Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,2
twenty and fling it at him for the eleven-dollar ride. But that kind of drama wasn’t in her, and she paid the thirteen dollars exactly and waited for the receipt.
She rushed, sincerely, up the stairs, stopping for another stolen moment to use the hand sanitizer.
The man at reception acted as if he had been waiting for her: “Yes, yes,” he said. “Third bank of elevators, north side.”
Ana continued rubbing her hands after the sanitizer had evaporated. Up she rode in the elevator until her ears gently popped.
She saw James immediately, or the back of him, through the glass window of a cordoned-off waiting room. He faced a panel of three white coats, as if taking an oral exam. The three doctors weren’t talking but nodding and listening to James. Though the glass prevented her from hearing his words, from the stabbing and flapping of his hands, Ana knew that James was holding court.
She opened the door.
“They want information,” James said to her once the tides of introduction had receded and they’d all sat down.
“We are trying to establish a medical history,” said the young doctor, an Asian woman rescued from her adolescent looks by painfully thin eyebrows. Next to her sat a stout Indian doctor, bored and fuller-browed. “Your husband thought you might know if Ms. Weiss had any history of high blood pressure? Diabetes mellitus? Kidney problems?”
Ana stared.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, Christ,” said James, who had been bobbing up high in his shock, caught in its currents. “You don’t know what happened.”
“How would I know? I was on a call and I got a message—” The stout doctor looked at her watch.
“There was a car accident. On the Lakeshore. Some kind of debris in the road, and Marcus swerved—” James spoke without any emphasis, a witness giving a police report. “No other cars were involved, but Marcus’s car went head first into a retaining wall. Finn’s okay, but Marcus – he died.” The last two words sounded like a book clapping shut.
Ana put her hands together and they rose to her mouth, touched her lips, then moved to the bridge of her nose and stayed there. She closed her eyes, bowed her head and tasted the information. She felt James’s hand on her back and shrugged it off quickly, her whole body in thrall to a sensation of bugs crawling and burrowing. Then she realized what she had done, the quick and urgent rejection of her husband’s kindness, and felt upon her that pettiness, and on top of that the awful loneliness of what had happened. She saw, bright and burning in her head, a red station wagon crumpled like a rolled toothpaste tube up against a concrete wall. She felt the hopelessness of flesh between car and cement. And she dizzied, and reached quickly for James, for his arm, his shoulder, clasping his left hand, finally, to her right.
As all of this was happening, the doctor explained that Sarah had hit her head. “We stopped the bleeding,” she said, and the other doctor perked up with pride.
“Where is the bleeding?” asked Ana.
“A good question. In the frontal lobe, so focal processes are affected.”
“Wait – her brain?” The phrase “hit her head” had tripped Ana up. She hadn’t considered the brain, somehow picturing an external cut to the scalp, like a nick from shaving.
“Most people wake up from a coma within a few days or weeks, but hers is a severe trauma.”
“Coma!” Ana said.
The doctor ignored her incredulousness. “We’re waiting to hear from her GP, but it would help us to know her medical history. James said she has no living relatives.”
“No parents. She’s an only child,” said Ana, scanning her memory for cousins, aunts, uncles. “She’s – she was – very healthy. I don’t know. There’s a lot I didn’t know. Don’t know.” James squeezed her hand.
“Neither of us have heard her talk about taking medications,” he said suddenly. Ana wondered, just for a moment, how he could speak with such authority.
“Wait—” Ana shook her head. “Why did you call us?”
“We’re the emergency contact, remember?”
“We are?”
“I’m the executor.”
“The executioner?”
James stared at her. “What?”
Ana rubbed her forehead. The conversation had occurred a few months ago, in a wine haze. It came to her now, lightly, faded. “We’re in such an unusual situation – would you guys consider – if something happened to us—“ Flattery and consent.
“Do you know if she’s allergic to penicillin?”
Everyone looked at Ana, as if women shared all such intimacies, pedicures and pap smears.