by Lisa Gornick
The shift supervisor told him that the father is in the lobby, too scared to come up. The grandmother is on the floor below. Her daughter is with her, the supervisor said.
On his break, Talis goes downstairs. He reads the grandmother’s chart. Her breathing is labored. If it doesn’t stabilize by morning, they will do a bronchoscopy. Talis peeks in the door. A handsome woman, younger looking than the fifty-nine years it says on her chart, is sleeping propped on pillows. She has a thin nose and a high forehead. Her lips are parched from the tube that goes into her lungs. Even in sleep, she appears to be in pain.
The daughter is curled up in the chair with her knees pulled into her chest. She is tinier than her mother, with a mop of curly brown hair. Her hand rests on her mouth. Talis covers her with a blanket from the closet. In her sleep, she pulls the blanket up over her shoulders.
Talis takes the elevator down to the lobby. It is empty except for a guy with a scraggly beard and dirty sneakers. A ratty jacket and a plastic bag with what looks like some magazines in it are on the floor next to him. A television, bolted to the wall, is playing with the sound turned off. The guy stares at the screen, his neck arching back from his hunched shoulders like a turtle poking its head out of its shell.
Talis sits next to him. From Omar’s chart, he knows the father’s name is Adam. Talis looks at the TV. It is an old movie, vaguely familiar. His mouth goes dry. “I know that movie,” he says. “It’s about smoke jumpers.”
“Red Skies of Montana,” the guy says without taking his eyes from the screen.
“It’s about the fire at Mann Gulch where twelve smoke jumpers died.”
“Richard Widmark, Jeffrey Hunter, Richard Boone.”
Talis saw the movie with his mother when he was maybe nine or ten. He’d always known that his father, Kip Talis, had been a smoke jumper, but it wasn’t until he saw the movie that he connected the image he’d had in his mind, his father sailing through blue skies with a red-and-yellow parachute overhead, with an inferno of smoke and flame and crashing trees.
Talis turns from the screen. He looks at Adam. The grandmother and kid were admitted a little before six. Has this guy been sitting here since then? Talis takes the remote from the magazine table and turns off the television. The guy blinks like a kid whose glasses have been stomped on by a bully.
“Let’s get you something to eat.” Talis picks up Adam’s coat and the plastic bag. He leads Adam to the section of the cafeteria that stays open all night. Only a few of the tables are occupied: people drinking coffee or sodas to help them stay awake, eating sandwiches or chips. Adam follows Talis through the line, not reaching for anything.
“Hey, man,” Talis asks, “what do you like to eat?”
Adam doesn’t respond. Talis puts a yogurt container and a piece of pound cake and a turkey sandwich on the tray. He fills two cups with coffee and adds a bottle of juice. Adam trails after him, bumping into the rail.
Talis pays for the food and leads Adam to a table in the corner. He hangs Adam’s jacket and the plastic bag over one of the seat chairs. He wants to tell the guy to go take a piss and wash his hands and face, but that seems like crossing a line. He opens the juice bottle and hands it to Adam with one of the sandwich halves.
Adam chews the sandwich without looking up. He gulps down the juice. Talis puts the other half in front of Adam. He unwraps the pound cake, breaks off a piece for himself, and passes the rest to Adam.
When Adam finishes the food, he looks up at Talis. “Who are you?”
“I’m your son’s nurse. I’m on break. He and your wife are both sleeping.”
Adam covers his face with his hands. From behind his hands come snorkeling sounds. Talis pulls a wad of napkins from the dispenser and pokes the backs of Adam’s hands with them.
“He’s going to be okay. It’s a bad burn, but it’s contained to his scalp. They put a porcine graft on it. Pig skin. In a couple of weeks, when he’s stable, they’ll replace it with a skin graft from his buttocks. It should heal fine.”
Adam takes the napkins from Talis. Tears stream down his cheeks, falling unheeded on the table.
“Your mom’s burn is less severe, but she inhaled a lot of smoke so they have to keep her on close watch.”
Adam blows his nose. “It’s my fault. I left him to go to the store. I thought it would be only twenty minutes but it took longer. It took thirty minutes.”
Talis’s jaw tightens. Every time he hears this story about kids having been left, it is always thirty minutes. The adult who was supposed to be watching the kid was gone only thirty minutes.
“You left him alone?”
“Eva, she’s the housekeeper, she was there. And my mother was on the ground floor seeing her patients. I thought he would be okay.”
“So you didn’t leave him alone? The housekeeper and your mother were there?”
“I went to buy these.” Adam lifts the plastic bag off the back of the chair. He hands it to Talis.
Talis looks at the bag and the tear-streaked man. Whatever is in the bag, he knows he doesn’t want to see it. Adam is staring at him. It reminds Talis of the way he has seen certain patients with terrible disfigurements study his face, as though testing their own humanity. Would he be able to look at the horror they’ve become and still see them as human?
Talis pulls one of the magazines partway out of the bag. On the cover, an Oriental woman with her naked butt stuck up in the air is being led on a pearl leash by a black man in a leather thong. “Christ, man, are you crazy?” Talis stuffs the magazine back in the bag. Adam stares at the remains of the pound cake.
“You left your kid to go buy porn?”
Adam nods. Talis’s hands have formed fists, his thoughts sirening: Break the fucking pervert’s nose, break the fucking pervert’s nose. As a kid, he’d been on a hair trigger. One word about his mother, Dot—the town widow, too comfortable, some thought, from the insurance money she got after her smoke jumper husband disappeared packing out from a fire west of Yellowstone, too popular with the married men—and his fists would rise.
Talis stands. He ties the plastic bag shut and picks up the tray filled now with their debris. He drops the plastic bag into the garbage can and dumps the trash on top.
5
At five, Myra wakes. Caro is sleeping in the chair beside her with a blanket pulled to her chin. Adam. Where is Adam? Then she remembers that he arrived while she was being lifted into the ambulance.
Her throat aches from the tube. Her chest feels tight. Her abdomen is burning. She pushes the buzzer.
A Filipino nurse comes. Myra pantomimes for pencil and paper. The nurse leaves, then returns with a small pad and a pen.
“My grandson,” Myra writes. “How is he?”
“You want to see your grandson? No children are allowed on this floor.”
Myra shakes her head. She takes the pen and adds. “He’s here.”
“Your grandson is here. He’s a patient here?”
Myra nods. She writes Omar Mendelsohn on the paper.
A pleased look, as though she has figured out a charades clue, forms on the nurse’s face. “I’ll call.”
Caro sits up as the nurse leaves. “How are you feeling?” she asks her mother.
Myra moves her hands in a wave motion. Mezzo. Mezzo. She points to the pen and paper the nurse put on the bedside stand.
Caro stands to get them. In her haste to get to the hospital, she’d grabbed without looking an old pair of jeans from before she’d lost weight. Now she has to hold them up. She hands her mother the pen and paper, then drags her chair next to the bed.
Her mother writes something, then sinks back on her pillows. She turns the pad so Caro can read it.
“Eva?”
6
When Rachida wakes, Omar is still sleeping. The oxygen mask has been removed. With the white gauze wrapped round his head, he looks like a small Sikh.
She does not want to think about what she knows is under that gauze: the skin burned
to a pasty white or a leathery gray, the pig skin placed on top. The skin graft that will follow. Then the series of operations, perhaps years from now, to replace the hairless grafted skin with a skin flap created by an inflatable balloon from the adjacent scalp that will hopefully allow for hair growth.
It could have been worse. It could have been much worse. As a dermatology resident, she saw children whose hands had been charred to stumps, whose lips no longer existed. She saw legs so badly burned, amputations were required. Watching her drugged, sleeping son, she thanks the God in whom she has never believed. She vows that if Omar is okay, she will give up Layla and her button nipples. She will eat her tongue before saying a sharp word to Adam again. She will take care of her mother, let her come live with them if she wants, or visit for however long she wants. Take her shopping at every outlet she can find. Then she closes her eyes and silently cries because she cannot believe in a God who will bargain with her.
7
Caro tightens her pants with the safety pin one of the nurses has given her and goes to see Omar, asleep, with Rachida holding his hand, and then on to find Adam, seated in the lobby staring at the morning talk shows. After promising her brother—Cross my heart, hope to die, she says in their oath from childhood—that no one is too scary, Caro leads him first to their mother, groggy from having been sedated again, and then to Omar, still sleeping, where she leaves Adam while Rachida goes to see Myra and she goes to look for Eva.
She takes a cab to her mother’s house. Strips of yellow plastic printed with DO NOT ENTER are strung across the walkway to her mother’s office and the steps that lead to the parlor level door.
Caro studies the house. The windows on the second and third floors are boarded up. The glass has been swept from the sidewalk, but the steps are littered with shards. The stench of wet burned wood and smoke permeates the air.
A man comes out of the brownstone across the street. He asks about Omar and her mother, tells her that he carried Omar into his apartment and held his head under cold running water until the ambulance arrived. No one had realized that her mother was also injured.
“She was so brave, your mother. A fireman had to restrain her from going back in to look for your brother. That’s when she passed out. She came to for a few minutes while they were lifting her into the ambulance, and we dragged your brother over to her so she’d see that he was okay.”
“Did anyone see the housekeeper, Eva? A young woman from Peru?”
The man shakes his head. “The firefighters went in to check for other people, but no one else was inside. We were all here on the street for over an hour. I never saw her.”
“Could I borrow a piece of paper and a stapler? I’d like to leave her a note.” When the neighbor returns, she writes: Eva, I hope you are okay. Please call me on my cell. She adds her cell phone number, then staples the folded paper with Eva’s name on the outside to the yellow police tape.
She walks to the synagogue where her mother has told her Eva attends services. The sanctuary is empty except for a man sweeping between the pews. No one has been here today, he says, other than the rabbi and the Misters Finkelstein and Mandelbaum, who come together every morning.
At home, she brushes her teeth and washes her face. Her mother gave her the name of her insurance broker and the number for her colleague Jim Meyers, who she wants to call her patients. Caro sits down at her desk with a pad of paper. She writes the two names at the top of the page and underlines them both. Then she calls her father.
8
As far as Talis can tell, the family is pretty shaky. When he returns from sign-off rounds to check on Omar a last time before he goes home, Carol, the day nurse, tells him that the mother, the Arab woman doctor, went to visit the grandmother. The aunt asked for a safety pin to hold up her pants and then left the father, weeping in a corner of the room, alone with the sleeping boy. Omar woke up a few minutes ago, but so far the father hasn’t been able to say a word to him.
“Get your skinny ass to bed,” Carol tells Talis. “You should’ve been out of here an hour ago.”
“I’m just going to bring in some games for the kid.”
“Do you like checkers?” he asks Omar.
“Do you have chess?”
Talis rummages through the shelves of the children’s day room for a chess set. The box is missing two black pawns. He takes two black checkers and carries the set into Omar’s room, where he pushes back the IV rack and sets up the board on a stand that rolls over the bed.
Omar picks up one of the checkers.
“Just pretend these are pawns.”
Even on painkillers, the kid plays a wicked game of chess. The father watches from the corner. After Omar has beat Talis, Talis motions to Adam to come sit by the bed. “Play with your son,” he says.
9
Except for those times when he has a foster baby with him, Talis has the post-graveyard-shift routine down to a science. Immediately upon getting home, he pulls the blackout shades and makes a cup of elderberry tea sweetened with milk and honey. He drinks it while he takes a hot bath, then puts on a sleeping mask to cover his eyes. He is usually asleep within a few minutes.
This morning, though, he feels restless. He puts on the teakettle, trying to stick to his routine, but already he can tell that he isn’t going to fall asleep anytime soon.
It’s that damned movie, Red Skies of Montana. It has set him to thinking about his father, Kip.
In his twenties, Talis had tried to locate his father. He went to Tennessee, where Kip had grown up, to find out if anyone had heard from him. But his father’s father, the town preacher, Howard Talis, after whom Talis had been named, had died the year before and his grandmother was lost to Alzheimer’s, leaving Talis with only the stories his mother had told him. How his grandfather had inculcated in his father the belief that war, all wars, even the war against Hitler, was evil. How Kip, drafted in ’43, registered as a conscientious objector and was assigned to the Civilian Public Service. With so few able-bodied men to fight fires, some of the CPS guys, Kip heard, were being used in McCall, Idaho, at the newly formed smoke jumpers’ base. He immediately volunteered.
“Your father was just nineteen,” Talis’s mother, Dot, told him. “I think he needed to prove that he wasn’t a conscientious objector because he was a coward. And it suited him. He was a loner. He loved trees. He loved the animals that live in the forests. The elk, the bears, the raccoons, the deer. And the birds. The ravens, the hoot owls, the sparrows.”
Talis’s father had made his 238th jump into a fire near Yellowstone two days before Talis’s first birthday. After an hour on the ground, Kip Talis told his crew leader he wasn’t feeling well and was going to pack out. He was never seen again.
Talis’s mother refused to believe that Kip was dead. “Your father knew the forest too well to die in a fire. He just wasn’t suited to being a family man. Too many people around all the time.” Until Talis was ten, she waited every day for the mail, hoping Kip would send a clue. She imagined a postcard from Alaska, the smoke jumpers’ base at Fort Wainwright, the idea so vivid that in the fourth year Kip was gone, she called the Wainwright base and asked for someone with a cowlick in front and a scar on his right cheek.
On the tenth anniversary of his father’s disappearance, Talis’s mother gave away his father’s clothes. She cut the thick red hair she’d worn in a long braid down her back since she was a girl. The new hairdo brought out her green eyes and gave her a come-hither look. She threw out her oxford shirts and sensible shoes and started dressing in tight skirts. The kids in town took to calling her Red Hot Dot.
At twelve, Talis dropped his first name, the embarrassing Howard that made him think of his Tennessee preacher grandfather. Anyone looked at him cross-eyed, he bloodied their nose. He did bungee jumping from cliffs over the Snake River. He married his high school sweetheart, only to learn on their honeymoon, from which he came back alone, that she’d been fucking his best friend for the past year. He did a doze
n parachute jumps landing on a farmer’s six-hundred-acre corn field. He moved to San Francisco, where he worked construction and discovered that if there was any genius in him, it was in his hands. He learned to fit pipes, tape walls, pull wires, lay tiles. He learned to do Venetian plaster and dirty washes and gold filigreeing on egg-and-dart moldings.
On his thirtieth birthday, Talis woke up with a girl whose name he couldn’t remember on a mattress on the floor of the otherwise empty studio apartment he called home by default. For the first time in his life, he felt old—with too little time left to be wasting it beautifying the already sufficiently beautiful homes of people with too many beautiful things. He enrolled in nursing school.
During his second year of nursing school, Talis did a rotation in a pediatric burn unit. Classmates who had tolerated gunshot wounds and stillbirths threw up in the bathroom sinks when they saw children with feet burned off, gray dead flesh. Children who screamed when their dressings were changed. Talis, though, felt immediately that he understood burns. The dermis needs to be prepared for its new layers in the same way as old walls do for paint. No rushing, no cutting corners.
Although Talis would never say it out loud, he believes his work is his father’s legacy. His father cared about the trees and the animals, large and small, on whom fire inflicts its damage. He cares for the children whose delicate skin depraved adults, on purpose or by neglect, have let fire destroy.
10
Larry hangs up the phone after talking with his daughter and instructs his secretary to cancel his afternoon patients and to book him on the next flight to New York. He calls Betty and asks her to pack him a suitcase, enough for a week, and to meet him at the airport. From the car, he pages his partner and signs off his hospital patients and then calls the Stanhope Hotel in New York, where he always stays, to reserve a room.
As a cardiologist, he has learned that you don’t ask stricken people what you can do to help. A drowning man might say, Go ahead and finish your lunch. Or, I’ll be fine. Or, Don’t bother. You take off your shoes and jump in.