When he came back to the waiting room, Carolee and Oscar were making small talk, just as if they were lounging over drinks at the Martini Bar on the ship. He heard her say, “And your youngest son, what’s he do?” and then she glanced up with a smile and patted the seat beside her.
“He’s in computers,” Oscar said. “Actually paying his own rent, which is kind of a miracle these days, if you know what I mean—”
“Oh, yeah, we know,” she said, and he thought she was going to say something about Adam, but she didn’t, and that was all right, that was a blessing, because for the first time in years, it seemed, Adam had gone right out of Sten’s head — he wasn’t worrying about where he was, what he was thinking, what kind of trouble he was going to get into next, because they were in enough trouble themselves. “Don’t we, Sten?” she said, and gave him an odd look, as if she wasn’t attached to the moment, and he supposed she wasn’t and no sense in pretending otherwise. This was hard. As hard as anything that had ever happened to them, and she’d had to stand there and watch it unfold.
“Maybe you want to go freshen up?” he said, sinking into the seat. “They’ve got a real bathroom here, with hot and cold running water. Paper towels. The works. Knock yourself out.”
“Yes,” she said, rising from the chair with her black cloth bag still looped across her chest, “I think I will,” and then she was sidestepping a child in a wheelchair and making her way across the room.
They both watched her go. There was a crackle of Spanish over the address system. A baby, exasperated beyond endurance, threw back its head and began to howl. He turned to the man beside him, to Oscar, and shook his hand. “I want to thank you for doing this,” he said.
A shrug. “Least I can do.”
“What about your wife, she okay with it?” The wife, short, plain, with an expressionless face, a straw hat and an oversized turquoise necklace one of the goatees had jerked from her throat and dropped casually on the pile in the middle of the blanket, had gone back to the ship with the rest of them.
Another shrug, more elaborate this time. A smile. “Once a paramedic, always a paramedic.”
“The guy’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he’s dead. You could see that when you let go of him. But we have to try — and I tell you, I’ve seen people come back to life so many times I wouldn’t want to be taking odds. You do what you can and the rest is out of our hands, you know what I mean?” The loudspeaker crackled again, more Spanish. Oscar looked up, concentrating, then shook his head. “No, it’s nothing, it’s not for us.”
“But again, thanks for this. I owe you. When we get back to the ship, the drinks are on me.”
“No apologies. What you did out there was amazing, it really was. Word is”—he lowered his voice—“there’s been problems lately, the kind of thing the Costa Rican government, not to mention the cruise line, doesn’t want to get out. It’s not just robbery. Sometimes — again, I’ve heard rumors — they want more than that.” He shot a glance round the room, then leaned in confidentially. “They can get brutal. With the women especially. In one case I know of they raped them all, young, old, they don’t care, right in front of the men. Daughters even. Kids.”
“Jesus.”
“So what I’m saying is you don’t have to thank me, I should be thanking you.”
There was movement at the door. Sten glanced up, expecting the police, but it was only another patient, a boy of ten or so, his head wrapped in gauze and the right side of his face looking as if somebody had taken a cheese grater to it. The woman with him — his mother, his aunt, maybe a big sister — looked like a saleslady from one of the high-end stores, pink dress, heels, eye shadow, but the face she wore was the face of despair.
Distracted, he watched the woman guide the boy across the floor to the admittance desk and begin making her case to the secretary there, who barely glanced up from her computer screen. The boy was unsteady on his legs, leaning into the woman for support, and Sten could see where her dress had begun to go dark under the arm and across her breast with what might have been perspiration but wasn’t. He couldn’t understand what she was saying, but her voice rose up suddenly to jackhammer the secretary, who kept pointing to the seats in the waiting room with an increasingly emphatic jab. The woman in pink was having none of it. Her voice raged on until there was no other sound in the room. The lights flickered. The air conditioner blew. And then, as if it had all been decided beforehand, a nurse emerged to escort her and the boy into the inner sanctum and the little sounds came creeping back, people coughing, sneezing, conversing in low voices against the pain that had summoned them there. Sten could feel his blood racing. “High drama, huh?” he said.
Oscar, who’d been watching the boy too, turned back to him. “Bicycle,” he said. “Or motorbike. Bet anything.” His eyes flicked to the doorway behind the desk and back again. “And a concussion on top of it.”
Sten shifted in the chair, which had begun to dig into his backside. He wanted to stand and stretch, but instead he just sat there, bearing it. People crowded the room, faces everywhere. Somewhere a machine was whirring. Babies cried. Somebody’s phone rang. “So what now?” he said, shifting again. “I mean, what are the police going to do — I’m not in trouble, am I?”
“You? They ought to give you a medal.”
“Right, sure. But do you know anything about the laws down here?”
The thin stripe of mustache quivered and it took him a moment to realize Oscar was working up a grin, as if all this was funny, as if now, sitting here exiled in this little chamber of horrors, the real fun was about to begin. “They ought to give you a medal,” he repeated.
An hour crept by. Nothing happened. More people came dragging through the double doors and they brought more squalling babies with them, more bandages, more broken bones and abrasions, more grief, but the police never showed. Oscar, depleted of small talk, leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. Carolee kept saying, “This is ridiculous,” and Sten kept agreeing with her. Beyond the windows, the sun stood high still, though it was past five now, cocktail hour, and he couldn’t help thinking about what they were missing aboard ship, the outward-spooling loop of activities that lassoed every moment, as if to sit on deck and look out to sea would crush you with boredom. He didn’t need activities. He needed rest. He needed a drink to wash the bad taste out of his mouth. The Martini Bar was all ice, the bartop itself, frozen and planed smooth, and the air-conditioning was like the breath of a deep cave in the hills back home in Mendocino.