October
Sam fell asleep crying, face down on Robert’s hospital bed. When she woke up it could not have been more than a few minutes later. Creases in the hospital bedding pressed into her face. She’d slumped sideways and the arm of the chair she was sitting in jammed into her ribs. Robert was still asleep. She sat back in her chair and dared not move in case she woke him. The white privacy curtain cocooned them. The clear plastic of his IV bag magnified the black and red letters printed on the side that faced away from her. Robert’s breathing was deep and restful except for an occasional twinge where, even in his sleep, the pain of his injuries cut through him.
She knew Robert’s mother was probably in here somewhere. The woman had looked all but dead coming out the front door on the ambulance stretcher, a motionless loaf of human body beneath a white sheet. Had anyone made the connection? Had anyone told Robert his mother had been admitted to hospital? Maybe he already knew. Maybe there were things he would not want to know.
She stood up carefully, pushed the chair back just enough to allow her to straighten her legs, and edged away from the bed. Robert did not stir as she pushed the privacy curtain aside.
There was a nurse’s station halfway down the hall. A serious-looking woman in her late twenties was scrolling through some information on a flat-screen monitor. There was a counter between them, and behind the woman there was a narrow doorway with two video monitors mounted near the ceiling. One showed the hallway outside the nearby elevator, the other was tuned to what looked like a news channel. A reporter in an overcoat, a dark city behind him. A sideways scroll of text at the bottom.
The nurse did not look at her.
“Excuse me,” Sam said. The nurse did not budge. “Excuse me.”
When the nurse looked up, Sam hesitated slightly over what to say.
“I’m a friend of Robert’s?” Her mouth felt dry and rubbery. And she had a shaky, anxious feeling. She licked her lips and swallowed a dry swallow. “From down in room…” She pointed back over her shoulder with her thumb.
The nurse had raised her eyebrows to indicate she was listening. “He was… ah. He is asleep right now…” There was now some sort of movement around the nurse. A doctor or another nurse going past. Sam was trying hard to not let that distract her.
The nurse wanted to give up and look away, Sam could tell. Sam’s eyes were wide now. She knew it and could not help it. And they were filling with tears that threatened to roll down her cheeks. It must have been hard for the nurse. Most people she dealt with in the run of a day were probably either in tears, on the verge of tears. How much sympathy could she be expected to have?
“Can someone update him on his mother’s condition when he wakes up? I’m not even sure he knows she’s been hospitalized.”
“His mother?” The nurse looked down at her computer screen. She clicked the mouse and did some typing. “There’s nothing in here about his mother’s condition.” The nurse widened her eyes for a half-second, inviting more information.
“Well, I don’t know much myself,” Sam said. “I’m not a family member or anything. They have the same address. Lemon Street? I was told.” I was told. “She was hospitalized this morning? After Robert was hospitalized? I was told by ambulance?”
The nurse put her head down to the screen. “I’m going to look into this,” she said.
“He’s got enough trouble already,” Sam said. “But he’ll probably want to know when he wakes up.” The nurse did not look up again. She was busy clacking away at the keyboard. “Thanks for bringing this to our attention,” she said, still looking at the screen.
Robert was still asleep when Sam got back to his room.
He lay flat on his back with his arms straight down at his sides. The pillow was bunched under his neck and his head crooked back. He was snoring quietly and intermittently, and Sam found the sound reassuring, healthy, normal.
The privacy curtain had been pulled all the way back, and when she settled into the chair by Robert’s bed she could see every occupant in the four-bed ward.
Robert was by far the youngest patient in the room. The two beds against the far wall contained old men. The one on the right had a little hospital TV on a mechanical arm pushed right up beside his head. His head was at a 45-degree angle. His eyes were closed, but the TV was on, though it was mostly turned away from Sam, so all she could really see of it was the flickering light on the old man’s face. His cheeks were lined and sunken. Both of his bony hands were up at one side of his face, and the grey-white wires of the TV earbuds were tangled like a rosary in his fingers.
Beside him, in the bed on Sam’s left, was a grey-faced old man with a high forehead and a bald crown fringed by short white-grey hair. He had his bed up too. He was awake and had just put a newspaper down on his lap and was taking a hard sip from a straw in a sweating wax cup. Sam could hear the ice in the cup as the old man brought it to his mouth, then placed it back on his bedside tray. He was looking straight at her but made no indication he could actually see or was in any way aware of her. He blinked slowly and walled himself again behind the newspaper.
In the bed right across from Robert was the only other person whose ailments were visible. This guy was in his late twenties or early thirties. He had a beard that appeared to have once been neatly trimmed, but around it grew a kind of shaggy outer beard, no doubt the result of his time in hospital. Both arms were strapped into splints that left them immobile from the shoulders down. His hands were free. In one hand he held the controls for his bed, in the other he had his phone: a black screen like polished stone in a white case. He did not appear to be in pain, but the splints on his arms looked awkward and uncomfortable and he fidgeted non-stop, rearranging himself in the bed and readjusting the bed with the remote. At an arm’s length distance, he was forced to crook his head uncomfortably to look at his phone. He swept his thumb across the screen impatiently and texted slowly with one thumb. Once, he brought both hands together to try to text normally, but the splints crowded out his chest and he looked like he was struggling to breathe.
“I’m like a caveman with a stone tool over here,” the man said. It took Sam a moment to realize he was talking to her.
“I was in the hospital once when I was a kid. Some white blood cell thing. I never understood it and then it went away. But I read books for two weeks. How cultured is that! Two weeks I did nothing but read books. That’s what everybody did in the hospital back then, I guess. What do I do now? This thing!” He indicated the cellphone by holding it up as high as he could and pointing at it with his chin. “Cat videos, celebrity gossip, and illiterate text messages from my friends. I’ll bet my brain has shrunk by like…I don’t know. Some significant percentage. I’ll bet if they scanned my brain fifteen years ago, before I had a cellphone, and now. I’ll bet a scientist could see where my brain has shrunk. I’ll bet it’s measurable.”
“There are books down in the gift shop,” Sam said. Why was it that sometimes she could not make her mouth move, could not will her voice to work at all, and then suddenly words were just popping out of her mouth as though it was the easiest and most natural thing in the world?
The man tilted his head and looked at her. “What?” he said. He’d been talking away, but Sam realized that he was expecting to be ignored.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a rack of books downstairs. In the canteen. The gift shop. If you give me the money, I’ll go get you one. What do you want?”
The man’s face lit up. “Are you serious?” He turned toward his bedside table. He flapped his arms at it, like a penguin in a cartoon. “Can you look in that top drawer for my wallet?”
When the elevator doors opened onto the ground floor of the hospital, Sam noticed that the windows that looked out onto the parking lot and the on-ramp to the highway were dark. As if waking from a dream, she remembered Uncle Ray. She’d left school in the middle of the day. He would have gotten a robocall about her attendance. She dug her phone out of a side pocket of her bookbag, and a string of notifications, all from Uncle Ray, scrolled down the screen. When he picked up before the end of the first ring, she knew he’d been waiting with his phone out.
“Uncle Ray.”
She heard him breathing, checking himself. “The school called. They said you skipped. Absence without excuse.”
“I did not really skip, Uncle Ray.”
“You’re here with me for school. That’s the reason you’re here.”
She thought she remembered leaving Music at the start of class. Right after attendance. “I didn’t miss the whole day. My friend…” She had never spoken to Ray about Robert. “My friend got hurt. He’s in the hospital. I’m calling from the hospital.”
“Your friend got hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“He got beaten up. Bad. But he’ll probably be okay.”
“Were you with him when he got hurt? You’re not hurt, are you, Patricia? I’d feel better if I could see you right now. Just get a look at your face. If you’ve been hurt, your mother is going to box my ears for me.”
“Uncle Ray. I’m fine. I was not hurt. I was not anywhere near Robert when he got hurt. I heard about it at school. That’s why I left. I got worried and I came to the hospital.”
She could hear Uncle Ray exhale sharply into the phone as his mind switched gears. “Patricia. Your hospital visit needs to be over now. I’m that worked up. I just need you to be home here. I’ll pick you up at the main entrance in a few minutes.”
She knew better than to argue with Ray right now.
She had a copy of The Shining and a handful of change for the man in the bed across from Robert.
There was a nurse. Or a doctor. Someone in scrubs, beside Robert’s bed. They had the privacy curtain pulled most of the way around. Sam only caught a glimpse of whoever it was from the doorway as she came in. Robert was awake. Blinking groggily. The nurse was explaining something, looking at a clipboard.
“What you get for me?” the man with the arm splints said. He extended a stiff arm in her direction.
“Ever read any Stephen King?” Sam asked.
“Carrie,” the man said. “That was pretty darn good.”
“I got you The Shining,” she said.
“Great movie.”
“The book is very different.”
“I’m just going to devour this book, I can tell,” the man said. He was shifting beneath the covers in anticipation of getting the book in his hand. When she handed it over, he got it in both hands and turned it over at arm’s length a few times.
“Are you going to be able to read it like that?” Sam asked.
“I’m lucky my eyesight is good,” he said and laughed. By the time Sam put the change on his bedside table, he was already reading.
“Thanks a lot,” the man said distractedly without looking up from the page. She could see him settling back onto his pillow. His body lost almost all its uncomfortable fidgeting as though he’d just been shot up with a pain med.
“Enjoy,” Sam said. She put a hand on the edge of the privacy curtain and hesitated. She considered asking whether he wanted it pulled over, but he was already engrossed in The Shining, had it pinched between his arms as though in tweezers.
There was the metallic scraping sound of Robert’s privacy curtain being drawn back, and the nurse pivoted on her heels and left the room with a purposeful gait.
“That was about my mother,” Robert said when he saw her. “She’s in a coma.”
Sam felt her heart begin to race. “Was she…? Did the people who…”
Robert shook his head sadly. “Nobody beat her up. She was probably already in a coma when I was getting the shit kicked out of me. She’s been in the hospital before. She has alcoholism. I kind of saw this coming.” He closed his eyes as though thinking about all of this had tired him. “It’s touch and go, I guess.” He opened his eyes again. “She might not come out of it.”
“Maybe I should go check on her,” Sam offered. There was no way they were going to let Robert leave the bed he was in, and she thought if she were in his shoes, she’d want at the very least for someone she knew to just look in on her mother and report back.
Robert shook his head. “The nurse said they put a note in her file. Any change at all and they’ll tell me.”
“How are you feeling?” Sam asked. She sat in the padded armchair next to the bed, but she settled on the edge of it. It was almost time to meet Uncle Ray at the main entrance.
“Honestly? I’m feeling pretty defeated. I’m even lower than an alcoholic’s bootlegger. A man who will sell liquor to people at double the retail price right up until the liquor kills them, that man thinks I’m a low-life.” Robert’s voice was shaky and thin.
“I’m not exactly sure what you’re talking about,” Sam said.
“The people who beat me up were bootleggers. They sell overpriced alcohol to…to desperate people. I don’t know what to do about my mother. I can’t even think about her at the moment. Isn’t that terrible? No sympathy for my own mother. For all I know she’s breathing her last breath right now.”
Sam burrowed her hand through the bedsheets until she had Robert’s hand. She squeezed and held on firmly. Her heart set up racing inside her. She looked in Robert’s face for some response, and when none came, she loosened her grip and began to pull her hand away. His hand immediately followed hers, found it again quickly, and held on.
“I’m going to have to go in a minute,” she said. “My uncle’s picking me up. He’s pretty pissed off. I missed some school today. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
Robert nodded. His eyelids were drooping. Soon he’d be asleep again. “I need to ask you a favour,” he said.