Fearless (16 page)

Was that what he yelled at her for? Did he want help looking for it? Horrible. It was horrible.

Did he get out? She didn’t want to know. She wanted to forget.

Manny kissed her on the cheek, the way you would a grandparent, and backed away a few feet from the bed. “I’m here,” he said grimly. “You hurting?” he nodded at her leg.

She shook her head no. When was he going to ask about Bubble? Or tell? Did he know more than she?

“The airline got me here as fast as they could.”

She shut her eyes at the idea of that, of anyone she knew in an airplane. “Don’t!” she croaked in a panic at the thought.

“Sorry,” Manny mumbled. “Anyway, they did it.” He bent down to be at her level, carefully raised his hand to her forehead and touched her delicately, like a priest’s blessing. “I love you, babe,” he mumbled.

There was a scream inside her. The drugs had buried it underneath her numb skin. She shut her eyes at her husband’s touch. She was back in the burning plane. The man missing an arm yelled at her for running. Inside, she screamed to chase it away.

“Bubble…” she managed to get out, but she kept her eyes shut.

“Okay,” Manny pressed his face against hers. She felt his arm over her chest, his voice at her ear. “I’m here.”

She cried for a long time and was grateful Manny said nothing and did nothing. He waited. He was patient. That wasn’t like him. He was an active man who hated to sit still. When she stopped weeping, he moved to a yellow chair by the window and just sat, staring.

They were quiet. It was night outside. She could only see the silhouettes of a few trees. There wasn’t much light, a little cast by other windows, but no city lights, no distant lit-up buildings. They were nowhere.

After a while Manny said, “They gave you a private room.”

She knew what he meant. Why? She wasn’t badly hurt. Maybe that was why.

“Things are crowded out there,” he nodded toward the corridor.

Why put me here alone? He was right. It meant something. She wished he would stop thinking so clearly.

“I ought to call home and say you’re okay.”

Everything he was thinking made good sense. Even the fact that he didn’t use the phone. It was over by a beige night table with some discarded extras from her bandage. How could he talk to anyone without knowing about Bubble?

But really they did know about Bubble. That’s why Manny sat in the chair and did nothing.

Eventually a nurse gave her another shot. She felt she didn’t need it for pain or any medical reason, but she allowed it. The drug didn’t raise her on a bed of pillows this time. Her ears got hot; her legs first felt thick and then were numb. The painful sight of Manny in the chair softened to a blur. Her eyes wanted to shut. She let them.

She felt something in her arms, something warm and wonderful that squirmed and snuggled her.

She was holding Bubble. She cried in her sleep, knowing it wasn’t him, just the memory of him, a thrilling bundle that vanished as soon as she tried to carry it back into the wide-awake world. She was asleep and yet she was weeping. She thought: That’s strange, I didn’t know you could sleep and cry at the same time.

She forced herself to open her eyes. Manny wasn’t in the chair anymore. Good, she thought, glad he was gone, even though she missed him.

She slept. A dark sleep without feeling.

She woke to harsh morning light. She was sober. Everything hurt. Any movement was painful. The tiniest muscle in her body had been bruised. Her neck was so stiff it might as well have been locked in a steel brace. She would have gone back to sleep, only the pain kept her awake.

Manny was asleep on a cot by the wall. His mouth sagged open. The presence of the cot was new to her. He was fully dressed and looked uncomfortable.

She realized she had made a bargain last night. She had agreed to go to sleep in the hope that she would be wakened by her rescued baby, by a miracle.

There are no miracles, Carla
.

For the first time she knew without any doubt that Bubble was gone. In a cold hopeless way she understood he was dead.

She wanted to get out of the hospital.

“Manny…?” The sound of herself was shocking. Not only was she hoarse, but the tones were old and hard. I’m an old woman now, she understood. I’m only twenty-nine but I’m an old woman.

Manny startled awake. His legs slipped off the cot and he fell half out. The right side of his thick straight black hair, the side that had been on the cot, was ironed the wrong way. It stuck up in the air. “What is it!” he said.

“Let’s—” She wanted to say, “Let’s get out of here,” but her battered muscles overwhelmed her with pain. She moaned.

“You need another shot?” Manny was already up, heading for the closed door.

“No!” she cried out as loudly as she could.

“Yeah, babe. You need it.” He opened the door and stuck his head out. He called out for a nurse and told someone that his “wife is in pain and needs another shot.” He mumbled more; she couldn’t hear what.

She wanted to get out of bed. She pulled off the sheet. She was shocked by the fact of her cast. She had forgotten about her broken leg. How the hell was she going to walk?

The tears started again. This time in anger and frustration.

“How can I walk!” she yelled at Manny. “I can’t walk,” she blubbered, wanting to be angry, but falling into sadness, into a bottomless loneliness.

“It’s okay, babe, it’s okay,” Manny rushed at her, nervous and scared. “They’re coming. They’re coming.” He said everything twice, his repetitions a plea for her to be quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she admitted her shame. She covered herself in his arms and begged: “I’m sorry, honey, I’m sorry…”

“Shh, don’t talk. I’m here…”

You’re so weak. Calm down. Stop making a fuss
.

“I want to get out of here! I don’t want to be here anymore, Manny! Get me out of here.” She pulled and pushed his shoulders, rocking him back and forth as if his weight were what kept her stuck in grief.

“I can’t.”

“Why not!” She hit him on the chest. The blow made a hollow sound. She shied away, afraid she had hurt him.

“There’s nowhere for us to go. We’ve got to stay until they—” he interrupted himself. He looked away from her and shut up guiltily.

He did know something. “What? Until they what?”

“Where’s the nurse?” he avoided her ineptly, moving off the bed and returning to the door. He poked his head out and called for a nurse.

“Stop it, Manny,” she reached after him. The gesture shocked the left side of her body. From the ribs to the neck, her muscles jumped as if they wanted to escape her body. She moaned and fell back. She was in agony and it scared her: the bones and muscles were hot and brittle. Maybe she was in very bad shape, not okay, but seriously, maybe permanently injured. She lay still, tears rolling out of her eyes. She was trapped and helpless: she was never going to get out of that plane.

Manny charmed the nurse while she took Carla’s temperature and blood pressure. This time the nurse said that instead of an injection, Carla would get two pills. One was Tylenol, the other a muscle relaxant. Manny talked cheerfully. Carla recognized the tone as his I’m-going-for-my-Christmas-tip voice. She heard him use it when she called him at work and one of the residents at his building interrupted with a repair problem. According to Manny it was the old people, the nontippers, who complained the most.
Los ricos
, the yuppies, who paid incredible rents and handed out Christmas cards with as much as one hundred dollars inside were grateful no matter what you charged, so long as what you did worked. But the old people were irrational, ungrateful and miserly. A few years ago an old woman for whom Manny had slaved all year gave him an envelope with eighty-five cents, fifteen of them in pennies. She complained the next morning that he hadn’t been sufficiently appreciative. Manny talked in the same tone to the nurse that he used with the stingy old people: a singsong that sounded a little dumb and cheerful and very friendly, but also, if you knew Manny, had an echo of mockery.

“How am I going to walk?” Carla groaned.

“There you go,” the nurse said, handing Carla the muscle relaxant.

“I can’t walk with this,” she tapped the cast.

“We’ll give you crutches,” the nurse said and nudged her with the pill.

“I hurt all over,” Carla could hear herself whine like a tired toddler, the way Bubble whined…And again her sore puffy eyes were wet with tears.

“All charley-horsed, right?” the nurse nodded sympathetically. “Same thing happened to me after my brother totaled a car with me in the death seat.”

“My God!” Manny put a hand on his cheek. His mouth dropped open and his eyes were comically wide. “Were you badly hurt?”

“Nothing. Not even a scratch.” The nurse turned to Manny, pleased by his responsiveness. “But I couldn’t move the next day. Comes from the adrenaline rush. It’s the same thing you’d feel if you’d lifted weights for hours.”

“Poor baby,” he said, looking at Carla, but his tone was so general he might mean the nurse’s old accident.

What is their problem? Why don’t they shut up and leave me alone?

The drug untied her muscles. Soon they were warm and caressed. Her head, she realized, must have been squeezed by a headache before, because now she felt there was blue sky up there, plenty of space without pain.

Manny hustled to put away the cot the minute the nurse left. He was afraid of her. Manny would sooner chase a crack dealer from the corner than argue with a nurse or a city bureaucrat. She watched her husband strip the cot, fold it and the sheets, and stack them neatly with anxious speed. He could be a marine hurrying to get ready for inspection.

“They were very nice to get me this,” he said about the cot when he was all done. He sat on the chair admiring his neat pile of bedding. “Against hospital rules,” he nodded at her.

She was about to mock his gratitude when she was stopped by a good look at his eyes. His smoky skin, alloyed from his olive Italian father and coffee Filipino mother, was especially dark under his brown eyes. The shadowing lent them a romantic aura. But that morning the skin was blackened by fatigue and grief; it looked almost charred. His eyes were wasted in their burnt setting.

“I got something to tell you,” Manny said. His legs were spread, elbows on his knees, his head braced by his hands. He looked at the floor. “A guy from the airline came by while you were sleeping.”

“They found him?” she was able to ask without any trouble. It surprised her. Hearing herself, she thought she sounded bored.

“They can’t identi—” Manny lowered his head and took a deep breath. He started again, breathing fast: “They can’t be sure it’s his body—” He had to stop. His chest heaved with anxiety. He looked away and mumbled, “Oh God…” He pressed his lips and swallowed. Then he spoke fast: “They’re sending for his hospital records. They’re going to use his footprint.” Again he stopped.

She remembered. When Bubble was born they took a footprint. So part of him had survived. Her baby’s foot.

“They don’t think there’s any reason for us to look at—” Manny covered his mouth with his hand and breathed noisily through his nose.

Not enough left for her to recognize. The image of her beautiful boy being torn apart came into her head without mercy. Manny rushed to hug her, but she looked past him at the ghastly visions of Bubble killed. “I—want—to—go home!” she gasped between her sobs. “Get—me—out of here!”

“We have to wait, honey,” he whispered. “We’ll go soon.”

The nurse poked her head in. “She want a sedative?” she asked Manny, as if Carla weren’t competent to answer for herself.

“No!” Carla shouted. She shook her head vehemently to prove she meant it. “No more drugs!”

“Relax you,” the nurse said.

Carla grabbed Manny’s short-sleeved shirt by its cuffs and yanked. “Leave—me—alone!” she choked the words out.

“Shhh!” Manny pressed her head against his chest. He wasn’t only comforting her; he was worried about her rudeness to the nurse.

The nurse didn’t care. “You sure?” she asked Carla. “I’ll get somebody…” she said and rushed away.

Carla concentrated on the look of Manny’s arm. It appeared smooth and soft, but to the touch the muscles were defined and hard. You might think he spent all day weight-lifting rather than fixing leaky pipes, replacing hallway lights, and rewiring intercoms. She stroked the bulge of his forearm, brushing its few hairs. He had lots of thick hair on top of his head and little elsewhere. He was a bastard, the product of his father’s weekend leaves while stationed in the Philippines. Carla assumed Manny’s mother must have been a whore, but he never said so, and he punched a friend who once suggested it. As soon as his mother died Manny made the trip to the States. He was still a teenager when he came to Little Italy to find his long-lost biological father, retired from the service and then the superintendent of a row of tenements on Broome Street. The meeting was a disappointment for both men. At least Manny did get a job out of it. Through a friend of his unacknowledged pop Manny was made assistant porter in a Greenwich Village apartment building, which meant he got all the shit work, running the service elevator, collecting the garbage from each floor and mopping the halls. Once a month he polished all the brass doorknobs. Manny didn’t like the hours or the work, but he liked New York, its ethnic and racial stew, and its promise of doing better. He took the abuse of the doormen and befriended the handyman, who gave him books so he could teach himself about carpentry, plumbing, electricity and compressors and all the gadgets that people use but don’t know how to fix. Eventually, the super was fired, the handyman was promoted and he elevated Manny as well. Manny was the handyman now, and the heir apparent to the superintendent. “You know what that means,” Manny liked to crow to Carla about his vision of their future. “That means someday you get a fancy Manhattan address.” She admired his ambition and willingness to work hard, his belief in the American dream; but she wished he wasn’t so willing to accept insults and pretend thankfulness.

After she had stopped crying, after her breathing had slowed down, and after she had been quiet for a while, Manny said softly, “I called your mother while you were sleeping. She says it’s all her fault.”