The Venus Fix

Sixty

Five hours later, Nina and I left Lenox Hill Hospital. I’d dislocated and broken a bone in my right wrist. The doctors had reset it and put my arm, just below the elbow to the knuckles, in a cast.

“Morgan? C’mon, sweetie. Let’s go.”

“Where are we?” I was groggy from the painkillers. Where was I? I looked around. In a taxi. In front of Nina’s brownstone on East Fifty-sixth Street, across from the East River.

“You’re spending the night with me,” she said, and she helped me traverse the sidewalk and get into the building safely.

Inside, she put me in the bedroom where I’d spent so many nights as a kid, and brought in a cup of hot milky tea laced with honey-a concoction that she never drank herself but foisted on anyone who was hurt or sick. I loved it.

More than that, the milk and the honey with the slight bite of the tea was what comfort and caring tasted like to me. I made the same drink for my daughter when she didn’t feel well, and she always drank it slowly, the same way I did, making it last, the way I was doing now.