Banishing Verona (23 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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They were over the Maritimes, still several hundred miles from Boston, when a commotion rippled through the plane. Zeke saw it pass down the cabin, people removing their earphones, whispering to each other, sitting up straighter to peer over the seat in front. Jill too was leaning forward. Then she was on her feet, heading toward the front of the plane. She had taken a couple of steps when she stopped and turned back to Zeke. “Don't be alarmed,” she said. “I'm a nurse. I think someone needs help, but you're quite safe. The plane is fine.”
Gradually he understood, how he couldn't say, that a woman in business class had collapsed. At once he undid his seat belt and followed Jill. I was looking in the wrong direction, he thought again. He remembered the man on the bus last autumn sliding to the floor, his father.
“Sir,” said a flight attendant, raising her hand.
He raised his own hand, pointing, to indicate an urgent summons, and she stepped back. He reached the cabin he had passed through when boarding the plane, where the seats were much larger and fewer. A knot of people were gathered in the far aisle and from the knot rose a voice, Jill's, counting: “One, one, two, two, one, one.” Somehow his urgency persuaded people to let him through. Jill was bent over, pummeling a woman's chest. Zeke glimpsed flesh, underwear. “Tell me what to do,” he said, kneeling beside her. “Don't they have those shock things?”
“They're looking for them,” she gasped. “Give me your hands.” She grabbed his hands and placed them where hers had been. “Keep pressing,” she said. “Keep counting aloud. Press on one, release on two. I'm going to try mouth-to-mouth.”
He pressed, he counted, scarcely conscious that what he touched was a woman. Only a few hours ago she had made her way to Heathrow; perhaps he and Emmanuel had sat next to her on the train from Paddington or he had stood behind her in line,
watching her possessions pass through the X-ray tunnel. Beside him Jill's motions were the opposite of his: when he pressed down she raised her head; when he rocked back she bent to force air into the woman's mouth.
The crowd parted and a man in uniform was bending over them with a red case. He handed two plastic disks attached to wires to Jill. She placed the disks on different parts of the rib cage. Zeke took the woman's warm, limp hand in his. Please, heart, start beating. Please, lungs, start breathing.
A spooky mechanical voice interrupted his litany. “Stand back. Stand back. No one must touch the patient.”
Just as Zeke grasped that the machine was issuing instructions, Jill seized his arm and pulled him away. “Go,” she said.
Four times the woman's body convulsed in response to the current. Then Jill held up her hand. She put her fingers to the woman's throat and he watched her eyes turn inward—he knew no other way to describe the motion—as she listened to whatever message the flesh was transmitting.
“Her heart's beating,” she said quietly, and launched into a flurry of instructions.
The woman was lifted from the floor and laid in a makeshift bed; pillows and blankets were organized; a message was sent ahead to have an ambulance waiting in Boston. The pilot announced that a passenger had collapsed but luckily there was a nurse aboard. Jill sat beside the woman, holding an oxygen mask to her face.
“Why did you come after me?” she said. “Are you trained in first aid?”
“Not really. I did do a course.” He pictured the room at the local library, where he had gone last autumn after the man on the bus. In two hours Winifred, the registered nurse, had walked them through what she called the three biggies: choking, drowning, and heart attacks, life-threatening situations in which anyone with a little knowledge could make a difference. They had taken turns practicing CPR and artificial respiration on the dummies,
coaching each other while Winifred passed from group to group, correcting and explaining. She had praised Zeke's Heimlich maneuver. You're pushing at just the right angle, she had said.
The woman gave a soft moan; her head rolled from side to side. “My father nearly died of a heart attack last month,” he offered.
“Well, thanks,” Jill said. “You were a big help. You knew what to do and you weren't afraid to use your strength. That was what was needed.”
Zeke stood watching the woman. Her cheeks were mottled with red blotches and her eyelids twitched, as if she were dreaming. Beneath the blanket her chest rose and fell. Tomorrow, he thought, if she looks in the mirror she'll see the bruises on her rib cage where my hands pummeled her and she won't know who made them. “Will she be all right?”
“I don't know. She's not old, she's not overweight, and I couldn't find any medicine in her carry-on luggage, so this is probably her first attack. The best we can say is that she'll have a chance. There are some excellent hospitals in Boston. That's why I'm going there, in fact. I've taken a job at Massachusetts General Hospital.”
That was good news, he thought, if anything should happen to Verona. He made a careful note of the information. “What's today's word?”
“Sorry?”
“You said you tried to use a new word every day. What's today's word?”
“You heard it already,” she said. “Countenance.”
“And tomorrow's?”
“Sufficient unto the day …” A little line appeared between her eyebrows. “I can't remember how that ends,” she said, shaking her head as if to dislodge the remainder of the quotation. “It'll come to me. The point is, I'll think about tomorrow's word tomorrow. That way it's a response to whatever's going on. Though right now I might not have chosen countenance for today.” She stopped again and raised her hand to cover her mouth. “I need to be quiet for a few minutes before we land.”
It took Zeke a moment to realize that she was asking him to leave. Can't I stay, he wanted to say. But Jill was looking down, adjusting the blanket around the woman, and he saw that she was even paler than her patient.
 
 
The noise of the engine changed and a series of announcements came over the speakers about landing cards, seats in an upright position, seat belts fastened. The man in the next seat removed his mask and earplugs and began to struggle with his shoes. “Smooth flight?” he asked.
Zeke was in the middle of his little
hmm
sound when a grinding noise erupted from the floor of the plane. “What's that?” he said, grabbing the armrests. Oh, Verona, he thought.
“The undercarriage,” said the man, looping a thin strip of patterned material round his neck and moving his hands up and down. “Is my tie straight?”
The term
undercarriage
meant nothing to Zeke, but he grasped that the man, like Jill, was in no immediate fear of destruction. Cautiously, he looked over and discovered the blue silk tie listing to the left. “No,” he said and, releasing an armrest, motioned the tie down.
Gravity wrestled them back to the other side of grayness. He saw dark sloshing liquid only a hundred feet below. Were they attempting the unlikely eventuality of a water landing? But even as he bent forward, searching for the life jacket under his seat, the runways were stretching out around them with huge white mounds beside them: snow, he guessed. And then they were landing. Like the birds he had watched while walking with his father in the park, they bounced several times before they finally reconnected with the ground. He heard another sound—the flaps on the wings going up—and felt himself being pulled forward in his seat.
“Welcome to Boston,” said the pilot cheerfully. “The local time is two thirty-two P.M. Twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit and overcast.”
A
ding
sounded, not unlike the bell at the shop, and on all sides people rose out of their seats as if they had been forcibly ejected. Zeke slipped on his jacket, picked up his still-unread newspaper and his half-empty bottle of water, and followed his fellow passengers haltingly down the aisle, through the now-empty business cabin, over the threshold of the plane, and up a large plastic tube into a corridor. Unthinkingly he walked behind his dark-suited neighbor until they reached a brightly lit hall, where the passengers separated into several queues, facing a line of glass cubicles, each containing its own uniformed official. After searching the crowd in vain for Jill—for once he felt sure of his ability to recognize a person—Zeke took his place behind the notice labeled visit-TORS AND NONRESIDENTS.
For a few seconds, his feet firmly planted on the linoleum, he gave himself over to the pleasure of being earthbound. Then he recalled where that earth was, and his anxieties began to gather. However frightening the journey, his duty, while on the plane, had been clear: to pray and not to pull the red lever except in case of emergency. Now he was thousands of miles from home, much farther than he could walk or drive, even if a continuous landmass
were available, and between him and Verona lay a series of people who were likely to be even more perplexing than those he usually encountered.
Following the cardinal rule of any queue, some passengers whisked past the officials and others, for no apparent reason, entered into prolonged discussion. Zeke's arms itched and his hair kept falling over his forehead. The room, he realized, was stiflingly hot; he unbuttoned his jacket and, after a quick survey, decided that removal was permissible. Then he stood, trying not to fidget, and rehearsed his lines. The main thing they want to be sure of, Emmanuel had said, is that you're not planning to stay. Say that you're here on holiday, the purpose of your trip is pleasure. Isn't February an odd time to take a holiday, Zeke had asked. Of course not. You could be going skiing. Or, he added, seeing Zeke's expression, shopping. You're bound to buy something in America.
“Next,” came a voice. Zeke stepped over a yellow line and, entering the glass cubicle, found himself facing, across a high counter, his first real American. A plump grublike man, with sandy hair and eyebrows so pale as to be almost indistinguishable from his skin, asked for his documents. Zeke was already offering them but he could not help staring; the man had spoken like a ventriloquist, barely moving his mouth.
“How long are you staying?”
“Five days. I have a return ticket.”
What if this being, who could talk without talking, decided that he was not worthy to set foot in America? The man opened Zeke's passport and, with plump fingers, began to turn the empty pages, pausing over each one. He slipped the open passport face-down into a machine and typed. Zeke gazed at the speckled Formica counter, trying simultaneously to imagine what he would do in such an eventuality and to keep it at bay. If you act guilty, he heard his father say, it just sets the buggers off. He had been talking about the health inspectors from the council, but surely the same thing applied to immigration officials. If he won't let me into
the country, Zeke thought, I will cling to the counter and demand to speak to Verona. In preparation he took firm hold of the edge and, remembering a lifetime of admonitions, raised his head. But the officer showed no interest in eye contact. He tapped a few more keys on the computer, withdrew the passport from the machine, and, flipping open Zeke's ticket, traced the lines of type with a pudgy finger.
Zeke held on.
After eighteen breaths, the man put the ticket inside the passport along with the customs form and held them out. “Welcome to America, Mr. Cafarelli. Enjoy your stay in our fair land. And have a good day.”
Downstairs was another large room filled with luggage carousels. Zeke followed the crowd to one near the end, which was already circling noisily beneath its burden of mostly black suitcases. Just as he was thinking how vastly improbable it was that his own small green case, which he had handed over in London that morning, would have followed him on this huge journey, something nudged his leg. Startled, he looked down to discover a substantial brindled dog sniffing its way toward the baggage.
“Excuse me, sir. U.S. Customs dog training.”
He couldn't tell if the person who had spoken was male or female. As he watched the squat, uniformed figure move away he caught sight of a neatly turned ankle. Female, he decided.
“Search, Bruno. Good boy, search.” Bruno dutifully pushed his nose at half a dozen bags and then, in spite of the woman's commands, sat back on his haunches and let his spectacularly long pink tongue hang out.
A companion in discouragement, Zeke thought. Looking around, he found many others. Almost everyone was watching the luggage with expressions he judged to be neither optimistic nor confident. And as he took this in, he suddenly came to his senses. What was he doing loitering here when he could already be in a taxi, heading toward Verona? He could always buy new clothes. Meanwhile, thank goodness he had dressed carefully for the journey.
He was almost at the exit when some impulse made him cast one last look over his shoulder. There, caught between a battered army duffel bag and a pristine cardboard box, was his green case.
As he lifted it to the floor a voice said, “One moment, sir. Put the case down. Bruno.”
The dog thrust its sharp nose against the lid and sniffed along the seam. There's nothing for you to find, Zeke thought, trying to send the message into Bruno's recalcitrant American brain, but innocence did not entirely quell his anxiety. He had read the stories about unsuspecting travelers being used to carry contraband. What if one of those people with red flags at Heathrow had slipped a bag of pills into his case? Then he remembered again the importance of seeming relaxed and began to count the remaining suitcases on the carousel. At fourteen, the dog backed away.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” said the woman, sounding in no way thankful.
In customs another expressionless official lifted his case onto a table, clicked the catches, and raised the lid. He wore gloves of the kind used by dentists and doctors; through the milky rubber Zeke could see the dark hairs on the backs of his hands pressed flat. The man studied his alarm clock, squeezed out half an inch of toothpaste, and unrolled a pair of socks. Some principle seemed to forbid him from fully removing any item from the case, and by the end Zeke's clothes were rumpled and storm-tossed. When the man tried to close the lid a gap of two inches remained. He looked at Zeke for the first time. “I'm no great shakes at folding,” he said.
After a few seconds, Zeke realized that he was being invited to help repack his possessions. Beneath the man's gaze, he rolled socks, folded shirts, and fitted his spare shoes back together. “I've never seen anyone do that before,” the man said, pointing to the socks. “Neat trick.”
“My father taught me.”
“Family tradition. You Brits are good at that. My dad came from Coventry. Do you know it?”
“I'm afraid not,” said Zeke, and the man moved his head from
side to side as if yet another Englishman had brought him bad news.
He folded the last of his shirts and took the opportunity to retrieve his hat and scarf. The formula for translating Fahrenheit to Centigrade eluded him, but 26 degrees Fahrenheit, he guessed, was chilly.
He walked through the open door and, instead of the oblivious crowds he had left behind at Heathrow, found himself facing a mass of people holding flowers or shiny balloons or signs saying WELCOME HOME, ABBY. HURRAH, YOU'RE BACK! WE LOVE YOU! For one stupid heartbeat he paused, hoping to see a tall pregnant woman step forward from the crowd, even though she had told Emmanuel that he should come straight to the hotel. But no one approached; indeed, several people turned away.
Outside the air was cold and smelled of exhaust and something that he thought might be snow. He crossed a road and joined yet another queue of people, waiting to climb into a line of dingy white and brown taxis. Emmanuel had warned him that American taxi drivers often barely knew the main streets. Driving a cab is one of the first jobs people do when they get off the boat, he'd said. You should phone the hotel from the airport and get directions. But this advice came back to Zeke only now when there was no pay phone in sight, and he could not bear to delay another second. So long as he had been making his way through the various formalities, he had not allowed himself to fully comprehend what was about to happen. He was about to see Verona again.
A taxi pulled up and the driver, a thin man wearing a faded green anorak and round black glasses, climbed out. As he wedged the suitcase into the already crowded boot, Zeke thought he looked like a giant insect. Carefully enunciating each syllable, he gave the name and address of the hotel. “Do you know where that is?”
“Sure,” said the driver. “Ted Williams, okay?”
Zeke moved his chin up and down uncertainly, and the next thing he knew he was leaning as far back as he could in a corner of the taxi, clutching the door handle, as they squeezed between an
orange bus and a huge black vehicle. Everything was back to front. The driver was seated on the wrong side of the car and he was driving on the wrong side of the road and cars, mostly much larger, were passing with equal speed on either side. For a few seconds, in his terror, Zeke forgot Verona. The view through the window did little to assuage his fear; on all sides were bulldozers, tractors, makeshift concrete barriers, wire fences, and huge mounds of snow. They stopped beside a booth and the driver rolled down his window and offered several pieces of green paper; money, Zeke thought. TED WILLIAMS TUNNEL a sign proclaimed. A moment later they entered the most beautiful tunnel he had ever seen, the road surface smooth as glass, the lighting bright and hospitable, the walls virginal.
“Excuse me,” he said, leaning forward to push his voice through the plastic barrier. “Who is Ted Williams?”
“Who is Ted Williams?” In the mirror the driver's eyebrows rose above his sunglasses. “I guess you don't follow baseball where you come from. Williams was only the greatest hitter of all time. He played for the Red Sox, the local team. Now his son has him frozen.”
“Frozen?”
“You know, like cryogenics. Apparently the kid thinks his dad's DNA will be worth something in the future. Not that he's short of cash these days.”
“But where does he keep him?” A baffling picture came to mind of a fully clothed man lying in a block of ice on a dining room table or, more plausibly, in a bath.
“There are places,” the driver said, “if you pay enough. They have some fancy name but it's just a big deep freeze with backup generators in case of a power cut. You can go there. Say if you're having a bad year, you get yourself iced up, then they thaw you out when you ask and you haven't lost the year. Well, you've lost that year, but you have another one.”
They had emerged from the idyllic tunnel and were making their way over bleak, bumpy roads lined with more snow. Between
drifts Zeke caught sight of a small metal effigy perched on the edge of the sidewalk, some sort of shrine perhaps. They passed endless car parks, bounded by chain-link fences, as if to prevent the few captive vehicles from making a break for freedom. As for the buildings, they were made haphazardly of brick or stone or concrete, each different from the others. Some were quite modern, others almost in ruins. At one corner he even saw a house made of wood. He had not given much thought to America, the place itself, but he had expected everything to be modern and gleaming.
Meanwhile the driver continued to hold forth. He had been to London a few years ago. “Things pretend to be the same,” he said, “but they're different. Like McDonald's. The burgers have the same names but everything's half the size and twice the price. Same with music and clothes.”
And what was Zeke doing here?
“A holiday. Funny time of year but it's when you can get away, isn't it? I went over in November. Didn't rain once, in spite of all the jokes. You should come here in the spring. See the lilacs and the cherry blossoms. The Japanese go wild about them.”
Zeke did his best to listen courteously, but all he could think of was Verona. What if he didn't recognize her or didn't know what to say? They had reached a more prosperous part of the city, the buildings taller and closer together, the sidewalks clean and populated by well-dressed men and women, picking their way through the snow. But suddenly every light was red, they had to pull over for an ambulance and a minute later for a police car; pedestrians plunged, lemming-like, from the curb; roadworks erupted in their path. Every time Zeke saw a sign saying HOTEL he leaned forward, only to watch it disappear. Once, he was sure, he saw the same sign twice. He was about to question the driver when he pulled over and slammed on the brakes. “Here you go. That'll be twenty-two dollars plus four-fifty for the tolls.”
Zeke was already holding his wallet, examining the sheaf of money that Emmanuel had helped him to obtain from a bank at
Heathrow. The notes were all the same size and color and he had to look at them individually to distinguish tens, twenties, and fifties. Only two of those, Emmanuel had said to the cashier; people always think they're fake. In his haste and confusion he was tempted to thrust the whole lot at the driver, but what if he needed to buy Verona supper or a pair of gloves for her chapped hands? He checked the numbers printed in each corner and handed over two twenties. The driver handed back a single note emblazoned with tens. Zeke was almost at the door of the hotel when someone called, “Mister. Hey, mister.”

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