Page 101 of We All Live Here
“Mum. Go.”
Lila goes. She will drive to the hospital. It will be impossible to get a taxi in this weather. She prays that the old Mercedes will start. She shuts the front door, feeling the wind lift her hair, hearing its whistle in her ears. Then, as she turns, she stops dead on the front steps. The large plane tree that had stood at the edge of her drive, the tree whose branches had elegantly framed her house and that Jensen had warned her was listing, is horizontal, completely blocking the entrance to her driveway. It’s such an unlikely sight that at first she can barely take it in. Its longer branches are draped over the top of the Mercedes, obscuring the windows. Even to get to the pavement she will need to climb over the trunk.
Her brain is a blur.Think, she tells herself.Think. Dan is at the hospital with Marja. He’s not going to be able to help. Eleanor doesn’t have a car. She calls for an Uber. The app tells her that nobody is available in her area but, helpfully, they are still searching. She feels panic rising in her chest, lets out afuck.Fuck!She screws her eyes shut, and counts to five.
And then she makes the call.
•••
“Thank you somuch for coming. I’m so sorry. I just…didn’t have anyone else I could call.”
“It’s fine.” Jensen doesn’t look like it’s fine. He doesn’t look at her ashe speaks, just keeps his eyes straight ahead, as the windscreen wipers move steadily backward and forward. He had arrived within seven minutes of her calling, climbed out of the pickup truck, gazed pointedly at the fallen tree, then opened the passenger door for her to get in.
“I should have got someone to look at it. I just—with everything—it kind of got away from me.”
He doesn’t say anything. She has rarely seen anyone so focused on their driving.
According to her phone, it will take seventeen minutes for them to get to the hospital. Her whole body is vibrating with anxiety. She keeps hearing the fear in Penelope’s voice, pictures a thousand images behind the words “I found him.”
Please be okay, Bill, she wills him silently.Please just be okay. We can fix everything if you’ll just be okay.
“Where are the girls?” he says, as they approach the hospital.
“At home.”
“Is anyone with them?”
“No. But they’ll be fine. They have the dog. And Celie is under strict instructions not to open the door.”
He nods, swinging the truck past the barriers toward the main entrance. It sits, glowing, like the portal to a world of pain. He slows the truck, and comes to a halt. He still stares resolutely ahead, as if he cannot bear even to look at her. It makes something in her contract. “Thank you. Thank you so much. Again, I’m so sorry to have to ask, especially after everything.”
“Just let me know how he is,” he says. “And call if you need a ride back from the hospital.”
“I don’t want to bother you again. I’ve already disrupted your—”
“Just call,” he says shortly. He waits silently while she opens the door and climbs out of the truck. She runs in through the sliding doors, glancing back briefly to watch the tail lights disappear into the darkness.
•••
Bill is ina room by himself on the third floor. It takes Lila a while to find it, jogging down the strip-lit corridors, weaving past the medics walking in groups or clutching folders to their chests. She finally locates him in Coronary Care, and sees him first through the small window on the door, lying immobile in a mask beneath a mass of wires, Penelope bent over at his side, her slim frame a question mark. She looks round as Lila walks in and Lila sees that she is holding Bill’s hand in both her own. Lila registers the near-silence, the intermittent bleep of the monitors.
“How is he?”
“Stable. They’ve given him a cardiac…cardiac catheterization? He’s having ECGs or EKGs or something. Oh, I can’t remember. Just lots of drugs.” Her voice is low and shaky.
Bill’s exposed chest looks old and gray, plastered with sticky patches from which wires project in a spaghetti tangle, covered from the waist in a light blanket. His face is largely obscured by the mask and he seems sedated. His fingers twitch periodically in Penelope’s, and she answers each twitch with a gentle squeeze.
“Oh, Lila. I thought I’d lost him.” Penelope starts to cry, silent tears that fall onto her sleeves. “They won’t even tell me if he’s going to be all right because I’m not…I’m not family.”
“Okay,” says Lila, trying to keep her voice calm as she takes in the awful reality of it. “Okay.”
Penelope straightens, struggles to pull herself together, gazing at Bill’s face. “I know—I know that everyone loves him. But it just feels so cruel to find your person after all this time alone, the person you just love, such awonderfulman, and then to have them snatched away. I can’t—I just can’t—” She breaks off, then composes herself. “I’m so sorry. How terribly selfish of me. I’m just a newcomer in his life and you all have known and loved—”
Lila puts her hand gently on Penelope’s shoulder. “Penelope. It’s fine. You’re allowed to feel the way you feel. We know you love him too.”
Lila stoops and kisses Bill’s forehead. He seems so removed from them, so far away, this man she has known almost her whole life. It is as if all the things that make him Bill, his upright stance, his air of purpose, the sense of safety he has always conveyed, have just evaporated, leaving this shell of an old, frail man. “I’ll find a doctor. I’ll—I’ll go and find one. I’ll be back.”
Lila lets herself out of the room, closing the door gently behind her. She stands for a moment, feeling overwhelmed, and then she walks to the nurses’ station. There are three women, one bent over a screen, entering something on a keyboard, the other two having a conversation in lowered voices.
