To The Power Of Three

6

When Josie woke at 2:00 A.M., she had no confusion about where she was, not even for a second. Hospital, her brain supplied instantly, GBMC. Greater Baltimore Medical Center was the same hospital where she had been born, in the middle of a blizzard. At the school today, the paramedics had wanted to take her to Sinai, but Josie had wailed and screamed, determined to come here, and they had obeyed her, much to her surprise. GBMC was safe, familiar. GBMC was a place of happy endings.

Josie’s birth was a famous story in the Patel family, one that Josie had asked her parents to tell over and over again when she was small. Then, about the time she turned thirteen, she decided it was all too embarrassing, that the problem with a story about one’s birth is that it kept pointing back to the fact that one’s parents actually had sex, which was simply too gross to contemplate. Besides, she had decided that it wasn’t really about her after all. She may have been the title character, but it was her parents’ adventure. Josie was little more than a series of contractions causing her mother to squeal, which made her father push harder on the accelerator, so the car skidded off the road. “You were so determined to be born,” her father would say, “that you almost killed us all.”

This was when her parents still lived in the city, in South Baltimore. GBMC was ten miles up Charles Street from the rowhouse the Patels were restoring in a then iffy neighborhood. There were closer hospitals, but her mother’s ob/gyn preferred to deliver at the suburban hospital, which no one expected to be a problem. And even with the snow, her father was making good time until he came to that final curve.

It was then that the car-an ordinary Honda Civic, her father always pointed out, not an SUV or a minivan, for her parents were still young and giddy then, just beginning to be parents-had fish-tailed and swerved off the road, hitting the gatehouse at Sheppard Pratt, the psychiatric hospital next to GBMC. This was when the road to Sheppard Pratt led through a stone gatehouse, which everyone just assumed was a charming relic. Josie’s parents had never known that someone actually lived in this quaint structure, famous as it was, but on the night their car plunged off the side of Charles Street and into the side of the gatehouse, a caretaker had emerged, a parka thrown over his pajamas. He was angry at first, sputtering about what fools they were to take the curve so fast. But when he saw Josie’s mother in her down jacket, which wouldn’t zip over her belly, he stopped yelling and put her in his pickup truck, leaving Josie’s father behind to wait for a ride in the tow truck.

(Her father always said here, “And for all that, your mother was another eleven hours in labor, so what was the rush? She could have walked to the hospital, and I could have gotten the ride in the pickup truck. I was the one who had hit my head on the steering wheel and cut my forehead. I was the one who had a cracked rib, although we didn’t know it at the time.” Of course, he could say these things, because everyone in the Patel family knew that Vikram Patel could have been dying in a ditch and he would have insisted that the gatehouse keeper take care of his wife first.)

Many years later the road to Sheppard Pratt was redone, at great expense, so instead of going through the gatehouse, the road now swept to the side. It was an article of faith in the Patel family that Josie’s birth had led, at least indirectly, to that bit of reconstruction. My road, Josie always thought when she passed it. Eight years later, then ten years later, her younger brothers had been born at GBMC, but far less dramatically.

Meanwhile Josie had been in GBMC several times since then-she was something of a regular in the ER because of her physical fearlessness-but this was her first overnight stay. Her parents had explained that the doctor wanted to keep her here for observation, but Josie hadn’t felt observed so much as guarded. She had been given a sedative, but she vaguely remembered someone coming to the door and being turned away, on the grounds that she just couldn’t speak right now. Part of her had wanted to call out, groggy as she was, and part of her had been glad to fall back into the dreamless sleep afforded by the pill.

Now here she was, at 2:00 A.M., wide awake. What were the rules? Was she allowed to ring for water? Turn on the television, or even the light, or was there someone on the other side of the curtain? Would they bring her a bedpan if she had to pee? Oh, God, she would rather hold it all night than pee in some basin, a nurse standing by. She had been allowed to limp to the bathroom throughout the afternoon, a nurse or parent supporting her. How bad was her foot anyway? It felt funny-throbbing and fiery, with a pins-and-needles sensation.

And then she realized her father was sitting in a chair in the corner, his chin resting on his chest, his bald spot staring at her. A few strands of hair, so much darker and glossier than her own, clung to his skin, but most of it had fallen back to the side from which it had been coaxed so painstakingly. Her father’s comb-over was a source of great embarrassment to Josie, but her mother had forbidden her to tease him about it. “You can say all the hateful things you want about my appearance,” her mother had said, “but don’t you dare pick on your father. He works so hard.”

He works so hard. Her mother was always saying that, as if it should have some special significance to Josie. He works so hard. Translation: You and your brothers need too much. You can’t imagine how hard it is to commute. Translation: We moved out here just for you. The strange thing was, Josie’s mom worked hard, too, with virtually the same commute, but she sought no sympathy for herself. Josie was left with the sense that her mother was happy to make the sacrifices that children required, but her father had surrendered something infinitely more precious.

What, exactly? What else could her father have wanted from life? Here he was, asleep in front of her, murmuring, literally dreaming. Yet Josie could not imagine her father’s dreams. For all her mother’s complaints, he had a job he genuinely liked at Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, pretty much nirvana for a onetime math nerd. (He wrote code. At least that’s what Josie thought her father did. She had always been a little vague on the details, even after going to the office with him on Take Your Daughters to Work Day, where the one thing that kept Josie’s interest was the tray of doughnuts. She was only eleven.) He adored Josie’s mother to a degree that was almost embarrassing, and he was just as affectionate with his children. If she had to guess, Josie would say her father was happy, although she didn’t know why.

Josie’s father had been a musician in college, playing guitar in a band. That was how her parents met, at a keg party in the middle of a field at Grinnell College. “His band was terrible, just terrible,” her mother said. “Although they did a very good punk version of ‘ Pleasant Valley Sunday.’” Her father still had a guitar and played in the garage on the rare weekends when there was nothing else to do. He wasn’t very good. Josie could recognize the chords he picked out only because some Glendale guys listened to a lot of vintage music-the Clash, the Rolling Stones, that sort of thing. Every now and then, her father would start plucking out the derder opening of what Josie’s mother called his signature song, and her mother would abandon whatever she was doing and go out into the garage and dance to the Monkees’ idea of what was subversive, all those years ago-to Josie’s utter embarrassment, although her brothers were still young enough to think it was funny. There was something so…well, teenage about her parents’ devotion to each other. Her mother especially reminded her of the Glendale girls who went steady with the same boys all four years. Although, come to think of it, those girls always looked grim and exhausted, while Josie’s mom beamed as if she still couldn’t believe that Susie Cobb from Janesville, Wisconsin, had landed worldly Vik Patel, the math whiz who played in a band, tossing his then full, dark hair back from his face, smiling his brilliant smile, so white in contrast to his walnut-colored skin.

“I couldn’t believe someone so worldly was interested in me,” her mother always said. Josie, who had learned the word “uxorious” when studying for the SATs, asked her English teacher if there was a corresponding word for a woman who worshipped her husband. Mrs. Billings had shrugged. “I guess it was assumed that wives were supposed to be that way about their husbands, that it was the natural order of things.” So sexist, Perri had pointed out.

But being goony in love with your spouse clearly wasn’t the natural order, not based on what Josie saw around her in Glendale. Perri’s folks were nice enough, but hardly romantic. Mrs. Kahn did that humorous, put-upon thing, claiming that Dr. Kahn was terrible to her, but it was clearly all for show. As for Kat’s parents-they had always been a little snappish with each other, even before the divorce. Kat may have been shocked when her parents broke up, but Josie and Perri had seen it coming from a long way off. Josie had always been keen to escape the Hartigan house, despite its wealth of toys and gadgets, making a beeline for the patch of trees and the old creek at the far end of the Hartigans’ property. Yes, Kat had the coolest house but the worst parents. Josie had the worst house, and her parents were a close second to Perri’s. Perri had the second-best house and the best parents, because they simply never got mad. Perri could do no wrong as far as her parents were concerned, although they did have very high standards in terms of effort. The only time that Perri had gotten in trouble for a report card was when she had gotten a 2 in effort.

But it was wrong, keeping score, now that Kat was dead. Dead for no reason. How could this have happened? Perri was crazy, an actual lunatic. Had she always been this way? Not when they were little, of course. No one’s insane in the third grade, except for serial killers, the boys who blow up cats and set dogs on fire. It was only in the past year that Perri had gotten so weird, and every-one-Josie included-had chalked that up to her obvious jealousy of Kat.

Still, she was Perri. The smart one, the funny one, the one with the best ideas. She was the one who had dropped them, although the school didn’t spin it that way, couldn’t see how much Kat and Josie missed Perri when she distanced herself from them last fall-suddenly, viciously, without any explanation. Just because they were two and she was one didn’t make it any easier to bear. Especially given the fact that Kat was as strangely silent on the topic as Perri was.

The memory of how her two friends had looked, after, rushed over Josie, and she glanced around frantically. There was a plastic trash can near her bed, but she had to lean out at a perilous angle. She tried to throw up silently, but it was too hard maintaining that posture while vomiting, and the sound of retching woke her father.

“Oh, Josie.” Her father tucked her hair behind her ears, fetched a towel from the bathroom, and wiped her face. He was still in his office clothes-the embarrassing short-sleeved shirt and polyester old-man pants-and his BO was a little funky. He must have sweated a lot today. Her father’s sweat didn’t smell like anyone else’s-it wasn’t worse, just different-and Josie had always feared that it had something to do with being Indian, that her own perspiration would have this same foreign undercurrent. So far it didn’t, but you never knew.

“I was worried the codeine and the sedative would be hard on your stomach, but the doctor kept saying he didn’t want the pain to get ahead of itself. How’s the foot?”

“It feels kind of…fiery.”

“Yeah. There may be some bone chips in there. They took the bullet out, but they still need an orthopedic surgeon to go over the X-rays.”

“Am I going to be okay? I mean, totally normal, so I can-Dad, what about my scholarship? If I can’t do acrobatics, if I end up with a limp…Dad, Dad-”

“You’re the lucky one, Josie. We’re the lucky ones. That’s all that matters for now.”

Her father’s voice became thick and strange, as if he might begin to cry, an idea that made Josie even more frantic. “Dad…Dad…Dad.”

“What, Josie?”

But she didn’t know how to deny him his tears, so she said instead, “Can I have a Sprite or a ginger ale to settle my stomach?”

“You bet, Josefina.” It was his private pet name for her, one he hadn’t used for years. “You bet.”

He left her room, whistling one of the songs he liked to play on the guitar-“The Best I Ever Had”-as if he wanted her to be able to know where he was once he was out of view. A nurse must have reproved him, for Josie heard a soft but stern female voice, chiding in tone, and the whistling stopped abruptly. But Josie could still hear her father’s shoes, slapping down the corridor in search of a vending machine. Oh, God, he was wearing his Tevas.

She thought she had nothing left to throw up, but the moment she tried to close her eyes, the room began to spin and the bile rose again, until nothing came out, her mouth opening and shutting almost convulsively. Wasn’t there a movie where a woman had honked silently the way Josie was now? Or was she thinking about someone in real life, someone odd, someone her mother had told Josie to stop staring at, a long time ago, when Josie was little and didn’t know better. Yes, that was it. Back when she was in middle school, there was a woman who looked like a goose, with a long, skinny neck and flying brown hair, and after each sentence she had opened her mouth wide and made a clicking sound deep in her throat. She had worked at the sandwich shop in the Strand, one of the first strip centers in the area. The woman looked straight at you while taking your order, and she seemed to speak more than was strictly necessary, as if to flaunt her disability, make you confront it. Her thin, long lips opened wide, and the strange snap echoed at the end of every sentence. “Do-you-want-cheese-with-that?” Snap. “What-do-you-think-of-the-weather-we’re-having?” Snap. When they were in middle school and wanted to buy sandwiches after school, they used to take turns going in. (If they tried to enter the store together, they ended up laughing too hysterically, and they were not unkind, not really.) Whenever it was Perri’s turn, she always convinced one of the others to do it for her. Kat would try to coax her: “It wasn’t so bad, she’s really very nice.” “So why don’t you go in every time?” Perri asked. “Because it’s not fair,” Kat countered. “We’re supposed to take turns.” Yet the next time it was Perri’s turn, Kat or Josie would end up going for her.

The sandwich shop had disappeared, replaced by a Caribou Coffee, and the woman had disappeared, too. Things in Glendale were always disappearing, changing-the open spaces that were supposed to be left untouched, the original houses such as the Patels’, which were now being torn down right and left. And now Kat was gone, and perhaps Perri, too. It had been horrible, waiting there with them, listening to the strange, labored sound of Perri’s breathing, looking, then trying not to look, at Kat’s waxy features beneath the fluorescent lights. There was no place to look safely, except the ceiling, which Josie had never noticed before. White, pockmarked, divided into squares by aluminum bands.

Finally the policemen had knocked, asking her to unlock the door, but Josie couldn’t get up, she just couldn’t. “Can you walk, honey? Can you crawl?” “Yes-no. I mean, I’m okay, but I can’t get up, I just can’t.” “You don’t have the gun, do you-what’s your name? Who are we talking to?” “I’m Josie. I’m not the one who did this. It was Perri, and she’s-” “Is she dead? Did she shoot herself?” “Yes. No. I mean, yes, she shot herself, but I don’t think she’s dead. She’s…it’s-Please find someone to unlock the door. I don’t want to look at them anymore.” But they had kept talking to her, disbelieving. “You don’t have the gun, do you…Josie? It’s Josie, right? You’re sure you’re not holding the gun?”

“I never touched the gun.” Finally a key turned in the lock, and she began to sob when she saw the police officers enter with their weapons drawn. Then everything had speeded up, with paramedics rushing in, taking away Perri, then Josie. Yes, it was Perri, she told them over and over. Perri had done this. Shot Kat, shot Josie, then herself. Perri. It was Perri, only Perri.

“What about Kat?” she had asked as they wheeled her out. “Aren’t you going to get Kat?”

“Your friend has to stay here a little while longer,” the attendant had said, soothing her as if she were stupid enough to think Kat was alive. “The important thing is to get you to the emergency room, have that foot looked at. You were smart to wrap it like you did and prop it up, but we need to attend to that.”

“I don’t want to go without Kat. She’s my best friend. I want to be with her. You can’t separate us. You can’t, you can’t.”

She knew she was being hysterical and idiotic. But there was a part of her that clung to the idea that everything could be undone

somehow, if they would just let her stay, give her five more minutes with the two girls who had defined her life for the last ten years, almost from the first day she had walked into Mrs. Groves’s class at Meeker Creek Elementary School. One for all and all for one, the eternal triangle. She finally knew what she needed to make everything right again.