The Walking People (39 page)

 

When Greta learned that Long Island College Hospital was not on Long Island, where she'd never been, but in Brooklyn, where she had, she began to cry. "Long Island!" she'd shouted at the cabdriver when she jumped in, leaning her head over the partition to add, "Please hurry."

The driver sighed. Please hurry, please hurry, that's all he ever heard. "I'll never get a fare back," he said. If she was in such a rush, she'd offer to pay for the return trip. "Where on Long Island?"

Greta, not used to taking taxis, was surprised that he had not zipped away from the curb upon hearing her destination and panicked that he would reject her request and ask her to get out. She'd never seen anyone hop into a cab and then hop right out again. Did she even have her purse? Yes. Wallet? What buses went to Long Island? Did the Long Island trains leave from Penn Station or Grand Central or both? When she spoke again her brogue was as thick as the day she arrived, a phenomenon that occurred whenever she was nervous or angry or very happy, and she had to repeat herself twice. Taking a deep breath, she told herself what her bosses had told her at Bloomingdale's all those years: slow down, enunciate. Think before you speak, Greta. Greta, try to act as if you understand.

"Long Island College Hospital," she said for the third time, and just like that, he understood the situation.

"Hey, good news," he said. "That hospital is in Brooklyn. We'll be there in twenty."

"Miss," he added when he saw that she had begun to cry—big, heavy sobs that transformed her face so much that he could no longer have guessed her age. "I'm sure it'll be fine. I got an aunt who went to that hospital. She had the big C. Breast. Turned out healthier than ever. I'm going over there for dinner day after tomorrow."

Greta wiped her face with the sleeve of her shirt and realized that she'd forgotten to ask Julia what she should give him in the way of a tip. Quietly, and out of the view of the rearview mirror where the
driver kept trying to catch her eye, she slid a crumpled ten from her purse and smoothed it out against her thigh.

Once in the emergency room, Greta leaned over to place her mouth directly in front of the circular hole cut out of the glass partition at the information desk. "There's been an accident," she said. "The water tunnels." The woman behind the glass told Greta to take a seat, a doctor would see her shortly. Like an obedient child, Greta stepped carefully around the waiting patients, people clutching their heads, people cradling their arms, and found an empty chair. Once seated, she wondered if the woman had heard her right. Wake up, she told herself, and putting on her most businesslike expression, she went back up and explained that she wasn't injured, her husband was, he was a sandhog and had gotten injured on the job.

"A what?" the nurse asked. "A hog?"

"Construction," Greta explained. "Water tunnels. Please. His name is Michael Ward. I don't even know what happened."

"The tunnel worker," the lady said, and her expression softened. "Okay, I'm sorry. Step through that door and go up to the third floor. Tell them who you are, understand? In the meantime I'll call up and tell them you're on your way."

From the moment Greta had sat down on the backseat of the cab, she'd felt short of breath, like someone much stronger than she had his hands around her throat, and now that pressure spread to her chest, her stomach, and her legs, which were becoming heavier with every step. "Third floor," she repeated as she pushed through the swinging door. She should have taken Eavan and James up to Mrs. Kraus and had Julia come with her. Julia was always calm. Julia always knew the right questions to ask. The display above the elevator door said that the car was on the eighth floor and rising. She looked around the corner for the stairs, and when she found them, she clutched the banister and took the three flights two steps at a time. Once on the third-floor hall, she looked left and right for the nurses' station, took a few quick steps in one direction, and, changing her mind, turned around and went the other way. When she found it, she announced herself before she'd even stopped walking. "The tunnel worker," she said. "I'm his wife."

She heard her name being called and turned to find Ned Powers walking down the hall toward her. He was still in his work clothes, mud dried and caked to the middle of his thighs. It was difficult to tell where his boots ended and his jeans began. His top half was cleaner where he'd removed his jacket, but his neck and face were filthy. My God, she thought with a lurch, there must have been a rock fall, a collapsed wall, Michael buried and crushed. Then, spying the flashlight still in Ned's back pocket, she remembered that this was normal, this was how they all looked after work before they showered and put on their street clothes again. It didn't mean anything more.

"Ned," she said, rushing up to him. "What happened?"

"I've been here the whole time, Greta. He's just out of surgery. Surgery is downstairs and then they bring him up. In the ambulance they said he has a broken arm and a cut in his leg that goes almost to the bone, and they had a question about his ribs. The doctors won't talk to—"

"Can I see him?" she asked Ned, and then turned and repeated her question to the nurse.

"No, dear, not yet. But I'll send the doctor out to speak to you. You can wait for him in the lounge, and I'll send him right in."

"Greta," Ned said, leaning up against the wall and taking a deep breath as the nurses cringed and looked at one another. "I'm a fucking eejit ninety-nine point nine percent of the time and I know it full well. Michael, he always says no, Ned, you're not a fucking eejit, but I—"

"I just want to see him, Ned," she said, walking past him, but he reached out his enormous hand, which was as knotty and rough as Michael's, and pulled her toward his chest.

"He'll be fine," Ned insisted to the top of Greta's head. After a few seconds Greta managed to wriggle away. Filthy pig, she thought. I could kill him. It was his fault somehow. She felt it. What did Michael see in this man, his only friend? All the nice Irish who work in the tunnels, and this is the one he lands home with every other Friday to eat up all the meat she'd gotten on sale at Spice'n Slice. And gab in the living room, gab and gab, Michael barely saying a thing, only smiling and nodding and adding his two cents now and again. That Ned Powers could talk to the wall. She had to kick him out half the time,
dropping hints about the children and bedtime and them not used to cursing and shouting stories and laughing all night when, of course, they were well used to it, Ned being over so often since Kate went back home with their baby. Jesus, the shock that day when they heard about his little boy.

Remembering, Greta became immediately kinder. She put her hand on Ned's arm and squeezed. It was a wonder any child made it to school age with all the things that could happen. But still, Greta thought as she sniffed the air around him, drunk at four o'clock in the day. If there was one type of person Lily couldn't stand, it was a drinker, and Big Tom used to want to kill her for giving coins to Nell Bourke in town, whose husband had it bad. Every time Greta laid eyes on Ned's big red drinker's face she thought of Lily turning her back on Mr. Bourke when he passed her on the road. Lily, gone by now except for bones. Greta often wondered what dress they'd buried her in and if the land next to Big Tom had held up well enough for Lily to be buried beside him.

"I'll show you to the waiting lounge," the head nurse said, and Greta turned her back on Ned to follow the nurse's brisk pace down the hall, past patient rooms, to a corner door that led to a room with a pair of mismatched couches and a stack of magazines.

"Mrs. Ward," the nurse said as Greta looked at the couches and decided she didn't feel like sitting. "That man has been drinking."

"Drinking?" Greta said, looking around the empty room as if trying to figure out what she could possibly be talking about.

"That man," the nurse said, tilting her head toward a vague spot somewhere over Greta's shoulder. Greta turned to find Ned making his way down the hall toward them, touching the wall every few steps to find his balance, his boots leaving dried pieces of dirt behind him like a trail of bread crumbs. "We suggested he go home, but he wouldn't listen. Now that you're here, perhaps...?"

"I just want to see Michael," Greta said, lowering herself to the very edge of the closest couch, her back to the hallway.

"Of course," the nurse said. "I'm sending Dr. Medina right in." The nurse pulled the door closed behind her.

***

Greta had tried to picture the tunnels many times, but always, when she imagined Michael going about his day, she came up against a blank that represented a piece of information she didn't have. Where did the men change their clothes? Were there stalls or were they all naked together? Did they have so many lights going down in the tunnel that they forgot they were underground? Where did the lights plug in? Were there hills and valleys underground, or were the tunnels built level so it always felt like a flat surface? What would happen if the cage didn't work one day? Did the water ever get so deep or rush so fast that the men got afraid it might fill up the whole tunnel? And if it did, would they be drowned? Or could the water possibly sweep them out of the tunnel and up the shaft to the top, like the piece of potato that sits at the bottom of the pot but rises to the top again when you fill the pot with water?

Michael had answered all of her questions, amused that she found it so interesting, amused that she forgot his answers sometimes and asked the same question a few months later. Some of her questions were about details so small she didn't even know what to ask. Others were so familiar to him that he didn't know how to explain. No, he'd said just a few weeks earlier, throwing back his head and laughing. They never got afraid the water would fill up the tunnel, but then they both remembered him wondering about this very possibility his first week on the job, 1970, Julia sprawled on the kitchen floor practicing her letters, trying on the ink pen Greta had given her as if it were a new accessory, tucking it, finally, between her first and second fingers and holding out her hand to admire it from a distance. Michael, who'd been to Bloomingdale's many times and then to Macy's where Greta now worked, knew exactly what Greta's day looked like, where her register was, what an impression the racks of clothes made hanging there in the wrong season—wool coats in August, bathing suits in March—the piles upon piles of garments that went in and out of the dressing rooms every day, most of which had to be inspected, turned right side out, returned to the correct rack. The disagreements over how to dress the mannequins.

Now and again, hearing of some politician or writer who went down into the tunnels for a look, Greta would get it into her head that
they should have a day when family could go down to see what's what. "Never," Michael always said. "It will never happen."

"Because the bosses wouldn't allow it or because you wouldn't allow it?"

"Both."

Now, waiting for Dr. Medina to come in and tell her what Michael's injuries were, Greta wished more than ever that she could fill in the blanks of his day. He'd been to sixteen sandhog funerals in sixteen years, all men killed on the job, but the details of those accidents were as vague to Greta as the details of the construction, digging the shaft, bracing the walls, mixing the concrete and laying it down. All of this before the first foot of tunnel was blasted. Suddenly, in this quiet room that had a distinct whiff of oranges, Greta became furious with herself. Like an idiot, like the soft-minded goose that she was, she'd just packed his lunches, sent him off, bought him new long johns and thermal socks faster than he could go through them. Worse, she'd often reminded Michael that they were lucky to have the tunnels to depend on. The Carpenters Union, the Scaffolders Union, even the Bus Drivers Union—all notoriously difficult to penetrate without a connection, and none paid as well as the tunnels. So he'd stayed on, year after year. And now this. Again she thought of calling Julia and telling her to bring the little ones up to Mrs. Kraus and take a cab to Brooklyn. She looked around for a phone but found only more piles of magazines. She sat down once more and began to feel as if she'd already spent a week in that room, a month, that her whole life had been pointing to this moment—alone in a room with blue walls, blue carpet, the sickening smell of oranges gone too ripe—expecting a doctor to walk through the door. A thought skittered through her mind: I've known him my whole life.

"Mrs. Ward?" Dr. Medina said, crossing the room in two long strides. He held out his hand, but instead of shaking it, she squeezed it and let go. He looked around the room. "Are you here on your own?"

"Yes," she said, flashing briefly to Ned, who was still in the hall.

"Your husband was lucky," the doctor said, and Greta felt the invisible man who'd been choking her all afternoon loosen his grip. "He broke two ribs, and one punctured his lung. Considering the amount of
time it took them to get him down the tunnel and up the elevator—is it an elevator?—he was very fortunate. He has a large tear in the rotator cuff of his left shoulder. He also has a very deep cut on his left leg, which we're going to have to keep a close eye on. He's scheduled for shoulder surgery tomorrow morning, and I'm keeping him under until then."

"Can I look in on him?"

"I already have the nurse getting you a mask and a gown. I'm worried about that leg. It should be fine, but I want no chance of infection. Traffic in and out of his room must be kept to the absolute minimum. You understand, I'm sure. Listen," he said then in a different tone, and placed a hand on her shoulder. "The bottom line is, if all goes well, he could back on his feet in no time. He'll need therapy, of course, on the leg and the shoulder, but he's strong as an ox, your husband. Is that a brogue I hear?"

Greta nodded.

"Him too?"

Greta nodded again.

"Beautiful place," Dr. Medina said as he escorted her down the hall to the nurses' station. "It's completely untouched, isn't it? Like a time capsule."