Fire Sale

18 Visiting Hours

Balloons and stuffed animals lined the scuffed corridors of the children’s hospital, looking like desperate offerings to the arbitrary gods who play with human happiness. As I wound my way along halls and up stairwells, I passed little alcoves where adults sat waiting, silent, unmoving. Passing the patient rooms, I heard snatches of overly bright talk, moms using sheer energy to coax their children to health.

When I got to the fourth floor, I didn’t have any trouble finding April’s room: Bron and Sandra Zoltak Czernin were fighting in a nearby alcove.

“You were out screwing some bitch and your kid was dying. Don’t tell me you love her!” Sandra was trying to whisper, but her voice carried beyond me; a woman walking the hall with a small child attached to an IV looked at them nervously and tried to shepherd her toddler out of earshot. “You didn’t even get to the hospital until almost midnight.”

“I came here as soon as I heard. Have I left the hospital for one second since? You know damned well I can’t take calls on the truck phone, and I get home to find you gone, the kid gone, no message from you. I figured you and April were out, you’re always taking her off someplace, buying her crap we don’t have money for.

“As far as you’re concerned, I don’t exist. I’m just the paycheck to cover the bills you can’t pay on your own. You didn’t even have the sense or decency to call me, the kid’s own father. I had to get the news off the answering machine, and it wasn’t you who called but that goddamn Warshawski bitch. That’s how I find out my own kid is sick, not from my own wife. Mrs. High-and-Mighty, Virgin Mary had nothing on you for purity, and you wonder why I look for human flesh and blood someplace else.”

“At least you can be sure April is your daughter, which is more than Jesse Navarro or Lech Bukowski can say about their own kids, all the time you spent with their wives, and now, now they’re saying April has this thing with her heart, this thing, she can’t play basketball anymore.” Sandra’s thin aging face was twisted in pain.

“Basketball? She’s sick as a horse, and you’re upset she can’t play a stupid goddamn ball game? What’s with you?” Bron smashed the wall with the palm of his hand.

A nurse making rounds paused next to me, gauging the level of anger in the alcove, then shook her head and moved on.

“I don’t care about the stupid goddamn ball game!” Sandra’s voice rose. “It’s April’s ticket to college, you-you loser. You know damned well she can’t go on your paycheck. I’m not having her do like me, spend her life married to some creep who can’t keep his pants zipped, working her life away at By-Smart because she can’t do any better. Look at me, I look as old as your mother, and talk about the High-and-Mighty Mother of God, that’s how she looks on you, and me, I’m supposed to get down on my knees and slobber thanks because I married you, and you can’t even support your own kid.”

“What do you mean, I can’t support her? Fuck you, bitch! Did she ever go to school hungry or-”

“Did you even listen to the doctor? It will cost a hundred thousand dollars to fix her heart, and then the drugs, and the insurance pays ten thousand dollars of it? Where are you going to find the money, tell me that? The money we could’ve been saving if you hadn’t spent it on drinks for the boys, and the whores you screw around with, and-”

Bron’s head seemed to swell with anger. “I will find the money it takes to look after April! You cannot stand there telling me I don’t love my own daughter.”

The woman with the small child approached them timidly. “Can you be a little quieter, please? You’re making my baby cry, shouting like that.”

Sandra and Bron looked at her; the little girl on the IV was crying, silent hiccupping sobs that were more unnerving than a loud howl. Bron and Sandra looked away, which is how Bron caught sight of me.

“It’s goddamn Tori Warshawski. What the fuck were you doing, pushing my girl so hard she went and collapsed?” His voice rose to a roar that brought aides and parents scurrying to the hall.

“Hi, Bron, hi, Sandra, how’s she doing?” I asked.

Sandra turned away from me, but Bron erupted from the alcove, pushing me so hard he flung me against a wall. “You hurt my girl! I warned you, Warshawski, I warned you if you messed with April you’d answer to me!”

People watched in horror as I carefully righted myself. The pain coursing down my left arm brought tears to my eyes, but I blinked them back. I wasn’t going to get into a fight with him, not in a hospital, not with my left arm in a sling, and, anyway, not with a guy so worried and helpless that he had to pick a fight with anyone who looked at him crossways. But I wasn’t going to let him see me cry, either.

“Yes, I heard you. I can’t remember what you said you’d do if I saved her life.”

Bron pounded a fist against his palm. “If you saved her life. If you saved her life, you can kiss my ass.”

I turned to Sandra. “I heard you say it was her heart. What happened? I never saw her weak or short of breath at practice.”

“You’d say that, wouldn’t you?” Sandra said. “You’d say anything to protect your butt. She has something wrong with her heart, it’s something she was born with, but you ran her too hard, that’s why she collapsed.”

I felt cold with a fear that Bron hadn’t inspired in me: these words sounded like a prelude to a lawsuit. April’s treatment would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars; they needed money; they could sue me. My pockets weren’t deep, but they sure hung lower than the Czernins’.

“If she was born with the condition, it could have happened anytime, anywhere, Sandra,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “What do the doctors say they can do to treat her?”

“Nothing. Nothing but rest unless we can come up with the money to pay their bills. All the blacks, they have it easy, just show their welfare cards and their kids get whatever they need, but people like us, people who work hard all the time, what do we have to show for it?”

Sandra glared up the hall at the woman with the small child, who happened to be black, as if the four-year-old had designed the managed care companies that decreed what medical care Americans could get. A nurse who’d come out of one of the patient rooms stepped forward, trying to intervene, but the Czernins were in their own private universe, the world of anger, and no one else could get into it with them. The nurse went back to whatever she’d been doing, but I stayed on the battlefield.

“And I’m married to Mr. Wonderful here, who hasn’t been home one night all week and then acts like he’s Saint Joseph, the greatest father of all time.” Sandra turned her bitter face back to Bron. “I’m surprised you even know your own daughter’s name, you sure as hell forgot her birthday this year, out with that English bitch, or was it Danuta Tomzak from Lazinski’s bar?”

Bron grabbed Sandra’s thin shoulders and started shaking her. “I do love my daughter, you damn cunt, you will not say different, not here, not anywhere. And I can get the fucking money to pay for her heart. You tell that SOB doctor not to move her, not to check her out of the hospital, I’ll have the money for him by Tuesday, easy.”

He stormed down the corridor and slammed his way through a swinging door that led to a stairwell. Sandra’s mouth was a thin bitter line.

“Mary had the Prince of Peace, I get the Prince of Pricks.” She turned her scowl on me. “Is he going to ask that English woman he’s been screwing for money?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she has any.”

And who forks over a hundred grand to the daughter of a man she cares about only as a good story to tell her friends back home? I didn’t say it-Sandra was only clutching at straws; she didn’t have any sense right now, no sense of what was possible and what wasn’t.

“You said the insurance would cover only ten thousand dollars. Is that your insurance?”

She shook her head and said through tight, thin lips, “I can’t get coverage because I only work thirty-four hours a week. By-Smart says that isn’t full-time work, it has to be forty hours a week. So Bron buys the insurance, for him and April, we decided we couldn’t afford to cover me, and when the hospital, when they called the company yesterday, it turns out that that’s all the coverage she gets for being sick and we pay, Mother of God, we pay two thousand six hundred dollars a year. If I’d known, I’d’ve been putting all that money in a savings account for April.”

“What is it that’s really wrong with April?” I asked.

Sandra twisted her hands together. “I don’t know. The doctors use fancy language so you won’t know if they’re doing the right thing for your kid or not. Were you working her too hard because she’s mine?”

I wished I’d listened to Mr. Contreras and stayed home. All I wanted right now was to crawl into a cave and sleep until spring.

“Can we talk to a doctor? If I understand what the diagnosis is, maybe I can help find treatment.” I was thinking of my friend Lotty Herschel, who’s a surgeon at Beth Israel Hospital on Chicago ’s far North Side. Lotty treats her share of indigent patients; she might know how to help the Czernins dance around the insurance system.

“She fainted once, last summer, when she’d been at a basketball camp, but I didn’t think anything of it, girls faint all the time, I know I did when I was her age. I wanted her to have every opportunity, I wasn’t going to have you lord it over my kid the way you do over me.”

I blinked, reeling under the flow of words and the contradictory ideas jostling for airspace. I was about to utter a reflexive protest, that I didn’t lord it over her, but when I remembered our history together I felt myself blushing. That night just before the homecoming dance, if I could call up one evening of my life to do differently that would be the one, unless it was the time I’d snuck a pint of whiskey from Lazinski’s the night my mother died-enough. I had enough bad memories to make me squirm all day if I dwelt on them.

The nurse who’d tried to intervene in Sandra and Bron’s fight was still lingering nearby. She agreed to page a doctor to come to April’s room to talk to the family. While we waited, I crossed the hall to April’s room. Sandra followed me without protest.

April was in a room with three other kids. When we came in, she was watching television, her face puffy from the drugs she was taking. A giant teddy bear was propped up next to her in bed, brand new, holding a balloon that read, “Get Well Soon.”

April shifted her groggy gaze from Soul Train to her mother, but her face brightened when she saw me. “Coach! This is so cool, you coming to see me. You gonna let me come back to the team, even if I miss next week?”

“You can rejoin the team as soon as the docs and your mom say you’re ready to play. Great bear-where’d he come from?”

“Daddy.” She flicked a wary glance at her mother: the bear had probably already been the focus of a quarrel, but I found it heartbreaking, Bron wanting to do something for his daughter and coming up with this outsize toy.

We talked a little about basketball, about school, what she was missing in her biology class, while Sandra fussed with her pillows, straightened the sheets, pushed April to drink some juice (“You know the doctor said you have to have lots of fluids with this drug you’re taking.”).

By and by, a young resident came in. He had a chubby, cherubic face, complete with a circlet of soft dark curls, but he had an easy way about him, bantering lightly with April while he checked her pulse and asked her how much she was drinking and eating.

“You got that big bear there to try to scare me off, huh, but I don’t scare that easy. Keep him away from your boyfriend, though, boys your age can’t stand up to bears.”

After a few minutes, he left her with a nod and a wink, and ushered Sandra and me down the hall, out of April’s earshot. I introduced myself and explained my role in April’s life.

“Oh, you’re the heroine who saved her life. That how you got your arm in a sling?”

I hoped hearing the doctor call me a heroine would soften Sandra’s views of me. I explained briefly about my injury and asked what the story was on April.

“She has something we call Long QT Syndrome. I could show you the EKG and explain how we know and why we call it that, but what it really means is a kind of arrhythmia in the heart. With proper treatment, she can certainly lead a normal, productive life, but she absolutely has to give up basketball. If she keeps playing, I’m sorry to put it bluntly, Ms. Czernin, but the outcome could be very bad.”

Sandra nodded bleakly. She’d gone back to twisting her fingers together, thumbs pushing so hard that the backs of her hands were covered in purplish-red welts. I asked the resident what the proper treatment was.

“We’ve started her on a course of beta-blockers to stabilize her heart.” He went into a long explanation about the buildup of sodium ions in the chamber, and the function of beta-blockers in stabilizing the ion exchange, then added, “She should go to a pacemaker, to an implanted cardioverter defibrillator. Otherwise, I’m afraid, well, it’s a question of time before there’s another serious episode.”

His pager sounded. “If there’s anything else, please page me. I’ll be glad to talk to you at any time. We’re going to discharge April Monday if her heart is stable, and we’ll keep her on the beta-blockers for the time being.”

“Like I can afford those,” Sandra muttered. “Even with my employee discount, it’s going to be fifty bucks a week for her medication. What do they think, that only rich people get sick in this country?”

I tried to say something commiserating, but she turned on me again; our brief moment of rapport was gone. There was a limit to how much time as a punching bag I felt I owed her; I’d passed it some time back. I told her I’d keep in touch and headed down the hall to the stairwell.

On my way out the hospital’s front door, I almost collided with a tall teenager, who was entering from Maryland Avenue. I was intent on my own thoughts, and didn’t look at her until she gasped, “Coach.”

I stopped. “Josie Dorrado! This is great that you came to see April. She’s going to need lots of support in the weeks ahead.”

To my astonishment, instead of answering she turned crimson and dropped the pot of daisies she was holding. She half opened the door and made a flapping gesture with her right arm, signaling to someone outside to take off. I stepped over the plants and dirt and pushed open the door.

Josie clutched my left, my sore arm, trying to pull me back inside. I gave a squawk loud enough that she let go of me and muscled my way past her roughly to look at the street. A midnight blue Miata was heading up Maryland, but a group of heavyset women, slowly making their way across the street, blocked the license plate.

I turned back to Josie. “Who brought you here? Who do you know who can afford a sports car like that?”

“I came on the bus,” she said quickly.

“Oh? Which one?”

“The, uh, the, I didn’t notice the number. I just asked the driver-”

“To drop you at the hospital entrance. Josie, I’m ashamed of you for lying to me. You’re on my team; I need to be able to trust you.”

“Oh, Coach, you don’t understand. It’s not what you’re thinking, honest!”

“Excuse us.” The trio of heavyset women who’d been on the street were frowning magisterially at us. “Can you clean up your mess? We’d like to get into this hospital.”

We knelt down to clean up the flowers. The pot was plastic and had survived the fall. With a little help from the guard at the reception desk, who found me a brush, we got most of the dirt back in the pot and reorganized the flowers; they looked half dead, but I saw from the price sticker that Josie had got them at By-Smart for a dollar ninety-nine: you don’t get fresh, lively flowers for two bucks.

When we’d finished, I stared up at her thin face. “Josie, I can’t promise not to tell your mother if you’re going out with some older guy she doesn’t know or doesn’t approve of.”

“She knows him, she likes him, but she can’t-I can’t tell-you gotta promise-”

“Are you having sex with him?” I asked bluntly, as she floundered through unfinished sentences.

Red streaked her cheeks again. “No way!”

I pressed my lips together, thinking about her home, her mother’s second job, which would have to support the family now that Fly the Flag was gone, her sister’s baby, about Pastor Andrés and his strictures against birth control. “Josie, I will promise not to say anything to your mother for the time being if you make a promise to me.”

“What’s that?” she demanded, suspicious.

“Before you sleep with him, or with any boy, you must make him wear a condom.”

She turned an even darker shade of red. “But, Coach, I can’t-how can you-and the abstinence lady, she say they don’t even work.”

“She gave you bad advice, Josie. They aren’t a hundred percent effective, but they work most of the time. Do you want to end up like your sister Julia, watching telenovelas all day long? Or do you want to try for a life beyond babies, and clerking at By-Smart?”

Her eyes were wide and frightened, as if I’d offered her the choice between cutting off her head or talking to her mother. She had probably imagined passionate embraces, a wedding, anything but what it meant to lie with a boy. She looked at the door, at the floor, then suddenly bolted up the stairs into the interior of the hospital. I watched as a guard at the entrance stopped her, but when she looked back down at me I couldn’t bear the fear in her face. I turned on my heel and walked into the cold afternoon.