The Walking People (40 page)

"If this happened in Ireland," Greta said, "he'd be dead. I'm sure of it."

 

Michael filled the narrow bed from corner to corner. He was naked to the waist except for the bandages around his ribs, and from the navel down he was only partially covered, the sheet twisted and tucked around his injured limbs in such a tidy way that Greta realized there must be a point to the arrangement. He was bruised above his bandages and below, and though she cringed to see it, she reminded herself that it could have been worse. He could have been broken in two. He could have been crushed to bits. The room was warmer than the hall, much warmer than the waiting lounge, and Greta figured this must be because they couldn't put a proper blanket on him. It was disorienting to see him sleeping on his back, which he never did, and to see him so neat in sleep, which he never was. His uninjured arm lay parallel to the right side of his body, his injured arm folded across his chest. His right
leg was covered by the sheet, but his left leg was uncovered except for the bandages that circled his thigh from knee to hip. Even from the door of the room Greta could see that they'd stripped him bare, and when she approached the bed, she saw that his entire hip was exposed on his left side, his skin almost the same sterile color as the sheet, a few dark hairs underlining his basic whiteness and drawing her eye forward like signposts that grew darker and denser as they gathered at his crotch. She bent to look closer and saw that there were more angry bruises on his hips and legs. She took the very edge of the sheet between her first finger and her thumb and lifted. His good leg was black-and-blue from the hip to the knee.

She looked back at the nurses through the window in the door and saw them watching her.

"Hello, Michael," she said, standing clear of the bed as she'd been instructed. "It's me. Greta." Just as the words were out, his lips parted and his jaw fell open. He never slept with a pillow, but they'd tucked a pillow under his head. They'd cleaned him up for surgery and cleaned him again after. His face, she noticed, had been completely untouched. Not a scrape, not a single bruise. Apart from the bruises and the bandages and the sling, he looked scrubbed enough to step into a freshly ironed shirt and go to a party.

"Michael?" she said, stepping closer and placing her hand on his chest. She pressed down lightly and felt his heart beating wildly in its recently repaired cage.

The knob turned on the door, and a young nurse pushed it open. "Please don't touch him, Mrs. Ward. It's just a precaution for these first few hours. The doctor—"

"He's cold," Greta said, holding her hand out to the nurse as if she were holding up the evidence. "He doesn't like to be cold. He slept outside all his life and doesn't deserve to be cold now. He slept out in the cold and the wet, then he worked in the cold and the wet, and now this. Please, isn't there a blanket?"

"I'll get him a sheet," she said. The nurses at the station were listening to every word. "But we ask you..." she added before turning away, looking at Greta's culprit hand. When she departed, another nurse took her place.

"Is there anyone you'd like to call?" the second nurse asked. "Someone to keep you company?"

Greta remembered Ned, asked if the nurse had seen him.

"That gentleman left. Would you like to use our phone to call someone in the family?"

Greta shook her head and turned back to Michael. She should call Julia, she knew, but she couldn't get herself to walk out the door into the hall. He'll be fine, she told herself, fighting the urge to take off her jacket and drape it over him. He once asked her what she would do if anything happened to him. It was just after that electrical fire where one man had died and another was left not right in the head. "Do?" Greta had asked, never once having thought of the question herself. "I wouldn't do anything."

"I mean," he'd said, "would you go back?"

But Greta had refused to answer, had refused to even let the possibility settle into her thoughts. And now, looking at Michael's chest rise and fall, she unbuttoned her jacket in the warm room and knew she had been right not to let herself think about it. He was—as she had told him so many years before while they sat on the front stoop with Julia on her lap—her best friend. She had never said that to anyone, not to Johanna, not to any schoolmate. Johanna had left, and Greta had survived. Had thrived, even. But Michael was different. Without Michael she'd be like the child on the low end of the seesaw, no partner to lift her up toward the sky.

When the nurse came back with the sheet, she also had a metal folding chair that had been sterilized by the cleaning staff, and she opened it for Greta in the farthest corner of the room. No sooner had Greta sat down on the chair and slid down so that her head rested against the wall behind and her legs extended out in front of her, than she began to feel the tension of the day drain out of her. Out in the hall, a monitor beeped in a steady rhythm that Greta found soothing, the wheels of a gurney rattled as they passed. He would be fine. Up and about in no time. The temperature of the room really was very warm, Greta thought as her head lolled down toward her shoulder. I can't go out now and ask if it might be too warm, not after the stink I made about him being cold.

Just a few seconds later Greta was surprised to hear Michael laughing at her, laughing with her, telling her to shush so he could listen to a patient playing a fiddle down the hall. Ned Powers was at the nurses' station doing a jig, waving to Greta from the other side of the window to get up, do a dance, live a little. Didn't Greta know the Seige of Ennis? Didn't they teach them anything out there in Ballyroan? He pulled an amber bottle from the gap in his wellies, but Greta discovered that she didn't mind, poor thing, all he wanted was a nip. It was the old habits brought to a new place that made them seem so wrong. The smell of salmon cooking on a grill Dr. Medina had set up in the waiting room set her stomach rumbling. Will we go for a swim? Michael asked as he bent and straightened first his right arm, then his left, to test them out. Last one in is a three-legged donkey, he shouted, leaping up from the bed and, still naked, his bandages unwinding with every stride, he ran down the hall, down the stairs, out the front door of the hospital, and using that sixth sense of his, lifting his nose to the air and taking a long sniff, he turned and made for the river.

B
ECAUSE MICHAEL HAD
come so close to dying but had lived instead, Greta felt that he would be safer in the tunnels from now on. It wasn't rational, exactly, but it felt like the truth. Greta and Michael discussed it, sheepishly at first, it was such a silly idea, but then with more conviction. Where sixteen others had died, death had taken its shot at Michael but had missed. The next accident on the job would be someone else's turn.

The day Michael came home from the hospital was hot, getting hotter every minute, and felt to Greta more like August than June. Even the sidewalk outside was quiet in that August way, older children in groups and younger children with their mothers or their nannies over at Carl Schurz park on the East River or, if they had the energy, west to Central Park, where there was more room and where they imagined they felt a breeze stirring the leaves of the trees. The only sound from outside was the beat of a ball being bounced along the sidewalk, the supple smack of rubber against concrete moving closer and closer despite the handler's drowsy pace. Greta listened as it passed, counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, kept listening as the sound faded away toward Third Avenue. The smell of spoiled milk wafted up from the garbage piled on the street and slipped through the iron bars of the Wards' first-floor window gate. For twenty years now, the tenants of 222 East Eighty-fourth had been promised a large container for the garbage cans, something
made of wood with a hinged door on top to trap the smell and hide the cans from view. For twenty years Greta had been wondering when the handsome wood container was going to arrive.

She stared at the tiny kitchen she'd used for twenty-two years—first the rack of drying dishes, then the sheer cotton curtain as it moved toward her in the humid air. Her look fell upon the calendar, and with her index finger guiding the way, she ran her eye down the column of Wednesdays. June the twenty-fifth. Not possible. Was she looking at May? No, there it was at the very top, June 1986, month and year correct. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and leaned against the counter. Somehow, that afternoon, she had to accumulate as many boxes as she could carry from twelve different liquor stores if she walked down Second Avenue to Fifty-ninth, then back up along Third. Liquor store boxes were best for moving—they were strong, the right size, and they were unlikely to carry roach eggs. If only she'd learned how to drive. There was Michael's car, just sitting there at the curb until Julia came home and moved it to one of the Tuesday/Friday spots on the other side of the street. Julia could drive her from stop to stop, but only if Greta waited until after six o'clock. No, Greta thought. I've already left it too long.

In the next room, Eavan and James were constructing models of their new house out of Legos. Twice now Greta had heard faint sounds of demolition, pieces bouncing and skidding along the scuffed hardwood floor. Twice she'd heard Eavan tell James to cut it out or else. On Saturday, when she lifted the mattress in there, she would find red and yellow Legos along with socks, clips, hair bands, notices from teachers meant for Greta to read and sign. Eavan's voice came through the thin wall again. "You think I'm kidding?" she said, then a thump, something hard—a knee, a head—against the floor. "Oh, go tell," Eavan said a few seconds later, and then whispers, silence, back to the business of building houses.

"What's going on in there?" Greta called, rapping her knuckles on the wall. "If I hear any fighting you're going to be sorry. Your father is trying to rest."

"We're not fighting!" Eavan called sweetly, and then—Greta imagined the nudge—James shouted, "We're being quiet!"

In the dim living room, Michael lay sweating on the soft velour of the couch they'd inherited from a woman who used to live down the hall. His leg was propped up on pillows, his injured arm in a sling across his belly. When James had come along seven years earlier, Michael had cut the room in half with a wall of Sheetrock to make a third bedroom. He didn't see why it was necessary; they could have just put a cot in Julia and Eavan's room, but Greta had insisted. At home, he'd pointed out, the girls and the boys were often mixed and nothing wrong came of it. Plus Julia was so much older, it was like having a parent in the room. You're not at home, Greta told him, as she'd told him a million times before. He reminded her of the same fact just as often. Sometimes they joked about making a tally, who mentioned home most often. Since Lily died, and after getting over that first year or so of silence, it seemed that Greta had decided to fill the mute space left behind with more stories than ever, stories he'd never heard, about the boys, about Big Tom, about raising chickens and selling salmon. And somehow, the more she talked about it, the farther away home seemed to both of them. For Greta, home was not a place that coexisted with America, a place that went on and grew and changed at the same time New York was growing and changing. It felt more like Ireland had ended where America began, as if it were something out of America's past.

Even the children had caught on, saying the word home to each other but meaning Ireland, a place they'd never seen. "They don't have pizza at home, do they, Mom?" James had asked on his seventh birthday. He held the slice at an angle so that the oil formed a current down the center, leaked onto the plate, and made the thin paper almost transparent. "No, love," Greta told him. "They have delicious pig's feet."

"Home," James said, "sounds disgusting."

The side of the living room that became James's room got the larger of the two windows, so the portion of the room left over for the couch, the armchair, the television, and the low table they called a coffee table, though they usually drank tea, was at its brightest a rose-tinted gray. While it lasted, the light was perfect in its pinkness, in the way it airbrushed everything in the room, in the agile way Greta imagined the
rays must have bent and turned to avoid the tall buildings up and down Eighty-fourth Street just to shoot an arrow into the Wards' ground-floor apartment. For roughly thirty minutes each day—slightly longer in the summer, slightly shorter in the winter—the living room was awash with pinks and reds. At all other times the room was a black-and-white photograph—the maroon couch, the deep-piled beige rug, the blue-and-white-flecked armchair, the navy-and-green-striped curtain—all reduced to a palette of grays.

They had a single lamp in the corner, but Julia had told Greta recently that it wasn't enough; it would do more harm than good. Who ever heard of a reading lamp that only held a forty-watt bulb? It was this lamp that Michael inched closer to as he listened to Greta move back and forth in the kitchen, the girls' room, the hallway, his newspaper tilted to catch the light. Two weeks of physical therapy in the hospital had done wonders, but a dull ache still ran down his limbs when he craned his neck to catch sight of her. He had three more weeks of therapy to go, and those would be held in the suburbs, at a hospital he'd never seen.

"Did you take your pill?" Greta asked as she crossed the living room to James's room, a single memory of a toy wagon becoming sharper with every step.

"I did. Didn't you give it to me yourself?"

"Oh, right," Greta said, pausing her search to rest her hand on Michael's forehead. She'd asked him to explain it to her a dozen times, where he'd been standing, the size of the cutters, how, exactly, his hood had gotten caught. No, he wouldn't get paid while he was laid up, but he was alive, he would walk, he would be back at work within two months if all went well. The walking boss had come to the hospital with his cap in his hands and said he never should have asked them to look at the mole, that was for the damn engineers to kill themselves over, he should have let those good-for-nothing engineers get injured for a change. The man pointed out that the company always needed someone to supervise the pumps, no matter what the funding situation. "You can read a paper, Michael. You can bring down one of them portable TVs. As long as you're there if the pump stops." Without the pumps, all their years of work would be washed away. It was
as Michael had always believed: with the bad must come some good to balance things out. As the rest of the men got laid off, Michael tried to hurry himself to health so he could go back to work.