“She’s not cleared for visitors yet,” the receptionist said. “If you want to come back in a few hours—”
“I’ll wait.”
The receptionist frowned, then pointed at a row of molded plastic seats fastened to the wall.
He sat in one of the chairs and watched the business of the hospital unfold in isolated and harried bursts of activity. He closed his eyes and imagined Katherine Peel rounding the corner, Maria’s chart in her hand. Then he imagined himself close behind, white coated, sober faced, holding forth to a gaggle of interns on the proper questioning technique for rounds. What a joke that was.
“Mr. Worth?”
Simon jerked his head. He must have dozed off, the short night of sleep catching up with him.
A gaunt-cheeked man in blue scrubs extended his hand: “Dr. Rudich. I’m taking care of Ms. Campos. Diane tells me you’re Maria’s boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
Rudich frowned at his clipboard, distracted. “And how did you find her here?”
“I’m sorry?”
“We didn’t call you.” Rudich looked up. “Neither did she, unless she’s hiding a cell phone under her mattress.”
“Her neighbors,” Simon said, improvising. “I came to see her this morning and ran into some of them on the stoop. They said she’d been taken away in an ambulance and this is the closest hospital.” He shrugged. “It was a good guess.”
“Smart.”
“What happened?” Simon said. “Is she okay? I don’t—they didn’t tell me much else.”
“She’s stable now, yes.” Rudich seemed on the verge of saying more before reconsidering.
“Look, Dr. . . .”
“Rudich.”
“Dr. Rudich. I’ve been out of town for a few weeks. In California. I got home last night. It’s been a little while—maybe a week—since I talked to Maria. We were kind of in a fight.” Simon looked down at his shoes, wondering if he was overdoing it. “I guess I’m asking . . . is this a sudden thing? Or has she been sick for a while and I just didn’t know it?”
“Mr. Worth, has your girlfriend been to Israel recently?”
Simon raised his head. “Yeah. Last month. Why?”
“Did you go with her?”
“No. I was in California visiting family. Los Angeles.”
“Have you seen her since she returned?”
“No. We talked, but I haven’t seen her. Like I said, I just got back last night. Did she get sick while she was there?”
Rudich looked at him, tapping his pen against the edge of his clipboard. His eyes blinked rapidly behind frameless glasses. “Not exactly. She’s had a procedure done, which she says took place there.”
Simon tried to project the appropriate level of confusion, furrowing his brow, crinkling his nose. “What procedure?”
“It left her with a bile leak,” Rudich said, ignoring the question. “We went through her mouth to place a stent. When we got a clear look at things, we saw that the duct tear was actually rather severe, and we had to go in laparoscopically to repair it.” He shook his head. “Cleaning up somebody else’s mess is always fun.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ask her about this Israeli procedure, if you want.”
Simon paused. He wanted to sound concerned, but not overeager. “Will she be able to leave today?”
“Tomorrow. She’ll be on fairly heavy pain medication. You’ll be the one signing her out?”
“Yes.”
Rudich nodded as he led Simon down a hallway lined with empty gurneys. Doorways provided glimpses into windowless rooms, most of the patients hidden behind drawn plastic curtains. Simon glimpsed a few lying blanketed and entubed. Most were sleeping; the rest stared up at wall-mounted televisions, remotes cradled loosely in their hands.
“Here we are.” Rudich rapped on a half-open door, stuck his head into the room. “Maria?” He took a few steps inside, Simon close behind him. “You have someone here to see you.”
She lay propped up in the bed, her eyes closed. Her clothes—jeans, a gray sweatshirt, pink socks—were neatly folded inside a clear plastic bag, sitting on top of her black Chuck Taylors, on the seat of the room’s only chair. A tube, its gauge the width of Simon’s thumb, ran into the crook of her arm; a number of other tubes and wires disappeared under her gown. Her toes, the nails painted electric purple, protruded from the sheets.
“I doubt it,” she said, her eyes still closed, her voice thick and drugged.
“Your boyfriend?” Rudich said.
Her eyes snapped open, her head bolting off the pillow. She saw Rudich first, then found Simon standing beside him. She stared at him, her body rigid. Slowly she relaxed, sinking back down onto the mattress, grimacing, touching her abdomen.
“Simon,” she said. She looked away, color blooming in her cheeks.
“Are you all right?” Simon could feel Rudich’s eyes on him; he forced himself to keep his attention on Maria.
“I don’t know.” She jutted her chin at Rudich. “Ask him.”
“Could we speak in private for a moment?” Simon said.
“That’s up to her,” Rudich said.
She waved a hand. “It’s okay.”
Rudich glanced at Simon a final time before he slipped out of the room.
They stared at each other, Simon standing just inside the door, Maria breathing heavily, the pulse jumping in her neck. Simon broke first, turning away to place her sneakers and bag of clothes onto the floor. He pulled the chair closer to the bed and sat down.
“Boyfriend?” Maria said.
“Should I have said cousin? I thought you might be sick of that game by now.”
She smiled, twisting it off into a grimace.
“I’ve been calling you,” he said.
“I threw away my phone.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer.
He leaned forward. “I went along with the Israel story,” he said quietly. “I said I knew you’d been there but that I didn’t know anything about the surgery. Why Israel?”
“I read an article,” she muttered. “I don’t know—it popped into my head. I hadn’t planned for this.”
“What did you plan for?”
She shook her head, looked away. “How did you find me?”
“I got a call,” he said.
“You got a call? What does that mean?”
He ignored this. “I’ll tell you something. If you boarded that train? If you visited that doctor in Glendale? Then, yeah, it’s none of my business what you were planning. Why you needed the money. What you were going to do with it. I never pressed you about any of that because it didn’t matter. It wasn’t relevant. But now?” He paused, took a breath. Maybe he was going at her too hard. But the truth was that her evasions were pissing him off. “Do you know how many hospitals do live-donor liver transplants?”
“No, Simon, I don’t.”
“Three in New York City. About a dozen in the rest of the country. In the rest of the world, maybe thirty. You can’t just turn up in the ER with that scar and not have people ask questions.”
She stared at the ceiling.
“Maria. I need to know why you’re still here in New York. And when you’re planning on going home.”
She said nothing.
“Maria?”
She snapped her head around. “I wouldn’t be here unless the surgeons you sent me to hadn’t fucked up. I’m the one who’s suffering. I’m the one who’s got a hole in her gut. Not you.”
“If you’d gone to Dr. Grodoff—”
“Fuck Grodoff,” she hissed. “And fuck you.” She collapsed back into the pillows, her sweaty hair pasted across her forehead. She closed her eyes again, shuddering and clutching at her abdomen.
“I’m trying to help you,�
�� Simon said.
She shook her head.
“Your son,” he said. “Is there somebody you want me to call? Maybe your sister? I can wire some of your cash out there, or . . . I don’t know.”
She shuddered again, this time with smaller, trembling movements. He realized she was laughing. She mumbled something he couldn’t make out, and he leaned closer, asking her to repeat it.
“There’s no son,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean”—she quieted the trembling, spoke louder now—“there is no son. I’ve never had a child. Probably never will. No sister either.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What’s not to understand? You make up stories for people all the time. I made one up too. I figured if I was a single mom you might ask fewer questions about why I needed the money.”
No wonder the life he’d imagined for her in LA felt so hollow, so incomplete; he’d assembled it out of faulty parts. “So you just lied to me?”
“Don’t act so shocked. Isn’t this whole thing a lie? Health Solutions and the rest of it?”
“We need to invent cover stories so—”
“Yeah, I get how it works. I’m just saying that you shouldn’t be so surprised to find out you’re not the only ones doing it.”
His ears felt hot. He didn’t fully understand why he was taking this so personally. “What else did you lie about?”
“Now is not the time.”
“Maria—”
“Please.” She pointed at her stomach. “Can we talk about this when I don’t feel like there’s a bag of broken glass in my gut?”
Simon looked more closely at the lines running into and out of her body: the saline drip, the antibiotic drip, the morphine drip, the catheter. Her pupils were dilated, the muscles in her face slack. He saw the plastic button held loosely in her hand, its cord running to the morphine drip. She watched him fidget in the chair, her eyes tracking a fraction behind his movements. She licked her lips.
“You know what?” she said. “I liked it better when I got paid to be a patient.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“I want to get out of here.” She lifted the button. “And I’m gonna take this with me.”
“Tomorrow. I’ll come sign you out.”
“You’re going to take me to my apartment?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. He watched her depress the button. “Who else knows I’m here?”
He hesitated. “Nobody.”
“Liar.”
“You’re safe, Maria. I promise.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” she said, the words slurring together.
She wriggled her body against the thin mattress, closing her eyes and turning her head away from him. He sat in the chair and looked at her. Her hospital gown had shifted with her movement, and he could see the side of one of her breasts, a pale swell of skin that rose and fell with her breath. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. He wanted to readjust her gown, to pull the pilled cloth tight across her chest and cover her up.
What was he going to tell DaSilva? She’d given him nothing, no real reason for not returning home to Los Angeles, no real reason for lying about having a son. (Or, rather, no clue as to why she would need to invent a lie at all.) He watched her breathe, the muscles of her face slackening. He wasn’t going to get anything more out of her now. He bent down to her sneakers and the plastic bag stuffed with her clothes. As he lifted the sneakers up onto the seat, he noticed a flash of brass inside one of them. He reached inside: two keys hooked onto a safety pin, partially tucked underneath the insole. He glanced over at Maria as he pulled the keys free and cradled them in his palm. She hadn’t moved; her head still faced the wall and her breathing was deep and steady.
These had to be the keys to her apartment. South Tenth Street, DaSilva had said. But South Tenth and what? He looked around the room and found her chart, tucked into a plastic holder affixed to the wall beside the door. He quickly scanned the top of the page, and there it was: “85 S. 10th St., #3B, Brooklyn, NY 11211.” He took a last look at Maria—passed out, tunneling deep into a morphine cloud—and slipped the keys into his pocket.
Outside, on Lee Avenue, Simon bummed a light from a man in a sheepskin coat who sat with his back against the hospital’s wall, three empty Starbucks cups strewn around the man’s feet, as though the sidewalk were his office. Simon walked north. He thought of the way Maria tensed when Rudich announced her boyfriend was there, her eyes wild and searching. She’d looked like a cornered animal, feral and desperate.
He turned off Bedford Avenue onto South Tenth. The block was near the river, on the northwestern fringes of Williamsburg’s Hasidic community. Simon found number eighty-five on the north side of the street, close to a spartan asphalt playground. The building was old and solid, pale-tan brick with white trimmings and rusted orange fire escapes, free of the vinyl siding and ticky-tacky tar-paper roofing that plagued much of Williamsburg’s housing. Simon shouldered his way through the building’s outer door—wrought iron and glass—and stepped into a dim vestibule with a row of tarnished brass mailboxes mounted on one wall. He used the first key again on the interior door and proceeded to the stairwell, his shoes scratching on a layer of sandy grit. The lighting was poor, the fixtures grimy. He smelled frying onions and wet cement as he walked up the steps, black stone slabs with depressions worn into their centers. Leaking into the second-floor hallway was the syncopated thump of reggaeton, the outraged tones of talk radio. He walked up to the third floor and found 3B in the far corner, a worn plastic mezuzah affixed to the door frame. The second key turned in the lock, the deadbolt giving way with a satisfying thunk.
He stepped into a short, narrow hallway, closing the door behind him and sliding the lock chain into place. He flipped the wall switch; a jaundiced light issued from overhead bulbs. The hallway opened into a living room and kitchen area, an electric stove and refrigerator jutting from one wall along with a perfunctory strip of counter. The rest of the space was bare except for a single plastic folding chair. A white sheet had been nailed up over the room’s only window. Next to the refrigerator was a tiny black-and-white tiled bathroom, and on the other side of the room, the door to the bedroom. Simon took two steps inside and couldn’t go any farther: a king-sized mattress lay on the floor, sheets and blankets and pillows piled on top of it, an out-of-date, battered laptop nestled in the blankets, the mattress’s edges flush against three of the room’s walls. A small window was set into the wall above the head of the mattress, and a sheet had been nailed up here as well. He pulled the sheet aside and looked down onto a courtyard littered with toilets, air conditioners, and refrigerators in various stages of repair or decay.
Immediately to the right of the doorway was the bedroom closet, an open-mouthed cubby. Maria’s clothes hung from a rod, jeans and sweatshirts and a few gauzy summer dresses. Her black leather jacket lay crumpled on top of the messenger bag he’d given her in the Royal Crown. The bag was empty. Next to it was a safe, squat and gunmetal gray, with an LED screen and a numerical punch pad on its door. So this was how she was protecting her money. He tested the safe’s weight; it was very heavy, impossible for one person to carry.
He went back out into the living room. He wondered how she’d chosen this neighborhood, this apartment. Probably she’d heard the party line on Williamsburg—a place for young people to pretend for a few years they could be whatever they wanted to be—and thought it would be a suitable place for her own reinvention, if that’s what this was supposed to be. She’d found a landlord who would accept cash, and she’d rented the place, unaware that it wasn’t quite in the Williamsburg she was thinking of. He opened the refrigerator: a quart of milk, a few plastic liters of seltzer water; some take-out containers filled with what looked like Indian food. The kitchen cabinets and drawers wer
e empty except for some clean plastic containers, a plastic fork, a few pairs of chopsticks. In the bathroom a family-sized bottle of ibuprofen sat on the bottom shelf of the mirrored medicine cabinet, along with a stick of deodorant, a tub of facial cream, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. On the second, higher, shelf rested a row of prescription pill bottles. Simon picked them up, examined the labels. They were the medications she’d been given upon her discharge from Cabrera, or, rather, they were refills she’d picked up at a pharmacy nearby. At least she’d done that much.
The place was depressing, but what else, really, had he been expecting? He was impressed that she’d made it as far as securing an apartment at all, not an easy thing for any twenty-two-year-old, let alone one who had only been in the city a few weeks while recovering from major surgery (although she did, of course, enjoy the advantage of having $150,000 in fresh cash on hand).
He returned to the bedroom, sat down on the mattress, and looked at his watch: it was nearly ten a.m. DaSilva would expect to hear from him soon, and still Simon had few answers. He lifted Maria’s laptop and saw, buried in the sheets by its side, a flash of metal. He picked up the object and cradled it in his palm: a switchblade, slim and dense, the handle inlaid with a swirling mother-of-pearl design. He depressed the button on its handle, and the blade sprang free. “Jesus, Maria.” He folded the blade and tossed the knife back onto the mattress.
He propped himself against the wall, Maria’s computer in his lap. His fingertips played nervously across the cool, smooth cover; an internet connection stick protruded from the USB port. He didn’t like doing this—picking through Maria’s things, snooping like a jealous boyfriend. He’d never believed Health Solutions’ donors owed him any sort of full explanation. He’d always tried to withhold judgment about their reasons for selling their organs or how they spent their money afterward. They could do what they wanted, as long as they were circumspect about the source of their cash; beyond that, it was none of his business. But Maria had been reckless. DaSilva was right: you couldn’t just turn up in a hospital with such a fresh transplant scar and not risk exactly the kind of unwanted scrutiny he and DaSilva worked so hard to make sure their patients would avoid. He needed to know why Maria had lied to him, not just about returning to Los Angeles but also, now, about her fictional son and sister. Or, rather, he knew why she’d lied—to serve him with an easily digestible, appropriately unhappy cover story—but he needed to know what truth that lie was designed to conceal. He needed to know what she was planning to do once she was discharged from Abraham. He needed to know all this to get DaSilva off his back, yes, but also because, sitting there in the hospital room, he’d felt the first stirrings of a protective feeling for Maria, a half-remembered species of emotion that had doubled when he’d stepped into her bleak apartment. He wanted to help her, and he couldn’t help her if he didn’t know what she was doing.
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