt.

“You know I don’t know much except the headlines. Your mom stopped coming here some time ago. There are big pieces missing.” It was almost lunchtime, and we agreed to share some lunch while we talked. I popped my head out the main office door and asked Patty to grab some tortas and Snapple from our newest street food vendors from Puebla. I gave it two more years before New York City was completely Latinized. It wasn’t just the Spanish language everywhere.
The whole city was beginning to look more like any Latin American city with its failing infrastructure and undersupported educational and health programs.

I sat back in the chair and looked at Isaac. He was different from the overweight sulking youngster I had known many years ago. Like most Bellevue kids, he tagged along with his mother to her office visits. Day care was unaffordable. Back then I would hold his small hand and walk him to the pediatrics floor where the Reach Out and Read program colonized the waiting room. Kids sat like flocks of migrating birds on blue mats surrounded by the volunteer reading instructors/coaches whose canvas bags were overflowing with books for all ages. Isaac would tentatively join a group, scrunch himself onto a corner of a mat, and listen enraptured as the young medical student in skintight blue jeans and a green Old Navy T-shirt, hair in a ponytail, worked her way through a Dr. Seuss opus and a trimmed-down version of
Around the World in Eighty Days.

He always came back gripping a new book, his very own with his name printed on the inside cover: “ISAAC R.” Most kids only had a Bible and some comic book–style self-help literature in their apartments. Depending on where the mothers were from, their cultural background and literacy, reading at home was a never event. The kids took a direct hit and ended up several years delayed at school by the time they reached kindergarten; they never made up the difference. Many mothers came to the waiting room even if they did not have appointments with their kids. Their kids lit up with the books in hand as the staff called out their names while hugging them and finding some mat space.

“You know, the last time I saw you I think you were fixated on the adventures of
The Count of Monte Cristo
in Spanish or English, I don’t remember. You ignored everything else around you. It was pretty cool. So what’s happened, Isaac? Last I knew you were a reader with a mother who had an apartment like a public library branch.” He looked behind me at the packed bookshelves, stacks of journals, and piles of papers that were a reflection of my cerebral cortex.

He began slowly. “It was a hard ride at first. I got into some street gang stuff. Nothing much. Alicia went nuts and grounded me forever. I had the world record of time-outs. So I went underground.”

“Yeah, so how did you turn your ship around?” I asked.

“Pure
suerte
, luck, Doc. I mean, I had this friend twice removed so to speak. We were walking together toward what looked like a warehouse in a sketchy part of the Bronx. There were lots of people coming in and out, all ages, races, sizes, and shapes. I mean a real carnival of humanity. Completely out of place in a neighborhood where pizza joints, bodegas, pawnshops, and liquor stores were on every block.”

A safe port in the storm?
I was thinking.

“We heard great hip-hop from the wide-open double metal doors. So we walked over and asked the guy at the door if we could come in and listen.

“There was a musical of sorts going on. Not like Broadway or any of that commercial stuff. But dancers, musicians, poetry, singing, some amazing hip-hop dancing, better than anything I had ever seen.”

“So what happened, Isaac?”

“This woman comes up to us, Rodney and me. We had been there for over an hour, just standing and watching and listening, the time just went. Her name was Mildred, a Puertorriqueña singer who was from the neighborhood. She ran the place with Steve, her Afro-American husband, also a musician.
El Puente
, it was called. They started as pickup musicians in high school. From there they had a group and decided to start something in the high desert of the Bronx fifteen years ago. A place for kids to come and do something besides drugs.”

Isaac was animated, in charge, and had pulled himself quickly out of a superficial funky younger avatar. “We got introduced to Steve and were invited back. The place has stuff going all of the time. Art, music, dance, and theater for starters. They have trips all over the city to see stuff I had never imagined except on those blue mats at the hospital waiting for my appointments. I mean I found a real
Cat in the Hat
.” He smiled and shrugged with an
aw shucks
look.

“So you still involved with them?”

“I got into writing. I still do that. Like short stories, working on the
Mano
newsletter, learning to edit and then into playwriting and short stories.” He had safely swerved the lethal street scene.

“What was going on at home?” I asked him in a monotone.

“Home was a real disaster zone. My mother hooked up with this guy who initially was okay, cool, friendly, and seemed to care about the two of us. That lasted about a year. I don’t know what came first, his drinking and acting out or the acting out and then the drinking. At any rate I was old enough to spend more time on the streets and with my friends and avoid the yelling, slapping, door slamming, throwing shit, breaking things, and then the making up. It was quiet for a few days or a couple of weeks. He’d be super considerate. A real gentleman.” He paused and took a bite from the torta sandwich dripping with burnt-orange-colored sauce. Chipotle.

“They would go shopping and bring home fresh lobsters and Italian food from Arthur Avenue near the Bronx Zoo. You can hear the elephants in between cab horns and the grinding gears of delivery trucks. We ate with candles on the table stuck in empty wine bottles, fresh baguettes, bottles of red wine that did not come in the shape that fits in your back pocket, and even an embroidered tablecloth my mother bought from our Mexican neighbors upstairs. Like a real family from television. Then one day he brought my mom some roses. Real roses from the Korean place across the street. I’m not sure who said what but he reached out and slapped her across the face with a dozen red roses. The alcohol reeked from the open hole in his face.

“It was out of the movies really. Like you paid a few dollars, got some popcorn and a soft drink, and settled into one of those tall chairs that slid down as you settled in and watched your life in play for two hours. Then the credits came on, the music stopped, and the lights came on. Then the movie was over. No more candles. No more embroidered tablecloths. The wine bottles were stacked forty deep next to the fridge and the stuff would start all over again. Eventually there was no making up, and no two weeks off on good behavior. It blurred together into one bad nightmare scene. It was just pissed-off bad stuff all the time. So much for
The Count of Monte Cristo
.” There was a reason Rikers was hidden on an island with a slim causeway from Queens and
killing tidal currents scuffing the rocky rim. Pissed-off rage and nothing to lose is a powerful thing.

“He was a smart guy, had a decent job. Speak about books, he did have book knowledge. He read the newspapers and talked a good game. What a fucking loser.

“The worst part for me was seeing my mother grovel for the guy. I mean she lost her self-respect. To not provoke the guy she would try to be perfect. But there is no perfect in this other universe. Anything could make him angry and set him off. Dinner was late. Dinner was early. Too hot or too cold. It made no difference. But the son-of-a-bitch had stalked her perfectly and set her up to fall into his trap. He had made slow cuts, little ones, almost not noticeable, but persistent, and he stole her from herself, until he owned her.”
Textbook
, I thought.
Psychopath
.

“Doc, I had two lives and kept them separate as I could. I had all this stuff to do and to think about and it was always there for me. It saved me from what was happening at home. I switched channels when I was there. Like I said, I was lucky.”

“How’s Alicia doing today, Isaac?” I asked.

“She is better and getting better every day. I just wonder what it will take for her to not be with these guys. I mean, why does she pick such losers? She is a needy woman who cannot bear to be by herself. These guys pick her out with built-in radar. You can see their antennas fluttering, picking up signals.” He put his fingers up over his ears and wiggled them. He was soft-spoken at this point, not talking particularly to me anymore. A general statement that said it all.

I leaned forward and half whispered to him, “What happened to her? What is the story?”

It made me uneasy that I was going down this trail again. Was it just voyeuristic interest? A need to know? To prove that I knew there was something there? To prove something to myself, to Alicia? All of the above. We all had emotional vulnerabilities, hidden fears and traumas that motivated us, propelled us, compulsively drove us to do certain things again and again. Anxieties that we rationalized, that made us hate ourselves, that stalked us in the night. If trauma hit when we were
young and emotionally tender, it lingered for a lifetime and we handed it off to our children. I satisfied myself that an attempted murder, lacerated liver, and near death of a fetus qualified as a reason to pursue a source—not in the perpetrator, that was another issue entirely—but in the victim. The victim who was suffering the near-lethal consequences of being a heat-seeking missile for victimizers.

He looked sharply at me and was pretty alert. The slight slouch was gone as his muscles tensed.

“Look, Doc, you have known us for a long time and seen us through a lot of stuff. To go deep and understand what is going on in my family, what family there is, is to go back to the beginning. The very beginning. Way before I came into the picture. I was part of the ticket out. I know my mother loves me very much. That’s not what I mean.” The conversation was entering a different place. I got up and made us a couple of espressos and put on the table some bitter dark chocolate a friend had brought back from Guatemala. We stirred the inky black coffee in the tiny hand-painted Uriarte cups. The wrappers from the chicken and beef tortas covered the table between us.

We both sipped the coffee. He had a mustache from the
crema
and looked more like the kid I knew on a blue gym mat in the pediatric clinic. He snapped off a piece of the black chocolate. “She had to leave; there was no Plan B. I asked her a lot of times as a kid where were my grandparents. I mean, my father had disappeared after a couple of years. He was one messed-up dude, from what I can make out. So there was really the two of us holding down the fort in the Bronx, literally our own Fort Apache with triple locks and window bars so people couldn’t crawl in from the fire escape. We couldn’t get out if there was a fire but that was secondary. You had to live long enough to have a fire to burn to death from.” A piece of homegrown wisdom from the South Bronx. I had grown up on the other side of the tracks in the same borough.

“Her father was military. I mean not her real father, not my grandfather, either. The people that brought her up were military. It took her a number of years and lots of questioning and detective work. First they admitted that she was adopted. That took some time by itself.
She was very persistent once she got it in her head that they might not be her real parents. I mean biological. And she kept asking why didn’t they tell her and who were her real parents.” He chilled and slowed down the pace.

“
Hijos
, children of the disappeared?” I asked. The dots were lining up.

“They said she had been left as an orphan in the hospital where she was born. She had been abandoned at birth. They were alerted by nuns from their diocese and went to see her and immediately decided to adopt her. She was so precious, they loved her as their own blood daughter. They considered that she was their daughter and there was no need to tell her. They apologized for bad judgment.” A dark storm cloud was descending over the household. Alicia Rittner was not then Alicia Rittner. “She was Alicia. Her biological parents had named her—she learned that much. The parents who adopted her were military as I said. This was during the
Guerra Sucia
, the Dirty War.”

Isaac was having trouble at this point. This was getting close to the unspoken truth that had driven his mother from her presumed home and made her a permanent refugee unable to go find her real home and the family that she might rightfully call hers.

“Her real parents had been kidnapped—her mother was seven months pregnant with her. They were young professionals in graduate school, journalism and architecture. Jewish. They were picked up one day off the street and disappeared. They were never seen again. The military secret service had taken the baby Alicia from her mother just after she was delivered and given her to the nuns to look after her. There was an understanding that she would be offered up for adoption to high-ranking military families. They killed her mother as they had killed her father.” He spoke of his grandparents in the third person. Like telling a story about someone else and not his own family member.