“My stepsister,” he said, and thought how funny that sounded.
“Stepsister?” The man laughed in that mocking but sympathetic way that Andrew always did. Like he’d been there before and would again. Under the parka hood, the man’s face bloomed then wilted. “I bet she’s fine.”
When he got to the hospital, a security man at a desk near the entrance stopped him, looked him over. He could see people waiting near an oncology sign. A couple of kids horsing around near the escalator.
“You got a room number? I’ll call up,” the security man said. He kept glancing down at Michael’s jeans, which were blackened and wet with slush.
He told the man the room number and the man looked blankly at him. “Maybe three twenty-one? That what you mean?”
“Probably I got it wrong. Sorry. It’s been a rough night,” Michael said.
The man sighed. “Last name?” he said, and dialed the number.
“Stein,” Michael said. The ocularist’s name sounded strange coming out of his mouth.
Down the hall, two attendants wheeled a gurney into an elevator. The air in the lobby smelled like mouthwash. He tried to remember the last time he’d been in a hospital, and then he remembered Alice’s asthma attack when she was two, the marathon evening in the emergency room, nebulizers, suppositories to stop the vomiting. Lucinda’s hand on his.
The security man’s face hardened. “No Stein,” he said, hanging up the phone. “People in that room named Taylor.”
“Must be some mistake,” Michael said, grinding his teeth. He tried to smile at the man.
“Yes,” the security man said, “there must be.” He glanced off at the reception counter, where people sat upright but seemed asleep. He rested his hands on his belt, where a radio hung.
“Maybe I could go up and speak with somebody.”
“Can’t let you up there unless you’ve got a room. Unless you got family.”
Where were they? What kind of game was Elise playing? He called her again on his cell but it clicked over to voice mail.
Outside, in the semicircle drive, snow swirled.
His jean pants legs had frozen stiff. He worried about hypothermia. He’d get warm at his mother’s place, dry off. What size pants did the ocularist wear? he wondered. At the corner of Wilson and Ashland, he saw a temple of some sort. Along its eaves, large banners strewn with a jumble of Chinese characters. A twenty-foot Buddha smiled an indecipherable smile from behind the wrought-iron fence, snow nestling in the crook of his raised arm.
He turned left at Paulina and found the lit porch of his mother’s house. It seemed less regal than the one in his mind, a little run-down. A porch swing hung slightly askew. He knocked and rang the doorbell but no one answered. He couldn’t feel his hands. He looked in the front window. A light burned in the hallway. He thought he could hear a TV or radio on somewhere. He knocked again, louder. He went around the house, kicked at the back of the gate, which was wedged shut with ice, and when it gave way, he went around to the tiny square of backyard. Something in the backyard seemed to muffle the sounds of the traffic, the crowdedness of the city. He tried the back door but it was locked. He looked through the window of the garage, which was off an alley, but there was no car. His bowels knotted. He picked up a hand spade from a stone planter and broke out a window panel on the back door, reached in and opened it. He stepped inside and the grinding of glass under his feet seemed to echo through his mother’s house.
46
JACK DIDN’T KNOW what to make of it. The first night, he felt ashamed.
In his kitchen, Kate Ulrich kissed him hard and pressed him up against the counter. Then they found their way into the living room, struggled with their clothes. She unbuckled his belt, he fumbled with her jean button, her top. They fucked on the floor rug until his knees were raw, then she straddled him in a chair. She shouted obscenities at him through gritted teeth. Bit his lip, drew blood. She panted so wildly, he thought she might pass out. Just before he came, she rose off him in the chair and went to hide from him in the house. Forced him to find her. They fucked on the laundry room floor, on a pile of dirty clothes.
Sometime in the early morning, Samantha came home from work and Kate gathered her clothes, dressed hurriedly, and left.