“Nothing for you to be sorry about,” I say, feeling remorseful already. “I’m the one who’s sorry that I didn’t have a chance to visit with your son while I was here. I could go up with you now—”
“Please, Doc, your friends are waiting for you outside. And I see you’re not moving so quickly. Not like usual, anyway. Maybe you can come back, but only when you’re feeling yourself again.”
“Perhaps you’re right.”
“Of course I am,” she says, trying to reassure me. “Besides, Patrick has hardly been awake the last few days. He’s had much better weeks. I know he’ll feel better soon, and when he does I’ll call you right away.”
“Okay, that’s a deal.”
“You bet it is,” she replies, still holding my hand, and quite tightly. She looks down into her lap, and suddenly I realize she’s crying.
“Mrs. Hickey,” I say, crouching closer to her. “You must hold on as best you can. It will be very difficult, but you have to, a little longer. Your son is counting on you.”
She nods and whispers, “Yes, he is.”
“The doctors will find a heart for him, and soon enough Patrick will be home, playing in the store.”
“I hope James is around for that,” she says, wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve. “He’s been terribly angry of late. I haven’t seen him for days, and I don’t know if he’s even been in to see Patrick this week.”
“Is it the money problems with the store?”
“It’s always money problems. But they’re mostly over now. He’s really decided to give up.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s going to give everything back to the bank. The whole building, the apartments, the store, everything. We haven’t paid the mortgage in some months, you know, because of Patrick’s bills. Business has been slow anyway. It has been, truthfully, ever since we bought the store from you. We only have about a month of insurance left. A few days ago we had a fight, and it was terrible. He said he wished they’d find Patrick a heart or not, and I went crazy. I asked him what he meant by ‘a heart or not,’ and he said we couldn’t go on like this anymore, waiting for something that might never come, and maybe not work anyway, with the hospital costing us fifteen hundred dollars a day. I asked him if he really thought that way and he didn’t answer. Then I told him to get out.”
“It was a natural response.”
“I know, but now I wish I hadn’t. Sometimes, Doc, for a second, I’ll think that way, too, but I don’t want to admit it. James has been so frustrated with the business these last few years. It’s never really worked for us. Then Patrick got sick and everything fell apart. We’re losing everything, and I don’t blame James for saying those things. He’s under so much pressure. He was wrong to say it. But even I can’t blame him anymore. I don’t. Am I an awful mother, Doc? Am I horrible?”
“You’re nothing of the kind, Mrs. Hickey.”
“I’m glad you think so,” she says, letting go of me now. Wisps of her light hair fall down over her temples and brow, and from this angle she reminds me of the obituary photograph of a younger Mary Burns, the clear, high sheen of the skin, the tender brow. “You’ve always been kind to us, and I hope you know that I appreciate it. James will, too, someday, when all this is over. We’ve just had bad luck with the store and he blames you for it, though there’s no reason why he should. You sold us a nice business and it seemed like the next day the whole economy went sour. Somehow James has this crazy idea in his head that you sold us a lemon, that you knew the business would only get worse but made out as if otherwise. But even if that were true, I say we should have realized it ourselves, caveat emptor. I don’t know why I’m getting into this except that nothing seems good for us these days, and I guess it would be nice to hear that it’s all a run of bad luck that has to end soon.”
“That must be what it is,” I tell her, not wanting her to think ill of the store. “Bad luck can come but it cannot last, either. I know this myself. You do what you can under extreme circumstances, perseverance your only goal. After the difficulties, you can begin again, but you must put behind you what has occurred. Like your husband’s words, for example. They were spoken under great duress, which makes people most unlike who they really are. We talk of people rising heroically in times of adversity, but I think that’s rarer than we’d like to believe. I’m sure Mr. Hickey is remorseful for his thoughts about Patrick, just as deeply as you are. The task now is to forgive and forget.”
There is silence between us, not so much because I’ve said anything profound or true but that we’ve gone much further in the conversation than either of us had anticipated. We both nod, trying to say how we appreciate the moment, although it pains me to think that the Hickeys have discussed the possibility that I might have made misrepresentations when I sold them the store in a neat and ordinary sale-by-owner. The last thing Mrs. Hickey needs is to wonder if I have had a part in their lamentable slide into misfortune, rather than focusing on the care and well-being of her son, and supporting her deeply stressed husband. With Sunny Medical Supply, I can say that I had no reservations at all of their prospects, except of course their own inexperience in general and Mr. Hickey’s stubbornness in particular. Mr. Hickey can always contend that keeping certain contracts with the area hospitals was in fact an impossibility, given the immense buying power of the national franchises which had recently opened, and that I purposely overstated the relationship and loyalty I’ve enjoyed with those hospitals. But I’ve gone over this ground too many ways, and each time I conclude just as Mrs. Hickey has, which is that not only should one always be wary when buying into a situation, but once committed, graciously accept all realities.
Which, presently, is that I should find Liv’s metallic green Saab and so make my way home. Mrs. Hickey offers to walk me all the way to the parking lot and to the car itself, but I refuse, saying how I’m disturbed that I’ve already taken time away from her son. Again I shudder with the thought of having to see him with her there, her mother’s presence somehow an added burden to me, as if she might spy something damning in my face. She escorts me instead to the automatic doors, and we make tentative plans again, contingent upon this and that, all of it contigent still upon Patrick and Patrick alone, and the sad and peculiar notion of waiting for a heart.
One realizes, of course, what it will mean when a heart does arrive, that another young boy or girl has come to an awful end, and it makes me think again how the conservational laws apply to human beings and their endeavors as well as to energy and matter, and that for us, those laws are often ironical and cruel. I recall Fujimori posting me from Borneo, where he and Enchi had been assigned, writing about our friend’s death. I still have the letter and read it sometimes for no burning reason.
“We could not find much of his body, Jiro. It was simply not present anymore. A corporal found a thumb some sixty meters from the spot where Enchi was last standing, but there had been others who were badly hurt and we couldn’t be sure if it was his. He was the only one killed, somehow. There was nothing left of him. Nothing else of shape, just tiny bits of flesh on the ground and most awfully, up in the branches of the trees. The shell must have landed right between his feet, and he disappeared. The night before, Enchi had been going on and on at the officers’ club, drunkenly, of course, about living here forever in this tropical paradise. He was obviously talking against his fear of death but he was doing so with great feeling and humor, and to a man we wanted to believe him. Later that night, after a service for him and then drinking alone, I walked past the spot. It was perfectly normal, having been cleared earlier. But I heard a rustle and I looked up into the trees directly above, and in the light of the moon I could see the tree limbs filled with small birds, what seemed like hundreds and hundreds of them. They were happily picking at the leaves and branches, and rather than feeling horror for our good Enchi, I began to bellow like a cow, and I almost fell down.”