I turned for one last whiff of the place and saw the baker dialing a wall phone. He spoke into the receiver in rapid Chinese. I clearly heard him say “Lim” twice. To tell the truth, everything he said sounded like “Lim” to me. His manner was so much like Em’s landlady, Mrs. Lim, brusque and grouchy, that I might have been listening for her name, assuming a kinship. Wondering what I was doing that made me so offensive, I admired Emily anew for her ability to get along peacefully with so many people.
I went back out into the rain, wondering whether hotels ran credit card checks before they handed out room keys.
Down at the corner, French Hospital was a lighted block against the dark of a school playground beyond it. I hugged the coffee close to me, hoping for some warmth to seep through the cup.
“I am Caesar.” A man shrouded in a tattered tarp held a gloved hand toward me, offering a limp square of paper. “I’m deliverin’ to you the message and the truth.”
The scrawny brown dog he led on a shoestring leash cowered behind him and growled at me. I took the man’s paper, assuming it was some sort of religious tract, and pressed on him the wet money the baker had refused. I felt it wasn’t rightfully mine, anyway.
“Bless you.” He looked closely at me through the downpour. “I don’ want no money. I already received my reward.”
He reached toward me and frightened me. I started to run back toward the shelter of the bakery lights.
“Wait,” he cried with such anguish that I stopped. “Pretty lady, don’ be scared. Jus’ take your money.”
“What’s wrong with my money?”
“I can’t take nothin’ from you.”
“Go buy the dog a meal, he looks hungry.”
“We’re okay.” He had to hold the money against his upturned palm to keep it from being washed away. “Please, I can’t take it from you.”
“Keep it,” I said, and rushed past him. “It is the message and the truth.”
Outside the hospital entrance there were more candles. And flowers, too, several little pots of them, and one good-sized spray of white carnations. The ribbon sash across the carnations had DOLOR spelled out in gold letters. Pain, it meant. Stuck to the flower easel was a round pro-choice sticker. I wasn’t sure what the message was, except it had nothing to do with Christmas.
The small waiting room inside was crammed with people, a mini U.N., a fair representation of the city’s immigrant makeup. The information pamphlets on the wall came in five different languages, but they all looked poor. Women held sleeping children in their laps, men stood along the sides, clustered in pairs or trios, with their heads together. A brace of nuns averted their eyes as I passed.
Behind a window at the far end of the lobby, I found a receptionist. She was a round little woman, about my age, with TRINH FREEDMAN pinned to her stiff white bodice. When I cleared my throat, she looked up from the stack of file folders she was sorting.
“Is Emily Duchamps here?” I asked.
“The hospital has no comment to make about Dr. Duchamps.”
I stifled a laugh. The hospital must have learned over the years how to deal with Emily’s crusades. I had heard the State Department use nearly the same phrase when Em took off on an unauthorized medical mission to Cuba during a typhus epidemic. I hoped that this was only a flash of deja vu and not a clue that Em was in trouble again.
“I’m Dr. Duchamps’s sister,” I said. “I’ve come to fetch her home with me.”
“Oh! Miss MacGowen.” Trinh Freedman’s head snapped back and she blushed. “I didn’t see it was you. We don’t say nothing to the press about Dr. Duchamps.”
“Glad to hear it. Will you please page my sister or point me in her direction?”
“Page her?” She looked around the lobby, meeting the dozens of eyes turned on us. Then she got up and smoothed the seat of her white uniform. “Come with me, please.”
“If she’s in the lab, I’ll wait here,” I said.
“Doctor is not in the lab. Please, this way.”
She led me into the maze of slick, polished corridors.
I’m not sure when denial kicked in. I was considering offering Trinh my unpaid-for Ferragamo pumps in trade for her worn, white oxfords instead of thinking about where she was leading me, or why everyone we passed stopped in their tracks and stared. Even when I’m dry, I don’t have the sort of looks that make people stop and stare. I should have tumbled.
Because of my line of work, I found the scene we walked through thoroughly familiar: big city hospital, knots of uniformed police and paramedics sloping against the walls, plainclothes detectives with guns on their belts, medical people in white lab coats and soft-soled shoes bustling among them, the smells of coffee and disinfectant.
Trinh checked back to make sure I was still with her, waited for me to catch up. The door I followed her through was marked INTENSIVE CARE, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
When I went inside, I saw panels of monitors, the back of a uniformed nurse hovering over a patient on a raised hospital bed. The patient lay absolutely motionless.
“Barbara,” Trinh said to the nurse. “Miss MacGowen has come to see Dr. Duchamps.”
The nurse stepped away from her patient.
I stood frozen, dazzled by all the white-white sheets, white gown, masses of white gauze bandages, dead-white skin.
Incredibly, in the middle of the whiteness, all six feet of her stretched the length of the high bed, was my sister, Emily.
Chapter Three
My brother, Marc, came home from Vietnam in a bronze box with a bronze star on his chest. I was barely sixteen. I remember edging up to his coffin, expecting him to throw open the lid, shout boo and laugh and pass out some of the righteous grass he had promised to smuggle home. An elaborate prank would have surprised me less than watching his box disappear, seals intact, under a load of gray cemetery dirt.
On December 20, 1969, Marc died. Now he had been dead for exactly as long as he had lived. Twenty-two years. The two halves of his life, measurably the same, seemed so unequal; one too short, the other endlessly long.
Now here was Emily, his twin in life, perhaps in death as well. It was a strange and horrible irony.
I edged over to the bed and found Emily’s hand under the sheets. Her icy fingers didn’t respond, but I held on to them anyway. “Emily?”
“She can’t hear you,” Nurse Barbara whispered.
“How do you know?” The situation was so weird I couldn’t take it in. What I wanted to say to this nurse was, “Emily always hears everything.” Instead I put my face so close to Em’s that her soft gauze turban brushed my cheek. “Em, it’s me, Maggot.”
“Honestly, Miss MacGowen, she can’t hear you.”
“What’s happened to Emily?”
Trinh Freedman hovered at the end of the bed. “I’ll get Doctor Song.”
I looked at her, stopped her flight toward the door. “What happened to Emily?” I demanded.
“We’re not authorized to say.”
“Authorized, hell,” I snapped.
“I’ll get Doctor.”
I appealed again to Barbara, but from the anxiety in her face I knew there was no point in pursuing it.
Under the fluorescent lights, Emily was impossibly pale. There was a network of fine lines around her eyes I had never noticed before. In my mind’s eye, she is still the young woman on the cover of Time, fresh and earnest and powerful. Here in front of me was Emily the middle-aged woman. How was it possible I hadn’t noticed the passage?
Emily’s mouth was drawn into a hard 0, like a maiden aunt puckered for a duty kiss. I felt I should kiss her.
“Maggie MacGowen?”
I wheeled at the deep voice behind me. He was dark and slender, a tall Asian wearing a crisp white lab coat.
“Doctor?” I said.
“Albert Song.” He extended his hand. “I’m glad you made it so quickly.”