THIRTEEN

“I can’t go anywhere looking like this,” she said, gazing in the bathroom mirror with the light off, her reflection a shadow.

We had not even tried to sleep. It was 5:03 in the morning. We had just turned off a movie about an ex-con who lived in San Francisco just before World War II, the city of the movie empty of tall office buildings, nothing but white apartment buildings and hills, and the blank Bay in the background. The man had plastic surgery so he could start a new life, but he didn’t seem like someone with a new face. He encountered the people he met like someone accustomed to the muscles of his smile.

Mom did not put on what she called her Street Face, although she did brush her hair as we drove the streets. I was careful at each stoplight, some of them blinking red, too early Sunday morning for the normal red/green/yellow. She brushed her hair, finding snags, working the boar-bristle brush I had bought her for Christmas along with a matching rosewood hand mirror. She sawed the bristles through the tangles fiercely, as though she wanted it to hurt, taking a bitter satisfaction from the pain. It was dawn the way you hardly ever see it, the constellations fading in the east.

We had plenty of empty spaces to choose from. If I made up tests I wouldn’t ask questions about how a bill becomes a law, or the formula for photosynthesis. I would ask Where do you like to park, under a tree or near a streetlight or out in the middle of nowhere?

The hospital was full of light. Sofia arrived just as we did, explaining that her sister had driven up from Santa Monica to stay with Daniel.

The nurses passed among us with soft steps, and when they hurried into his room it was the way people zip in to do something already planned, responding to a schedule and not to any sudden urgency.

But we did not go in to see him. We didn’t even ask. We wanted to be close, but we did not want to alter the tempo of what was happening.

My mother and Sofia talked about private schools for Daniel when he was old enough, how important it was to control the amount of television he watched. Sometimes the effort of being patient with Sofia tightened my mom’s lips and made her close her eyes for a moment. But what kept all of us calm now was not mutual understanding so much as very great weariness.

“I was born in a hospital, wasn’t I?” I found myself asking, as though I wanted reassurance that I had some past connection with a place like this.

“Daniel was born down the hall,” said Sofia. “The staff was so friendly I just couldn’t believe it.”

Sometimes I thought maybe my mother was right about Sofia. Sofia is always saying she just can’t get over the weather or the traffic, or how she just can’t believe something. For Sofia, a pleasant vacation was really neat, a kind person dear. Dad told me she had a brilliant head for statistics, the number of termite eggs per cubic meter.

“Kaiser Hospital in Oakland,” said my mother, answering my question at last. “You knew that already,” she said, not really chiding me, understanding: we had to keep talking. “Dr. Chung couldn’t be there, so that doddering Dr. Luke talked the whole time about his new computer. ‘Is that the baby’s head,’ I would ask, and he would say, ‘hang in there,’ and rattle on to the nurses about battery technology.”

“I didn’t have any trouble, did I,” I asked. “Breathing?” Becoming alive, I meant.

She understood why I needed to know. She put out her hand, although she was sitting across the waiting room from me, touching the place where my hand would have been if I was sitting beside her.

Why can’t I remember how the nurses looked? Each word they spoke was so important. But they dashed in quietly, hovered, and flashed softly out of the room.

He looked the same as he had before, a man being choked by tubes. A part of me wanted to cry out that he was worse than before, shrunken. But there was a presence to him, now, without a single movement on his part.

One eyelid struggled to open. The eyeball beneath it made a rapid-eye-movement dance. The lashes parted, dark iris glittering.

“He can hear you,” said a nurse, a little inappropriately, not seeing what we saw, too busy at the foot of the bed.

“You’re doing so well,” said Sofia, leaning over the bed. “So fantastically well, Teddy.”

His mouth was stuffed like a deep-sea diver’s with the air tube. We could all see stupefied curiosity in his eye, wonderment, almost fear.

“You’re in the hospital,” said my mother, the just-the-facts words contradicted by the softness of her voice. “You were shot, but you’re going to be all right.”

I didn’t feel as awkward as I had the first time. Maybe one part of me sensed that my father would remember our first visit and find the sight of us less like the vigil for someone who was not likely to survive. But why didn’t I say something more articulate? Why were my words so insipid? “I’m here, too,” was all I could say.

Dr. Monrovia wore new white running shoes and a zipper jacket. “Pneumonia is going to be a threat,” he said. “Infections are always—” He made his hand go this way and that: you know how germs are. “But—” he added emphatically, upbeat, in a hurry to leave, meaning a great deal with one syllable.

Mom looked innocent without her makeup, her hair rust red, her face, which was naturally pink cheeked, all the more ruddy in the warm air of the hospital. The doctor could see the unasked, impatient but what? in her eyes.

He smiled, not looking like my father just now. My father’s smile is infectious, while Dr. Monrovia smiled like someone having his picture taken, just enough to look pleasant. He said, “The crisis is over,” like he was letting us in on a secret, just don’t tell anyone else.

And it didn’t sound like good news, the way he said it. He meant that the crisis was over, but something else wasn’t. My mom and Sofia seemed to want to cooperate, smiling with wan relief. I was the one who said, “So he’s going to be all right?”

“It’s really out of our hands,” said the doctor. It was one of those moments when an authority figure makes the appeal: remember I am a person, too. Remember I have feelings.

“He’s not going to die,” I said, a croaking little voice.

The doctor said, “The odds are in his favor now.”

“He’ll recover,” I said. “He’ll be the same as ever.” My mother took my arm, trying to pull me away.