The third number she tried was Sarah’s. No answer.
She texted James: I’m coming.
And a response, instantaneous beeping: University Hospital, Room 5117, which was approaching in the distance, an odd, jarring coincidence. The wide boulevard the driver had chosen held several hospitals. Patients wandered the sidewalks slowly, in hospital gowns. A man smoked, leaning on an IV drip.
“I’m sorry, can you take me to University Hospital instead, please?”
The taxi swung across three lanes, setting off honking. The driver stuck his fist out the window.
Ana felt that if she were in a movie, she would grab a twenty and fling it at him for the eleven-dollar ride. But that kind of drama wasn’t in her, and she paid him thirteen dollars exactly and waited for the receipt.
She rushed, sincerely, up the stairs, stopping for another stolen moment to use the hand sanitizer.
The man at reception acted as if he had been waiting for her: “Yes, yes,” he said. “Third bank of elevators, north side.”
Ana continued rubbing her hands after the sanitizer had evaporated. Up she rode in the elevator until her ears gently popped.
She saw James immediately, or the back of him, through the glass window of a cordoned-off waiting room. He faced a panel of three white coats, as if taking an oral exam. The three doctors weren’t talking but nodding and listening to James. Though the glass prevented her from hearing his words, from the stabbing and flapping of his hands, Ana knew that James was holding court.
She opened the door.
“They want information,” James said to her once the tides of introduction had receded and they’d all sat down.
“We are trying to establish a medical history,” said the young doctor, an Asian woman rescued from her adolescent looks by painfully thin eyebrows. Next to her sat a stout Indian doctor, bored and fuller-browed. “Your husband thought you might know if Ms. Weiss had any history of high blood pressure? Diabetes mellitus? Kidney problems?”
Ana stared at the Asian doctor’s blank face.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, Christ,” said James, who had been bobbing up high in his shock, caught in its currents. “You don’t know what happened.”
“How would I know? I was on a call and I got a message—” The unspeaking doctor looked at her watch.
“There was a car accident. On the Lakeshore. Some kind of debris in the road, and Marcus swerved—” James spoke without any emphasis, a witness giving a police report. “No other cars were involved, but Marcus’s car went headfirst into a retaining wall. Finn’s okay, but Marcus—he died.” The last two words sounded like a book clapping shut.
Ana put her hands together, and they rose to her mouth, touched her lips, then moved to the bridge of her nose and stayed there. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, and tasted the information. She felt James’s hand on her back and shrugged it off quickly, her whole body in thrall to a sensation of bugs crawling and burrowing. Then she realized what she had done, the quick and urgent rejection of her husband’s kindness, and felt upon her that pettiness, and on top of that, the awful loneliness of what had happened. She saw, bright and burning in her head, a red station wagon crumpled like a rolled toothpaste tube up against a concrete wall. She felt the hopelessness of flesh between car and cement. And she dizzied and reached quickly for James, for his arm, his shoulder, clasping his left hand, finally, to her right.
As all of this was happening, the doctor explained that Sarah had hit her head. “We stopped the bleeding,” she said, and the other doctor perked up with pride.
“Where is the bleeding?” asked Ana.
“A good question. In the frontal lobe, so focal processes are affected.”
“Wait—her brain?” The muted phrase “hit her head” had tripped up Ana. She hadn’t considered the brain inside that head, somehow picturing an external cut to the scalp, like a nick from shaving.
“Most people wake up from a coma within a few days or weeks, but hers is a severe trauma.”
“Coma!” Ana said.
The doctor ignored her incredulousness. “We’re waiting to hear from her GP, but it would help us to know her medical history. James said she has no living relatives.”
“No parents. She’s an only child,” said Ana, scanning her memory for cousins, aunts, uncles. “She’s—she was—very healthy. I don’t know. There’s a lot I didn’t know. Don’t know.” James squeezed her hand.
“Neither of us have heard her talk about taking medications,” he said suddenly. Ana wondered, just for a moment, how he could speak with such authority.
“Wait—” Ana shook her head. “Why did you call us?”
“We’re the emergency contact, remember?”
“We are?”
“I’m the executor.”
“The executioner?”
James stared at her. “What?”
Ana rubbed her forehead. The conversation had occurred a few months ago, in a wine haze. It came to her now, lightly, faded. “We’re in such an unusual situation—would you guys consider—if something happened to us—” Flattery and consent.
“Do you know if she’s allergic to penicillin?”
Everyone looked at Ana, as if women shared all such intimacies—pedicures, and Pap smears.
“No,” she said. And then James remembered when he had last set foot in this hospital. It was the day after Finn’s birth.
“She had her son here,” said James. “There must be records.…”
The silent, bored doctor suddenly stood up and left without a word. James hated her for a moment. He knew the type: young, overachieving, and indifferent. A straight-A suck-up.
The remaining doctor said they now had to wait. Sarah was too swollen for an accurate reading of the depths of her sleep. To James, waiting seemed like a euphemism for futility, but the doctor went on, painting a picture of a future in which Sarah could be better, where she might move a little, then a lot, and one day, snap to. But then that happy picture was snatched back by the phrase “potential persistent vegetative state.”
“We have her on a cocktail, if you’re wondering about the IV.”
“Cocktail?” said Ana, and she glanced at James, whose mouth began to twitch.
“Vitamins and glucose and—”
From her husband’s mouth, a small laugh, which Ana caught and returned.
“I need a cocktail, too,” said James, wishing it didn’t bother him that the doctor didn’t crack a smile.
* * *
Two days later, they arrived at an unadorned apartment building, the rectangular shape of proletariat Russia, one of several jutting out of the cement, circled by parking lots.
Earlier that morning, Marcus’s lawyer had called about something called “direct cremation.” This request was in the will. James gave the lawyer his Visa number to cover the $1,600 cost and scribbled instructions on an envelope about recovering the money through the insurance policy. James marveled at Marcus’s foresight. He couldn’t even plan lunch.
James negotiated the buzzer and doors of greasy glass. Ana held his hand, gripping him in a way she almost never did.
“Did you eat anything?” he asked her, as they walked up the stairs to the third floor, obeying the OUT OF SERVICE sign on the elevator.
“No,” said Ana.
“Me neither. Maybe we can take him for some food after.” Ana nodded.
The hall smelled like burned wax, which Ana identified as sesame oil. In places, the carpet curled up at the edges, as if trying not to touch the walls. On the door to the apartment, someone had hung a little straw heart with a stuffed red bird dangling in the center.