“Yeah.” She stared out through the windshield. “How did he seem to you? Really.”
“Well, I’m not a doctor, but, physically, his recovery—”
“Come on, Simon.” She straightened in her seat, suddenly irritated. “You know that’s not what I mean, they can tell us that at the hospital. How did he seem to you?”
“I think he’s glad he went through with it,” Simon said carefully. “He seems happy to be with the kids again. To be with you.”
“Yeah, I know that’s what he said, but do you—oh, Christ! You’re making me feel like I’m fucking crazy.” She rubbed her eyes, then looked him straight in the face. Her expression was raw, overflowing with the need to be heard, to be understood. “Howard was over here last week, okay? I asked him the same thing, and he answered the same as you: ‘He’s glad he did it. He’s happy to have you back. It’s all fine. It’s all great.’ You have no idea how much I want to believe that. After all the shit we’ve been through, after the years I’ve spent watching Lenny drink himself into oblivion, his organs crapping out on him one by one . . . You think I want him to be lying to me now?” She shook her head sharply, as though trying to rid herself of the thought. “I can’t talk about this with anybody else. Everybody thinks—miracle of miracles—he got his new liver off the UNOS list, from some poor kid who crashed his motorcycle and smashed his skull or whatever. They don’t know how hostile Lenny was to the idea of saving his own life. But you do. So, please, I’m going to ask you this one time, and then you can forget I ever said anything: Can you honestly tell me you didn’t notice anything fake about the way he was talking? Can you honestly tell me you think he believed in what he was saying?”
Simon could easily tell her he had no reason to disbelieve Lenny; he could tell her he’d noticed nothing to indicate her husband wasn’t genuine in his optimism and gratitude. Pleading ignorance would be an easy means of disengagement. The establishment of a safe, blameless distance. And yet he found himself silent. She continued to search his face, the train station’s halogens carving shadows into her cheeks, her eyes fervid and alert. She didn’t want to be reassured; she wanted to be told the truth, even if that made her husband’s new embrace of life a lie. But he couldn’t be the one to tell her.
“I think he’s doing all right, Cheryl,” he said. “I really do.”
She held his gaze for a final breath. And then, abruptly, her eyes shut down, their intensity snuffed out. She nodded, looked out the windshield again. “If that’s what you really think,” she said, and he heard in her voice that he’d waited too long to answer, that he’d given himself away. She knew he’d seen what she was talking about, and she knew that he was a coward for not admitting it. “Thanks again for coming out here.”
“Good luck,” he said, lamely, before he let himself out of the car and walked up the stairs to the platform.
• • •
SIMON was back in the office late the following afternoon, continuing to sort through the Cabrera list, homing in, he hoped, on Health Solutions’ next pairing. He tried to put Lenny out of his mind, those flat lizard eyes, that cheerful and utterly hollow voice. He and DaSilva had done what was asked of them, hadn’t they? It wasn’t their fault if it wasn’t what Lenny truly wanted. Not their problem now either.
The desk phone rang again, disrupting the construction of his self-defense. Usually Simon considered the phone, like the rest of the office, more of a prop than a functional tool, and yet here it was intruding on him for the second time in as many days. He checked the caller ID: he didn’t recognize the number, but the area code indicated the Los Angeles area. He hesitated, then thought of Maria and picked up: “Health Solutions.”
“Peter DaSilva, please.” A male voice, Mitteleuropean accent.
“He’s not in. Who’s this?”
A pause, then, “Who is this?”
“Simon Worth. Can I help you?”
“Simon. That’s right. Peter mentioned you.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Stan Grodoff, calling from Glendale.”
Simon straightened in his chair. “Dr. Grodoff.”
“Maybe you can help me with this. Your client, Maria Campos. She missed her appointment with me. Peter knows I don’t like to chase after these people, so I’m going to let you do that now.”
“I . . . I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything. I just thought you should know. Give Peter my best.”
“I will,” Simon said, but Grodoff had already hung up.
Simon’s first thought was to call DaSilva, but he stopped himself. Maybe he could handle this on his own. He called Maria’s cell phone, using the office line. It rang five times before going to voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message; then he took out his cell phone and dialed again. This time he left a message, asking her to call him, not mentioning her missed appointment with Grodoff.
The Royal Crown stonewalled him over the phone, so he showed up at the front desk and brandished the credit card on which he’d charged Maria’s room. The clerk retreated, a manager replacing him to inform Simon that Ms. Campos had indeed checked out on the morning she’d been originally scheduled to leave. No, she had not extended her reservation with cash. And what was his relationship to Ms. Campos, if he didn’t mind them asking? “Colleague,” Simon muttered, already walking away.
He stood outside on Forty-Fifth Street and called Amtrak—she’d been scheduled to take the train back to California to avoid having TSA agents quiz her about the $150,000 in her baggage—which informed him that the status of its passengers was not public information, and, no, it did not matter that he’d paid for the trip. He called Maria’s cell phone again and left another message, this time mentioning her appointment with Grodoff. He imagined her cooped up in her Torrance apartment, sweating with fever, too sick to take Gabriel to the playground, the boy scrambling all over the house, driving her batshit.
He ate dinner near his apartment, at a glass-walled sushi place installed on the ground floor of a new residential complex called the Octagon, which was named, rather unbelievably, after a mental institution that had once stood on the same ground and been made infamous by an outraged Charles Dickens on one of his American publicity tours. After drinking a carafe of hot sake to smother the little flame of anxiety that flickered in his chest, Simon walked home along Main Street, past the tiny old Episcopalian church tucked among the apartment towers. Nine p.m., and Roosevelt Island had emptied out and turned in—the stores shuttered, the few restaurants mostly quiet. What was Maria up to?
He let himself into the lobby of his apartment building, a pile of take-out menus strewn along the path to the elevator. Upstairs, he lay down on the couch, lit a cigarette, and turned on the television. He let the bad news wash over him, the graphs plunging into red, the anchors auguring further collapse; the campaign for the presidency was in its acrimonious and frantic final days. He decided that in the morning he’d tell DaSilva what had happened, making it sound as though Grodoff had only just called him. He got up to fix himself a whiskey, then lay back down to watch the CEO of the bank that employed his father explain how he couldn’t be held responsible for the mistakes of employees whose jobs he didn’t fully understand.
He fell asleep easily, as soon as he dragged himself from the couch to his bed, a small miracle he wasn’t fully aware of until some hours later, when he was woken by his buzzing cell phone. He checked the screen: the Health Solutions office number. Baffled, he answered before he was fully awake.
“Office.” DaSilva’s voice, icy, level. “Now.”
“Peter? What—”
“Now, Simon.” The line went dead.
A cold stab in his gut. It was five thirty a.m. He got up and dressed, half hungover, half simply dog tired. He walked to the subway, full of dread, running through a short list of feeble excuses.<
br />
When he let himself into the office, DaSilva was sitting behind the desk, a cigarette hanging from his lip, three crushed butts in the ashtray. Peter waited for Simon to close the door behind him. Then he said, “Where is Maria Campos?”
Simon stopped, his hand still touching the doorknob. “California?”
“California.” DaSilva’s voice remained, for now, as calm and uninflected as usual; his eyes betrayed nothing. “You’re telling me California. Do you know that, or are you just saying it?”
“I don’t know. No.”
“No, what?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Until an hour ago, I didn’t know either, and I didn’t care, because I thought you had a fucking handle on things.” DaSilva paused, regained his calm. “She’s in the ICU at Abraham Medical Center. In Williamsburg. You know, in Brooklyn? They processed her tonight after somebody found her collapsed in the stairwell of some shitbox on South Tenth Street. Where she’s apparently living now. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
Simon gripped the doorknob so tightly his knuckles ached. “No.”
“No. It’s three a.m. in Los Angeles right now, which is the only reason I haven’t called Stan Grodoff to ask him why his patient was admitted to a Brooklyn hospital with a bile leak and 103-degree fever. Can you help me guess what he’s going to say when I do call him?”
“She never showed.”
“And you know this how?”
“He called and told me.”
“When?”
Simon stepped away from the door and dropped his head, the chastened freshman called into the principal’s office for a stern dressing-down. “Yesterday,” he said.
“Yesterday. And did you ever stop and say, hey, maybe my bud Pete DaSilva might be interested in this particular nugget of information? Did that ever cross your mind? Because, I’ll tell you, I would’ve felt like much less of an asshole when some admitting resident from Abraham calls our unit, wondering whether we’ve recently performed a living donor resection on somebody named Maria Campos.”
“Why would—”
“Why would what? Why would what?” DaSilva was hissing now, his anger escaping like pressurized steam. “Why would he think that? Maybe because a girl with a fresh transplant scar just washed up in his ICU half-delirious from fever, claiming, first, that she never had any surgery, then changing her story to say it took place two weeks ago in fucking Israel.”
“You said no.”
“What?”
“You said she hadn’t been a patient at Cabrera.”
“What the fuck do you think?”
Simon took his Parliaments from his pocket and got one lit. His hands were shaking.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” DaSilva said. “You’re going to go down to Abraham when we’re finished here and find out what the fuck is going on. She’s got a biliary leak. It didn’t rupture until after she left Cabrera. Grodoff would’ve spotted it five minutes after she walked into his office, but now we’re dealing with the possibility of sepsis. They’re probably blitzing her with IV antibiotics. My guess is they’re going to go in through the mouth to see if a stent will work. She’ll be there for at least a few days. Apparently she’s living here alone and wouldn’t give them a number for anybody to notify. Whenever they’re done with her, she’ll be pumped up with pain meds, and they’ll need somebody to sign her out. Guess what? You’re that special somebody. You’re going to take her back to her apartment, and you’re going to watch her until she’s healed. I don’t want her disappearing like this again. I want to know why she lied about going back to Los Angeles. It doesn’t make any sense to me yet, and what I don’t understand makes me nervous.” He crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. “Anything else I should know? Or maybe you prefer I look like an asshole every now and then—I don’t know.”
“I thought I could deal with it on my own.” Simon figured it probably wasn’t the best time to tell DaSilva about his family dinner with the Pellegrinis. “I thought it was my responsibility. My problem, not yours.”
“What a noble sentiment. Too bad it’s bullshit. What you wanted was to fix your fuckup before I knew it had ever happened.”
“Look,” Simon said, suddenly tired of being lectured, “have I ever made a mistake before? In eight months of working for you, has anything like this ever happened?”
“One mistake is all it takes, Simon.” DaSilva picked at a particle of food wedged between his front teeth and flicked it into the ashtray. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in about a year. “We depend upon people’s inertia. Their willingness to not pay attention, to look the other way. Nobody, except maybe some asshole journalist trying to boost his career, wants to discover what we’re doing. The hospital administration, the police: what a fucking headache an investigation would be for those guys, right? Because it’s a case without a victim. Somebody like Maria wants to keep her cash and shut up. Somebody like Lenny wants to keep his new liver and shut up. The surgeons and administrators want to keep their fee and shut up. But it only takes one little mistake to unbalance all that. One irregularity. Somebody asking why a transplant patient turned up at Abraham talking a bunch of bullshit about Israel. They trace her back to Cabrera—that could be the mistake I’m talking about. I’m not pissing on you because it’s fun, Simon, okay? Health Solutions is a balanced, self-regulating system, but it is delicate. You need to understand that.” He lit another cigarette. “I thought you did understand that, frankly.”
This was the longest speech DaSilva had delivered in the eight months Simon had known him. Perhaps because his first dozen cases had gone so smoothly, and perhaps also because he so rarely saw DaSilva in person, Simon had nearly forgotten what kind of a risk his employer was taking, what kind of base-level paranoia and anxiety must always be simmering behind his mask of exhausted placidity. And yet, even as he was reminded of all of this, even as he saw these cracks in the mask, he still thought DaSilva was at least partly full of shit.
“We’re supposed to be obsessed with not drawing any attention to the unit,” Simon said, “but you force Lenny through?” DaSilva stared at him, his mouth hanging slightly agape. Simon’s cheeks flushed—he’d never defied DaSilva before—but he pushed on. “It seems to me that enrolling an obvious alcoholic in the program counts as a mistake.”
“The fuck it was. The surgeons would never have operated on him if they thought he couldn’t survive the procedure.”
“But I thought you altered—”
“Yeah, I can trim a few corners to get him past Klein, but I won’t mess with his medical exam results. Never. That’s the surgeons’ call. I told you before: this hospital—this transplant unit—needs volume. That directive flows from the top down, and the surgeons are just interpreting it like everybody else. Besides, were there any problems with Lenny’s surgery?”
“No, but—”
“Then why are we talking about it?”
“But what about Maria?”
“The bile leak? I told you, if she’d done what she was supposed to do—what you were supposed to make sure she did—then this wouldn’t be a problem. So now, yes, you need to fix this, Simon. Get her out of Abraham. Supervise her recovery. Figure out why she lied and what she’s planning to do next. Can you do all that?”
“Yeah.” It helped that he also wanted to know the answers to these questions. “I’ll handle it.”
DaSilva nodded. “You’re deep in this thing too, Simon. Don’t fucking forget it.”
SIMON found Abraham Medical Center south of the elevated J/M/Z tracks, the demarcation between the Williamsburg of cupcake shops and bike lanes and faux dive bars and that of storefront iglesias and bodegas and, a few blocks farther south, yeshivas and shtreimel hatteries. The line, though, seemed to have lost its elasticity since the last time Simon had been here, sagging now irregularly southward.
As he walked down a block of sooty tenements from which a ten-story glass tower protruded like a flipped bird, he decided he was going to set this situation with Maria right, deliver to DaSilva another two viable pairs, and then get the hell out. He didn’t like how exposed he suddenly felt. Maria, Lenny, Cheryl, Crewes, now the staff at Abraham—it was his face and name they’d point to if shit really hit the fan, if DaSilva ever blew the whole thing up. And he didn’t like the way DaSilva was shifting the responsibility for Maria’s situation so squarely onto his shoulders. Okay, he’d fucked up by not checking in with Grodoff sooner, and maybe he should’ve told DaSilva about the doctor’s call right away. But how was he supposed to know Maria would lie like that? It had ambushed both of them, and it was a problem they should be solving together. Instead, DaSilva was isolating him, boxing him in. He didn’t like it at all.
He continued toward the BQE. The hospital was on the far side of the expressway, a hulking white-brick structure set back from Lee Avenue. He dodged a Hebrew-lettered private ambulance and located the main entrance. He was directed up to the fourth floor, where he gave Maria’s name to the receptionist, a pink-cheeked young woman with silver crosses dangling from her earlobes. She tapped at her computer, asked for his name.
“Simon Worth.”
“You’re the first to come see her.” She checked a clipboard, scribbled a note. “She didn’t give us a contact name or any number to call. I’m assuming she’ll be happy to see you?”
“I’m her boyfriend,” he said. The lie was spontaneous, thrilling.
The receptionist glanced up at him for the first time. “Just hang tight for a sec.”
She picked up the desk phone, dialed a number. She glanced up at him again, and he realized he was leaning over the desk, crossing an invisible barrier into what she’d apparently designated as her personal fiefdom. He straightened up and backed away, shoving his hands into his pockets. Bells pinged, phones rang, the PA droned: the white noise of a busy urban hospital.
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