The Necessary Beggar (29 page)

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Authors: Susan Palwick

BOOK: The Necessary Beggar
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Zamatryna never would have thought of that. “I have no idea.”
“Okay, well, then we should just take yours. If you don't mind driving me. You can drop me off here later, or if it's too late and you don't want to do that, you can drop me at the frat house and I'll get somebody to give me a lift up here tomorrow.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure,” he said, and smiled. “Is this a custom where you come from, too? Bringing food to people?”
She noted that he'd said “where you come from,” not “Afghanistan.” Paranoid much, Zama? “Yeah. As a matter of fact, it is.”
“Cool. Should we bring her something to drink?”
“Just water. I always worry about whether she gets enough clean water.”
“Well, we'll bring her bottled water, then. We can bring her a whole case, if you want to.”
“No. She wouldn't have anywhere to put it, Jerry. It would just get stolen. A bottle or two, or three. That will be fine.”
So Zama found herself driving down to the river with Jerry in a car that smelled like pizza. She parked on Riverside near the Keystone Avenue Bridge and got out, holding her flashlight and scanning the line of benches along the river. She didn't see Betty, or any other homeless people, for that matter; Betty avoided this area when there were a lot of other transients here, but she liked it when there weren't. Which meant she might very well be here now. Zama walked ahead a few feet, peering, and caught sight of a large black Hefty bag near a bush. There. That could be one of Betty's. She was
down to two now, because so much of her stuff had been stolen. But then, of course, all Hefty bags tended to look alike.
“Do you see her?” Jerry said. “Should I bring the pizza?”
“I'm not sure. Leave the pizza in the car for a sec, okay?”
He followed her to the Hefty bag. She risked turning the flashlight on—sometimes flashlights freaked Betty out, because flashlights belonged to cops—and saw that the bag was ripped, with a blue and white sweater poking out. Definitely Betty's: the sweater was an old one of Timbor's he'd given her last winter. “Betty?” Zama called, and then caught a whiff of Betty's signature stench. She was here somewhere, then. But where?
And then she saw a leg sticking out from behind the bush, and said, “Betty!” and pushed aside undergrowth to find Betty lying on her side, clutching her arm. She turned her face away when Zamatryna shone the flashlight on it: her face looked gray, sweaty.
“I feel funny.” Her voice was hoarse, strained.
“Betty, what happened?” Zamatryna ran the flashlight up and down her body, but saw no injuries. “Did someone attack you again?”
“No. Feel funny. Hid here. Who—”
“I'm Jerry,” Jerry said, kneeling down on the grass. “I'm a friend of Zama's. Betty, are you having trouble breathing?” Nod. “And your arm hurts? Your left arm, where you're holding it there? Does it feel heavy?” Nod. “Okay. We have to take you to a doctor, then—”
“No doctors!”
Jerry reached out and patted her on the shoulder, and then turned to Zama. “Where's your phone?”
“What?”
“Your cell phone. Call 911, Zama.”
911?
“Call the
police?
But—”
“Hey, Zama, didn't anybody ever teach you the symptoms of a heart attack? Call 911. Now. Do it!”
She ran back to the car, feeling useless and incredibly stupid, and dug her cell phone out of her purse and called an ambulance. Then she went back to Betty and Jerry. He was holding her hand and talking to her. “Zama called an ambulance, okay? Don't be scared when you see the flashing lights. It won't be the police. It will be medics, to help you. No, Betty, don't try to get up. Just sit there, okay? Stay quiet.”
“They'll throw out my things,” Betty said plaintively. “People always throw out my things.”
“We won't let them,” Jerry said. “Zama, can you put Betty's bags in your car, please, so no one throws them out? Betty, is it okay with you if
Zama puts the bags in her car?” He gave Zama an unreadable glance and said, “And then Zama should probably stay near the street, so she can show the ambulance crew where you are.”
Betty nodded, and Zama picked up the two bags and carried them to her car. She was glad that Jerry was thinking so clearly, because she certainly wasn't. Maybe it was easier to think clearly when you didn't know the person having the heart attack. She might just as well have been having a heart attack herself, for all the oxygen that seemed to be reaching her brain.
Sirens. The ambulance was here already: good. She showed the medics where Betty was and then stood back while they talked to her, examined her, lifted her swiftly onto a stretcher. There was an oxygen mask over Betty's nose and mouth now, and they were wheeling her toward the ambulance, and someone was saying something incomprehensible into a radio.
“Okay,” Jerry said next to her. “Now we follow the ambulance to the ER. Zama, you okay?”
“I—is she going to—”
“I don't know anything. I don't think they do. Zama, you're shaking. Let me drive, okay? Can you walk to the car?”
“Of course I can walk to the car.” She took a step on rubbery legs, and stumbled, and Jerry put his arm around her. The ambulance had just driven away, sirens blaring, and suddenly the place where they were standing seemed very dark and deserted. “Oopsydaisy. Lean on me to the car, okay? And then you need to drink some of that water.”
“I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know—I had no idea—if you hadn't been here—”
“If I hadn't been here you probably would have handled it fine,” Jerry said, guiding her into the car. “If you'd been alone, you'd have done what you needed to do. That's how these things work. But you weren't, so you went into shock because she's a friend of yours. And I was here, so your body knew it was okay for you to go into shock. That's how it works, sometimes.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“I've had a lot of first-aid training. Seatbelt on? You want to call your family?”
“What?”
“Your family,” he said patiently, pulling away from the curb. “They're Betty's friends too, right? And it's getting late now and they're going to wonder why you aren't home, and we'll probably be a while, at the ER.”
“Oh. Okay.”
She was still clutching the cell phone. She dialed the number for home; after two rings she heard Timbor say “Hello?” in a voice as strained as Betty's had been. In the background she heard screaming, Aliniana and Macsofo, screaming, and a crash, something breaking. “Hello?” Timbor said again, and Zamatryna hung up, terrified. Whatever was happening there, it wasn't the time to tell Timbor about Betty.
“No one's home,” she told Jerry.
“You can try again later. Let me know if you see a space, okay?”
Zamatryna blinked; they were in the parking lot of St. Mary's. “Shouldn't they have taken her to Washoe Med? That's the county hospital, isn't it?”
“This is closer.”
“Jerry, she doesn't have insurance!”
He shook his head. “Hospitals can't turn away people in life-or-death situations. They're required to treat them. That's the law.”
Zamatryna shivered. “You saved her life.”
“Well, you saved her life, I hope. We never would have been there in the first place if you hadn't thought of bringing her the pizza.”
Betty was already in a treatment room when they got to the ER. “She had a cardiac arrest,” a nurse told them. “I can't let you go back there; she's got too many people working on her. They'll admit her and she'll probably wind up in the cardiac care unit, CCU, if there's a bed. You, uh, are you two her family?”
“We're friends,” Zama said.
“We're the people who called the ambulance,” Jerry said.
“Yeah, well, okay, legally I'm not supposed to give out information about her condition to anyone except family. Privacy laws. Do you have contact information for her family?”
“No,” Zama said, her mouth dry. “She has a daughter in foster care, her daughter's—slow too, like she is—”
“Okay, so Sierra Regional Center will probably have a file on both of them. I'll tell the social worker that and they'll get on it tomorrow. What's her last name?”
“What?”
“Her last name. She doesn't have any ID on her, and she's not very coherent at this point.”
“I don't know,” Zama said, ashamed. She'd never known Betty's last name. Betty had always just been Betty, like a doll or a pet. “My grandfather might know. I can call him and ask.”
The nurse sighed. “Well, you do that. Call your grandpa, go get some coffee from the cafeteria, sit out in the waiting room. I'll come out again when I know something else.”
“Even though you aren't supposed to,” Jerry said with a smile.
“Right,” the nurse said, and smiled back. “Good thing this happened to her now, before the resettlement.”
“What?” Zamatryna said. Nothing was making any sense tonight. Resettlement was something that happened to refugees. Betty lived here.
“The resettlement,” the nurse said, as if Zama was the one who was slow. “You know, because of that Public Nuisance Law? It's the latest get-rid-of-the-homeless scheme. In a few weeks, before the cold weather sets in again, the cops will start doing sweeps and bussing them all to the refugee camps.”
“
What?
How can they do that? That's, that's—”
“The police are saying it's a kindness,” the nurse said drily, “because they'll have tents and meals and blankets. And there are doctors out there. And I guess they're right. But those camps are crowded enough already. The real issue is that the county doesn't want to build more shelters: it's a NIMBY thing. Listen, I have to get back to work now. Go get coffee.”
“NIMBY,” Zama said blankly to the nurse's retreating back.
“Not in My Back Yard,” Jerry said.
“Oh. Right. I knew that.” She let him take her elbow, let him guide her to the cafeteria and buy her a cup of coffee. “Jerry, people die in those camps.” My uncle died there. I can't tell you that. A friend's someone you can tell anything. But I can't tell you that, because I'm not supposed to have ever been in the camps in the first place.
“People die on the streets, too.”
“Yeah,” she said, looking down at her white styrofoam coffee cup. “I guess they do.” Just like Gallicina died on the streets, because Darroti killed her. I can't tell you that.
“Let's go back to the waiting room,” he said, “and then you can try your grandfather again, okay?”
“Okay,” she said numbly. Manners. Manners, Zama. “I—Jerry, you don't have to stay here with me, it's awfully good of you to have come—oh, but you don't have your car—Jerry, I'll drive you back to your car and then I'll come back here—”
He started laughing. “Zama, right now I wouldn't trust you to drive around the block. Drink your coffee, okay? And call your grandpa?”
She sat. She drank coffee and tried not to look at or listen to the other people in the waiting room: a thin man holding to his head a towel drenched
in blood, a woman, moaning in pain, lying across three chairs, a heavy boy vomiting methodically into a bowl his weary mother held for him. Zama drank her coffee, grateful that Jerry wasn't trying to talk to her, and then looked unhappily at her cell phone, still clutched in her hand. She was going to have to call again. She didn't want to call. She didn't want to hear Macsofo and Aliniana screaming.
She called. Timbor answered. “Grandfather, it's Zama. I need to ask you a question. What's Betty's last name?”
There was a pause. “Hello?” Zamatryna said. “Are you there?”
“I am here, Zamatryna. Where are you, and what is wrong with Betty?”
Zama closed her eyes. “She had a heart attack. I'm at St. Mary's. I can't see her, but a nurse is going to tell me when—when they know something. But they need to know her last name, so they can contact her family.”
“Her last name is Pierre. Are you all right?”
“Yes, of course. I'm fine. I'm just shaken up.”
“You called before,” Timbor said. “You called and you heard your auntie and uncle yelling, and then you hung up. That was you, wasn't it?”
“Yes,” she said, ashamed without knowing why. “Are they—it sounded like something broke. Are they—all right?”
“A clown broke,” Timbor said. “The large clown on the hutch in the dining room. I will tell you the rest when you get home. Do not worry. Do you need me to pick you up?”

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