The Care of Strangers

by Ellen Michaelson

  Mrs. Sampson slid the photograph out of the pocket of her robe. It was sealed in clear plastic.

  The daughter stepped around the bed, close to her mother. She reached out one finger to the clear cover. “I’ve touched him now,” she said softly. The sides of her mouth turned down as though she were about to cry.

  “That photograph is to make me feel close,” Mrs. Sampson said. She pulled the photograph into her chest. “You gave away your right to feel that.”

  “He’s mine,” the daughter said.

  “I can’t live without him.” Mrs. Sampson looked as though she were about to cry, and she reached away with the photograph for Sima to take hold of it.

  “Give it here,” the daughter said.

  Sima wanted the daughter to see the photograph, the way she wanted to see the photograph of her baby brother. She took it directly from Mrs. Sampson.

  “He’s not yours,” the daughter said.

  “I’m going to adopt him. Make him mine.”

  Sima stared at Mrs. Sampson, at the daughter. She knew how much she wanted, needed, begged for her own mother to love her. How much it hurt to love her back, how hard it was.

  “Nobody’s going to let an old dying woman adopt a child when his mother is right here.”

  “So that’s why you’re here.” Mrs. Sampson got red in the face. “You want to steal him from me in my last days. And I thought maybe you wanted to see your mother one more time before it was too late.”

  The daughter had her grubby fingers on the edge of the photograph now. Sima tried to hold onto it, but the plastic was slick. And then the photograph slipped from her hand and into the daughter’s. The eyes of the three women were locked on the photograph for what seemed like a long time. If only the mother and daughter could bear to look at each other, could see all the pain. And the love.

  “Your sister can adopt him. She takes care of him when I’m in here.”

  “That bitch,” she huffed. “You’ve always loved her best.”

  Then the daughter moved to the other side of the bed. She dropped Sammy’s shirt on Mrs. Sampson’s lap. She held onto the photograph. She pulled Mrs. Sampson’s purse from the drawer of the night table. She turned the purse upside down, dumped the contents onto the bed.

  She put the photograph into the bosom of her coat and picked up a bottle. “Morphine sulfate,” she read. She unscrewed the lid and took out two pills. She put one in her mouth and swallowed it. She held the second pill under her mother’s nose. “This is what we have in common now, old lady.”

  Mrs. Sampson turned her face away from the pill but the daughter’s hand followed and the pill was there again, in front of her. Mrs. Sampson closed her eyes. She shook her head.

  Sima could see Mrs. Sampson’s breath growing fast, she could hear it getting wheezy. She pushed the daughter’s hand away from her mother’s face. “Take the pills and get out.”

  The daughter sneered at Sima. “Big shot. You the one who give me the photograph.”

  “Leave now. Or I’ll call security.”

  The daughter held tight to the bottle of pills. She put her other hand up to her chest. “I got the photograph.”

  Mrs. Sampson kept her eyes closed. “Keep it,” she said.

  The daughter backed away from the bed and slinked around the corner, out the door.

  Sima sat down on the edge of the bed next to Mrs. Sampson. She fingered the buttons on Sammy’s shirt where it lay between them. “I’m sorry about the picture,” she said.

  Mrs. Sampson opened her eyes. “Don’t make no never mind. That’s all she got left.”

  15

  Family Photos

  Sima saw her mama step into the elevator of their building as the doors closed. She took the stairs, two steps at a time, up all four flights.

  Her mother had left a small grocery bag by the front door of their apartment, the door opened. Sima carried the bag inside, set it down, and turned the inside bolt to lock the door.

  She dropped her backpack by the door, didn’t bother to take off her coat and hat. She headed directly to the dining room cabinet.

  She pulled open the narrow drawer on the left side. She lifted the envelopes, large and small, and emptied them onto the dining room table. And then her mother’s shadow was over her shoulder, her mother still in her winter coat standing by her side. Two curly haired heads staring at a pile of black-and-whites, three-by-fives. Neither of them said a word. Sima could feel the cold air between them.

  Sima lifted one photograph. Her mother and father standing close together, she at one end holding onto her mother’s gloved hand, her father holding a baby.

  “Tell me about him,” Sima said in Polish.

  Her mother stood silently.

  Sima waved the photograph in front of her mother’s face.

  “This boy, this baby.”

  “That boy, that baby boy,” her mother said. “He was not my first boy. I lost the first one before this one was born, in a bucket, in the bathroom. His little boy parts, those tiny toes. He was supposed to be David.”

  Her mother’s words rushed out of her, as if she couldn’t wait to be free of them. The expression on her mother’s face was sadder than sad. There was a heaviness in her eyes, in the drooping skin alongside her mouth, that Sima had never seen before. She was almost sorry she had pulled out the photographs. She had betrayed her mother the way she had almost betrayed Mrs. Sampson.

  Her mother picked up a photograph of people holding drinks, candlelight in the background, so happy, happy, eating and smiling, happy.

  “This was his bris,” her mother said. “You had to hold down his legs while Lesk did his circumcision. All I did was cry. Cry.”

  In that tiny, dark room in the basement of the building in Poland, holding tight to the little pink legs of her baby brother. Why was she the one who had to hold the baby’s legs still? Was she the only child there other than her baby brother? It was stuffy and crowded. Every Jew in the village was packed into that small, windowless room.

  “We were like sardines down there,” her mother said.

  Sima remembered her mother crying, wailing more loudly than her brother.

  “Why were you crying, Mama?” Sima said.

  “I didn’t want for him to be circumcised. I feared for his life, for when he went to school and the other boys would know. I didn’t want that for him,” she said. “But your father, he insisted.” And now her mother was crying beside her.

  And then Sima remembered the night the doctor came to visit. It was not many days after the circumcision and the baby wouldn’t sleep. He was crying and screaming. Her mother was up walking the floor with him, her father was yelling at her to go back to sleep, that the baby would be fine in the morning.

  “Why did he die, Mama?” Sima said.

  “Your brother had a fever,” her mother said. “His little face was all red from crying. His little penis was swollen. I insisted your father get a doctor. And then a doctor came.” Her mother stopped talking. She fingered the photograph of the party, of the baby in a blanket in her arms in another picture. She reached for the one covered in tissue paper but didn’t open it.

  “The doctor was Ukrainian,” she said. “He understood perfectly our Polish, his Polish. We were all Polish.”

  Her mother grew very quiet, her breath slow. The hand reaching for the yellowed black-and-white photograph was shaking.

  “The doctor saw the baby’s penis with the skin cut off. He dropped the sheet on his body. ‘Juden,’ he snickered. He would do nothing. He ran out the door.”

  “Did Papa find another doctor?” Sima asked.

  “The next morning, my David was blue. My baby was blue. He had turned on himself, crying so hard, and he wasn’t breathing.” Her mother sat silently in the chair. Her head down, her eyes on the photograph of the baby in her arms.
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  “Why didn’t Papa get another doctor?” Sima said.

  “ ‘No Ukrainian doctors,’ your father said. ‘No more doctors.’ ”

  “Why didn’t you insist, Mama?” Sima said.

  “Why? Why?” her mother said. “Ask your dead Papa why. He wanted you should become doctor. How was that going to save my David?”

  “Papa said I should become a doctor?” Sima stared at her mother.

  “Doctors deal with death, and dead people,” her mother said. She reached for the photograph but Sima’s hand landed on it first.

  “Doctors do more than that,” Sima said. “I could become a doctor.” She could.

  “A more better job,” her mother said. “It’s enough.”

  Her mother slapped her hand hard. “My son.” She hit Sima’s hand with both hands now.

  Sima grabbed her mother’s hands with her free one and pried them off.

  Her mother’s arms flailed in the air between them. “Enough is enough.” And then she slapped Sima on the face.

  Sima stood silent, stunned by the sting. She held back the urge to slap her mother back. She could see now how her mother denied her, had denied her father, and her brother. Her mother, a head shorter, still strong and as willful as she’d ever been. The will that allowed her to sell her husband’s heirlooms after he died and bring her daughter so far away to a new place.

  “Is it enough Mama?” Sima said. “Is it really?”

  16

  Four H

  The ward was dark as usual the next night except for lights that glowed low along the hallway wall outside the six-patient rooms. It was past midnight and Sima would be up all night, same as the doctors on call, though they had rooms to sleep in when they finished their work, mostly free of cockroaches, and air conditioned. Sima put her feet up on the footrest of a geri chair in the hall by the Nurses’ Station, pulled a blanket up to her chin. She’d barely closed her eyes when voices boomed and bounced off the walls in invisible currents.

  “He won’t budge,” a big male voice said.

  “What do you mean, he won’t budge?” a second big voice said. “Tell him to get his butt out of there.”

  “You do it,” the first voice said.

  “I ain’t going to do it.”

  Sima put her fingers in her ears and then she felt a nudge on her shoulder.

  “You’ve got to come.” Nurse Bailey’s Jamaican twang rang true.

  “Why?” Sima pulled the blanket in closer. “You should page the intern.”

  “Just come.” Nurse Bailey’s voice trailed off. She wasn’t one to insist for no reason. Sima pushed down on the footrest and left the blanket on the chair.

  Around the corner, two hospital police, big guys in blue, stood across from the elevator. One cop wore a cap and the other had a billy club hanging off his belt. It looked like Mr. Biggs, the elevator man, had gone off on break and left the elevator door open. Inside the metal box stood Skinny in his hospital gown. His arms hung so long they nearly reached his bony knees.

  “What’s going on?” Sima asked.

  The cop wearing the cap smirked. “She wants to know what’s going on.”

  Nurse Bailey elbowed Sima. She pointed to the elevator. “Skinny’s been in there for forty-five minutes now.”

  “Just standing there?” Sima said.

  “He’s taken the elevator hostage,” the cop huffed.

  “Come on, guys.” Sima chuckled.

  “You can see for yourself, missy,” one cop said. “This here patient won’t budge.”

  Skinny was taller by a head than either of these men in blue, but the cops’ wrists were bigger around than Skinny’s thigh. Skinny wasn’t threatening either of them, or Nurse Bailey. He was just staring into the air in front of him, out the elevator door.

  “Etienne?” Sima called, using his Haitian name. Etienne, like Sima’s mother, didn’t speak a word of English. She stepped toward the elevator, and tried a few words in French. Not Haitian French but the Parisian French she’d learned in seventh grade. “Venez ici.” Come here. Skinny would understand this kind of French better than the Ukrainians understood her Polish.

  Skinny glanced at Sima, and then lowered himself into Mr. Biggs’s elevator chair.

  The second cop yanked the billy club from his belt. He hit the palm of his hand with it and swung it in the air.

  “This isn’t a Western shootout,” Sima said. “Just get Skinny off the elevator. He’s a toothpick—you guys can handle him.” Sima’s French wasn’t good enough to ask Skinny what he was doing there. She figured he wanted to go for a walk but got confused or scared. With the second set of elevators not working, his presence there was clearly a problem.

  “You get him off,” the cop wearing the cap said to Sima.

  “He’s a foot taller than me,” Sima said. “You do it. He doesn’t bite.”

  “Maybe he does. Who knows? Not going to let one of those kind touch me.”

  The Times had reports about parents afraid to drink out of the cup of a gay son with the new disease or even eat at the same table, but Sima had never seen County hospital police behave this way. The new disease was called GRID, Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome, and struck sick the four Hs: homosexuals, heroin addicts, hemophiliacs, and Haitians—like Skinny. All anyone knew for sure was that it had to do with blood. And at the County, where the house officers—the interns—had to do their own blood draws, hospital chiefs worried there would soon be a fifth kind of H getting deathly ill. Not hospital cops.

  The elevator door closed and Skinny disappeared.

  Sima, Nurse Bailey, and the two cops stared at the closed doors. Nobody said a word. They stood around for what seemed like a long time to Sima, who just wanted to get back to the geri chair. The cops paced the floor and muttered about calling for more security. Nurse Bailey pulled out her list of important telephone numbers to call in times like this. Then she started to head back to the ward to write up an incident report when they all heard the click of shoes coming down the hall. A ward clerk, not old wrinkly face Parker but a young woman in an African turban Sima had never seen before arrived on the scene.

  “That patient, Etienne something or other, bed six, the tall one,” she said.

  They all turned in tandem—Sima, Nurse Bailey and the two cops.

  “He’s wandered downstairs to the ER, and somebody’s got to bring him back.” They watched silently as the ward clerk’s head turned and the colorful shape of her turban angled over her torso back down the hallway.

  Nurse Bailey said, “Sima, you go. Skinny likes you.”

  “It’s always me.”

  “Go on.” She nudged Sima’s shoulder. “You speak French. You’re a translator, a natural.”

  The second set of elevators out of order, Sima double-stepped the six flights down from A71 to the ER. The stairwell reeked of piss. The floor was sticky underfoot. Cigarette butts, empty Coke cans, a crumpled bus transfer glued to the wall. It was rumored a patient had once been found dead in this very stairwell.

  The Male Room, the men’s side of the ER, was wall-to-wall brown bodies half naked, sweating or shivering under piles of white blankets—no curtains pulled around any of them. Muscular arms and scarred ones held on to IV poles. Scruffy-haired heads leaned back into stiff pillows. Puffy eyes and swollen ankles, coughs and groans. The room was flooded with pain, fevers, fears, and foul words from foul mouths. Sima blocked out the smell of dirty socks and dirty bodies.

  At the back of the room in a chair by the clerk’s desk sat Skinny.

  From the door, his eyes looked even deeper than they had in the elevator. His hollow cheeks sunken between bone. Like the faces in the newspaper cartoons of Jews in Poland.

  Sima moved through the tangle of beds. “Etienne,” she said. She knew more Ukrainian than French. “Are you all right?” she s
aid in English.

  Skinny just stared. Sitting in the chair, his head was almost to Sima’s chin. His chest moved air in and out right before her. She could hear his silence. The way she’d heard her father’s when he sat on the sofa and the wintery wind blew outside their house in Poland, around the edges of the living room.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS THE YEAR AFTER her brother died, one of the few moments when her parents didn’t argue about selling the blue glass, her father’s heirloom—all that was left of his family after the war—so they could move to America and Sima could have a future. It was all about Sima, her mother insisted; her father refused to talk about leaving Poland. “Over my dead body, over the dead body of my brother.” Her mother spit at the air, “So be it.” It was a quiet moment. No shouting, no ranting. Her father sat on the sofa and her mother rubbed one of her father’s hands, Sima held tight to the other. Her father leaned into her mother.

  “Mama,” her father said.

  Her mother fingered his dark hair and pulled him closer. “It’s OK, Papa.”

  “Go to the attic,” her father said.

  Then her father nosed a button of her mother’s blouse, and started to whimper. Her mother closed her eyes, and then opened them.

  “Sima, the attic,” her mother said.

  They didn’t have an attic.

  Sima climbed the stairs to her bedroom and sat by the window, watching branches blow in the wind, the way the snow sat on them an inch thick. Sometimes she had to sit there until it was dark outside. Her father needed her to go away and it was OK with her mother. These times she felt there was no one in the world she could count on. She worried that one day her mother wouldn’t come upstairs to get her, and she wouldn’t know what to do. She felt so alone. Invisible. As if an uncertain movement in the world might make her disappear into thin air.

  * * *

  —

  SHE MOVED HER HAND TO Skinny’s wrist, laid the other on his exposed knee.