“Look, Lisa—”
“Elise. Elise Hyde.”
“The truth is, I don’t care really about your drug use. What I need to know is what drugs Jamey’s using.”
“Jamey don’t even really drink. He never does drugs.”
“Except when he does LSD.”
“Once. That girl made him.”
“Heroin? Cocaine?”
Elise stands. “Do you have a hearing problem?”
Dr. Brandywine pushes a button on his phone without taking his eyes off her.
An assistant enters the room.
“I’m leaving!” Elise says. To Brandywine: “You suck.”
She makes it to the turquoise couches before sobbing.
A nurse sits next to Elise, says: “You’re okay, love, you’re gonna be fine.”
Jolie’s hips are almost busted like an overripe tomato. She’s maidenly, an artist of tenderness.
Elise cries on her shoulder, wetting her scrubs.
“I hate that doctor—”
“I understand,” Jolie soothes her. She unwraps a mint for Elise and unwraps one for herself. “I’m gonna put a word in.”
Elise hiccups, and nods.
A bouquet of a hundred white roses gets delivered by a Jamaican man with a handcart.
The note from Tory Boyd Mankoff: I so wish I could be there. Thinking of you!
Elise tells the nurses they can redistribute the flowers; he wouldn’t want them in the room.
Finally, Alex shows up. No one has been allowed to sit with Jamey yet, but Alex and Brandywine have a closed-door conversation. The doctor makes an allowance for this suffering father, who is gracious, as Hydes are known to be.
Once they’re alone, Alex pulls a chair to Jamey’s bed, livid he has to sit in this melodramatic configuration of furniture and bodies. He rubs the bridge of his nose, displacing his glasses.
“James. Why are you doing this?”
Alex stares at his son.
Jamey smiles for the first time.
“This isn’t funny. Everything is pretty damn stressful as it is right now. Cecily is buried in work for the Sloan-Kettering Ball, you know she’s on the board this year. You know what that means. I’ve got my hands full with Daley-Cray in London. I’m not even supposed to be in New York, for godssake. And I know you don’t want people talking, but the longer you’re in here, the worse it looks.”
Alex paces in topsiders.
Jamey’s eyes follow his father in his spearmint-green Polo shirt.
“You’ve put me in this position. I don’t want to lie to our friends, but I can’t tell them what’s going on. Not a one is going to understand how a kid with everything just up and throws it away. Jamey—you were given the world. Your grandparents are too horrified to visit, and I wasn’t even going to tell you that, but I had to. They’re disgusted.”
Alex stands squarely in front of his son, looks at his watch, then: “What do you have to say?”
Jamey stares at his dad.
“I’m going to count to ten, Jamey.”
Jamey shakily puts his legs over the side of the bed for the first time.
He holds the IV pole, and slides off the mattress—slowly—till he’s standing.
Alex, hands on hips, nods with triumph. “There you go, son,” he says.
Jamey squats, eyes closed, and Alex starts to wonder.
Jamey grunts, and a huge coil of shit hangs from his buttocks, and it peacefully finds the faux-granite vinyl floor.
Cecily and Elise sit in the waiting room without talking, staring at a watercolor of a robin in a blooming apple tree on the wall.
The kids read books on the carpet.
Then Samantha sweetly asks Elise: “How come your hair’s like that?”
“Sam,” Cecily says, face reddening.
The girl asks Elise: “Are you black?” in an angel voice.
Elise laughs. “I am black.”
Cecily gathers her daughter onto her lap, says “Well, then,” to Elise, meaning: No you’re not, and stop talking like a fool.
Alex storms through the doors.
He glares at Elise, and gathers his family, and leaves.
Elise goes to work, somehow putting on lipstick and finding her way to the site, picking up a bagel on the way but she doesn’t remember where.
“It was a little stroke,” she says, without meeting their eyes.
“That happened to my brudda,” Salvatore says.
“It’ll happen to you if you don’t stop with them cheeseburgers and sundaes,” Tommy says to Salvatore. “Elise, where’s he at?”
“Um, Lenox.”
“Oh yeah? I spent a lot of time there with my ma. Which wing?”
“Let’s see, not sure what the name is.”
“Well, we’re all rootin’ for him to get out soon. He’s gotta take care of the mother of his babe.”
She knows they know he’s not at Lenox when Tommy slips her an envelope of cash the next day, from the boys. They smell a rat—they think it’s drugs too. They just want her safe.
She works, she walks Buck, she takes deep breaths like Jolie said, and she can visit Jamey now—even though he’s either asleep or propped up with eyes open, but never awake.
He won’t speak. Day after day.
She puts his hand on her tummy. “Feel that?”
One evening, he blinks when she takes his hand to her belly.
She tells Jolie, who writes it on the chart. “That’s great.”
“Soon? It’s been two weeks. He’ll pull out of it?”
Jolie chews gum and shrugs. “I hope so, love. You should just try to trust what’s happening. He apparently needed to be like—removed from reality right now. He’ll come back when he can. That’s sometimes how psychotic breaks function.”
Brandywine strokes his own beard; he smells of red wine and garlic from lunch.
“He won’t talk still, I see,” the doctor admits, “but let’s get his vitals.”
He takes the stethoscope from around his neck and listens to Jamey’s heart: Remember little child of God what this is. It’s a drag show. It’s fake. It’s a snow globe. Golden cigarettes and little kittens. Someone keeps setting fire to blanket like sparkler. It’s a TV show, the blocks of primary color signify God the father. You’re in this kaleidoscope. It’s a play your mom made in third grade. Esoteric and out-there, man. For children. Those kids of God were killed. Black dresses. A tiger in a dormitory. A rich girl who ate arsenic. This is a terrarium. This is joyful.
Brandywine shines a light into Jamey’s eyes:
It’s powder. A fine dust from heaven. You could lie outside and slowly get buried. It’s gold flake blanched into meaningless drift. It’s a black sky somehow made darker by white fluff. Everyone knows how to make an angel. You get up without wrecking the print you made and everyone does a shadow.
He presses the gauge against his Velcroed arm: