CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
ADELINA
Glen Cove Hospital has a corridor upstairs with eleven chairs in it and a window at the end.
I do not sit in any of them.
I stand at the window with my arms folded and my back to the room and I look at a car park, and behind me there is a man in a soaked shirt in a plastic chair with his forearms on his knees, and not one word has passed between us since the doors.
Matteo is in a bay four feet away with a curtain round him.
He is fine.
I want to put that down immediately because I know what it does to a person to read the other thing.
He is fine. The steroids went in at twenty to seven in the back of the ambulance on Glen Cove Road and by eight o'clock he was complaining about the cannula and by half past he had asked a nurse called Precious two questions about the moon.
They are keeping him until this afternoon.
That is all. That is the whole medical content of the worst morning of my life.
Here is what nobody tells you.
The bad part is not the bathroom floor.
On the bathroom floor there is a thing to do.
There is steam and a back to rub and a number to say and a shower to turn up, and you are the most useful you have ever been in your life, and the whole of you goes into about nine square feet of tile and there is nothing left over to be frightened with.
The bad part is a corridor.
The bad part is standing at a window looking at a car park at nine o'clock in the morning with absolutely nothing in your hands.
"Adelina."
"Mm."
"Sit down."
"I'm all right."
"You've been standing for two and a half hours," Salvatore says.
"I stand for a living. I stood for six years."
"Adelina."
"I'm fine," I say, to the window.
And then he does not say anything for about four minutes.
That is what he does. He does not push. He is the only person I have ever met who does not push, which is much harder to hold out against than pushing, and at some point in those four minutes I hear him get up.
He does not come over.
He goes past me, down the corridor, and I hear him say something to somebody at the desk, and then I hear him come back, and then there is a noise behind me that is a chair being moved.
I turn round.
He has taken one of the eleven chairs and put it at the window.
Not next to his. Not in the row. He has carried a plastic chair the length of that corridor and put it at the window facing the car park, where I am standing, and then he has gone back and sat down in his own one again, eleven feet away, so that it is not a thing he is standing over me about.
"It's there," he says. "That's all."
I look at the chair for a long time.
There is a story I have never told anybody and I have thought about it once a year since I was fourteen.
It is not a good story and there is no ending to it.
My mother said it's fine, Adelina, sit down, in a corridor at Maimonides at four in the afternoon on the nineteenth of March, with her hand on the small of my back, pushing me at a plastic chair.
And I did not sit down.
I stood at the end of that corridor for forty minutes because I was fourteen and angry and I was going to show her, and when the nurse came out I was standing up, and I have been standing up ever since.
Nine years.
Nine years of getting there first and holding it and finding the need in the room, and I have built an entire person out of not sitting down in a corridor, and there is a plastic chair by a window in Glen Cove and a man five feet away pretending to look at his phone.
I sit down.
It takes about six seconds and then I am crying so hard I cannot see the car park.
Not the good kind. Not the two minutes in the back of a car on Eighteenth Avenue. The other kind, the kind that comes up out of the floor of you, with noise in it, in a public corridor, with my hands over my face and my elbows on my knees.
He does not come over.
I want to be clear about this because it is the single best thing anybody has ever done for me. He does not come over, and he does not put his arm round me, and he does not say any of the four things people say.
He sits eleven feet away and lets me do it.
And when a nurse comes down the corridor at about the two minute mark, he stands up and intercepts her, quietly, in the middle of the floor, and says something I do not hear, and she goes back the other way.
It takes about nine minutes.
Then I say, "Okay," and wipe my face on the sleeve of a dead woman's coat, and he comes and sits down in the chair beside me.
"You counted," I say.
"Yes."
"In Italian."
"Yes."
"I heard you go all the way to thirty-one." I am looking at the car park. "And then you started again at one."
Salvatore Marchetti sits in a plastic chair in a corridor on the second floor of Glen Cove Hospital.
And then he tells me.
He tells me in about ninety seconds and he does not look at me once.
The fourteenth of November 2002. A cupboard under the kitchen sink with the waste pipe against his shoulder. His mother put him in it and shut the door and he was eleven years old and he had his own hand over his own mouth.
And on the other side of that door, quietly, at about the speed you would want somebody to breathe at, his mother counted.
From one. In Italian.
So that he would breathe, and not make a noise.
"She got to about forty the first time," he says. "And then she started again."
"How long."
"I don't know. It felt like a long time. I was eleven and I was under a sink." He has his hands together between his knees. "Long enough that I got to the end of it with her. That's what it was for. She was giving me something to do."
The corridor is very quiet.
"And then she stopped," I say.
"Yes."
I do not touch him.
I want to. Everything in me wants to put my hand on his arm and I do not do it, because I have watched that man for four weeks and I know that if I touch him now he will put it away, and it will go back in the cupboard with everything else, and he will be perfectly pleasant about it for the rest of the day.
So I sit in a plastic chair with my hands in my lap.
"Thank you for telling me," I say.
"Adelina."
"No, that's all. I'm not going to do anything with it. I just wanted to say thank you out loud in a corridor so it's been said."
He nods at the car park.
"It's the only thing of hers I've got that isn't a plant," he says.
At eleven o'clock they let me in behind the curtain.
He is sitting up with a cannula taped to the back of his left hand and a plastic cup of apple juice he has not touched, and there is a blood pressure cuff on the rail that he has clearly been examining.
"Addie."
"Hi."
"They've got the moon wrong on the poster."
"Matteo."
"It's in the corridor. It's a poster about sleep and there's a moon on it and it's a crescent but it's the wrong way round for this hemisphere." He says this with real grievance. "Nobody checks."
I sit on the edge of the bed.
"You should have come and got me," I say.
"You were asleep."
"Matteo."
"You've been asleep about four times in nine years," my brother says, "and it was one of them, and I did the breathing and I thought it was going to stop."
And there is nothing at all I can say to that, and we both know it, so I take the plastic cup off the tray and put the straw in it and hand it to him, and he drinks some of it to be kind to me.
Then he says, "Was he there?"
"Was who where."
"The Shark. In the bathroom. I can't." He frowns at the blanket. "I've got bits of it. I've got you saying in, that's it, and I've got the floor being cold, and then there's a bit where somebody's counting."
"He was there."
"In Italian."
"In Italian."
Matteo puts the cup down.
"I thought I made that up," he says.
"You didn't make it up."
"Because I don't know Italian and I knew what the numbers were, so I thought it was a made up thing that your brain does." He looks up. "He was underneath me, wasn't he. I was on him."
"For about twelve minutes."
"In his suit?"
"He wasn't in a suit. He'd been out in the garden."
My brother lies back against the pillows and looks at the ceiling of a bay in Glen Cove Hospital with his hands folded on the blanket, and he goes perfectly still, which is what he does when he is working something out.
"Addie."
"Yeah."
"Don't tell him I don't remember it," Matteo says.
Tommaso comes at half past nine with a suit bag.
He comes up that corridor with a suit bag over his arm and a white shirt still in the shop plastic, and he sees the two of us in the chairs at the window and stops about twenty feet away and stands there.
I stand up.
"Signora."
"Tommaso."
"How is he."
"He's arguing with a nurse about the moon."
Tommaso Greco closes his eyes for about a second and a half.
"Good," he says.
Salvatore shaves in a hospital bathroom.
That is a thing I watch through a gap in a door and will never forget. A man in a second floor visitors' toilet at Glen Cove Hospital at ten to twelve, shaving with a disposable razor his consigliere has bought in the shop downstairs, with his shirt off, in a room with a hand dryer.
He comes out in the black suit and the new shirt.
And he looks like him again, which I have not seen since a bathroom floor, and which I discover I do not entirely like.
"One o'clock," he says.
"I can read a clock."
"Frankie's staying. Beppe's on the door at the end of this corridor and he'll be there until I'm back, and he is not going to talk to you, so don't try, he gets embarrassed."
"Salvatore."
"Tommaso's coming with me as far as the gate and then he's coming back here."
"Salvatore."
He stops.
"Come here a second," I say.
And I do the thing I have not done once in four weeks in front of another human being.
I put both hands on the front of his shirt and I straighten a collar that does not need straightening, in a hospital corridor, with a consigliere twenty feet away pretending to read a poster about hand washing.
"There," I say.
"It was straight."
"It was not straight."
"Adelina."
"Kitchen," I say. "Between four and eight. That's still a fact about a room."
And Salvatore Marchetti puts his hand on the side of my face for about two seconds, in a corridor, in front of Tommaso Greco, which is a thing that man has never done in front of another living person in his life.
Then he walks away down the corridor.
And I stand at a window and watch him go, in a black suit, past eleven plastic chairs and a window at the end, the way you watch somebody go down a corridor in a hospital.
I have done this before.
The last time I was standing up, and the person did not come back.