The Wicked Redhead, page 33
MUMMA WAS AFFRONTED. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I never had morning sickness.”
“Because you’re perfect, Mumma.”
“That’s not quite true, Pepper,” Daddy said. “There was that business with the toothpaste.”
“It made me queasy, but I didn’t vomit,” she said, as if vomiting were a sign of weakness. She looked at Ella, and her face softened. “But everyone’s different, I suppose. Poor Vivian felt awful, remember? She was very brave to have four, I think. Anyway, your uncle Paul’s driving down as soon as he’s done with some surgery he’s on. He’ll set these doctors straight, I’m sure.”
“Mumma, he’s a pediatric surgeon. I don’t think he’s going to be that knowledgeable about pregnancy.”
“Why not? He went through three of them with Vivian, including the twins, and God knows . . .” Mumma shook her head, which sent a shiver down her lustrous blond ponytail and made her blue eyes catch white from the fluorescent light. Only Mumma could look that good in the middle of the night, having caught the last flight out from National airport, because only Mumma had the kind of bones and skin that deserved a special display in the Smithsonian or someplace, the Museum of Natural History, some diorama of the siege of Troy with Helen glowing in the middle. Here is Beauty. Ella used to gaze at her own face in the mirror and wonder where it had all gone wrong, why she didn’t have those cheekbones and that shining hair, why you could see the resemblance but the chemistry, the finish wasn’t right, and Ella had ended up just kind of pretty, not bad. Patrick called her beautiful, but Patrick probably told his hookers they were beautiful. “God knows,” Mumma was saying, with her lips that needed no lipstick, “any man would be an expert, after spending nine months with Vivian when she’s got a bat in her cave. God, remember those mackerel sandwiches she used to have him make her?”
Ella groaned.
“Enough of that,” said Daddy. “Ella needs her rest, more than anything. Let’s head back to the hotel. Patrick?”
Patrick was standing out this exchange at the side of the room, arms crossed, looking respectful and faintly bored. He raised his head at the sound of his name. “Yes, sir?”
“Let’s give Ella a little peace and quiet, all right?”
“If you don’t mind, sir, I was just going to sleep in the chair over there.”
“As a matter of fact, I do mind. Ella’s too polite to say it, but I have the feeling you’re the last person in the world she wants inside this room with her.”
“Sir—”
“He’s right,” Ella said. She stared at her parents, one on each side of Patrick, and she thought, I don’t know these people. Patrick who is not my husband. Daddy who is not my father. Mumma who was in love with another man, who made me with someone else. The three of them, looking at me with the same eyes, the same faces, and I don’t know who they are. She said again, “Daddy’s right. I need some peace and quiet. I’ve got a lot to think over.”
“Like what?” Patrick said. “What have you got to think over?”
Mumma walked over to Patrick and put her arm around his shoulders. “Come along, Patrick. We’ll give you a ride to the hotel.”
“But—”
“Patrick, darling.” Mumma gave him a squeeze and spoke sweetly. “Now.”
UNCLE PAUL SHOWED UP in his scrubs at half past six o’clock, bearing a shadow of stubble over his chin and Aunt Viv at his side. He was impossibly cheerful. He studied Ella’s charts and said her urine was looking great, she should be going home soon.
“Wow,” Ella said. “Doctors give the best compliments. Your pee is awesome, honey.”
Aunt Viv rolled her eyes and kissed Ella’s forehead, right where Patrick had kissed her earlier. “He was exactly the same when I was crouched over the toilet with the twins. Not an ounce of sympathy.”
“Did the surgery go well tonight?” Ella asked. She always hated to think of all the children who came under Uncle Paul’s scalpel, all those anxious parents desperate for him to save some precious life. When she was little, she used to stare at his hands and imagine what they had done that day, what miracles they’d performed. Or failed to perform. Ella had spent a week in their apartment after leaving Patrick, so she knew that his cheerfulness was sometimes absent. Only Aunt Viv knew how to deal with him then. He’d walk in the door, and she’d know everything in an instant, just by the way he looked at her. Put down whatever she was doing, whatever conversation, even midsentence, and take him into the study or the bedroom, and sometimes Ella heard them talking and sometimes not.
“Very well,” Uncle Paul said now, smiling, and Ella wanted to take this as an auspicious omen, but she was too deflated, and anyway there was a forced quality to his smile, to Aunt Viv’s smile, and she knew what they were thinking. Uh-oh. Ella’s up the stick without a husband. “And this little fellow looks like he’s doing all right,” added Uncle Paul, flipping a few more pages.
“Who?”
He pointed his pen to her belly. “That one in there.”
“It’s a he? You can tell?”
Paul laughed. “Not yet. He or she. The heart rate’s normal, looks about six weeks’ gestation by the size. Am I right?”
“I guess so. I wasn’t exactly counting.”
“Of course not.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “Anything you want to talk about? I am a medical professional, you know.”
Ella glanced at Aunt Viv, who looked like Mumma only not quite so perfectly beautiful, just merrier. Not today, though. Her face was heavy, her eyes narrow with concern. So much love inside Aunt Viv, so much loyalty. “Not really,” she said. “Still trying to get my head around it. Maybe we could talk later?”
He patted her leg. “Whenever you like. What I really want to do right now is track down that Samaritan who found you at the train station and shake his hand.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Viv, “thank God for that.”
ELLA TRIED TO SLEEP, but people kept coming into the room. The doctor, the nurses, the orderly with the breakfast tray. She was on a special bland diet, and she managed to swallow some plain oatmeal and white toast. A slice of pear. The electrolyte water in the plastic bottle. When she didn’t throw it right back up, the nurse unhooked the IV and said they would see about her discharge papers.
Then Patrick and her parents came in, and Ella knew at once that some discussion had passed between them. Patrick’s face glowed with some kind of victory, while Daddy and Mumma looked wan and weary. Patrick always could close a deal. Not even a pair of lawyers could withstand him.
“Look,” Mumma said, cool fingers against her cheek, “if you want to come with us back to Virginia, or else we could get a rental in the city. I hate to ask Vivian—”
“No, don’t. They’ve done enough already. It’s okay. I’ll figure something out.”
“You’re really going back to him?”
“I’m not going back to him. I’ll spend the night there, maybe, just because I can’t go back to my apartment like this . . .”
“Well, what about Hector?” said Daddy. “Can’t Hector give you a hand?”
Patrick was in the back of the room, speaking with the nurse. He looked up. “Hector? Who’s Hector?”
There was an electric pause. Mumma’s eyes widened. Daddy looked like he had just bitten off his own tongue. Patrick . . . Ella couldn’t look at Patrick.
“What the hell?” Patrick said. “Who’s Hector?”
Ella stared at her father. “He’s the handyman at my new apartment. He’s a friend of mine.”
“A friend, huh? Is this the guy you were bragging about last week? The one who wanted to get in your pants? Hector?” He snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute. Yesterday morning, over coffee. Hector, right?”
“Yes,” Ella said.
Patrick turned to Daddy. “What the hell is going on here? Is she sleeping with this guy?”
“Either way, young man, I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Daddy said quietly, in his lawyer’s voice. “Not anymore.”
“Well, I can tell you, she’s not going home to him. That’s for sure. She’s sick. She’s not going back to some shitty apartment and some horny asshole who—”
“That’s enough.” The nurse spoke sharply. “I won’t have that kind of talk in here.”
“She can’t go home with him!”
“She’s not going home with him.”
“I’m her husband. She’s pregnant. She’s carrying my baby, she comes home with me.”
Ella said, “I don’t need to go home with anybody. I’m a grown woman.”
“Oh yes, you do,” said Patrick. “They can’t discharge you without a caretaker, a family member, and that’s me. I’m your next of kin.”
“Wait, seriously?”
“That’s not quite—” began Daddy.
“Everybody leave,” said the nurse. “Now.”
THE NURSE WAS FROM Jamaica—the Caribbean island, not the neighborhood in Queens—and she wasn’t taking any guff, not even Patrick’s. Especially not Patrick’s. Earlier, when she was changing Ella’s IV, she told her she’d moved to Long Island with her parents and her brothers and aunties when she was thirteen, and her island accent was so faint it was more of a lilt. She had beautiful cheekbones and light brown eyes, and her name was Campbell. Nurse Campbell.
“That is some family you have there, Mrs. Gilbert,” she said, shaking her head, stretching out the word some to its most expressive length.
“Yeah, you should see them at Christmas. So what’s the story? Am I free to go?”
“Not so fast, young lady. The doctor’s going to be coming through after lunch. He’ll be the one signing your discharge papers, so you had better behave yourself.”
“And then? If I pass?”
“Then you’ll be on your way home with a bottle of pills and a lot of pages telling you how to take care of yourself. I don’t want to see you coming through my ward again.”
“I won’t.”
“You rest and take your pills and keep yourself hydrated. Find somebody to take some care of you. It’s okay, you know, to let someone else take care of you, when you’re having a baby and as sick as you are. Young ladies these days, they want to be so independent. You let someone else do the caring for now, okay?”
“I’ll try.”
“Now, to answer your question,” Nurse Campbell continued, wrapping the blood pressure thing around Ella’s arm, “it is yes. Given your condition, you must be discharged into the care of a responsible family member.”
“My husband?”
“That’s your choice,” said Nurse Campbell, in a tone that made Ella think that Patrick wouldn’t be her choice, for sure.
Ella hated having her blood pressure taken, absolutely hated anyone measuring her pulse or anything like that. She looked the other way while the nurse pumped away and the vise tightened around her upper arm, until she could feel the queer, hard blip of her heartbeat in her artery, a sensation that always made her nervous. What if something was wrong with that blip? On the ledge she saw her personal effects: her pocketbook, the Bloomingdale’s bag with the photographic plates inside. Thank God. She’d forgotten all about those; at least someone remembered to gather them up and put them in the ambulance with her, while she was out.
“Hmm,” said Nurse Campbell, unwrapping the band.
“Everything okay?”
“Everything okay.”
“Can I ask you a favor? Can you pass me my pocketbook from the ledge over there?”
The nurse handed her the pocketbook, and Ella hunted inside for her cell phone. The battery was dead, of course. The charger was back in Hector’s apartment.
“You better not be thinking of turning that thing on in here,” said Nurse Campbell.
Ella looked up. The nurse hummed to herself, looking wise. “Of course not.” She held up the phone. “Battery’s dead.”
“They are the instruments of the devil. People gabbing away all the time now, while the world goes by.” Nurse Campbell made a movement with her hand, like a wave. “People need to slow down. They need to sit down and talk to each other, you know? Face-to-face.”
Ella slipped her phone back into her pocketbook and snapped the fastening shut. “Can you tell me something? Has anyone left a message for me or anything?”
“You mean like this Hector fellow?”
Ella blushed. “Anyone.”
“Ah, I see that color on your cheeks. Mmm-mmm.” Nurse Campbell shook her head, but not in a way that signified disapproval. More like sympathy. “You got yourself in a bit of a fix, haven’t you, Mrs. Gilbert? Out of the frying pan . . .”
“A fix. That’s what my grandmother called it.”
“I see his kind before.” Nurse Campbell nodded at the door, where Patrick had left a few minutes ago, casting Ella the kind of look that said he’d be back. Her accent was picking up a little strength. “I always feel a little sorry for the wives, you know? A man like that, he like to have his own way. Sweet as molasses when he get what he want, but when he don’t? Mmm-mmm,” she said again, shaking her head. “Now, that man who brought you in—”
“What? Who?”
“That nice man who came in the ambulance, holding your hand.”
“What man? Oh my God. What man?”
“All the nurses in the ER, they were talking about him, oh my. A handsome devil. Thick, dark hair, nice figure. Skin like he just step off the beach. He was the one who found you on the train platform, called the ambulance for you. Rode all the way to the hospital. Called your daddy.”
“Where did he go?”
“Why, he left, madam. As soon as your daddy came, and your husband. He slip away in the dark.” Nurse Campbell made another motion of her hand, a flutter of her long, capable fingers.
“What was his name?” Ella whispered. “You have to tell me his name.”
“Ah, now. I don’t think I can tell you his name, madam. But I might just have a little something in my pocket right here, something he give the nurse for you.” Nurse Campbell reached into the pocket of her smock and drew out a piece of folded paper. “Now remember. If anybody ask, I don’t know anything about it. Not a thing.”
AFTER LUNCH, THE DOCTOR came. Examined Ella, asked her questions—how was she feeling, any vomiting—and exchanged a few words with Uncle Paul, who was on his way back to the city with Aunt Viv. Conferred with the nurse, who said that Ella had been drinking her electrolyte water and hadn’t vomited since the morning. Ella sat upright in the bed while they talked in their low voices. Her nerves drummed. In the pocketbook tucked beside her, the folded paper seemed to leech heat into her leg.
“All right,” said the doctor, and he signed her discharge papers and handed them back to the nurse with a prescription for pyridoxine, which he told Ella to fill at the hospital pharmacy before she left.
“Okay, now,” said Nurse Campbell. “I’m going to get your paperwork ready. You get yourself dressed, okay? And maybe I will tell that husband of yours to fill this prescription for you, down at the hospital pharmacy. Mind you, Mrs. Gilbert, they are sometimes pretty slow down there. And if I call down and say to them that a certain order is not urgent, they will maybe take their time, you know?”
Ella got up and went to the bathroom. Changed back into yesterday’s clothes; nobody had thought to bring her any fresh ones. Brushed her teeth and her hair with the toiletries Aunt Viv had brought her from the gift shop. Gathered her things and picked up the telephone receiver on the bedside table.
“Daddy?” she said, when her father picked up. “I need a favor.”
Finale
(alive, alive oh)
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA
May 1924
1
I AM NO good invalid.
Anson does his best to spoon broth into my mouth and that kind of thing, but after seven days in bed, I don’t care who you are, you commence to become frisky, as I call it. (I’m sure Anson has another word, but he’s too polite to say so.)
Anyway, when he’s gone seeing about the steamship tickets, I rise and walk across the little room, as I do whenever he leaves it. Stride back and forth from one wall to another, a distance of maybe four steps. At first, I could only manage a few of them, but now that seven days have passed since that pirate—that’s what he was, it turns out, a pirate left behind for dead during the hijacking of the schooner Perseus, laden with Canadian whiskey on its way to Rum Row—since that pirate, as I say, slashed for my throat and got the tender inside of my arm instead, I seem to have recovered enough blood to keep going for all of eleven and a half minutes before my head starts to get a little dizzy.
So I sit on the end of the bed, clad in a virtuous white nightgown and robe, staring out the window at Halifax Harbor, and I try not to think about anything. Try not to see anything except the delicate play of sailboats on the water, the tiny patches of white curling upon the surface, the gray steamship laboring into harbor’s shelter. The skift of clouds before the noon sun. The sturdy brown wood of the window frame making a rectangle around it all.
2
MR. MARSHALL is dead. I feel I should tell you that, before Anson walks in that door wearing his face of desolation and tells me to eat, to drink, to rest. Anson sleeps atop that cot in the corner. Hangs his feet over the edge. Makes the bed up again in flat, precise planes of sheet and blanket as soon as he rises, which is generally before the sun does. Goes out for a walk in the damp streets and returns an hour later to bring me breakfast. I imagine he thinks I don’t know all this, but I do. As soon as he eases the door shut, I crawl out of bed and look out the window. Watch him step out of the house and pass beneath a streetlamp, hands in pockets, staring directly ahead. Wait there leaning upon the sill until he saunters back, and then I crawl back into bed and pretend I was sleeping all along.
According to Julie, they were tacking east about an hour after we parted company when they spotted the schooner. The pirates had grappled on the port side and were loading crates of booze, barrels of it, hundreds of thousands of liquid dollars. There was a call of distress. Julie said to wait; Marshall insisted on boarding because he was certain Anson was aboard. Well, Anson wasn’t aboard, but the pirates made short work of Marshall anyway, not having the time to tenderly strip away his face like they had the crew, and he lay dead on the deck until I found him.
