Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [138]
“You were concussed,” Les added, miming the swing of the nightstick.
Jude said, “You passed out in the ambulance.”
“Ambulance?”
“Tell her,” Jude said.
“Tell me what?”
“Tell you nothing. She’s awake now, gentlemen. You can go.”
“I think she’s going to find out,” Les said.
Jude rubbed his scalp. “They shaved your head.”
“Just part of it, darling, for the stitches.”
Eliza lifted her hand to her head. It was wrapped in a bandage.
“Thank you very much, Jude, you can take your father to the waiting room now.”
Jude and Les rose to their feet. Les said, “You look great, sweetheart.”
“Honestly, it’s not much,” said her mother after they left the room. “It’s just a patch over your ear. You remember Randall, the one who did the stage makeup before Angie. His lover is a wigmaker. He’s got this fabulous shop in SoHo with nothing but beautiful wigs made from human hair. We’ll find you something beautiful.”
Eliza traced the bandage. Her head didn’t hurt; she couldn’t feel a thing.
“We won’t waste our time worrying about hair. Hair grows back. You’re safe, and the baby’s safe. We should be glad all we have to worry about is a little hair.”
“I don’t care about my hair, Mom.”
It had been more than three months since she’d seen her mother. Her makeup was carefully applied, her hair pulled back tightly in its braid. The only thing that was different was the faint glaze of dark hair above her lip, dusty with powder. She’d waxed her mustache for years. Without Les to kiss good night—or without Eliza—she’d stopped.
“I moved back home,” Eliza said. “We were trying to reach you.”
“I know, my darling. I know everything.”
Eliza scooted up in the bed. “Jude told you? You didn’t give him a hard time, did you?”
“I certainly did.”
Di was pleased to fill in the details. She knew, after weeks of false leads, that they had been in Vermont. She knew, after a weeks-long wild-goose chase to Chicago, where Jude had called her at her hotel, that they had not been in Chicago. She knew a bad private investigator. She didn’t know who was a bigger piece of work: Les or his ex-wife. She knew that, apart from her first trip to the ER and her present one, Eliza had not seen a doctor. She knew about the six weeks of cocaine and the marijuana and now the doctor and nurse did, too. She knew about Johnny’s indiscretion. She knew what had happened in the park, and if Eliza thought she wasn’t going to bring the fattest lawsuit the City of New York had ever seen, she’d better think again.
She took a long sip of tea.
She knew that Eliza had decided to give up the baby. Was that right?
Eliza, petting the tape on the back of her hand, nodded.
Her mother petted the back of Eliza’s hand, too. She thought that was a wise and brave choice. She knew that Eliza had missed her and that Eliza knew she’d missed her, too. She knew that Eliza was sorry and that Eliza knew she was sorry, too.
The nurse came in then. “Someone’s awake!” She padded around in her sneakers, checking monitors, the IV. They wanted to keep her here one more night, she said, to make sure her brain didn’t swell. While the nurse adjusted the strap on her belly, Eliza looked at the ceiling, staring at the white lights until tears burned in her eyes. The nurse held up the banner of paper spilling out of one of the machines. “You see these dips and peaks?” she asked, tracing them with her finger. Eliza squinted at the graph. “This is your baby’s heartbeat. It’s following a nice pattern now.”
Eliza cleared her throat. “The drugs I did—did they hurt the baby?”
The nurse hung her clipboard at the end of Eliza’s bed. Di gazed into her tea. “There’s no way to know yet, honey. You quit the hard stuff in the first trimester—that’s what counts.”
After the nurse left the room, Di took up Eliza’s hand and began gently, absently pushing back each of her cuticles. Always file your nails in one direction, so they don’t tear. If you tap your nails on a table, they’ll grow faster. Eliza closed her eyes. Maybe it was the sleeping pill. She felt light, as though she were floating in her hospital bed on a