The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (43 page)

Hyunjee, her daughter, says, No offense, Kevin. But if she knew it was a black man taking care of her, it would finish her off.

Hyunjee has a funny way of smiling, like squinting into the sun. He can tell she finds this thought faintly entertaining.

I'm not
black
, he says. My father was from Jamaica and my mother was from Queens. Irish Queens.

Oh, I know, she says. It's complicated. But it wasn't complicated for her. She was held up three times after Dad died and she was trying to run the place alone. She had nightmares for years afterward. Wouldn't admit it, though. Typical Korean mother.

Hyunjee's hair is already streaked gray on one side, though she can't be much older than forty. She wears it long with a wooden clasp, and loose-cut linen clothes, all in blues and browns and blacks. A jewelry maker—he has her card—who doesn't wear any herself. Divorced, with two little girls who come only once every two weeks or so. She comes every day, with food in a stack of steel boxes.

She was saying something different today, he says. Something like
Dung gum kuei go chora.

Dung jum kuel go chora.
Scratch my back.

Okay. I'll remember that.

You don't have to do
everything
she says, you know.

If she's itchy it means that her skin is too dry, he says. It could be a sign of dermatitis. That's what you're paying me for, to watch out for those things. The hospital nurses won't do it.

He shifts his weight from one leg to the other, trying to relieve the bone-ache in his arches, but nothing helps. These Nikes are two weeks old; he's tried lacing them loose, tight, in between. There's no stepping out of the shadow of this pain.

It's too bad, she says, her back to him, shoveling leftovers into the garbage, filling the room with the smell of sour cabbage and garlic. Until last year her English wasn't bad. She used to watch
Oprah
every day. But after she woke up from the stroke—nothing. What a shame, you know? All that wasted effort.

Not wasted. She used it to survive.

She used to say speaking English made her tongue tired. And it's true! Even I remember that, from when I was first learning. All the correct sounds in Korean are wrong in English. It's absurd, really, if you think about it. Nobody should have to work that hard to ask for a glass of water.

Count yourself lucky, he thinks, that she can speak at all.

He could tell her about the saddest cases, the old women with half-melted faces, their minds wiped clean by a clot smaller than a baby's fingernail. But nurses don't compare. To do so would be to suggest this patient is not the only patient in the universe, their only and every and always, their one sole concern. Doctors, yes. Doctors comfort by comparing, by giving the odds. Nurses never say,
It could be worse.

His mother, on the other hand, never lost her gift for languages, right up to the end. Fluent in Latin and French by seventeen, thanks to the Carmelite Sisters of Charity, she took up patois with the steely determination of a missionary. His father's parents, so the story went, refused to believe that the woman they'd spoken to on the phone was white until she stepped onto the tarmac in Kingston, shielding herself from the sun with a blue parasol. Years after his father died she stayed on as a part-time community liaison for Catholic Social Services. It wasn't unusual, when he was in high school, to come home and find her at the kitchen table, sorting the bills, the phone clasped between shoulder and chin, her face the color of boiled lobster, saying,
Y'cyaan stay wid dat man, soon as 'im get money 'im gone.

It embarrassed him, in a small, private way. He himself could understand his Jamaican relatives only barely and could not speak patois at all. Like the taste of ackee and jerk chicken: a foreign thing colored by the guilt of having once been familiar. At fourteen he had refused to go to the family Christmas party in Flatbush, and somehow that single gesture, that flutter of adolescent pique, had poisoned the well. No more presents, not even a birthday card. Tell them, he told his mother finally, years later, tell them I'm not ashamed to be part Jamaican, that's not it, I meant no harm. I was just a kid. She looked at him over the rim of her coffee mug and said, Well, you
meant
no harm. That must be some consolation.

When his mother died, his father's family held a Nine-Nights ceremony after the mass and didn't invite him. He was twenty-one, two weeks off the plane from Saudi Arabia, desperate for a pair of flabby arms and a perfumed shoulder, a mouthful of curry goat. Instead he stumbled home from the Liffey at three
A.M.
Two days later he was on the graveyard shift at St. Vincent's, picking buckshot from a gangbanger's backside. Like the grunts always said: When you get off the plane, go down on your knees and kiss the ground. Tunnel into it like an earthworm. Don't make any serious decisions for the first six months. He was lucky, having never fired a shot, flipped a switch, thrown a grenade; he could carry on the same work with no interruption, one war zone to another. Like switching saline bags on an IV, a continuous flow of tears.

Sometimes he feels his brain curdling.
Curdling:
exactly the word for it. A snatch of conversation in the elevator, the headlines on Hyunjee's copy of the
Times
, a few bars of a song someone whistles in the bathroom: always it takes him a moment too long to see the point, to put words to the melody. Synapses atrophy, lose their shape, their elasticity, their charge. Why should he be surprised? An hour spent folding towels, testing bathwater, dividing pills into groups for the night nurses: not a single abstract thought. Even the taking of vital signs boils down to a series of small muscle movements: tightening the Velcro, flicking off the old thermometer cup, squeezing the wrist with two fingers, just so. The brain carries the numbers as long as it takes to insert a quarter into a vending machine. The body drones on, he thinks, the autonomous nervous system taking care of itself quite nicely with the cerebral cortex switched off.

Have you been a nurse for a long time? Hyunjee asks, her back turned, watering the row of potted plants on the windowsill.

Since 1989, on and off.

Is that the proper word to use? I'm not up on the terminology.

If there was another term for it, it wouldn't matter. A nurse is a nurse.

You don't seem old enough to have been working in 1989.

I joined the army when I was eighteen. I was a medic in the Gulf War. Oh.

He can hear her thoughts recalibrating, one assumption leapfrogging backward over another. It's okay, he wants to tell her, no one ever believes it. That certain slackness in the way he moves, as if he was all double-jointed, Renée had said. Hard to imagine him in formation with the helmet and the gun. His mother used to say, What is it about you that always finds the farther corner of the room?

I thought medics were doctors.

Medics are just grunts with a little bit of extra training. The MDs work in the field hospitals, out of sight, way back from the front lines.

She sticks a finger into the soil of each pot before and after watering, frowning, as if the perfect dampness is hard to achieve. A large hydrangea, the color of barely boiled tea, two long trailing ivy plants, a kind of small shrub with tiny, waxy leaves. He's never seen anyone look after plants so intently. What is her house like? he permits himself to wonder. Pristine, presumably. No dust bunnies in the corners. All uniform colors. Lots of wood, no clutter. Elaborate cabinetry. Hidden richness on all sides.

And how long did you stay in the army?

Not long. Discharged in '92.

She's brought him a stack of forms to fill out from the insurance company, a whole Conditions of Care portfolio and six-month review. Most of it she could fill in herself. Not that he would point that out to her in so many words. That's not the way a private nurse keeps clients, especially the guilty ones, the ones who want to feel like they're doing everything they can. Still, he has to grit his teeth now and then, turning a page to see another row of boxes waiting for the near-puncturing tip of his pen. Little black flashes of rage at her helplessness. Unacceptable, he tells himself, inappropriate, ridiculous.

My feet are freezing. She speaks to the window, to no one in particular. The puddles on Second Avenue are fifteen feet across. I always mean to buy a new pair of boots and never get around to it.

I can get you a pair of hospital slippers if you want.

Her laugh is high and piping and uncharacteristically girlish.

Thanks. I'm not
that
desperate.

Some indefinite tension lingers in the air. As if it's a joke and he guessed the punch line by accident too soon. So it is with me, he thinks, never one for chitchat.

I've been meaning to ask you something, she says. And I want you to give me a frank answer. I should have her at home, shouldn't I? I mean, medically speaking, there's nothing keeping her here, right? It's not as if I don't have the space. The girls can bunk up again. You just have to say the word—

You'd have to pay me almost double. Plus a night nurse. Rentals too. Home dialysis equipment, a hospital bed, a wheelchair, plus all the supplies. It would mean turning your house into a miniature clinic. Plus trips back here when she gets an infection or has to have a stent changed.

All that's required? I mean, like, by law or something?

At moments like these her face drains of expression, a strange placidity, the opposite, he thinks, of real calm, of actual relaxation. Without looking back she reaches behind her and touches the old woman's foot, the tender ankle with its close webwork of veins.

It's the standard of care.

Her village in Korea didn't get electricity till the eighties, she says. Her father dug the family well by hand. She grew up eating meat once a week if she was lucky.

Then she's one of the fortunate ones.

I don't know if that's what she'd call it.

Good thing there's no choice in the matter.

These are the kind that just
go
, a resident said to him once, in a low voice, when they were alone in the room. You could turn around and the hematode simplex is dividing and you'd never know. A hundred things depend on her saying
right
and
left.
Fucking Alz-heimer's. You might as well be back with the dogfish in Gross Anatomy. She's a regular time bomb, this one. But I don't have to tell you that.

He fixed the resident with a look. Why, he said. Why don't you have to tell me that.

You went to med school. I can tell. Your notes are too detailed.

I guess that's a compliment.

Well, then, you
should
have gone to med school.

He muttered under his breath.
Quae vero inter curandum, aut Etinam Medicinam, minime faciens, in communi hominum vita, vel videro, vel audiero, quae minime in vulgus esseri oportear, ca arcana esse ratus, filebo.

What's that?

What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

Damn.

My sergeant was kind of a sadist. Made us memorize it before we could run an IV.

Seriously, though. Was it the money?

He's a healthy, six-foot-two Indian kid with long, tapering fingers, trying to make himself older with thin gold wire-loop glasses and a rep tie. From one of those leafy midwestern suburbs, Shaker Heights or Grosse Pointe. A certain guilelessness, the product of a vigorous, uncynical, public-school upbringing. Doctor and Doctor Sharma with the matching Mercedes. Work as a nurse in New York long enough, he thinks, and you'll meet everyone: the upwardly mobile, the failing fast, and the stick-it-outs, the in-betweens, too perverse or lazy to be counted.

Yeah. Somehow my fairy godmother never came along.

Well, you never know, right? There's loans. You're still young.

Listen, he says, I
like
nursing. Want to know why? Because it's women's work.

Dr. Sharma draws in his shoulders, protectively, and blinks.

Seriously, he says. Look at her. Nothing to be done, right? Tacrine, donepezil—they ran through that years ago. Vitamin E supplements? And then a whole slew of antidepressants. She was diagnosed as ALZ-likely twenty years ago and ever since it's been a comedy of fucking errors. One doctor coming in after another and trying to fix it. That's not how it works, man. Pay attention to the basic science! Until they find every single one of those triggers in the DNA and figure out how to turn them off, all anyone's going to be able to do is be there day by day, trying to keep those synapses exercised. For nurses, man, that's life. That's medicine.

Look, Sharma says. I get it. It's not just changing bedpans. I just can't see living in New York on a nurse's salary.

You just have to travel light. No kids, no encumbrances. I'm not looking for a condo on the Bowery.

I was thinking more like a three-bedroom in Flushing.

What, he wants to ask, is it Sympathy for Doctors Day? You mean I'm not the only martyr in the building? Well, he says, it's a sad world when a young MD can't make a mortgage payment.

Yeah. Businesslike now, his pride wounded, he knocks Mrs. Kang's chart with two knuckles and lets it clatter back into its holder at the foot of the bed. I should get back to my rounds.

It's not about the body, he's thinking, and not
not
about the body. Her clothes are loose, squared-off, raw silk, unbleached cotton, cashmere. Drapery. They generalize her figure. Only when she squats or reaches or bends low does he become aware of the generosity of her hips, the smooth unfreckled cleft of her breasts. She never arouses him, not in person, not in daydreams. Nothing as obvious as that.
Her smoldering frustration.
Like her scent, not perfume, not soap, but there in the room nonetheless, slightly sweet and damp.