A Map of Tulsa (16 page)

Rod lowered himself into a chair. “That’s what you do—if the doctors screw up, you call and get a new ambulance and you start over.”

Lydie shouldered her purse and made ready to leave.

“I’m pretty sure they know what they’re doing here,” said Rod.

“But what they are doing is running a business, Rod. I have total confidence that they know what they are doing. They’re shuffling beds.” She turned to me. “Were you going to come with me to get hamburgers?”

Lydie and I left the hospital via skybridge. I had not yet reintroduced myself, yet she seemed to have me well in hand. She was a regal walker with long strides, and her shift beat against the backs of her ankles. At the end of the skybridge she raised her hands against the door in front of us, relying on her momentum to open it:

And everything changed. The hospital’s bright air-conditioned interior shrank to nothing. It was like walking out of a movie: The garage darkness was damp and fresh. The gasoline opened my nostrils. You could hear the muttering of one or two cars moving on the floor below; there was a drip someplace, far away, all around us.

Lydie stopped, and glanced keenly into the darkness. Then she raised her key chain and fired, and in the darkness a car winced and blinked its lights.

We strode forward.

“I hope I’m not stepping on your toes,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Being here today.”

“I fight with Rod because if you don’t, he’ll drag everything into the ditch. You have to fight him.”

Out of politeness, I pretended to be confused: “He’s the patient’s father?”

“He fathered her.”

With my hand on the door handle I waited for her to get in, but she was fishing for something in her purse. “Well,” I said, “I really hope she recovers.”

“Uh-huh. Listen—”

I had to get in the car to keep up with the conversation. The car reeked of cold leather.

“She’s going to recover.” Lydie depressed the cigarette lighter. “She doesn’t have any other choice. We do have to be careful though. I don’t think neuroscience is the strongest branch of medicine. Do you? And St. Ursula’s isn’t the Mayo Clinic. I can’t believe they had you carrying that IV pouch. I’ll be able to sue them for that alone. And her father goes along with everything they say…”

“He has a doctor’s-orders mentality.”

“Uh-huh. But sometimes you have to press.” Lydie held up both hands, heavily bejeweled, and shoved gingerly into the air between us.

“The path of least resistance,” I added.

Lydie smirked, and the cigarette lighter popped. She produced a pack of cigarettes.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Mrmm.” She held the unlit cigarette in her lips and brought the red-hot coil up, and sucked at it with the cigarette like a straw. She puffed. “Adrienne’s worst injury is so low that, even if she didn’t recover, she’d be able to walk. She’s S2. Are you familiar with this terminology?”

“I’m not.”

“Well,
S
means sacral.” Lydie backed out and then paused, with her long car crooked in the lane. “Anyway, the sacrum. That’s the term for the end of the spine, the triangular piece of bone there.” She measured it with her fingers, and then snapped them. “That’s shattered. And the cord there is bruised.” She leveled her eyes at me. “It’s the part that controls the bowels.” Lydie shrugged and stared, seemingly distracted, into the windshield. “Above that, however: T7. The seventh thoracic vertebra. Controls
the legs. The bone there didn’t shatter, but was snapped in two, and one of the pieces is slicing down and pinching the spinal cord. We want to slide that piece back up before it slips further, and staple it to the other piece—to keep it from doing any further damage. We want to take the pressure off that section of the spinal cord. In time, it should come back to life, and she’ll be able to walk. Anyway, they’re going to do surgery tomorrow, to stabilize the bone there, as well as parts of the neck where she has hairline fractures. It’s just a preliminary surgery—to stabilize her. But until then they should be keeping her in ICU. She needs to be constantly monitored.”

Was I supposed to have spoken up when they came to take Adrienne away? I wondered if Rod had secretly wanted me to. Somehow in coming here I had assumed that Adrienne was ultimately okay, that paralysis was just a matter of being knocked out and then waking up. “How did it happen?”

“In the first place Adrienne should have gone to St. Luke’s—that’s where we would normally go. But of course I got the call in the middle of the night, that they had her here on life support. I called Rod. ‘Your daughter has been hospitalized,’ I told him. And he did come. However he’s still the most
passive
person I have ever dealt with.”

“Right.”

“We have to decide on surgeons here. Then we have to decide on rehab programs. And that means researching different therapies.”

“Huh. Is there anything exciting there?”

“But Rod takes no interest. You do. You take more
interest than Rod does, and he’s her legal guardian. I’m the one”—Lydie pressed her fingertips into her sternum—“who is going to take care of Adrienne if she doesn’t get up. While my brother, as I’m sure he told you, is
devastated
.”

“Well it’s pretty traumatic.”

“It’s a nightmare.” She raised her eyebrows intimately. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”

Lydie had straightened us out and reversed, executing an eccentric but practiced maneuver, backing the car quite elegantly past the ramp, backing against the arrows until she was lined up with the exit and could sail right out. It was efficient, high-handed, and fluid. I thought Lydie used to have a driver. But she drove for pleasure, apparently.

Lydie followed the hospital’s landscaped drive, snaking up to Sixty-first Street, and we sat there with her blinker on, clicking for a turn. New York loomed in my imagination, the work I was missing, a drinks date I had tonight at one of my favorite bars—a thought as sticky and glamorous as New York itself but impossible to superimpose on this boulevard of green corporate lawns, Sixty-first Street. I remembered my green bag with my clothes in it, still down in intensive care’s waiting area where I had dropped it, rattled.

“You know,” Lydie suddenly said, “Adrienne brought this upon herself.”

I pretended not to have heard her. Sometimes people, after they emerge from a particularly intense and confined situation, have to talk things out to themselves first, before attempting polite conversation.

But Lydie kept looking at me. “What do you have in your sack?” she asked.

I still had the necktie sack in my hands. I edged out the tie, to show her the fabric. “For Adrienne, actually.”

Lydie was looking not at the tie, but at the sack. She chuckled. She kept her eyes on the road. “You didn’t buy that in Tulsa.”

“No. No. I got it at JFK.”

“You’re coming from New York?”

“Yes. Chase emailed me.” Which was an untruth: Chase emailed the listserv. “Is he around?”

“Not as yet.”

“What about Edith?”

“Who?”

“Edith Altman?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

Lydie seemed thoughtful, with both hands clinging to the top of her steering wheel. “And did you come all this way just to see us?”

“Oh, well, I haven’t been home in years, so. It made sense. And at Kennedy I just grabbed this—I thought it might cheer her up, actually.”

She smiled. “You probably shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“You came all this way.”

“Well, I love Tulsa. I—can visit my parents while I’m here,” I lied.

Lydie looked at me slyly and returned to her driving. And then, after a second, she again mentioned that Adrienne “had this coming.”

“I haven’t really been in touch with her,” I said.

“But you know how she acts.”

“I heard that she was riding a motorcycle at the time.”

“But you
know
her.”

“Yes,” I said. “I definitely do.”

“She’s been asking for this ever since she was fourteen.”

“You mean, because she got a motorcycle when she was fourteen?”

Lydie held her cigarette one inch in front of her face, as if she was about to jab it forward. “Jim, right? A lot of young people have motorcycles, Jim. But that doesn’t make them the same as Adrienne.”

“You know me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself.”

“That’s all right.”

“Did you recognize me just now?” We were pulling into the McDonald’s.

“Well, no one else brought her a
present
, Jim. I remember you. I pay more attention to Adrienne than people think. You were the only one of Adrienne’s friends who was ever going to amount to much. Which I think is why she was so taken with you. But we have to go in. I don’t do drive-thrus.”

At the cash registers, Lydie and I split up to game the two shortest lines. Small children, brought here by their mothers for the high hour of their pre-kindergarten lives, stood by at random, studying the current display of Happy Meal favors or curling up in the booths, waiting
on their food. I used to be brought to this McDonald’s. The boy nearest me windmilled his arms. On the way today, I had taken an interest in the corporate signs embedded in the streetside hills, OG&E,
HILTI,
PENNWELL
: corporate marquees that when I was a new reader had seemed tediously vague.

Lydie paid. I was handed our food, two grease-bottomed sacks to carry to the car. “Make sure they got the order right.” While I was bent over in my seat rummaging in the sacks, Lydie asked me to tell her what all I had done since dating Adrienne. She sat there, not starting the car.

I told her I had completed undergrad, making friends with all the professors, who packed me off to New York with letters of recommendation. About the magazine she wanted to hear more. I told her how much I got paid. “I’m technically freelance, which makes no sense: I’m expected to go there every day and sit at a desk. But that’s how things work nowadays.” I thought Lydie would be interested in this. “Outside of finance, almost nobody I know from college landed jobs with benefits. I actually can’t even think of one person right now, sitting here.”

“But you’re lucky. That’s a very prestigious job.”

“Which is why I can’t leave it. Right?”

She lit another cigarette and appeared to be thinking, so I decided to start in on the fries.

I tried to hold a fry in my lips, like it was a cigarette. I sucked on it for a while and then it started to taste like a potato, for once. The smoke from her cigarette was
drawing out my window, a dense tendril right in front of me, and I chopped at it with a fry. The smoke fell apart; some of it floated down and got mixed with the gold dust on my fries.

“Should we go?”

In answer, she took another long, contemplative puff. The pale cake of her foundation glistened in the heat. “I was pleased when Adrienne started dating you,” she said. “I thought: Oh—I’ve underestimated her! She’s going to grow up now, she’ll go to college.”

“Well she was too smart for that. She wouldn’t have been Adrienne if she’d gone to college.”

Lydie smiled. “That’s not fair to Adrienne.”

I took a fry out of my mouth. I wanted to proceed like a plausible adult, if I could.

“College would have changed everything,” Lydie said—leveling out her hand. “Everything.”

“But you can’t pretend that the accident is because Adrienne didn’t have a college degree.”

“Yes, I’m sorry Jim. But it is actually. That’s actually how life works. You go up or you go down.” Lydie took a puff of her cigarette, and then she continued in a weary voice. “Her accident is the logical result of Adrienne’s career. You’re upset. But you have to realize, I’ve been dealing with Adrienne ever since she was a little girl. To me, you know, I’ve been watching this wreck in slow motion.”

She was powerful, this lady. With her deft gesticulations she had the steely pace of a practiced public speaker. As she talked, she pressed her mane back against her
headrest; she seemed to grow larger and larger in her seat.

She started up the car.

I said, “Coming here that summer and dating Adrienne was one of the smartest things I ever did.”

“But you didn’t stay.”

“No. No, I wasn’t brave enough, actually.”

“But you wish you had?”

I looked at the brown fence of the McDonald’s. “Sometimes I do.”

She was twisted around to look behind her, backing out. “Jim,” she said, “you’re going to be happy in life. And she’s not. That’s all you can really say, and it’s all you need to know.”