She felt close to tears, which surprised her, because hadn’t she always chafed at Poppy’s presence in her life, and resented how she’d had no choice in the matter, and even, on occasion, allowed herself to fantasize his death? But apparently you grow to love whom you’re handed. It seemed shocking — a scandal, an atrocity — that such a thin, gray, warm-ankled person might just stop being, as easily as that.
Poppy glared at the ceiling and chewed his mustache.
Once they’d reached the hospital, Rebecca was directed to a desk to answer questions while the ambulance men wheeled Poppy through a set of swinging doors. “I’ve already answered everything!” she told a nurse. (Was she a nurse? Hard to know, nowadays, with these teddy-bear-print smocks and baggy pants.) The woman patted her arm and said, “You can see your loved one in just a few minutes.”
Rebecca didn’t like the sound of that loved one.
She answered the questions all over again, signed several forms, and then chose a chair as far as possible from anybody else. The room had the scrappy, exhausted look of a place where people had sat too long and then left in too much of a hurry. Empty Styrofoam cups — one of them scalloped with bite marks around the rim — dotted the tables; the magazines had been read into ruffles; a blue-jeaned man lay sleeping on an orange vinyl couch patched here and there with duct tape. Near the window, a family argued about who should go back home and walk the dog. A woman spoke urgently into a pay phone. Another woman tore something from a magazine inch by inch, trying to make no sound, while her husband yawned aloud and stretched his legs out until he was nearly diagonal in his seat.
Just yesterday Rebecca had snapped Poppy’s head off. He’d been complaining about his exercises—“Why you make me go through these boring, baby arm bends every morning…” he’d said — and she had said, “Fine, then; quit doing them. See if I care when your elbows rust solid.” And last week she had refused to take him to visit his friend, Mr. Ames. Worse than refused: she had said she would but kept putting it off, hoping Poppy would forget, and eventually he had stopped asking her, perhaps because he forgot but perhaps because he had simply lost hope. It broke her heart, now, to think of that.
She watched a skeletal man on crutches shuffle through the room, guided by some kind of aide — a round-faced young girl who kept an arm around his waist. He was speaking to her in a peevish drone: “They shoot you with their needles, wrench you every which way, make you stay perfectly still for hours on end… Then they force you to drink all these gallons of water after. Say, ‘With our patients who get a dye, we like to encourage the fluids.’ Which gave me quite a start, seeing as how what I heard was, ‘With our patients who’re going to die …’”
The girl laughed softly and squeezed his waist with such apparent affection that Rebecca wondered for a moment whether she was a relative. But no: more likely just one of those low-level, underpaid hospital employees who showed more genuine care than many physicians. She was opening a door now and shepherding him through it, one hand placed gently at the small of his back.
This was where they’d brought Patch when her appendix burst. Although the place had been remodeled since then, perhaps more than once. And NoNo when she broke her wrist. Or maybe not; that might have been Union Memorial. Oh, all those accidents, childhood illnesses, frantic late-night rides… Rebecca ought to publish a rating chart for Baltimore emergency rooms.
Joe had been taken here, too, but they’d moved him to Intensive Care before she arrived. She had spent four days and three nights in the Intensive Care waiting room — a much smaller space, with its own uniquely dread-filled atmosphere. Once an hour she had been allowed to come in and grip Joe’s unresponsive hand for five minutes before they made her leave again. Upon her return to the waiting room, total strangers would ask, “Did he speak to you? Did he open his eyes?” and she would ask the same of them when they returned from their relatives. They had grown as close as family through fear and grief and endless hours of just sitting. Although now, she couldn’t recall what those people had looked like, even.
A woman dressed in aqua scrubs called, “Mrs. Davitch? Is there a Mrs. Davitch?”
“Here I am,” she said, standing up.
“You can come on back now.”
Rebecca collected her purse and followed the woman through the swinging doors, down a linoleum-floored corridor. “How is he?” she asked, but the woman said, “Doing just fine!” so promptly that Rebecca suspected she had no idea. They entered a large, uncannily quiet area where doctors were going about their business without any appearance of haste, thoughtfully studying clipboards or conferring at a central desk. Curtained cubicles lined three walls, and the woman slid one curtain back to expose Poppy’s yellow-soled feet poking forth from his stretcher. “Company!” she sang out, and then she left, her jogging shoes squeaking as she turned to close the curtain behind her.
Rebecca walked around to Poppy’s head and found him wide awake, scowling at the machine that chirped and blinked beside him. “How’re you feeling?” she asked him.
“How do you expect I’d feel? With all this commotion going on.”
“Is the chest pain any better?”
“Some.”
“What have they done so far?”
“Punctured about six veins for blood. Gave me an EKG. Went off and left me lying here in the very worst position for somebody subject to backache.”
He was wearing a pastel hospital gown that made him look frivolous and pathetic. An IV needle was attached to the back of one hand. She covered the other hand with her own, and he allowed it. He closed his eyes and said, “It’s okay with me if you stay.”
“I’ll be right here,” she told him.
She kept her hand on top of his, shifting her weight from time to time when her legs started to tire. There was a chair over near the curtain, but she didn’t want to risk disturbing him.
If this turned out to be Poppy’s deathbed, heaven forbid, how strange that she should be standing beside it! Ninety-nine years ago, when he had come into the world, nobody could have foreseen that an overweight college dropout from Church Valley, Virginia — not even a Davitch, strictly speaking — would be the one to hold his hand as he left it.
Well, that was the case with nearly everybody, she supposed. Lord only knew who would be attending her deathbed.
The curtain rattled back, and all at once, there was Zeb — a comfort to behold, with his long, kind, homely face and smudged glasses. “How’re you doing?” he asked her.
“Well, I’m fine, but Poppy, here…”
Poppy opened his eyes and said, “I believe they’re trying to finish me off.”
“Nope. They’re letting you go,” Zeb told him. He was peering now at the chirpy machine. “Turns out it’s indigestion.”
“It is?”
“I just spoke with the resident.”
“Oh! Indigestion!” Rebecca cried. It was such a wonderful word, she felt the need to say it herself.
“I hear you had three cupcakes at the baby-welcoming,” Zeb told Poppy.
“Well, what if I did? I’ve eaten far more, many a time.”
“They’re going to bring you an antacid. That should help,” Zeb said. “It may take a while to spring you, hospitals being what they are, but sooner or later, we’ll get you out.” He looked over at Rebecca and said, “We should let them know at home. They’re pretty worried.”
“Did Joey get his shot?”
“He did, and he’s back at the party making up for lost time.”
“I’ll go telephone,” she said. She bent to kiss Poppy’s cheek and told him, “I’m glad it wasn’t serious.”