Emergency Room

  Oh, Dad! thought Seth, his eyes spilling like his heart.

  He had a father who had never skipped a birthday or a Christmas, that was for sure. A father who never skipped dinner or breakfast either. A father who was so there that Seth had had hideouts to avoid him.

  “Volunteer!” yelled Meggie.

  Seth brushed his face on his sleeve and walked blindly toward Meggie. He would telephone Dad tonight. He had never told his parents about his ER volunteering, although they would be very proud. His parents had orchestrated so much of his life that Seth had opted for privacy on his choices at college. He could no longer imagine why. He had parents who wanted to know! He was three hundred sixty-five days times many years luckier than Diana.

  “Volunteer.” A nurse called out. “Take this patient up to seven three.”

  The patient was nine years old, an adorable little pigtailed child who looked and acted as healthy as Seth. Healthier. The mother, on the other hand, was acting as if the little girl were on her deathbed, wringing her hands, hyperventilating, begging the nurse to accompany them. “You’ll be fine,” said the nurse, walking away.

  “I hate this hospital!” muttered the mother, right on cue.

  Seth could not imagine why the child was being admitted. Any fool could see there was nothing wrong. He collected the chart and set out for seven three, the mother whining, and the little girl — by hospital rule in a wheelchair — bouncing and chattering.

  “Asthma,” explained the mother, spitting out the words with wrath. “We were here all last night because Mandy had such a severe attack, but they sent us home.” The mother made this sound like a staff crime that ought to be punishable by death. “Then Mandy had another attack this afternoon, which of course wouldn’t have happened if anybody in this zoo had even a pea-sized brain and admitted her back last night. I knew they had to admit her! But would they listen to me, her mother? Oh, no! Not those arrogant worthless doctors! So of course she has another attack, and they act as if it’s my fault, but this time they told us we wouldn’t have a second chance.”

  No second chance? Was that a euphemism for dying? Couldn’t be. Plain old wheezing couldn’t kill a healthy little girl. No way. The mom was an hysteric. “She looks fine now,” he said.

  “It’s temporary. They gave her oxygen and medication. Hurry up.” The mother tugged at Seth’s jacket and gave him a little push. “We have to get to the pediatric floor.”

  “It’s true,” Mandy told Seth. “I’ve been nearly dead twice now.” She was as proud of this as the gunshot victim had been of his wound.

  He would research asthma when he got back to the college library. Could you really die of asthma?

  They got on the elevator. Seth punched 7, and up they went. Too late, he realized he had gotten on the wrong elevator. This was the way to CAT scan. There were four separate banks of elevators in the hospital. He was in a building that did have a seventh floor, but not the pediatric seventh floor. Were these buildings connected on any floor but ground level? Or should he just go back down and start over?

  Seth hated being a confused amateur. He did not want this panicky mother to know they were on the wrong elevator.

  They got off at 7.

  He pushed the wheelchair forward to the nearest nursing desk where the secretary (Meggie’s twin) said irritably, “Seven pediatric? You took the wrong elevator.”

  “Oh, my god!” shrieked the mother. “We aren’t even in the right building? What if Mandy has an attack?”

  “You can get there from here,” said the secretary irritably. “It’s just stupid, that’s all. Go down that hall all the way to the end, take two lefts, going all the way to the end of each of those halls, and then a hard right at the third drinking fountain.”

  A ridiculously long hall stretched before them. What were they doing — crossing the state line? He pushed the wheelchair past dozens of doors.

  “This is taking too long!” cried the mother. “Mandy, don’t have an attack!” Now she was clutching at Seth’s jacket and Mandy’s sweater. “Whatever you do, don’t have an attack right now!” she shrieked.

  Mandy began to cry. Seth could hear her sucking breath in to accommodate the crying. Her chest sounded as if it were full of bubbly water.

  “Oh my god,” said the mother. “She’s going to have an attack right now! And we don’t have oxygen and all because they gave me some volunteer kid instead of a real person!”

  Seth took the second left and prayed he would locate all three drinking fountains.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing!” cried the mother. “Mandy, don’t have an attack.”

  Seth found the first drinking fountain, which was good because he was about to have an attack himself. Mandy was crying harder.

  The mother launched herself at somebody in a uniform. “Where is pediatric seven?” she shrieked.

  The janitor jerked a thumb in the direction Seth was already going but did not look up and said nothing.

  “I hate this hospital,” said the mother, striding on ahead. “I hate everybody in it. I hate the doctors and the nurses and the whole staff and every single stupid, worthless, uninformed volunteer. Mandy’s going to have an attack right here, where we’re completely lost and there’s no oxygen.”

  Seth pushed the wheelchair faster and accidentally rammed the heavy metal footrests into the back of the mother’s heels.

  She screamed in pain, threatening to sue Seth and sue the hospital and sue the whole world.

  “I’m sorry,” said Seth desperately. “It was an accident, I’m really sorry, but here we are at the third drinking fountain.” Except of course he could no longer remember whether to go left or right.

  He paused, looking both ways, hoping for a sign that said PEDIATRICS. No, Nothing. This hospital believed you should have been born knowing where you were.

  Having her mother turn into a basket case apparently satisfied Mandy. She stopped crying and pointed to an unexpected corridor that went sort of backward. There in the distance was the pediatric nursing desk.

  The mother limped after Seth, cursing, while Seth whipped forward. He turned Mandy and her chart over to the nurse and fled, keeping his hand over his ID so that the mother would not know his name when she filed suit.

  The Waiting Room 8:01 p.m.

  THIS DIANA. YOU COULD tell from her haircut and her perfect makeup, the very slight flowery scent of her expensive perfume, the lovely tiny earrings which — knowing what college she went to — had to be real emeralds…you could tell that this girl Diana had everything and always would have everything.

  Roo had half thought that maybe she and this Diana would talk about things like cheerleading and pompom squads. English papers and gym class. Boyfriends and hairstyles.

  But Diana never looked her way.

  Why should she? thought Roo. I’ve ruined my life. She doesn’t want to catch it. I’m like a bad cold. Nobody wants to get near me.

  Roo’s brief plan to run away from home evaporated. How pathetic. She couldn’t go anywhere. Mothers never got to go anywhere. Even if you were a drug addict and had AIDS, which meant you had two very consuming things to think about — your next fix and your death — you had to put your baby first and come to the Emergency Room.

  Roo was even more jealous of Diana now — the way the black woman had comforted her.

  Roo needed it more, she knew she did. Roo didn’t have a mother who intended to comfort her; she had a mother who was going to go on scolding her forever; making her pay every possible price for dumb judgment.

  The male nurse carried the little AIDS baby back to the Pediatric ER. He kissed the tiny forehead over and over and crooned in that singsongy voice people always used with Roo’s twins. She had the odd thought that she would like to date a man like that. A man who sang to sick babies.

  My babies aren’t sick, she thought. They don’t have AIDS. They’re here on a pretense.

  The door closed behind the nurse and the sick baby, and Roo
was aware of a deep relief within herself.

  Her babies were beautiful and healthy and quick to learn new things. People loved to snuggle her babies, and they loved to sing to her babies, but not to comfort them in terrible illness. Because they were beautiful and healthy and quick.

  Roo turned to look at her own children. She needed to see them, solid and safe and strong, the way they had been born and the way she was raising them.

  I’m raising them! thought Roo. I’ve pulled it off. It was stupid to get pregnant and it was even more stupid not to give the children up for adoption. But even so, stupid as I am, I’ve pulled it off.

  She began remembering things — funny minutes, silly times, giggly afternoons, snuggly hours. Good things about these twins who were so relentlessly there.

  All these memories swelled her heart in the short, short time it would take to swivel in her chair and see Callum and Valerie, asleep in their double stroller.

  The Waiting Room 8:06 p.m.

  WHEN THE CITY POLICE, rather than the security guards, strode through the great glass doors, it was different. In this terrible heat, the cops nevertheless wore all their layers. Uniform piled on uniform, hips enlarged from leather belt, pistol, stick, radio, gloves, keys. Their suits were dyed a deeper, stronger blue, as if they were also deeper and stronger cops.

  Hands splayed below their waists, like western sheriffs about to grab for guns, their eyes surveyed the room. People shrank down, trying to look invisible, or at least ordinary. They lifted magazines before their faces, or carefully studied the television on the wall, or decided it was time to concentrate on filing their nails.

  The cops separated slightly, forming a net.

  They knew who they wanted.

  For a moment the dealers radiated insolence. They could get away with anything, always had.

  But Dunk’s nerves clocked in, on the timer of his drug use. He could not meet the cops’ eyes without blinking too much. Then his muscles blinked, too, and he was standing there twitching, and knew his impotence, and hated the cops and himself and every witness in the room.

  The Waiting Room 8:07 p.m.

  “NOW, SIR,” SAID THE police, trying to be relaxing and firm and in control.

  Ridiculous. The person in control was the person whose gun was out. Dunk. He was back in control and he knew it and he loved it…and he waved it around.

  It looked like a squirt gun.

  But Anna Maria knew dealers, and this was a dealer who had become an addict. Not a good sales plan. She knew the odd staring blaze in his eyes, the off-center confusion that would make him do anything without warning. She knew the gun would not squirt water.

  Anna Maria prayed to the Lord Jesus not to let José cry or throw his bottle again. She had had her chance to run and she had screwed up. Nothing could be done now.

  The thing was not to move. Like a little animal when a hawk flies overhead, the thing was to freeze, and not be seen.

  The cops were also frozen. They saw the flutter in Dunk’s brain and muscles and knew they were not dealing with sanity. Anna Maria saw the cops spreading their minds as well as their hands, trying to think about her and Yasmin and José and all the other kids in the Waiting Room at the same time they thought about armed dealers.

  They didn’t call it “hopped up” for nothing. The man with the gun was hopping around, his wires crossed so that his feet moved whether he meant them to or not.

  Dunk kicked the double stroller.

  Cal slept on, but Val awakened with a scream. It was the kind of scream that makes parents crazy; the kind of scream that turns a cute kid into the most annoying, obnoxious creature alive.

  Dunk’s nerves split like pieces of wire about to be spliced; he came apart at the sound of the screams and jerked Val out of the stroller to silence her.

  The patients and families packed into the Waiting Room had a lot more to worry about now than just waiting. Waiting looked pretty good from here.

  The Waiting Room 8:08 p.m.

  HIS HANDS WERE TOO full. He did not know what to do next and everybody knew it. He was going to drop something, either the baby or the gun. Or he was going to shoot somebody, either the baby or whoever else the gun happened to be pointing at. He wasn’t aiming. He was just holding.

  The cops needed to give him choices, help him figure out what to do with those arms that were too full. “Now, sir,” said the police. “You don’t wanna mess with no baby. Babies are a pain. Let’s just put the baby back in the stroller and talk about this.”

  The other dealer had sat down. Carefully. He was as afraid of the gun as everybody else. He held himself pointedly, like a rocket about to blast into space and leave this mess behind.

  Dunk had no secure grip on anything — not the gun, not the baby, and certainly not himself. He was about as hopped up right now as the mother eating the cracker packages. Fear and adrenalin had pushed him even farther than the drugs.

  The baby he held under his arm like a newspaper flopped back and forth. It never stopped screaming, its sweet little face all peeled back like an orange into one great shriek.

  The police had to shout over the baby’s racket, just when they wanted to be all soothing and friendly.

  “So, sir,” they yelled, as if Dunk deserved a title of respect, as if when they thought of Dunk, they thought “sir.”

  Scum, thought Anna Maria. Very good thing Dunk had not grabbed José, who was a biter. If José had bitten a drug dealer, he would get shot.

  The cute little teenage mother did not seem to fathom the situation. She got up from her toddler chair, and stood right between the pointed gun and the police. “May I have my baby please?” she said, like somebody from a suburb, like somebody wanting the grocery boy to get a can off a high shelf.

  The gun and the hand holding it went back and forth as if Dunk were playing Ping-Pong. But it was no soft little white ball that would go bang.

  The mother looked like a high school girl.

  She dressed the way Anna Maria wanted to dress when she was in high school. She held out her arms as if she actually thought Dunk would just give her her baby back.

  Dunk stepped back, and then stepped back again. Anybody would have shifted anyplace for him, but people were sitting down and had nowhere to go. He pressed up against the black woman whose son had the broken bone.

  Any semblance of control and power had vanished. Whatever the drugs and the nervousness might be doing in Dunk’s system, they had turned him into total panic; total consuming panic.

  “Now let’s not get all excited here,” said one of the cops. He was trying to keep his voice slow, but he had as much adrenalin pumping in him as the dealer, and his voice ripped as frantically across the room as the baby’s. “Let’s just not get ourselves all worked up.”

  This was absurd. The cops and the dealers were so worked up now they were practically on the ceiling.

  The cop edged forward. “You wanna let me hold the baby? How about you let me hold the baby?”

  Yet again, Diana listened to somebody tell somebody else where to go. It seemed to be an Emergency Room favorite, this sentence, consigning people to hell. It struck Diana that the creep holding the baby, like the girl in CIU, already lived there.

  The dialogue did not sound like anything in a movie. The cops forced themselves to back off physically. They were panting, as if they had been working out in the gym for hours, been on the StairMaster and the treadmill and lifted weights. All they had done was face a gun for a few seconds.

  None of the cops did much. One of them actually took a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and opened a stick for himself, chewing noisily. “Want a stick of gum?” he said to the guy with the baby.

  Gum? thought Diana incredulously.

  The ploy worked, unfortunately, with the wrong person.

  “I do,” said Yasmin, getting up.

  Yasmin loved gum. She, too, walked right between the gun and the police. The cop gave the Juicy Fruit to her, smiling as if this was what
he had had in mind. “Honey, you go sit over by the nurse, okay?”

  The Waiting Room 8:12 p.m.

  ANNA MARIA COULD TELL THE cops hated having kids around. It terrified them that they could not protect the kids; that the most likely to get hurt, as always, were the smallest and weakest.

  Yasmin went over by the nurse, where she was scooped up and removed. Good. Anna Maria’s only responsibility now was José. She was sorry about the baby girl, but Val was not her problem.

  The police tried to talk the gunman into setting the baby down.

  They tried to talk the young mother into backing off.

  They tried to talk the dealer into getting his buddy to hand over the gun and the baby.

  The other dealer claimed he’d never seen the guy in his life.

  Dunk’s eyes, flared wide with terror, flew toward Anna Maria, and she realized that she was the only one in the room who could actually name him.

  Well, she wasn’t dying that way.

  In school tomorrow they had Art, and Anna Maria loved Art. She would take her crayon drawing in to show the Art teacher. He had promised they would make papier-mâché, and Anna Maria thought those were such pretty words: papier-mâché. What pretty things would they make out of papier-mâché?

  Dunk began backing up again, waving his weapon.

  He was going to get himself pinned in the narrow corridor at the back of the Waiting Room.

  That was fine with Anna Maria. She would grab the stroller, go out the other way, grab Yasmin, and beat it for home.

  The gun went off, tossing its hot shell back against the baby’s back while the bullet itself spun harmlessly across the room. The baby girl screamed horrifically when she felt the burn. The whole Waiting Room took this as a signal to start screaming, and the place erupted in howls of fear, one of which, Anna Maria was sure, was Dunk’s own scream.

  But he had the baby, and nothing else mattered.