They were waiting for the blood results and cultures to tell them what bugs were growing in Anouk’s lungs and which antibiotics she would have to receive intravenously. On the inside of Anouk’s elbow, a wad of cotton secured by transparent tape. Nora, with breath held, carefully peeled the tape back from Anouk’s skin and removed the cotton, which was stained with a perfect, heartbreaking pinprick of brown blood. Nora scrunched the cotton in her fist and tossed it to the garbage bin at the foot of the bed.
‘Why’d you do that?’ asked Red, rubbing his eyes under his glasses.
‘Cotton balls give her the heebie-jeebies.’
‘You could’ve woken her up. She only just stopped coughing.’
‘I didn’t wake her up.’
‘Well.’
A porter passed in the hallway pushing a cart with wheels that squeaked. Some kind of jargon was spoken impassively over an intercom.
More time passed and then a man they knew well, Dr Atulewa, slipped through the gap in the curtain looking worn out but impeccable. Nora had always liked him (hero worship, but so what): the triangular tuck of his silk hankie that matched his tie, the strong cologne that was oak and vanilla and moss. Huge hands, and fingers tapered like fine candles.
‘Hello again, family,’ he said, a whispered and vibrating radio voice. He bent over Anouk and with one elegant finger gently stroked the back of her hand.
‘She’s so tired,’ Nora said.
‘We’ll have to wake her,’ he said, ‘but in a moment.’ His finger stopped moving, but he left it on her hand for one more beat before removing it, as if reading her. He sat on the edge of Anouk’s bed, his knees almost touching Red’s, and bent to a file in his hands. His glasses slipped to the end of his nose and stopped, seemingly on command, just short of the tip. He read Anouk’s results quietly. A new bug, nothing ominous, but one that was resistant to penicillin so they would be going with some kind of macrolide. Nora nodded and Red rubbed his beard. Anouk would likely be in hospital for two weeks. He asked Nora and Red for permission to speak to Anouk about doing a blood gas, not essential for her treatment and quite painful, but imminently helpful for research. The team would be very grateful, he explained, over the rim of his glasses, but would understand completely if Nora and Red declined.
‘Sure,’ said Nora. ‘We can talk to her.’
‘No way,’ said Red.
‘You don’t have to decide tonight,’ said Dr Atulewa, getting up from the bed. He closed the file and tucked it securely under his arm. ‘We’ll have to wake her now, I’m afraid, get this line in.’ He excused himself while Red leaned over Anouk and, with both hands on her shoulders, shook her gently. She shrugged him off. He kissed her forehead, whispered something in her ear. Nora put one hand on Anouk’s shin and nudged it side to side. Anouk kicked and rolled away but soon opened her eyes, dark with anger. Angrier still when they told her it was time to put the intravenous line in her arm.
Dr Atulewa returned, pushing a cart that held the tubes and needles for the IV. Anouk shifted her gaze towards him, didn’t say hello. Her eyes followed his movements as he reached over her head and switched on a fluorescent wall lamp that spluttered and revved and cast them all in its mean, blue light.
‘Would you mind if I sat?’ he asked her.
She shrugged.
He pushed the cart out of the way and sat on the edge of the bed, facing her. ‘You’re cross with me,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame you. You were sleeping well. But I’ve asked my colleagues who run the ward if I can do this procedure for you. Really, it’s their job. I had to bargain with them a little.’
‘Nurses are better at needles.’
‘You’re remembering the last time,’ he said.
Anouk nodded. Nora remembered too, the student doctor who’d run the intravenous line into Anouk’s arm and immediately Anouk saying it felt wrong, and the doctor assuring them all it was fine. Within hours, Anouk’s arm was swollen and burning.
‘My colleagues reminded me of that too,’ he said, smiling. ‘I told you, I had to bargain.’
‘Why do you want to do it?’
‘Ah,’ he said, gesturing to her arm, ‘may I?’
Anouk offered her arm and he turned it gently to expose the smooth, white underbelly. He cradled her elbow with one hand and traced the lines of her veins with his finger. ‘You have perfect veins, do you see? Very easy to work with. Some people’s veins burrow, deep down, and they wriggle out of sight. Like earthworms. They don’t want to be found. Yours aren’t like that at all.’ He let go of her arm and she tucked it close to her body, under the blanket. ‘Now. If you don’t mind, we’ll go ahead and be done with this business very quickly and you can go back to sleep. The anticipation of the thing is always far worse than the thing itself.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘It means we waste too much time worrying about the future,’ said Red.
‘Quite right,’ said Dr Atulewa, pinching a couple of blue gloves from a box mounted on the wall, snapping them on. ‘Now, Anouk. Shall we?’
She dragged her arm once more from under the blanket, as if it were some heavy load not part of her, and offered it. Dr Atulewa tied a tourniquet a few inches above the elbow, then with his fingers felt up and down the smooth path between her wrist and elbow and settled on a spot halfway between the two. He rubbed the area clean with an antiseptic cotton pad. Nora shuffled her chair closer to the head of the bed, and the sound it made as it scraped the floor was brash and unsettling.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered. She leaned close to Anouk and gave her a quick smile, and Anouk closed her eyes.
Red got up and stood at the end of the bed.
‘Can you believe we hit a deer?’ Nora asked Anouk, because Anouk loved stories, and here was a whopper. ‘Can you believe we have his antler in the back of our truck?’
‘Is this supposed to be helping?’ Red’s voice from the end of the bed, a thousand miles away.
Dr Atulewa busied himself with tubes and a wide-gauge needle, filled a small plastic dish with saline, and flushed out a tube and catheter. He screwed bits together, removed caps, pulled fluid with a fat syringe from a glass bottle. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘What deer?’
‘Anouk, tell him,’ said Nora. She put her hand on Anouk’s cheek, to say: I’m here.
‘I’m going to hold your arm now, Anouk,’ said Dr Atulewa, gently gripping her stick-thin arm, pulling the blue vein taut with his thumb. ‘I’m going to insert the needle. Small scratch.’ He slid the needle into her arm, not far from the wrist, guiding it with the same thumb he used to hold the vein. ‘Now. Tell me about the deer.’
Anouk, breath held, eyes shut tight against the pain, refused to give up the story.
Dr Atulewa removed the tourniquet and pulled the needle out of her arm, leaving the catheter inside and a plastic port dangling. He screwed more tubes together, flushed and primed, fastened the port and tubing to her arm with a transparent, skin-like tape. He removed his gloves and tossed them with a hook shot into the garbage. ‘I’m dying of suspense,’ he said. ‘Tell me the story of the deer.’
‘It’s not pretty,’ Red said.
‘We hit it,’ said Anouk, her eyes moving between Nora and Red, and in them some kind of fear or recognition. Clearly unsure how to present this story, which version would please or harm one of her parents or both.
‘How awful.’
‘My mom had to rip its antler off.’
‘You don’t hear that every day.’
‘That’s enough now,’ said Red. He looked at Nora with eyes empty and sad.
* * *
At the very least? Nora took comfort in the night hospital. She left Red sleeping with his jacket over his shoulders, on the couch in the family room, and walked the darkened corridors to the elevator. Rode it to the ground floor where there was a caf
e and stationery store, a pharmacy, a coffee and sandwich counter. There was also a flower shop that sold long-lasting carnations and metallic helium balloons, which, in the middle of the night, were pressed like faces against the shopfront glass. The hospital at night. A sleeping village, a film set. Everything closed and she was drawn to the hum of a vending machine, brightly lit in the semi-darkness. She slotted in a few coins and waited for the paper cup to drop. Night coffee. Skeleton-crew coffee. Anouk safe, for now.
These hours between shifts, with their red EXIT glow, these hours were exclusive in the hospital. A carnival after closing time. Carrying her tepid, third-rate coffee, she passed through the lobby, which was an atrium, lofty and echoey and dissected by elongated, geometric shadows. At the back end of the atrium she strode, stretching her legs, up a wheelchair ramp and turned a corner to another wing, walked down a corridor that was very dark, and came up against a locked door.
She wasn’t going to drink the coffee, had only bought it because it was something to do, to witness the procedure of the cup dropping, the nozzle opening and the dark liquid spewing. Procedure was everything in this place and easier to think about than blood.
Here was another elevator. Which didn’t stop at Anouk’s floor. So a stairwell had to be located, more dark corridors and locked doors. Eventually she found Anouk’s ward but didn’t go into her room. Instead, she sat in a chair opposite the nurses’ station and pretended to drink her coffee.
Night staff, they moved fluidly, in slow motion. Two nurses, a man and a woman, worked quietly behind their curved counter, like the watch on the bridge of a ship. His head was bent to something, the light from a desk lamp reflecting off his face, and she was going through a stack of files, checking things off. The man looked up from his work and asked Nora if she needed anything and she thought, sure: how about the night shift? I’ll sit where you are and you sit where I am and then instead of this, I can just be at work right now.
She smiled at him and shook her head no, and repeated the gesture of pressing the paper cup to her lips. She rested her head against the wall and listened to the collective sleep-breathing of children. Some on this ward required machines to help them breathe, and so there was the beep and hum and mechanics of all that too. From where she sat, she could see through a half-open door someone else’s child, asleep under a thick, floral-print duvet brought from home.
White deer hairs stuck to her jeans and the shadow of blood still marked her hand. A piece of deer antler in the back of the truck with bits of flesh still clinging, hardening, at its base. Red hadn’t known what to do. But she had.
She stood up and dropped the full cup of coffee into the garbage and went to where her coat hung over the back of the chair in Anouk’s room, and she put her coat on and she kissed her daughter on the forehead and whispered goodbye in her ear and stood there watching her for a moment, and then she turned around and, with body numb and electric, she walked out of the room, and there was her thumb on the elevator button, and there was the wait for the doors to close, and there were the metallic balloons with their faces trapped behind glass, and there was the revolving door that spat her out into the cold November night tarnished yellow with streetlight, tears freezing on her cheeks and the last flakes of snow drifting down from a sky night-purple and indifferent.
23
L’Inconnue
Paris, 1898
There was a time when I thought I could mark the point in my story where what followed was irreversible; this point like a hinge, where every moment leading up to it was inconsequential but everything after had its own momentum leading to one inevitable end.
This hinge moment, I once thought, could have occurred when my father died and Tante Huguette became my keeper. Or when my mother died, or when as a child I realized I was in love with a girl whose name was Emmanuelle.
It could have occurred before I was born, when my grandmother and Madame Debord met as young girls.
But, there again. Perhaps every moment, every single moment of our lives, is a pivot, a fulcrum. Perhaps the moment of which I should have been wary began with a patch of wood rot, with damp plaster and rusty nails. Maybe it was the morning Madame and I woke to what sounded like all the dishes in the world crashing to the floor.
That morning. I scrambled from my bed, wrapped my dressing gown around my shoulders and moved quickly through the apartment to the kitchen. There, I found the cupboards hanging crookedly off the wall, their doors open and Madame’s everyday dishes in shards at my feet. A lone cup slid from a collapsed shelf to the floor, pirouetted on its rim for several rotations, before wobbling and eventually coming to rest while Madame cuckooed from her bedroom. Where the cupboards and shelves had come away from the wall, a wound gaped from the plaster, revealing thin wooden laths with dried mud and horsehair filling the gaps. On the floor, broken pieces of glass, ceramic and dust, and pieces of the mouldy plaster that had finally given way. I stood in the middle of all this, unsure what to do. Madame squawked.
A querulous rapping at the front door. I went quickly down the hall, and opened it a crack to find Monsieur Muller standing there with a face puffy and demented from sleep interrupted.
‘What in God’s name?’ he asked, breathless. His fat hands twitched at his thighs.
‘The kitchen wall,’ I said, ‘has fallen apart. The cupboards have come down.’ I opened the door further and stepped back. ‘Have a look for yourself.’
I left him to it and went to Madame Debord, who was standing in the middle of her bedroom, reaching around her back, wrestling with one arm of her dressing gown. She looked like a marionette dancing spastically under the strings of a mad puppeteer. I gently untwisted the garment and helped her into it, and brought her to the kitchen.
Her eyes, like holes, moved from the gash on the wall to the pile on the floor. ‘This is a catastrophe.’
‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘It can be fixed.’ I turned to Monsieur Muller, who was rubbing both hands up and down his bald head, the loose folds of his scalp wrinkling and stretching. ‘You can call on someone for us, today?’
‘My man is holed up in his bed with a broken leg, fell from a roof just last week. It’ll be hard to find anyone good, and for the right price, at such short notice,’ he said.
‘I am not paying for this,’ Madame Debord said, pointing a shaky finger at the concierge. ‘I told you this had to be fixed. I told you many times.’ She put her hands to her temples, trying, perhaps, to rub away the two large glasses of wine she’d consumed the night before.
Monsieur Muller grasped both hands at his waist, his stance suddenly formal. ‘You’re mistaken, Madame. I was not made aware of any problems in this apartment.’
She turned to me, incredulous, and back to him. ‘I told you,’ she cried. ‘I told you about the dampness creeping up the wall, about the smell of mould.’
He pursed his lips, rocked on his heels. ‘Written clearly into the lease of this apartment, I can assure you, you will find that you are responsible for any damages to the property.’
‘But you, Monsieur,’ I said, ‘are surely responsible for the upkeep of the building? This is not Madame Debord’s fault.’
‘This is a result of Madame’s neglect.’
Madame made the smallest noise then, and leaned against the door frame.
‘We’d like to see a copy of the contract,’ I said.
‘Indeed.’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Madame Debord, everything about her depleted. ‘He’s got every word of that contract engraved on the backs of his eyes.’ She stepped carefully to the mess and stooped down, reached for a quarter-moon of salad plate.
‘But he knew about this,’ I said.
She stood by the counter, next to the sink, her small back to Monsieur Muller, and drew her finger along the cracked edge of the plate. The morning light through the window cast her face in blue pearl. I moved to stand ne
xt to her and put my arm around her shoulders. To the concierge I said: ‘You’ll call on someone for us, please.’ From upstairs, I could hear footsteps. From below us, water flowing through a pipe. We’d woken the entire building.
Monsieur Muller sighed, as if this weren’t his job, as if he weren’t enjoying this just a little bit. ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said, and as he walked down the hall, unaccompanied, continued to utter something about how difficult it would be to find someone dependable.
* * *
We took our breakfast that morning in a restaurant: simple coffee, bread and cheese. I brought a pencil and notebook with us, and showed Madame how we might recoup her losses over the next few weeks by cutting certain luxuries, mainly sweets and cakes and wine. We could go without meat. It was also a good opportunity, I told her, to sell off the stacks of journals and feuilletons. Make more space.
‘The butcher won’t want all of that paper.’
‘There are butchers all over Paris,’ I said.
‘You’ll waste whatever you earn on the omnibus.’
‘I’ll walk.’
‘You do know there is money? We don’t need to do this. You know I’m mad, don’t you?’
I reached across the table and covered her small hand with mine. ‘We are all of us a little mad,’ I said.
* * *
Later that afternoon, only minutes after I’d finished sweeping the mess of plaster and glass and porcelain into a corner of the kitchen, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to Monsieur Muller and a young man waiting with bucket and crowbar and other items of construction and repair. He was about seventeen or eighteen, tall with skinny arms that dangled awkwardly from broad shoulders and a barrel chest. His nose shone with grease and he wore a dirty cap over lank, auburn curls.
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