Hidden in Paris (34 page)

Her heartbeat raced, involuntarily catching up to the rhythm of the drums. The burning sun baked her hair, shoulders, and back. Her tongue felt swollen inside her mouth, and her hair stuck to her face and neck. Under her coat, she sweated the last drop of her body’s moisture. The crowd grew denser, more jubilant with every step. She needed to get back to the hospital and Jared. But where was the hospital? She didn’t recognize anything in this blinding light, this crushing heat.

And suddenly, shade. She stopped walking and lifted her head. The dense shade under the canopy of giant sycamores poured on her like a liquid blanket. There was a breeze suddenly, a delicious breeze. Althea began spinning in place, looking up at the leaves playing in the breeze. The shade of the tree seemed to be there for her only, like her own private oasis. Soon there would be peaches, lemons floating in iced water, and love. She laughed. But first, she had to strip her body of this armor of a coat that choked her. Her arms had trouble getting out of the sleeves as she slowly whirled and looked up at the canopy. When her coat came off, she let it drop to the pavement.

There were faces, people watching her. Some had surprised faces. Some were laughing. She twirled and removed her turtleneck, the drenched T-shirt that clung to her chest, until she was down to her minuscule bra and the horror of her devastated body. She felt the cool air, the refreshing spin, and the strange well being that came upon her. She stopped, looked down at the ground where her shed clothes lay like fallen black wings. The floor danced. The crowd danced and laughed. There was a bright white cloud before her eyes like gauze, and then darkness.

Chapter 25

Annie bent cautiously over Jared’s bed. Had she really seen his eyelid flicker? She sat on the edge of her chair, kept her eyes on his and held her breath. Jared blinked. She sprang to her feet like a madwoman and pushed on the call button over and over. Instants later nurses and doctors were hurrying about Jared, checking machines and life signs. A beautiful Algerian nurse whom Annie had spoken to earlier gently took her by the elbow and guided her out of the room. She was made to return to the hallway to wring her hands. She looked around, trying not to jump out of her skin simply from being here. She hated this damn hospital, and the hospital hated her right back. The smell of the place alone sickened her. The terrible bright lights and the nauseating pink of the walls were like an ever-present menace. No one knew her here, of course, but she and the walls of this place remembered each other well. Being in the emergency room on this day, of all days, was bitter irony. Thirty minutes after Jared had regained consciousness, Annie was allowed back into the room.

“Heavens thank you! You’re alive!” she said.

Jared shook his head feebly and whispered, “
Je suis désolé
.”

Sorry? He was sorry? She looked at him, horrified, furious. She opened her mouth to say something but decided against it. “I better call Lucas,” she said. She turned on her heels and walked out of the room. She asked for a phone and called Lucas on his cell. “Jared will be fine,” she said.

There was a long silence, then a longer sigh. “Thank you God.”

“All he could say was ‘
je suis désolé
.’ You know what that means?”

“What does it mean?”

“It means it was suicide. That’s what it means. The asshole tried to kill himself.”

“It doesn’t have to mean that.”

“Then why did he not ask what happened, or why he was in a hospital room?”

Lucas let the thought sink in. “You have a point.”

“Please get your ass over here before I rekill him.”

“You’re upset.”

“You let me open my house to a drug addict who also happens to be suicidal. How do you expect my mood to be?”

“Who are we speaking of here?”

“Jared of course”

“I’ve known Jared most of his life, but only when that bizarre young woman enters his life does Jared get into trouble with drugs.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that she is the one who got him into trouble. She’s the drug addict.”

Annie let it sink in. Althea’s erratic behavior, the strange moods, the physical clues that something was off. Could Lucas be right? If he was right, then she was the one who had opened her house to a drug addict.

“I’m already in a taxi on my way.” Lucas said.

Annie walked back to Jared’s room with the sense that she was forgetting something. Walking through the halls she held her breath and tried not to look at all these terribly sick people. All morning the doors of the emergency room had swung open to the clamor of ambulances and an endless flow of human beings on stretchers. She went to the emergency room desk and demanded to speak to the triage nurse.

“He’s awake. Here, do you see?”

“Yes.”

“So, he doesn’t belong here. He’s no longer an emergency.”

The nurse raised a bored eyebrow. “The doctors decide who is an emergency, and who isn’t.”

“But isn’t he using up important time and resources?”

“We have the space and we have the staff.”

“In my country...”

“I know my job,
Madame
, now please sit down or leave.”

Annie left the desk grumbling, then came back and found the beautiful Algerian nurse, the one with the nice smile.

“Look,” she said. “I don’t mean to be difficult here, but I know this emergency room. I know how this place works. This is where I showed up in the middle of the night three years ago to find out that my husband was dead.”

Jared was promptly transferred to the recovery floor. She followed Jared’s rolling bed toward the elevator and up to the fourth floor. She glanced toward the hallway where they had taken her that night. At the end of the hallway was a very cold room. There, in that cold room she had identified Johnny’s body. She had shaken so much in that room, shaken so violently, that they had to hold her. There she had wept and she had hollered like a wounded beast. She had wept with grief and with murderous rage. Mostly she had wept for herself. It was in that room that she did the first and the last of her crying. She had left the morgue resolute to pull herself together, to focus on the boys and what she was going to tell them and how.

In Jared’s new room, the walls were white and there was a window. In the next bed a small black man with a large bandage across his head was sound asleep. She sat beside Jared, not sure what to say or what not to say. Lucas needed to be here soon. She wondered where Althea was. Jared’s eyes were shut, and she took it to mean that he didn’t want her to be there. She was conscious of how difficult it was for her to speak to certain people. She let words storm out of her mouth to fill voids, and she amused some, but with Jared, her words did not feel welcome or amusing. It was a familiar theme. She had often sensed in Johnny’s friends a hint of indifference to her. Maybe worse than indifference: dislike. Maybe she lacked glamour. Maybe she did not know how to behave in Parisian society. Of course she could have simply been insecure and imagined the whole thing. Those daunting parties... Johnny glowing with that peacock certainty, and the women looking at him, and Johnny, not paying attention to her a single instant. Why was bitterness coming in through the back door simply because Jared’s eyes were closed?

“Do you need anything?” she asked abruptly, ignoring the fact that Jared might be sleeping.

“I’m starving,” Jared answered, his eyes still shut.

“I’ll go ask the nurses,” she said.

She asked the hospital staff if Jared could be fed, then realized that she had forgotten to call Lola. She passed the nurse’s station on her way to the pay phone when she heard her name.

“Madame Roland?”

She approached the nurse’s station. “That’s me,” she said, figuring Lola had tracked her down. As a joke, she put both elbows on the counter like she was ordering at a café. “
Un Croque-Monsieur s’il vous plaît
.”

“They’re asking for you in the emergency room,” the nurse said.

“We were just there,” Annie said cheerfully, determined to make friends with the staff of this floor. “He’s been transferred here, to room 402.”

The nurse spoke slowly to make it sink in. “This,” she said, “is for someone who just came in. A new emergency.”

Annie saw it, the image as crystal clear as anything she had ever imagined. She distinctly saw one of her boys, any one of her boys, it didn’t matter, the head crushed, the left side of the face a pulpy mass of crushed bones and burned flesh, dead on arrival, like Johnny. “Is it my child?” she screamed.

The nurse jumped to her feet, widening her eyes and speaking fast. “They did not say.” She pointed to the elevator. “Three floors down and to your right.”

Annie sprinted across the hall, pushed the button on the elevator, changed her mind and ran down three sets of metal stairs. Her heart was like a stone in her chest and her whole body tingled with panic. Visions of Maxence, dead, Paul, dead, Laurent, dead. All three of them, dead.

Once on the ground floor she ran to the emergency desk and practically screamed.

“Someone called for me. Annie, Annie Roland.”

The triage nurse recognized her and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Not her!” she said to the beautiful nurse.

“Are we having a busy morning?” the nurse said with a smile, and Annie understood instantly from the nurse’s casual attitude that whatever it was, her boys were not in any danger. She was flooded with instant relief. Tears ran down her cheeks that she did not even bother to wipe. Her relief was complete when she was told that a ‘
demoiselle
’ had arrived on a stretcher a few minutes before and had woken up, realized where she was and asked for her. The
demoiselle
, was Althea. Althea who had passed out only a block away from the hospital after having, the report said, taken off most of her clothes in the middle of a street fair, of all things.

Annie entered the room still high on adrenalin. But the sight of Althea took her aback. She lay on the hospital cot looking as frail and vulnerable as a newly hatched chick. A bag filled with clear fluid was hooked into her arm via an IV. Annie had wondered before why she had never seen Althea without a sweater or a jacket on, and now she knew why. The barely there, sleeveless hospital gown revealed it all and she was struck to the point of nausea by the impossible thinness of Althea’s arms, the large knob of an elbow above the bandage that kept the needle of the IV in place. In the room, a nurse as tall and wide as a lumberjack was scribbling on a pad. Maybe Annie should have felt compassion, and maybe she did, but mostly she felt cheated, furious. It must have been the adrenaline let down, but she felt ready to bludgeon Althea to death. Lucas’ theory that Althea had introduced Jared to drugs now made perfect sense. Jared and Althea, two young people with so much going for them both calling for negative attention like nine-year-olds. She had let them into her life, tried to take care of them, and this was what she got in return? Both acted like she was difficult, like
she
was the pain in the ass.

“Why in the hell are you here?” she said coldly.

The massive nurse advanced toward Annie, her arms crossed over her large breasts. “
Doucement
,” she growled.

“It’s been a hard morning,” she told the nurse between clenched teeth, but the nurse continued standing in front of her, unconvinced. “I’ll be fine,” she had to say before the nurse finally stepped aside. She walked around the nurse, sat on Althea’s bed, and willed her tone into cooperation. “What happened to you?”

Althea’s gaze was absent. “Jared?”

“Jared’s up and running,” she told her. Althea’s eyes brightened, and Annie felt sorry for her suddenly. “He’s fine,” she added, “the coma didn’t last. Lucky bastard. What a scare.” She forced herself to laugh. “He is devouring his hospital lunch as we speak, food, tray and all.”

Althea did not speak but began sobbing tearless sobs. Annie reluctantly patted her bony hand. “There, there, everyone’s fine,” she said, but Althea was not fine, that much was clear. Althea’s arms, her shoulders, her chest looked awful. This was what drugs did to bodies, it was all so clear now. Something about the way Althea had looked from the start was so dreadful, so different and wrong but then again she had not known, or she had preferred not to see. “Jared’s doctors want to run tests, keep him for a while, and then off to rehab if I have a say in this,” she said. She searched Althea’s forearms for a sign that she had used drug needles. How could one tell? Not all drugs came in a syringe. Were there drugs hidden somewhere in her home, a drawer away from her boys? A part of her brain was quickly thinking up schemes to get Althea and Jared out of her house by any means necessary.

But another part of her brain was screaming something too. Something she could not hear, and there was this terrible hollowness in the pit of her stomach. “This is a warning sign for both of you,” she said. “You both need to go to rehab.”

“I didn’t take drugs,” Althea whispered.

Annie smirked. “Yeah, right!”

“No drugs,” said the sergeant nurse. She read from her pad, “dehydration, and exhaustion, but mostly starvation. Looks like a concentration camp victim.”

Annie turned toward the nurse, flashed her best death stare, and turned back to Althea. She took a deep breath, “no drugs,” she echoed, and then, stuttered in anguish. “My home’s... hardly a concentration camp!” Her voice broke, and she tried to hold those burning tears, but they squirted out of her eyes irrepressibly.

“Weighing in at 90 lbs,” the nurse added. “A clear case of anorexia nervosa. And a bad one. Very sick that girl. Been going on for quite a while.”

“I thought you were on a diet. I didn’t mean...” Annie said. She was bawling now and there was nothing she could do to stop herself.

Althea’s exhausted voice tried to appease her. “It’s not your fault.”

“But I knew you were not eating. I knew it.”

“It’s all my own fault.”

“I saw,” Annie sobbed. “I saw and I didn’t make you eat.”

“It’s not like that.”

“I don’t... understand,” Annie sobbed, her shoulders shaking.

“Me neither,” Althea said, shaking her head, “me neither.”

“But did you know?”

Althea hesitated. “Kind of.”

The two of them became silent. Annie grabbed Althea’s hand. “I’m so sorry.”

“But Jared is going to be fine?”

Annie blew her nose. “As it turns out, it’s only drugs. He’s probably the healthier of the two of you.”

“I was thinking,” Althea paused and looked away, “maybe I need to go home.”

“Sure, absolutely!” Annie sprang to her feet. “I’ll take you home right now. Let’s get out of this joint.”

“Hospitalization is mandatory,” said the nurse who was obviously a sadist and did not want to miss a second of this.

“I mean, go
home
, to the States.”

Annie sat back down on the bed. She knew what she was going to say and knew she would regret saying it. “Your home’s here,” she affirmed, her voice calm, her eyes steady. “We are your family. Dysfunctional, yes, but family, nonetheless.”

“I’m afraid to go back to my mother. I don’t think I’ll get better there.”

Annie tried a joke, as she contemplated how she was essentially screwing herself up, but some things have to be done and cannot be undone and some words have to be said, and cannot be unsaid. “Well, I’m far too young, but please consider me to be your temporary dysfunctional mother.”

Althea looked at her with clear eyes, eyes that were full of a certain light, a hopeful light, and said, “Thank you.”