It’s so warm inside the hospital.
Hannah and Malcolm slouch in the waiting room’s orange bucket seats with their twin chewed-rimmed Styrofoam cups, watching Court TV on the high-mounted monitor, looking reassuringly bored. They’re lumpy in their coats still. Malcolm seems to be nearly nodding off. Esker, standing away from them, glances over frequently; the sight of them is a kind of ballast. She envies both how easily they have taken up residence here, and how easily they could get up and go if they wanted. After a while, Hannah does get up and disappear, but returns shortly with her hair loosed from its bun—she is still wearing the business suit that was her costume—and a box of Junior Mints in hand. She shakes a lot of the contents into Malcolm’s upturned palm, and then they both return their focus to the program: a sullen-looking woman on the witness stand. They swallow their chocolates, eyes trained on the screen, innocent and disinterested.
The swinging doors open. Cold air snaps forth like a sheet, and another emergency rolls in on a gurney. Esker takes a step back. She is unable to sit. She has had coffee, too; Malcolm and Hannah, unbidden, had brought her a cup when they got theirs, having tracked and isolated the coffee shop within minutes of arriving at the ER. Their ability to assimilate almost instantly and so unconcernedly to these environs is bewildering; she doesn’t quite know whether she finds it touching or cynical. She had walked over here with them, to Methodist, ten blocks from the school, the three of them plodding quietly in the silence left behind by the ambulance. Wally had ridden ahead in its shrill white capsule with Ann.
Behind her, for Esker is looking out through the dark glass revolving doors, looking again at her own reflection cut up and layered over by the lights and lighted objects on the other side of the glass, she can hear the sounds, general and specific at once, of the others gathered in the ER, sounds of the distressed, the bored, the cheery, the urgent. Conversations in Creole, Mandarin, Spanish, Farsi. A family leaves, trailing a powder-blue balloon. Two cops go out, laughing. A woman wearing a stethoscope around her neck and a lab coat printed with a nursery pattern—pastel teddy bears, Esker thinks—rushes in hugging herself: “It’s fucking freezing tonight!” A fat man with blank eyes set in his face like currants in a bun. An elderly woman with calves like walking sticks. Someone holding blood-soaked newspaper to the side of his face. A child with a great cheek-full of bubble gum.
Esker attends to them mentally in all their specificity; in her mind she pauses over each one, takes each one in with equanimity and regard. But she is anonymous, unknown to them, a figure standing by the door. This is safest. She is already in retreat. They are so beautiful and fragile in their specificity, frail as paper, and she is so large—the old fear, the secret truth—now, for a moment, she sees the hot geometry of her college library floor, beckoning and forbidding at once, so confusing—jump, don’t jump—and she is so tall and heavy and pointy and wild, it’s true; she may crush whatever she touches, so she stands very still; she is resolved. With a kind of pity, a cool benevolence, she stands still, she is a sentinel, sentient only in a general way, a desireless way, selfless.
She’d come tonight late on purpose, and hidden out for part of it in the faculty room, just down the hall from the Big Room; it had been empty; she hadn’t switched on a light. The great crack she’d made in the windowpane shone interestingly in Park Slope’s ambient nighttime lights. It was jewellike, a motherlode of diamonds she’d exposed. Another item now for the Renovation Committee. She lurked about outside the Big Room doors when she sensed the first act was nearly over, and slipped inside just as Ann’s piece was beginning. She could have come on time and held her head high. But she was here tonight for no one but Ann. It would have cost her to have to smile at or converse with anyone from the school community. And why had she come? Not to stand by with a fire extinguisher under her skirt, not exactly. But in a way, yes. Ann had asked her, and she felt uncommonly obligated, uncommonly needed.
After Ann had sailed off and down like that, and the lights had come up, and Esker had found herself almost instantly on the floor sorting through the slippery fabric heaped around the girl, who was still unconscious at that point, she wondered just what she’d been needed for, and how she had managed to fail Ann again. “Don’t move her,” someone had said sharply, though Esker hadn’t been going to. It was Florence, standing behind her, and the look she gave Esker was so shriveling and so cold with blame, and it dovetailed so smoothly with everything Esker most feared about herself, that she nearly scrambled to her feet and ran away, but then Ann stirred; Ann was looking at Esker. She didn’t have the slightest look of pain or fright, only the strange enchanted quality that was a product of all the silver-and-white makeup, and she smiled at Esker and said simply, “You came.”
And now she has the thought that maybe she did provide the thing Ann needed her for: to bear witness to what she would do.
She did bear witness, and she bears responsibility, of this she is certain; it is the heaviest weight. She asked too much, and things broke. It is so simple. It’s like arithmetic. She dared a thing, she dared to want, and in the school’s condemnation and Ann’s fall lie the proof: it was too great; the equation could not balance. So: Retreat. Cut losses. Lift off. Again she thinks, with despair and longing, of the peculiar peace of the emptiness after her mother’s death in Delos, her vacuous hometown, the long vacant summer, the summer devoid of wants or wishes, the great selfless safety and promise of naught, of null, the immense and perfect nothing from which she has strayed. Twice. “You’re so selfless,” they praised her, and she pulled up her kneesocks and pulled down the shades, and when she neglected to do this, neglected to be this, she was too much to bear, and she and Albert got wrecked beneath the weight of her, and now Wally and Ann. (Is it true? Is it that simple? Arithmetic of the sort Miss De Witt would endorse? You don’t believe that for a minute, Esker, something says, but she won’t have it, won’t listen; what if it’s just her cunning heart?)
It is eleven already, and then eleven-thirty. Winter Concert will have long finished. There are fewer empty seats now than when they first arrived. Malcolm has dozed off. Hannah, beside him, lifts her fingers in a small wave to Esker from across the room. Esker goes to sit beside her.
When Wally finally comes, near midnight, it’s with a theatrical shrug. It’s a shrug for their benefit, Esker can see that much. He’s got one of those hospitals-are-so-annoying expressions on his face, and he yawns and cracks his knuckles as he stops before their seats. Hannah wakes Malcolm by knocking her shoe against his. His chin comes up with a start.
“You guys should go home,” Wally tells the kids. “She seems fine. It’s just hospital policy, once you come in, they have to run five thousand tests before they let you go. She’s fine, though. She’s had a Popsicle. You guys should get some sleep.”
Hannah and Malcolm look at each other. “Okay, Mr. J. Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow,” says Hannah.
“Same,” says Malcolm gravely. “Take care.”
Wally smiles. The kids slowly get their jackets on and pass through the revolving door. In the light outside, Esker can see their breath hover like empty speech balloons by their mouths for a second before they slip out of sight arm in arm like some ancient married couple. A marvel. Babies. How do they do that?
Wally takes Hannah’s vacated chair. “They did a CAT scan,” he says. “There’s no bleeding. The doctor saw no signs of neurological deficiencies, no what they call focal signs, no head trauma or anything.”
Esker is looking at him. He’s looking ahead, speaking distractedly. His manner changed as soon as the kids left, relaxed into something more agitated, more frightened. He looks tired. The skin around his eyes, the gray in the sparse brown curls above his ear. These things look precious to her, even now. She swallows.
“Did you see the way she fell?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Were you looking? When she fell?”
She nods.
“Did you think she was conscious when she fell?”
She nods.
“She says she wasn’t. She says she fainted.”
“The lights must have been hot. And that costume. And she’d been standing still for a while. You know how people faint in churches and things, when they’re standing for a long time with their knees locked.”
“It looked to me like she stepped off the ladder.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“The doctor asked her how she fell and she said she didn’t remember.”
“What tests do they still want to run?”
He licks his lips. He looks elsewhere than at her. “Psychiatric.”
“Okay.”
“It’s the second time in less than two months she’s here because of a fall.”
“I know.”
“They didn’t see any reason to call a neurologist.”
“All right.”
“We’re waiting for a psych consult.”
“I understand.”
He nods. He’s seeming not to know what to do with his hands. Esker restrains herself from taking them.
“Do you think she would like to see me?” she asks.
“She still has all her silver makeup on. She’s sleeping at the moment. They gave her something.”
“To make her sleep?”
“She was shaking a lot.” Holding his own voice steady with obvious effort. “I wonder if I should call Alice now or in the morning.”
After a little, Esker says, “Do you want coffee?”
He turns to her, looks at her for the first time full in the eyes. “I hoped you’d come. I thought you would. I kept looking at the door.”
“Ann asked me to.”
“I just had a feeling I was going to see you.”
“I care about Ann. I always will.”
“We’ll fight this.”
“This? You mean whatever’s going on with Ann.”
“The Florence thing.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, of course, we’re going to take care of . . . what Ann needs . . . help. But I was talking about the Florence thing. I wanted to tell you that. We’re going to fight it.”
“I mailed in my resignation.”
He looks at her.
“This morning.”
“Oh.”
Now he is looking at her with much too much love. He has misread the meaning of her statement.
“Wally. Also—I need to say goodbye to you.”
The radical shift in his face. The struggle to understand her. He takes her hand, and, yes, it is a good touch he has, full of ken, she’s not immune. But this is necessary, what she’s about to do. She’s taking the reins away from her heart. Sacrifice is purifying, isn’t it? Freeing.
“I care about Ann. I’d like to be in contact with her. I want to stay a friend, an adult friend of hers.”
“But not of mine.”
“I can’t.”
He squints. The awful effort to control his face. “If you were telling me that in order to keep your job you needed to say goodbye . . . If . . . If you were saying you wanted to keep your job . . .”
She shakes her head. “I won’t stay at The Prospect School on those terms.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“I just need to say goodbye to you. I shouldn’t’ve . . .”
“What?”
She retrieves her hand as gently as possible. “Attempted this.”
“What?”
“This. This.”
“So.” He takes his breath. “All you have to do to keep your job is not have . . . a relationship with me. And you resigned your job. And now you’re saying goodbye to me.” He searches her face.
“Yes.”
“Because . . . ?”
This is the last time she will hurt someone. This is her largest possible act. This is the way she must tell it to herself in order to get out the door.
“Have courage, Esker.”
“This is my courage.” Knowing she’s lying.
He shakes his head, stares at her as though she were the most infuriating student, oppositional, willfully dense in spite of testing bright. “Why,” says Wally, and she has never heard him sound angry before, “why would you choose to be lonely? Why would you elect to be complicit in your own unhappiness?”
Nostalgia fills her mouth like cotton. His words go through her with the echo of the familiar. If only he knew; they are a kind of beacon, they are almost welcome. She is almost eager.
“How do you know,” says Esker, “I’m lonely?” As she bends through clouded vision to gather her gloves, her coat, her scarf, her hat, a blind bundle, the words rise of their own accord: “I don’t know about this.” The old words, Albert’s hex, his innocent taunt, now passed through her lips, involuntarily and unimpeachably true. She utters them with her mouth close to the wool, so low as to be barely audible even to herself.
When she leaves, one glass compartment of the revolving door admitting her body, then discharging it into the night as the door swings round again, free of her, the pain is so great it is like a burn. She wants nothing, not even air, to touch her skin. But air is touching her skin. The thing to do is keep walking. She walks and walks for a long time, waiting for the gift not to feel it.