Liberty Falling

by Nevada Barr

  “Two peas in a pod, right, son?”

  “Two peas.”

  Cal cast off and Dwight turned his attention to conning the Liberty IV away from the dock and clear of the dredging barge that toiled most hours of every day keeping the boat channel from silting in. Various creatures, animated by Digby, assisted in the process. A turquoise burro rode the top of the wheel, and a grape-colored, forked-tongued beast that more closely resembled a slug than a snake insinuated itself into the crook of Dwight’s elbow.

  “How come you’re not in school?” Anna asked, and was startled at how like her maternal grandmother she sounded.

  At the querulous tone, Digby looked injured. “It’s summer,” he said.

  “Monday, Wednesday, Friday Dig usually has piano, but his teacher’s sister’s having her baby today. C-section. So Dig’s come to work with me. Dig’s a musician. A regular Liberace.”

  Digby rolled his eyes and Anna laughed. “Harry Connick Junior?” she offered.

  “Maybe ...” Clearly Digby didn’t want to be pigeonholed this early in his career.

  As Manhattan, already formidable, grew to fill the windscreen, Anna watched Digby’s zoo wander across Dwight’s bridge and felt better than she had since she’d arrived in New York the previous Thursday.

  The boat became part of the balletic weave of ships in the harbor. Out the starboard side of the cabin, Anna could see the statue. A helicopter chopped the air over the plaza. No doubt retrieving the dead child. Ahead was the distinctive geometric shape of Ellis Island.

  “I was one of the last immigrants through there, did you know that?” Dwight said.

  Anna didn’t know whether to believe him or not. He liked to string her along to see how long it would take her to get a joke. The past few days it had been quite a while. Not feeling mentally acute, she just nodded.

  “No kidding. I was a little shaver, not more than four years old. I came over from Czechoslovakia with my mom. She was an old widow lady of twenty-two. That was in 1951. We were just about the last folks through.”

  “I was born here,” Digby said proudly. “Right there.” Using the tail of an armadillo as a pointer, he indicated most of Brooklyn.

  In need of harmless conversation, Anna asked: “Do you remember any of it?”

  Dwight shook his head. “Not much. But when I started working here, it was like that baseball guy said, déjà vu all over again. I’d remember stuff I’d never thought of before, just little scenes and things. Mom remembers, though. She had to stay out there close to a week. Some kind of paperwork snafu. My grandmother, or the lady that would be my grandmother soon as her son and my mom got married, came out and got me, so I was only there maybe overnight.

  “They must have known they were closing up shop soon. The people Mom spent her time with were these old geezers who’d worked Ellis since day one—”

  “That’d be fifty-nine years, Daddy. They’d be too old,” Digby said.

  “Hey, tell it to your gramma. This is her story.”

  “You tell Gramma,” Digby said in a tiny voice only he, Anna and a brown plush turtle heard. Anna gathered that Gramma was a formidable woman.

  “Ma came home from that week on Ellis with enough stories to last a lifetime. People born, people hanging ’emselves rather than be sent back to the old country, ghosts and royalty, a lady in the loony bin found dead wearing nothing but her knickers, operas, ball games, this shock treatment machine they rolled from ward to ward, guys falling in love with gals who didn’t speak a word of their language, folks with money stuffed in their shoes. Good stuff. There’s tapes from lots of immigrants in the library. They got Ma to make one.

  “Never make it, Cal,” he hollered out the window as the deckhand tossed the rope expertly over a piling. “Cal missed his calling,” Dwight said as he cut power and let the Liberty IV drift gently dockside at the Marine Inspection Office in Manhattan. “He should have been a bronc roper.”

  For Anna’s money, the boat trip had been too short. The hospital, the ICU, Molly on tubes and drugs, exercised an uncomfortable polarization. Anna could not bear to be away and couldn’t stand being there. Once in either place—at Molly’s side or tucked in the city exclosure of Ellis or Liberty—she was okay. In transit, both ends of the journey attracted and repulsed her simultaneously. Time went out of whack, either passing with mind-bending rapidity or creeping by so slowly she could hear her bones shrinking with the onset of old age.

  True to expected perversity, the subway ride to the Upper West Side ate up several years of her life. At twelve-thirty she was eating pizza at a stand-up table in a sidewalk restaurant on 168th Street. At twelve forty-five she presented herself in the intensive care unit on the fifth floor.

  “Please wait. The doctor will be right with you.” This was pronounced in indifferent tones by a distracted woman in white. It was said after she’d looked at a clipboard. That meant something; it meant she didn’t say the same thing to everybody, that there was some special reason Anna had to wait, a reason articulated on that board.

  The two slices of pizza congealed in Anna’s stomach and sent a geyser of what felt like quick-drying cement up her esophagus. In the eternity, she continued to stand before the counter trying to say, “Is there a problem?” The opaque pebbled glass of the sliding window closed.

  For a moment she hesitated, wondering whether to tap on the glass, but in the end she was too afraid of what she might hear. Knowing herself for a craven, she retreated across the waiting room to a blue plastic armchair flanked by angular wood-look tables covered with magazines. A woman in her early forties sat on a sofa of the same blue leatherette along the opposite wall. She was heavyset, with big hips and thighs. Her face was overly made up but open, with an eager friendly expression. The woman wanted to talk. Anna hid behind a magazine, raising the top edge till it screened not only her eyes but the whole of her face. Without being aware of it, she tucked her elbows close to her body as if she could protect all of her person with the glossy pages.

  In the next twenty minutes half a dozen people came and went. Each time, Anna jerked her head up and watched with the frightened expectant eyes that must come to haunt the sleep of medical professionals. Never was it for her. Thirty-seven minutes had creaked by before Dr. Madison finally came into the room.

  Anna didn’t move. She couldn’t. Don’t sit, Doc, she thought. Sitting is bad. Good news was delivered standing, shouted from the door: “It’s a girl!” “He’s alive!” Bad news called for chairs and exaggerated eye contact.

  Madison stepped across the small area, smoothed his lab coat over his behind, sat in the chair next to Anna’s and crossed his legs, plucking the seam of his trousers straight. Anna didn’t utter a sound. She thought of Shakespeare, of his writing that someone’s tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and that this, then, was what he had been talking about.

  “Molly’s about the same as yesterday,” Dr. Madison said.

  Anna eyed him coldly. “For that you had to sit down?”

  “My feet hurt,” he defended himself.

  “Wear sneakers.” To her surprise, he laughed. It wasn’t so much pleasant as infectious, high-pitched—almost girlish—but utterly unself-conscious. Anna liked him better for it.

  “Sorry,” he said, and pulling off his bifocals, he scrubbed his eyes on the sleeve of his lab coat. “I get it. I sat. Scared you. I’m so sorry.” He was still chuckling. It was beginning to lose its charm.

  “I’ve been sorry since your dye fucked up my sister’s kidneys.”

  Madison looked as if he’d been slapped. Before the words had passed her front teeth, Anna regretted them. Out of a primitive need to do battle she might have stood by her statement. Two things stopped her: The doctor looked more hurt than angry, and in this imperfect world, her bad manners might be taken out on her sister.

  “Sorry.” The word was hollow, feeble. “Really sorry.” Somewhat better but still lame. “Abjectly, grovelingly, idiotically sorry. I would abase mysel
f, throw myself at your feet, pluck out the offending member, but I’m afraid it would embarrass us both. I’m ...” Her mind shut down with sudden fatigue. “Sorry,” she finished.

  Several seconds ticked by while Dr. Madison looked at her, disdain or concern rumpling his high forehead, creasing the skin to a hairline that had retreated four inches since he was a young man. “That,” he said finally, “was the finest apology I’ve ever received. The groveling, the abasing, the plucking—it was positively eighteenth-century in its humility. Drawn from the days when humility and gratitude were considered good things. I accept. I would, however, enjoy a little groveling when Molly’s better. I think a laugh would do her a world of good.”

  “It’s a promise,” Anna said.

  Dr. Madison put his bifocals back on and brought his watery, slightly protuberant blue eyes into focus. “Molly is not improving. Yesterday afternoon we tried taking her off the respirator. Her lungs didn’t fail completely, but she was only taking five or six breaths a minute. Barely enough to sustain life. Not enough to recover from major surgery. We had to put her back on. She’s been fighting it and she’s pulled out her feeding tube twice. I’m telling you this because we’ve had to sedate her and we’ve strapped her wrists to the bed. It looks a whole lot worse than it is. Much of these tube-pulling actions are sub- or semiconscious, like swatting a fly in your sleep. But I wanted you to be prepared.”

  “I’m prepared.” Anna stood.

  Madison blinked up at her with his mild blue stare till she sat down again.

  “Sorry, Dr. Madison.” Anna gave him the short version.

  “David.”

  “Good name. David and Goliath. Davy Crockett. Go ahead.” Anna knew she babbled, but felt the need to make human noises and couldn’t manage to fix her mind as to content.

  “I think it’s not only wrong but dangerous to assume Molly can’t hear or understand you. She’s very ill, desperately ill. She has the body of a woman of seventy.”

  “The wages of sin,” Anna said.

  “All too common among my fellow physicians,” Madison said. “Often, after a major illness like the one your sister is going through, particularly in cases where the patient is physically helpless—where she is hooked up to life support machines and so forth—and mentally helpless in the sense that she’s in and out of consciousness, unable to speak, possibly unclear as to what she hears and sees and what she only dreams—in cases like this the patient can feel overwhelmed, lost, as if they’ve failed somehow. It’s not unusual for them to give up.”

  “And?”

  “They die,” Madison said simply.

  “Not Molly.”

  “Ah. That’s it. That’s where you come in. Not Molly. You need to talk to her, keep her interested in living. Don’t let her forget she has to come back, wants to come back.”

  “I’ll stay here. I’ll talk around the clock.”

  Again the merry girlish laugh. “Molly hasn’t a chance. You’ll probably drag her into her nineties. Round the clock won’t be necessary. Your sister has to rest. To mend. Three to five hours a day will suffice. And closer to three for a while.” He squeezed Anna’s hand reassuringly.

  Resenting it, she curled her fingers around the chair arm, the closest thing to forming a fist she would allow herself.

  “Do you want to see your sister now?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  Dr. Madison—David—appeared to give up. The kindly bedside manner disappeared and weariness—or professional distance—took its place. With an effort he levered himself out of the chair. The chairs were too low for a man of his stature. He was six foot five or six, stooped, no doubt from having banged his head on numerous objects in his youth, lanky, myopic and bald. Quite like some sort of benevolent insect, Anna thought, a walking stick or a praying mantis.

  She followed him through the door. Away from the pseudo homeyness of the waiting area was the high-tech bustle of the ICU. In his wake, she drifted down a hall of windows and flashed on the long brick walkway on Ellis. Through these windows was not the dripping green of Mother Nature in a frenzy of vengeance, ripping back her world, but pathetic and heroic pictures of frail broken human beings battling death with their little machines. In the third cubicle on the left was Anna’s only sister.

  David Madison left her at the door.

  A straight-backed chair with red plastic cushions, the kind Anna had seen in a hundred roadside cafés in the West, sat beside the bed. Looking shrunken and old amid the tubes lay her sister, arms pinioned to her sides by soft white-fabric restraints.

  Anna sat down. She’d boasted she could talk the clock around. Now she wondered what she should say.

  4

  “IT’S ME, ANNA.” She began as she had begun hundreds of phone calls over the years. For the first time in her life there was no response. Molly lay as one dead. Not dead, missing. Her humanity, her soul some might call it, was hidden from mortal eyes. The hospital had made her but a component part of their system, a flesh-and-bone cog in the machinery, the cheapest, weakest, most easily replaced link in the chain of medical technology. A translucent tube taped in her mouth forced her lungs to rise and fall precisely the same distance exactly twelve times a minute. No room for sighs or sobs or laughter. Another—the feeding tube, Anna guessed—hung from an intravenous fluid sack on a metal pole, the end needling into Molly’s inner elbow and secured with surgical tape. A catheter for urine snaked out from between sheets untroubled by human wrigglings. Palms up, Molly’s hands lay pinioned at her sides. Visions of the Virgin Mary flickered behind Anna’s eyes. Serene in blue plaster robes, she watched countless students pass through the halls at Mercy High School in Red Bluff, California.

  Delighting in her irreverence, Anna had called the statue Our Lady of the Lobotomy. The pose, the dearth of inner life, was echoed now on her sister’s face, as was the grainy pallor of plaster. Only Molly’s hair remained untamed by intensive care. Deep russet, once strawberry blond but coarsened now by age and the incursion of rebellious wiry silver hairs, a tangle of curls ran riot over the pillow. She wore it longer than Anna remembered. Combed, it would reach her jaw-bone.

  Anna wanted to touch it but didn’t. She wanted to touch the imprisoned hand but didn’t. She wanted to speak but couldn’t. Words formed in her mind much as thunderheads form on a summer afternoon. One would float in, others cluster around, mass and weight would build, Before a storm of conversation could ensue, they dissipated into mist.

  Molly was too sick to tell her troubles to, too frail to be cried over. So many of their exchanges over the years had been about Anna: Anna’s love life, her work, her fears, her feelings. It hurt to realize that though Molly knew every kink of her psyche, Anna knew very little about her. Molly’s opinions she knew on everything from thong panties to Israeli politics, but of Molly herself, very little. When their conversations weren’t centered on the health and well-being of little Anna Pigeon, they’d been a rapid-fire exchange of ideas, metaphors and jokes. It wasn’t a one-woman show; without her partner giving her cues, Anna couldn’t remember her lines.

  Digging deep in a well dry as dust, Anna dredged up topics. She told Molly of her flight out from Colorado. She told her of Hatch and the statue at night. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell her of the child crushed against the pavement, but Molly had blamed herself for a patient’s suicide several years before and Anna stopped herself lest she send Molly farther in the direction of darkness. She talked of Patsy and Kevin, Digby and Dwight, of the pizza she’d eaten for lunch and not yet digested. Even to her own ears she sounded like a parody of the boring party guest. When she finally droned to a halt, the clock above the bed had chipped away only seventeen minutes from the hour. For three more Anna sat without speaking, her mind an empty place surrounded by shadows.

  “I guess I’ll go check out your apartment,” she said at last. “Water the plants or whatever. I haven’t had a chance to get up there yet. Can I bring you anything?”
>
  Twelve lifeless breaths hissed by.

  “Cigarettes? Scotch?”

  And twelve more.

  “I won’t be gone more than an hour or so.” Anna backed out of the room, half believing at any moment Molly would sit up, call to her, be alive.

  Molly’s apartment was on Ninety-third Street between West End Avenue and Broadway, apartment 14D. Built before the war, it was a forbidding gray box punctured with symmetrical windows. The key would be with the doorman. This had been arranged before Molly went in for bypass surgery, before Anna flew out from Mesa Verde. Anna was to have stayed there. From the airport she’d gone to the hospital and from the hospital to the narrow rolling cot in Patsy’s spare room on Liberty. With her sister lying in the ICU, her lungs unwilling to take in enough air to sustain life, Anna couldn’t bear to be incarcerated in a box surrounded by hundreds of thousands of like boxes. The thought made her own lungs begin to shut down. She’d wear out her welcome with Patsy before she’d spend a night in the city.

  At 125th Street she got off the subway, then walked the last thirty blocks between the hospital and Molly’s building. Killing time, lulling her mind as she often did with the lifting and laying down of her feet. Block passed like block, a spatter of shops in tawdry hues, odors that would transport a discerning nose from the slums of Somalia to the Champs Éysées. Noise was constant, mingling, blurring till it became as white noise: meaningless.

  The doorman, dressed even on a warm summer day in the maroon and gold livery that enhanced doormen all over the city, was polite and helpful. A key was pressed into Alma’s hand and she was pointed into the opulent gloom of the late 1920s. There, flanked by mirrors in bronze and wood black with polish and age, Anna took an elevator to the fourteenth floor.

  Leaving the hospital, she’d had no plan but the feeble one she offered Molly: to water the plants. By the time she turned the key and heard the dead bolt slide free, she’d devised one slightly less tinged with self-interest. She would search through Molly’s things. Not snooping precisely—diaries and personal letters she would leave alone lest she uncover her sister’s secrets or, even less appealing, inadvertently stumble across some criticism of herself. Digging, then, gently, the way an archaeologist would dig uncovering a lost civilization, Anna would find the things that tied Molly most firmly to the surface of the planet. These she would take with her to the hospital and talk of them till Molly came back to join her. Or to tell her to leave her stuff the hell alone.