Moondogs - Alexander Yates [152]
Benicio wrote out a tip-slip for another four thousand pesos, tore it out of the booklet and handed it over. Glancing down at the figure, Edilberto balled up the tip-slip and discarded it in the backseat. Benicio took a breath. He signed the bottom of a fresh tip-slip, left the peso amount blank and threw the pad at Edilberto so that it struck him in the chest.
They didn’t speak for the rest of the night. Edilberto drove with the wipers on and took Benicio to a gleaming white hospital in Makati where a nurse cleaned his face, swabbed out his little cut with alcohol and closed it with a single stitch. There was some commotion in the hospital—people ran about with worried and intense expressions and the sounds of helicopters carried to and fro through the ceiling—but Benicio thought little of it. He negotiated to have the bill sent to his hotel and went back outside to meet Edilberto.
It was almost dawn when they returned to the Shangri-La. Alice was fully dressed and waiting in the lobby. She saw the car pull up through the big glass doors and raced toward them before Benicio had both feet out. She didn’t ask where the hell he’d been. She didn’t ask why he was wet and dirty and bandaged. She told him that they’d found his father, that he’d been shot, and they were bringing him to Makati Medical now to try and save him.
HOWARD WAS ALREADY IN SURGERY when they returned to the hospital, and he underwent two more operations before Sunday was over. The doctors said he was disoriented but conscious during the helicopter ride from Corregidor, but he hadn’t come back since the first operation. Benicio and Alice made makeshift beds out of plastic chairs in the waiting lounge, and on Monday, when Howard was moved into his own room with a spare cot, they joined him. They napped in shifts all day—or rather Alice did while Benicio tried his best to stay awake all the time. He never left his father’s bedside, and spoke only to the nurses who came to change his IV and write things on his chart. The night nurse was especially chatty. She pronounced Miracle like it was three words. Her hair was braided so tight it looked synthetic, her forearms were slightly furry and she signed the cross as a kind of punctuation for life—she would have fit in perfectly among his aunts.
“The best thing you can do is take it day by day,” she said as he gazed dully at the green peaks of his father’s heartbeat. Benicio guessed that measuring things in days meant a week was unrealistic. The nurse tapped her pen precisely on the rigid edge of his father’s chart and glanced at the beeping monitors. “How is your wife holding up?” she asked, gesturing to Alice sleeping lightly on the cot.
“We’re not married,” he said. The nurse replaced the clipboard and made to go. “My father’s dying,” he said.
“His body may be.” She touched the collar of her uniform and he guessed that under the fabric was a dangling crucifix.
“The doctors wouldn’t tell me how long.”
“That’s because they don’t know.”
“Will they? I mean, when he starts to?”
“It could be sudden,” the nurse said. “Or they could know. Nothing is certain. Put your faith in God’s hands.”
Benicio shifted in his seat beside the hospital bed. He’d released his father’s hand when the nurse came in, but now he took it again. “Can he hear us?”
“He hears us all.”
“I mean my father.”
“Oh. I don’t know. I like to think he can.” She placed her hand on his and Howard’s. They were like a team, getting ready for a game.
“You like to think?”
The nurse paused, not quite sure how to take him but embarrassed all the same. She opened her mouth and closed it. She pulled her hand from their modest stack, capped her pen and left. He listened to her footsteps in the empty hall, fading beneath the beep and hiss of life support. Alice sat up on the cot behind him.
“She doesn’t deserve that,” Alice said.
He was quiet for a while. “No. She doesn’t.”
The cot squeaked as Alice got up. She crossed to him and draped her arms lightly around his