“Please…” Fola whispers. “Not yet please no Kweku-no.”
2
Olu walks in no particular hurry out of the hospital, puts down his coffee, puts down his phone and starts to cry. Five quick sobs, drumbeats—your-fa-ther-is-dead—then he wipes his face, closes his eyes. Snowflakes fall, land on his nose and his lips. It is one A.M., zero degrees Celsius.
“So sorry.”
He opens his eyes to find an elderly woman, not five feet tall, fur coat, below him. She has just made her way through the handicapped exit and stopped by his side on the sidewalk outside. In the peculiar silence that invariably accompanies the opening act of a storm in the nighttime, they stand there together and watch the snow swirl through the black then the bright of the hospital sign.
She gestures to the lobby through the glass doors behind them, then touches him, winking. She says in a rush, “I know I should have stayed with the kids. Well. The kids. Jesus. Forty years old is our youngest, my youngest. Two boys. Brett and Junior. Bruce Junior, like my husband. He’s always had impeccable timing, my Bruce. Twelve twenty-one A.M., December twenty-first, time of death. How’s that for good timing? Yes, sir. I love it at night when it just starts to snow. It just goes by so quickly, though. Who did you lose?”
“—a doctor,” he says, his voice cracking on I’m. “I’m a doctor.”
“I could tell by your outfit,” she says. “But I assumed you weren’t standing here mourning a patient.” After a moment she laughs and he joins, clouds of breath. She pulls out a Cohiba Esplendido in a handkerchief. A small silver lighter. Sparks, loses the flame. Olu cups his hand around the lighter, fingers trembling. “Your fingers are shaking,” she says.
“Sure is cold.” He says foolish things like this whenever he’s nervous, short sentences that start with sure is and how ’bout.
“Dressed in those,” touching him, “cotton pajamas? You know we’re in a blizzard here, darling. Yes, sir. Doesn’t look like much now, never does to begin with, but wait until sunrise. Not here. Don’t wait here. You’ll catch a death of a cold — oh dear me. Did I say that? Not what one says at such times. Here, take this.”
“No. I’m a—”
“Doctor. You said.”
“I don’t—”
“Take it. I promised my Bruce that I’d smoke it for him. If he died, when he died. Like he did when our children were born, our two boys. Pack of three. But I’m old.” She laughs again, takes one good drag with her eyes closed, then puts the cigar—“That’s a dear”—in his mouth. A nurse inserting a thermometer. He bends to receive it. With his face there before her, she touches his cheek. “You’re crying.” A statement. She holds his chin, gently, and wipes off his cheek with her handkerchief. “There.” She pats his cheek, smiling, and adds before leaving, “The cold always makes me cry, too.”
• • •
Olu walks, smoking, up Huntington Ave. Streetlamps drip gold into puddles of light. The snow gathers strength as he makes his way home, leaning forward, lips chapping, arms naked. No coat. Saturday-night revelers stumble and shout. A few cars pass slowly, no traction, in fear. No one seems to notice someone walking in the street itself. Nude arms, blue scrubs, and the drumbeat.
• • •
Ling is asleep with her back to the door. He stands in the doorway and watches her sleep. The light cuts her body in two on an angle, her hair on the pillow an oil spill. Slick black. The bedroom is white, all white, everything white. She thinks it excessive, a sham wouldn’t hurt. She’s left her red shirt on the floor, a suggestion. He picks this up, making no noise. Looks around. He goes to the Eames chair (white), clutching the shirt as a child would a blanket or bear, for the smell of it. Chanel No. 5, Jergens lotion, cherry-almond. He tries to say her name, wants to hear it. Says, “L—.” But hears instead Fola, her voice flat and distant, the shoddy connection, “Your father is dead,” and the few things she told him, the pause that came after, that hush between heard and received, before hurt.
He asked every question and heard every detail—“on his face,” “in the grass,” “Benson found him like that,” “seems he walked outside, fell down, and couldn’t get up,” “six A.M.”—but she didn’t have answers. She wept. He set down his stirrer, dripping soymilk on the tabletop. He looked around the house staff lounge, packed at this hour. Emergency department interns, coked, Red Bulled, and coffeed, their eyes dim and bloodshot with fear and fatigue. Days before Christmas, wee hours, Sunday morning, the sorrows of the Saturday left at their door: desperate barroom brawls, suicide attempts, crashes presnowstorm, hypothermia among the homeless. He didn’t want to go home. This is what he misses in his second year of ortho now, buzzing through shifts high on sports drink and drive. Orthopedic surgery is intensity by appointment: fallen grandpas, fallen quarterbacks, procedural, well paid. He chose it for these reasons, the procedures above others, the physicality, the precision, nostalgia for track. But he misses the rush of ED, the desperation, the prospect and hovering presence of death.
Fola. “Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Please call your siblings? To tell them that…?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t mind? You’re okay?”
“Yes.”
“I just need to rest for a moment. Long morning. I love you, my darling. You know that.”
“I know.”
• • •
He sits in his scrubs with the shirt in the dark, with the moon making ice of the floor and the walls, and thinks maybe she’s right, all this white is oppressive, apathetic; a bedroom shouldn’t be an OR. In the sunlight it’s gorgeous, hard angles and harder the light crashing brilliantly against its own shade, to an eerie effect, white on white, like an echo, the sun staring at its reflection. Not now. Now it is lonely and cold in the darkness that isn’t quite darkness, a cold and dark light. With the snow falling onto itself out the window as noiseless as hopelessness, more white on white.
He watches her chest as it rises and falls. She stirs in her sleep, shifting here, shifting there, as she’s wont, tossing, turning. He tries again, “L—,” with the ing getting stuck in his throat, thick with shame. Of all things. Not with sorrow or grief, thick with tears, but a shame he feels spreading like warmth down his throat and below to his chest, to his stomach, his groin, where it stops, gathers strength, and spreads out to his knees. Of all places. Warm knees as he sits in not-darkness, her T-shirt pressed up to his mouth like a mute. And why this? Why this candle-wax-melting sensation that renders him too weak to stand or to speak and now turns into burning, a fierce, violent burning so caustic he bends at the waist, crying “H—!”?
The T-shirt reverses the outpour, red cotton ball pressed to his lips muting fury and shame, so back in goes the outburst, down, back down his throat to his stomach and lands there with one breathless “—ow.”
How is the question (does an exceptional surgeon just die in a garden of cardiac arrest?). How, when his whole life he’s sought to be like him, has forgiven the sins in the name of the gift, has admired the brilliance and told of the prowess, general surgeon without equal, remembered even now. “Sai, you say? I knew a Sai once. Ghanaian. A knife-wielding artist. You know who I mean?” “Yes. That’s my father.” “Your father! How is he? Oh my, it’s been years…” “Sixteen years, yes.”