Chapter 21: The Hospital
Boone woke to a ceiling he almost knew. The tiles were the same institutional white, the seams in the same grid, and for a moment his mind tried to place the room four years back and three floors down, where the ceilings had looked identical and had meant something entirely different. Then the pain in his side announced its own geography, and he understood he was a patient this time, which was a stranger thing than he would have predicted.
St. Anne's. Third floor, surgical step-down. A nurse named Delia, who was not Sarah and said so cheerfully, as if heading off a confusion she met often, told him the doctors were pleased, the wound was clean, and he had been lucky in the one particular way that mattered: nothing vital had been in the blade's road. Boone said he had never thought of himself as a man with luck to spare. Delia adjusted his pillow and told him he could think it over at his leisure, because he was not getting up today.
The room had a window that faced the parking structure, and beyond it the ridge, hazed and green. He lay and watched strangers come and go below with flowers and balloons and the particular hurry of people whose worst hour was happening on a schedule. Four years ago he had been one of them, downstairs, in the chairs by the vending machine that ate quarters. But he had never been back inside it, not once, not even when the diner sent a card around for signatures. Now he was here in a gown that tied wrong, and the building was simply doing its work, indifferent and competent, and he found the indifference oddly merciful. It did not remember him. It had too much to do.
Sarah came in the late afternoon, still in her scrubs from a shift she had traded away, carrying a paper bag and the air of a woman visiting in a category she had not named yet. Not family. Not not-family. She set his reading glasses on the tray table with the care of a nurse and the self-consciousness of someone else entirely.
"You left these on the counter at home," she said. "Otis let me in. I fed the cat you don't have."
"I don't have a cat," Boone said.
"Then something gray is living in your mudroom, and it sends its regards."
She had news, delivered in the flat way she delivered all important things, as if flatness were a form of respect for the facts and for him. Ketch was in the county jail. No bail. The troopers had the knife, the letter, the coat, the plaza cameras, and a prosecutor who used the phrase "open and shut" only when she meant it. Boone should rest. Boone should heal. Boone should not, under any circumstances, be Boone about any of it.
"I can manage rest," he said. "Rest is mostly lying still and losing arguments with nurses."
"Then you'll do beautifully."
Before she left she stood a moment with her hand on the door, and neither of them said the thing about the building, the floors between this room and that room, because some things do not need saying between people who have both read the same map.
He slept in fragments after she left, and each time he surfaced it took a moment to remember which year the ceiling belonged to. Toward evening he decided that was progress: the room was learning to be only a room.
Poppy came the next day, briefly, in the visitors' room on the first floor, because children her age were not permitted on the surgical floor and Boone would not have asked it anyway. Otis escorted her, enormous and formal in a clean shirt, carrying her backpack like a valet. She had made a card. She presented it with both hands, the way she had been taught to present anything breakable.
The card was folded construction paper, blue, with a drawing in crayon: a house, a porch, a stick figure with a gray beard, and front and center — larger than the figure, larger than the house — a yellow raincoat, drawn with the waxy pressure of a child pressing meaning into paper.
"That's the coat," Poppy said. "So it knows where you are."
Boone held the card the way he had held things in evidence bags, two-handed, careful of the edges. "That is exactly right," he said. "That is exactly where it belongs."
He thanked her with a gravity that had nothing theatrical in it, and the nurse at the desk, who had seen everything hospitals contain, looked away and busied herself with a chart that did not need her. Otis cleared his throat. Poppy, satisfied, asked whether the cafeteria still had the pudding with the skin on top, and the moment folded itself back into the ordinary world, which was where Boone intended, from now on, to live.