“No, Papa,” I begged. “Put me down.”
That made him laugh, and I cried for my mother but she couldn’t hear me. When he finally put me down it was on something hard, not my bed. “Mio letto,” I sobbed. “Voglio mio proprio letto.” He slapped my face and shut the door on me, and I remembered it hurt his feelings when I spoke Italian, because he didn’t speak it himself. “I want my own bed,” I repeated in English, but it did me no good, he started shaking the room from side to side so that my sore ribs and stomach bounced against the hard floor.
I kept passing out. I would come to when an extra–fierce jolt flung me against the floor. At some point the jolting stopped and the door opened. I had another brief moment of clarity: I was in a panel truck, lying on packing cartons. A couple of men approached me. I couldn’t protect myself as they seized me. They tossed me on the ground and slammed the van door shut. Polsen called me a stupid cunt and said this would teach me to mind my own business and then they left me on the ground and returned to the truck. The back door swung open as they drove off and several boxes bounced onto the road.
I saw now how Nicola Aguinaldo got out of prison and made it back to Chicago. And died.
42 Slow Mend
I looked up and saw the machine that made decals ready to push into me. My arms were manacled to the bed and I couldn’t lift them to guard my face. A man leaned over me. I didn’t want CO Polsen to know I was scared, but I couldn’t help crying out. The man called me “cookie” and seemed to be weeping. I shut my eyes and fell back asleep.
The next time I woke I realized the machine was the arm holding an IV drip. I wasn’t wearing manacles but had lines running into both arms and an oxygen tube in my nose. A woman was feeling my left wrist. She had on a yellow sweater and smiled when she saw me watching her.
“You’re all right, you know. You’re with friends, so don’t worry: you’re not in prison and you’re going to recover.”
I looked at my wrist. It was empty. I didn’t have my watch, my father’s watch that he’d worn for twenty–five years.
I croaked something and she said, “Your watch didn’t come over from the hospital with you. I’ll ask Dr. Herschel about it.”
This seemed so disastrous to me that I began to cry. The woman in the yellow sweater sat down next to me and wiped my eyes, since I was having trouble moving my arms. The fingers on my right hand were in splints, but both my arms were so sore it seemed like too much work to lift them to wipe my eyes.
“We’ll do everything we can to get your watch back to you. Now that you’re awake I want to see if you can drink something. You’ll recover faster if you can start to eat on your own. As soon as you drink a bit of this, I’ll call the hospital about your watch.” She cranked the bed up, and I swallowed something sweet.
I croaked again.
“You’re in the Grete Berman Institute. Recovering from your injuries.”
I knew I had heard of the Grete Berman Institute, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I went back to sleep, puzzling over it, but after that I began recovering, drinking more each time I woke, staying awake for longer intervals. Sometimes the man who called me “cookie” was there, and I finally remembered it was Mr. Contreras. I tried to smile and say something so that he’d know I knew him and appreciated his being there; I could just manage to say “Peppy,” which made him start to cry again.
Once when I woke, the woman in the sweater handed me my father’s watch and helped me strap it onto my wrist. I was relieved to have it back but still felt upset, as if I were missing something of even greater importance. The woman in the sweater urged me to drink miso broth. I was getting stronger—in a few days I’d be able to have rice, and then I’d be strong enough to remember what was troubling me.
I was too tired to think. I gave up worrying about the watch and drifted between waking and eating and struggling upright: the wound in my abdomen made sitting up an exquisite pain. It was only three days, in fact, between my first waking up and my shaky progression from bed to chair and a tour of the hallway, but the pain and the painkillers stretched time’s passage in odd ways.
On the day that Mr. Contreras helped me into a chair so that I could eat my rice and watch the Cubs, Lotty came in. Sammy Sosa had just hit his forty–sixth home run, but Mr. Contreras muted the television and with rare tact left us alone.
When Lotty saw me out of bed and in a chair, she burst into tears and knelt with her arms around me. “Victoria. I thought I was going to lose you. Oh, my dear one, I am so thankful to have you back.”
Close to her I could see how much gray was in her hair; for some reason that made me cry as well. “I thought you would chew me out.”
She blinked back her tears. “Later. When you’re strong enough to fight back.”