Coronado - Dennis Lehane [21]
He says, “I’m sorry?”
She jiggles the cup absently. “It’s just, you know, we like to keep the corridors clear.”
“Sure.”
She moves her head slightly, a gesture that Daniel takes to mean that the waiting area is behind him.
“It’s okay,” she says. “We’ll let you know. Soon as we do.” Daniel nods and she steps through the doorway and the doors close behind her.
A few minutes later, a young woman, maybe twenty-five, trots past him and stops outside the door. She’s dressed for a night out. She smells of perfume and liqueur. She’s pudgy, addled, made luminous by fear.
There’s a sign over the cymbal-button that says DO NOT ENTER SICU WITHOUT CONTACTING NURSE STATION. LIFT PHONE.
The phone is to the right of the button and the woman lifts it and waits and presses her forehead to the wall and closes her eyes and then jerks back and speaks into the phone, stumbling, cowed:
“Yes. Yes? This is Mr. Brookner’s wife. Paul Brookner? I’m his wife. I got a call. I’m…I’m Paul Brookner’s wife. Oh? Okay.”
She hangs up and steps back from the wall, stands in front of the doors and presses the button and tilts her head back for a moment like she’s waiting to be beamed up, and the doors open and she tugs her blouse down over her skirt and touches her neck and the underside of her chin with splayed fingers.
She walks through the doors and Daniel feels crushed for her and her tragedy, whatever it may be, a sweeping empathy he rarely feels for the people he knows.
Ten minutes later, a man in a tie comes down the hall toward him. Daniel lowers his head, looks at his shoes. The man comes abreast of him, and Daniel watches his cuffs swing past him and the man turns to his right and enters the ICU.
Daniel breathes, and a small man with a Slavic accent says, “How are you?”
Daniel focuses. The man is too close. He is about fifty years old. He is short and wears a blue barracuda jacket with red lining over a white pinstripe shirt open at the collar and black jeans.
Daniel says, “Excuse me?”
The man peers up at him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” Daniel can hear a defensiveness in the words he didn’t intend.
“Who is it?”
“Who is what?”
The man’s eyes gesture over Daniel’s shoulder. “You’re here to see?”
“My father,” Daniel says, not sure why.
“He is sick, yes?”
Daniel nods.
“Of?”
Daniel wishes the guy would take a step back. “I really don’t want to discuss it.”
The man places a soft hand on his wrist. “It’s good to talk. Yes? I think it is. My mother. She is here.” The man’s head tilts in the direction of the ICU.
“What is it?”
“Pneumonia.” The man shrugs, as if indifferent to the particulars.
Daniel says, “Open-heart surgery. My father. Things went wrong.”
The man nods, and his eyes are tender. He holds out his hand. “My name is Michael.”
Daniel shakes the hand. “Daniel.”
“My mother?” Michael says. “She is old. Ninety-six. But she is my mother, you see? Ninety-six, a hundred and six, what difference? She is my mother. She is sick.” His hands shake slightly. “Your father?”
Daniel takes a moment to compose himself. He’s beginning to believe his story, to feel his father is in there, hooked up to tubes, hoses, beeping boxes.
“He’s seventy-eight,” Daniel says. “He’s a strong man.”
Michael nods and claps his shoulder. “Now you must be the strong son. Strong for him. It is this way with things sometimes.” He leans against the wall. “Ah, the waiting.” He sighs and drums his fingers on his thighs.
AT TWO IN the morning, he looks out another window and he can see them on the roof by his car. Two of them. One takes the night air. He leans against the grille of the Sequoia and smokes a cigarette.
Daniel goes back to the ICU waiting room. It’s the waiting room for all the units on the floor. Someone must have figured that when it came to the loved ones, no S or C or N was necessary. At this point, it’s all ICU.
He is alone except for a Brazilian woman who snores under the TV, pieces