Chapter 44 #3
She had to clamp down on a quiver of emotion. “Not so well. They’re going to do a C-section. Some girls get all the luck.”
“Oh,” he said. “Why?”
“The baby is turned the wrong way and they can’t shift him. The longer he’s stuck, the more risk to his life. So they’re reaching
for the can opener.”
“She’s in good hands here. This is what they do. Come back in the morning?”
“I can’t, Arthur. I told her I’d stay. She doesn’t have anyone and she talks tough, but she’s scared out of her wits. You
might as well go. They can’t let you in the room. She’s only allowed one person.”
“And you’re her person.”
“I am tonight.”
He had had plenty of time to think, all on his own in Family Room B, and had arrived at some ideas that he didn’t much care
for.
“What about tomorrow?” he asked. “Are you going to be her person tomorrow? Or will you be taking a shift with Llewellyn instead?”
She sighed for the second time that evening and fitted her small hand inside his large one. She rested her head on his shoulder.
“He offered me forty-five thousand dollars,” she said. “Just to see him through the end. He can promise me forty hours a week,
minimum.”
“Why would he do that?” Arthur said. “You aren’t a nurse. He needs a nurse.”
“He’ll have one. More than one. For nights and weekends and regular visits. He’ll have my mother and me for the rest.” She
squeezed his hand. “There’s no reason to be afraid. I understand the precautions. I can’t get the disease from handling his
dirty dishes and I won’t get it from handling his dirty diapers. I’ll wear gloves and I’ll be careful.”
“I’m not afraid,” he said, which was a lie. “I’m worried for you. How are you going to look after a sick old man and manage
Rackham? Forty hours a week, plus a full slate of classes? It was thoughtless of him to pressure you into it.”
“He didn’t pressure me—Arthur. I offered. I suggested it.”
“You—why?”
She didn’t reply.
“Maybe,” he said, “you should talk to admissions at Rackham and see how they’d feel if you only attended part-time in your
first year.”
“I’m not going to Rackham. I’ve already put my deposit down at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.
I’m going to study to be an EMT. It’s two years of work and then they ease you right into a job with one of the ambalance companies.
Caring for Llewellyn will be good training for that too. Please don’t be mad with me.”
He felt a cold anesthetized sensation spreading through him, a kind of numbness in the extremities, not unlike being plunged
into icy water. It took him a moment to identify this sensation not as shock but as rage.
“Why? I need to know why.”
“Don’t you already know?”
He shook his head.
“I want to help people, Arthur. Right now, not later. I need to. Need. The way a person needs to breathe when someone is holding their head underwater. You and the others gotta find absolution
your way. This is mine. I can do something for Mr. Wren. I can make the last months of his life bearable. I can look after
Tana too. She’s going to need to get in the social service system, and I can help with that. I’m patient and I wear bureaucracies
down. And when she goes back to work, she’s going to need childcare, and I can offer her some. Tana and Mr. Wren don’t know
this, but they’re my way back. If I can do enough good for them, maybe someday, in a few years, I’ll be able to look at myself
in the mirror again and see something besides an evil tattoo. I want to like myself again, Arthur. Can’t you understand that?”
“You can help more people with a degree.” He thought his own voice sounded both mulish and childish.
“I could help them later, and by then Llewellyn will be in the ground and Tana’s child will be in foster care, and I’m carrying
around enough regret already.”
“If you aren’t going to Rackham, maybe I shouldn’t go to Oxford,” he said. “I could stay here. Help with the old man. Learn
ambulance stuff. We could work together.”
Even as he said it, he knew he wouldn’t.
He didn’t have the courage for dramatic gestures and he didn’t know anything but the study of literature.
It frightened him, to imagine his life without a syllabus.
He felt safest with an assignment to finish, a paper to write—he felt safe in the classroom, was comforted by the smell of chalk dust, reassured by the respectful give-and-take of a directed conversation.
Gwen laughed at him—warmly and affectionately, knuckles lightly brushing his chest.
“Didn’t we just talk about this? Someday, I’m going to meet your mother. And if I’m the reason you don’t go to Oxford, she’s
going to look at me like I’m trash. You want that? You want her to hate me?”
“I don’t care,” he said.
“I do. Maybe you don’t know the difference between what you want and what you need, but I do. You need Oxford. And I need this—Tana,
the old guy, and emergency work. I wanna save lives, not ruin them. Let’s start with yours.”
“Ms. Underfoot?” said a nurse, leaning into the room. “Tana is asking for you. They’re moving her into the surgical theater.”
“Yes,” Gwen said, and she rose on her tiptoes and kissed the corner of Arthur’s mouth. “Are you going to be okay? Don’t stay.
I’ll get a ride back from my mom later.”
“Go on,” he said. She was already turning away, but he patted her bum, and when she glanced back he made himself smile. “Go
be her person.”
She grinned and went with the nurse, briskly moving away down a dimly lit corridor. In her medical smock, Gwen already looked
a bit like a hospital employee herself. Arthur watched her hurry away to Tana, thinking there was some kind of cold moral
logic in it, thinking he had not lost Gwen tonight, or on the day Gwen was accepted to EMT classes at the University of Southern
Maine. He had lost her months ago. He had lost her when he took Tana to his bedroom. That didn’t make any logical sense at
all, but somehow it was still true.
Later that morning Gwen called to tell him it was a boy.