His soft brown eyes looked at me shrewdly. “Nothing is without connection in our lives. If I hadn’t goaded you about Dr. Chigwell, you might not have acted so fiercely as to get yourself into trouble.”
I started to answer him, then stopped. If he hadn’t goaded me, I might not have felt so reluctant to take my gun with me on my run yesterday. Maybe I even exposed myself unconsciously to danger to assuage my guilt.
“But I did have something to feel guilty about,” I said aloud. “You weren’t that far off the mark, you know—I only pressured Chigwell because he made me angry. So maybe I gave the final turn to his screw.”
“So maybe we can both learn a little from this, to look before we leap.” Max stood up to reveal a magnificent array of flowers in a Chinese porcelain bowl. “I know you leave tomorrow, but take these with you for some cheer while your poor muscles heal.”
Max was an expert on oriental porcelain. The pot looked as though it had come from his personal collection. I tried to let him know how much the gesture pleased me; he accepted my thanks with his usual cheerful courtesy and left.
26
Back to Home Base
I had a new roommate in the morning, a twenty-year-old named Jean Fishbeck whose lover had shot at her and hit a shoulder before she got him in the stomach. The cosmetic surgery patient had moved three rooms down the hall.
I got the whole shooting story, with loud-pitched expletives, at midnight when Ms. Fishbeck came in from postop. At seven, when the morning shift came in to see if we’d expired in the night, she vented her rage at being awakened in the clarion nasal of the northwest side. By the time Lotty showed up at eight-thirty I was ready to go anywhere, even the psychiatric wing, just to get away from the obscenities and cigarettes.
“I don’t care what shape I’m in,” I told Lotty irritably. “Just sign my discharge and let me out of here. I’ll leave in my nightgown if I have to.”
Lotty cocked an eye at the crumpled chewing-gum wrappers and cigarette pack on the floor. She raised both eyebrows as a stream of profanity poured from behind the closed curtain while an intern tried to conduct an exam.
“The floor head told me you’d been rough on your roommate yesterday and that they were giving you someone more suited to your personality. Did you vent your anger by handing her a few punches?” She started probing my shoulder muscles.
“Ow, damn you, that hurts. And the word you want is throw, not hand Or land, maybe.”
Lotty used her ophthalmoscope on my eyes. “We gave you X rays and a CT scan after we stabilized you on Wednesday. By some miracle you don’t have any cracks or breaks. Some more physical therapy over the next few days should help your sore muscles, but don’t expect them to recover overnight—tissue tears can take as long as a year to heal if you don’t rest the muscles properly. And yes, you can go home—you can do the therapy as an outpatient. If you give me your keys, I’ll have Carol bring you some clothes at lunchtime.”
I’d tied the keys through the laces of my running shoes before setting out on Wednesday. Lotty had rescued them before giving orders to trash what clothes I’d still been wearing on arrival at Beth Israel.
She stood up and looked at me gravely. When she spoke again her Viennese accent was pronounced. “I would ask that you not be reckless, Victoria. I would ask it except that you seem to be in love with danger and death. You make life very hard for those who love you.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. She stared at me for a long moment, her eyes very dark in her angular face, then gave her head a little shake and left.
My twenty-four-hour character summary wasn’t too appealing: a coldhearted bitch in love with death and danger who drove timid cosmetic surgery patients to the nursing staff for refuge. When an orderly came by an hour or so later to take me down for physical therapy, I went along morosely. The normal hospital routine, which depersonalizes patients at its expense, usually drives me into a frenzy of uncooperative sarcasm. Today I took it like a good little lump.
After my physical therapy I myself took refuge from my vituperous roommate, waiting in the lounge for my clothes with a stack of old Glamours and Sports Illustrated Carol Alvarez, the nurse and chief backup at Lotty’s clinic, arrived a little before two. She greeted me warmly, with a hug, a kiss, and little exclamations of horror over my ordeal.
“Even Mama has been praying to the Blessed Mother for your safety, Vic.” That was something, indeed—Mrs. Alvarez usually looked on me with silent contempt.