A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [15]
I put my cold hand on her shoulder. “It will be fine,” wouldn’t do, because there was no telling. Her back was rising and falling fitfully. To steady myself, I pictured Howard’s size-thirteen rubber boots with the buckles jangling. When Theresa sat up I was going to plow in, take her in my arms. I waited, with my hand on her. I waited until an enormous woman, dark, glowering like a bull, went to the reception desk and beat on the little service bell. Robbie MacKessy’s mother had gone without my noticing. The newcomer ripped open a family-size foil bag of corn chips and started eating them. It is probably not possible to eat corn chips quietly, but she certainly made no attempt to be discreet. “Let’s …” Theresa began, wiping her face with her tissue and walking away toward the lobby.
There was art on the wall, as well as carpet. There was a marble fountain that began in the mezzanine and trickled down a path like a staircase, with ferns on either side. Theresa and I had taken a tour together at the hospital open house, after the renovation. We had studied the renderings, made by local artists, one after the next: the murky police station, Dan’s own Dairy Shrine, the Kiwanis lodge, the old schoolhouse, several churches, and the first freestanding Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in a strip mall in the state. We had been rude and arrogant, secure in our good health and superior knowledge. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might someday feel culpable even for a thing as seemingly insignificant as passing judgment on local art. In my life I had felt stunned before; I have known how the paintings in a room, the dishes on the shelf, the peaches on the table, how everything comes into relief and looks clear, sharp, against your own emptiness. When we got on the elevator we stood side by side staring at the numbers on the digital panel, as if we expected to read something besides 1 and 2 and 3, as if we expected a truth to be divulged in midair. I took a deep breath and smelled the cucumber soap Theresa ordered by the pallet from a company in St. Louis. It was such a familiar smell, a fragrance that evoked not a hospital elevator, but home, the children, mornings at coffee.
“Am I allowed here?” I whispered, tagging behind her through the doors of the intensive care unit. She didn’t hear me. She had wanted to find me, to tell me and show me, so it made sense for me to follow; it was what she meant. There was ringing and buzzing and beeping coming from every door down the hall. Dan was in room 309, at the far end of the bed, and Reverend Nabor, from the Presbyterian Church in town, was at the foot, his hands folded, his head bowed. Lizzy’s little body was there too, after all, underneath a tangle of blue tubing. The machines supporting her were hissing and clicking, the goods running up her nose and down her throat, into the veins in her arms. She’ll be fine, I said to myself again. The doctor from Milwaukee was an expert and medical technology sublime. There will be a burst of smoke, dense, thick smoke—the machine will make it—and when it clears Lizzy will be whole, awake, unencumbered, looking at our pained faces with surprise.
I’m sure it sounds strange at best, and hardhearted at worst, but I found myself at the side of the bed, concentrating all of what was abject fear into the straightforward loathing of the good Reverend Joseph Nabor. I thought I heard him say something about rain upon the earth, sending waters upon the fields. He came to Theresa then with his hairy hands outstretched, palms down, like a sleepwalker. He took hold of her arms. It was common knowledge that he himself was continuously in mortal peril,