Fire in the Blood

  “Here’s a fun one for you,” said Dr. Adjaye, speaking in his slightly British accent. He handed Eva a sheaf of paperwork. Adjaye was a foreign medical graduate who had trained in Ghana, his skin so dark it made Eva feel pale in comparison. He was unshaven this morning, with white bristles on his chin that matched his starch-white coat. “Admitted a few hours ago without identification, wouldn’t give his name.”

  “What’s his status?” said Eva, absently flipping through the file.

  “But he did know your name,” said Adjaye.

  Eva looked up at her colleague with an expression of total bafflement, then down at the patient. Coop’s face was covered in bandages, tape, and bloody gauze, but she recognized him immediately. His chest was bruised and smeared with Betadine, and both arms were getting fluid through wide-gauge IVs.

  “Doctor?” said Adjaye.

  Eva forced her eyes back to the treatment record.

  “I’m not sure I recognize him,” she said. “But it’s hard to tell with all these contusions.”

  She stared a little longer, distantly sensing Adjaye’s impatient gaze. Probably eager to hand this off, she thought.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Security found him near the hospital. He was severely underdressed for the elements, as you can see from the frostbite. Based on pupil dilation, facial tremors, and patient behavior, the ER noted possible drug-induced psychosis, but urine screen came back inconclusive. According to the notes, patient stated that he’d been injected with an unknown substance against his will.”

  “Jesus,” said Eva, under her breath.

  She looked at Coop’s bare skinny legs and big feet. He was just a kid, Eva reminded herself. Him and Katherine both.

  “Any other injuries?” said Eva.

  “Hypothermia, obviously,” said Adjaye. “A handful of minor contusions. And some hyphema here, perhaps,” said Dr. Adjaye, raising one of Coop’s eyelids. “His RBCs are normal, vitals okay. No word yet from Neurology.”

  Eva stared, thinking about what would happen next. If no one else could identify him, the hospital would be forced to bring in someone from the local police precinct to take fingerprints. Eventually they’d find out he was military and someone would contact his unit. “Military justice,” she heard her grandfather say. “That’s what you’d call an oxymoron.”

  “So?” said Adjaye. “You don’t know him?”

  I am not going to help him, Eva told herself. Whatever it is, it’s too much. She stared longer into Coop’s unconscious face. Found herself nodding.

  “You know what,” she said. “Yes, I think I do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  An hour later Eva brought a wheelchair and a plastic bag of clothes to Room 316. Coop was awake now, but barely. They had him on a heavy dose of lorazepam to combat his hallucinations. As she came into the room he gave her a crooked smile of recognition.

  “Put these on,” said Eva.

  She had picked through the donation bin at the hospital and retrieved a pair of black sweatpants, a clean white T-shirt, and an oversized Christmas sweater decorated with white reindeer. She’d also managed to get him a temporary eye patch.

  She watched him while he put on the clothes.

  “You wouldn’t give them a name,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The first doctors who saw you. Why not tell them who you are?”

  Coop shook his head.

  “What happens when they find out? When the hospital calls the police, and the police call your unit?”

  “Trouble,” said Coop.

  Eva helped Coop off the bed and into the wheelchair, then rolled him down the hallway of Three East. She waved to Geo and pushed Coop into the elevator. As they descended, he studied his reflection in the aluminum interior.

  “I look like a homeless pirate,” he pronounced, after a few moments.

  “You’re welcome,” Eva replied.

  In the lobby a stained-glass portrait of Saint Barbara was set into one of the walls, between two artificial trees. The glass around her was deep midnight blue, with backlit stars in the three windows of her tower.

  “Wait,” whispered Coop, “they’re just letting me leave?”

  “I told them you were a patient at Next Start,” said Eva, “and that you didn’t have any insurance. Trust me, they couldn’t wait to get you discharged.”

  “So that’s it?”

  Eva smiled wearily, the hallway lights rising and falling as she maneuvered him toward the exit. “That’s it.”

  They rolled through the glass doors, waving to the lone security guard at the entrance, and into the cold glare of morning.

  “But the hospital will call someone, won’t they?” said Coop, speaking louder now that they were in the parking lot. “My unit will find out.”

  Eva shook her head. “Nobody’s going to call anyone. As far as the records are concerned, you’re just another John Doe with a drug problem. Probably not the last one we’ll see this week.”

  Eva left Coop on the sidewalk in front of the hospital. He sat in his wheelchair, blinking against the freezing wind, and watched as Eva trudged out into the street and stood there with an arm outstretched, finally managing to wave down an unmarked Crown Victoria, the gypsy cab flashing its brake lights too late and coasting a half block past them in the slush.

  Eva gestured for the driver to hold up while she hustled back to the sidewalk.

  “C’mon,” she said, leaning over Coop to help him. Her braids were everywhere, her breath hot on his face. “The driver won’t wait.”

  “You’ll get in trouble,” said Coop, staring at her.

  “Maybe,” Eva said. She held out her hand. “Now, you good to walk, or do I have to roll you through a snowdrift?”

  * * *

  —

  Coop was shaking by the time they got back to Eva’s apartment. As she laid him on the couch he let out a convulsive shudder, his whole body firing with each rattle of his lungs.

  Eva stepped back and tried to make a clinical assessment of her new patient. Pneumonia was the most immediate concern. Coop had been discharged with a prescription for oral Levaquin, but antibiotics were always a guessing game, and there was no guarantee that it would be the right course of treatment. It was obvious he was having difficulty breathing, and the damaged ribs would complicate any DIY respiratory therapy.

  There were too many things to do. First things first, she thought.

  From the bathroom Eva fetched the little glass bottle of cough syrup, decorated in Chinese characters, and allowed herself a crystal green spoonful. With great discipline she recapped the bottle and put it back in her medicine cabinet. She sat on the toilet lid and closed her eyes. The bathroom slowed and began to soften. Deep breaths.

  She stood up and got to work. First step was to keep him warm. She went to the closet for the spare duvet and found herself standing there, wanting to fold herself up in the darkness of the crawlspace. Pushed herself away from the door and laid the duvet over Coop’s trembling body.

  She turned up the thermostat as high as it would go, then rescued a few coffee cans from the recycling bin, which she filled with water and set on the radiators. She went to the bathroom and turned on the shower, let it run hot with the door open. At least the landlord pays for water, she thought, with a sense of calm that had been impossible only minutes before. She put pillows under Coop’s head and propped up his knees with rolled towels, wrinkling her nose at the sweaty male funk of his damaged body.

  She stood up and looked around, processing how messy her apartment was. How totally inappropriate for patient care. Look at you, Eva thought, discharging a sick and possibly psychotic young man to your own home. Good career move for a hungry young doctor trying to make it in the world. What if he dies here, she asked herself, or wakes up a
nd rapes you? Everybody in New York had heard stories like this: women trapped inside their apartment for days, chained to their own radiator and tortured while the rest of the building went obliviously about its business.

  But there wasn’t time for regret. Eva had only a few hours before her shift at Next Start began.

  She changed Coop’s fluid bag and injected a small dose of codeine into the IV port. The bandages on his face were crusty, but they’d be fine until evening. She checked the clock on her microwave and saw she had only a few minutes to change into new clothes after quickly cleaning herself with baby wipes—no time for a proper shower—and soon she was headed back into the cold, leaving Coop unconscious on her couch.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Coop came awake with the terror of drowning in a hot ocean. He tried to breathe, but each attempt caused him to bark in pain. Then something in his lungs wormed itself free, a burning clot that traveled up his throat and lodged in his sinuses. Coop turned to gag. For several minutes he lay with his torso half off the couch, staring at the blood-rimmed loogie he’d left on Eva’s floor.

  He knew he had survived something immense and brutal, though he struggled to give it a name. It was more a force of nature that had found him, and with the astonishment of a slapped child he couldn’t believe how badly he’d been hurt.

  Slowly Coop untwisted himself. He lay sweating in the fever of the apartment, which smelled like scorched metal. In his periphery Coop saw the steaming cans on the radiator, under the window, and he watched rivulets of water drip down the glass.

  Over the next hour he tried to take inventory of his broken body. There was a new IV in his arm and a tube running into his dick. Connected to the dick tube was an amber bag of urine that lay sweating against his thigh. All over himself he found bandages and gauze, on his hands, his ribs, his face, even an X-shaped dressing pasted to the back of his skull.

  For the rest of the day Coop lay in the puddle of his helplessness; too exhausted to move, too much in pain to sleep, feeling the seconds tick away one at a time.

  When he next came awake there was light in his eyes.

  “Hey,” said Eva. She was bent over him with a small flashlight. “Can you follow this?”

  Her face was close. Coop wanted to smile but was afraid to flash his broken teeth. Now she clicked off the light and went deeper into the apartment.

  “Are you feeling hungry yet?” she called out. “I’m thinking Saltines and chicken broth.”

  Coop gave a weak thumbs-up, hooking his neck to keep sight of her. The kitchen was narrow with cabinetry, and he watched her point her toes against the floor, leaning her pelvis into the counter as she picked through the cupboard.

  Together they sat in the living room. Eva ate with a glassed-over intensity, reminiscent to Coop of his fellow recruits in Basic Training, that sleepless, mechanical recourse to primitive tasks. Hunger as a function. Coop was thankful for the mutual burnout. He’d been expecting a tense silence, Eva waiting for him to explain how he had ended up at the hospital.

  “I want to say thank you—” Coop began, and Eva flicked her hand dismissively. From her purse she produced an orange prescription bottle, unlabeled.

  “Take two of these now you’ve eaten,” she said. “For the pain.”

  “What are they?”

  “Percocet. Should help you sleep, too.”

  Ordinarily Coop was resistant to taking any kind of drug, especially after the last few days. But under Eva’s care he felt cowed by his debt to her and so uncapped the bottle and upended two of the big white pills into his hand. He fed himself the pills and swallowed dry, feeling them go raw down his throat.

  Eva kept eating. With chopsticks she moved noodles to her mouth. But she watched him. Waiting for something. Coop had another Saltine. Looked around the room. Cleared his throat and wiped crumbs from his scabby lips.

  “So,” he said. “There’s a thing I should tell you.”

  Coop heard himself as if at a great distance. He was surprised to be telling Eva so much. Once he started talking he’d gotten the idea he could start in Afghanistan, and this might give coherence to the series of events culminating in the theft of the files from Presser’s office. He talked about the way he got the news about Kay’s death, about coming home and the funeral and the Bellantes. The cascade of truth being a side effect of the pills, he figured, or maybe just a failure of his body to keep anything else contained.

  Eva listened, frowning at the appropriate times. She didn’t seem surprised. He wanted to keep watching her, to judge the impact, but found himself losing track as the painkillers did their work. Things began to slow. His head felt heavy with ballast. Coop slumped back into the couch and squinted at the ceiling as he spoke, straining with the effort of reconstruction. He mumbled his way through the next part, trying to get the words correct. Telling her about why he didn’t tell the police, how instead he used the information she’d given him and went alone to the lab and found himself face-to-face with Dr. Presser—glancing over he saw Eva’s jaw working, but he couldn’t stop the mudslide of confession—and he continued through his story to the files and Mrs. Bellante and the broken cellphone, to Sean, then finally to the abduction, where the stream of his memory seemed to accelerate, gaining turbulence before spilling over a cliff in the landscape of his mind.

  “I’m glad you told me,” said Eva, once he’d finished.

  Was she angry? Coop couldn’t tell. Everything was glassy under a cloud of relief. Then through the haze he felt hands on his leg. Eva’s hands, he realized. Moving on his body.

  Coop came up from sedation, jump-started by the thrill of contact. Was she grabbing him? She had the duvet cover lifted up, his boxers were yanked down from his hips. Now she was touching him with gloved hands. Coop felt moved by unspeakable gratitude, and in the moment of thrilling, guiltless instinct he decided he wanted this, he wanted Eva. Craning his neck against the thudding imminence of sleep he looked up—just in time to see tubing from the Foley bunched in Eva’s gloved hand, her other hand braced against his hipbone for leverage. With a yank she removed the catheter.

  Cutting through the haze, a perfect clarity of pain.

  Coop yowled through clenched teeth and put his hands to his groin, gasping and confused, unable to mend, with pressure, the nauseating urethral pain.

  Eva neatly discarded the catheter into a plastic bag.

  “I’m glad you told me,” she said again, and without another word she went into her bedroom and closed the door, carrying the plastic bag like a small, slaughtered animal.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Panic arrived only after she’d shut herself in the bedroom and slid home the feeble lock. Eva was awash in adrenaline and embarrassment. At her feet was the crumpled plastic bag, filled with the snaking tube, darkly spotted in blood. Ripping out the Foley had been a cruel impulse. She was furious at Coop, furious at her own stupid investment of trust. Eva leaned her shoulder against the door and wondered how well it would hold. At the hospital she’d seen all manner of brutality in response to sudden pain, and now that she knew what Coop was capable of—he’d broken into the lab, attacked Dr. Presser—it had been even more foolish for her to take chances.

  For several minutes she listened to her own breathing in the silence, keeping her weight against the door.

  Nothing. No stomping or grunts of frustration, no footsteps padding closer.

  Cautiously she stepped away from the door. Then came the onslaught of nerves, panicked breathing. And to her alarm, a kind of perverse excitement, her body suffused with heat and expectation at the proximity to a dangerous stranger. Eva went to her dresser, pulled open the drawer where she kept the cough syrup. Then thought better of it, turning instead toward the small coat closet beside her bed. She wished it were big enough to crawl inside. Really it was a wish for her grandfather to be alive. She wanted to feel the largeness a
nd warmth of his hand on her back, guiding her toward that cubbyhole in her old bedroom. As a child she’d thought it was a game they played, something exciting.

  Her grandfather would walk her to the closet and gently usher her inside, always with the same secret orders, the same expression of tender vigilance.

  “Stay hushed.”

  In the closet she would reach up and pull down the sweaters and jackets from over her head, making a nest for herself, snuggling into the mysterious darkness. She’d listen to the floor creak as her grandfather padded through the apartment, hunting for hidden enemies, and Eva would feel a delicious sense of privacy. It was a feeling she had held on to, a kind of gift, even after she’d come to understand the closet games as dissociative episodes, a symptom of her grandfather’s “bad time” in Korea. And now, locked inside her room, Eva could see with a certain weariness how this fondness had obliquely drawn her to Coop. Something in him was reminiscent of her grandfather, perhaps the same mix of sadness and good manners, undertoned with a latent violence. Another soldier in a war that was sure to be forgotten.

  And now she had a dilemma. Her first instinct was: Get this motherfucker off my couch. Tell him he needs to discharge himself from the premises. Or maybe just call the police, let them sort it out. Except the police would have questions for her, too. After all, she’d been the one who told Coop about Dr. Presser and his shadiness, and then she’d freed him from the hospital. And even if she didn’t call the police herself, kicking him out would have the same effect. Inevitably he’d get himself in trouble and implicate her, and the rest would go like dominoes. Bye-bye residency, hello six-figure student loan debt. Sitting on the floor of her bedroom, Eva told herself to accept the true shittiness of her predicament: kicking Coop out could be the end of both of them.

  When Eva came back into the living room Coop pretended to be asleep. He wasn’t sure what would come next, and under the disorienting effects of the pain pills, Coop had the idea that Eva might come over to the couch and start hitting him. She could hold a pillow over his face. Instead she sat down across from him, wearing a stern mask.