Amy Bloom - Where the God of Love Hangs Out

S.S. TERRA NOVA

“This one’s a day brightener,” Mrs. Shenker said. “This guy’s an amputee himself, and a world-class athlete …” Mrs. Shenker skimmed ahead a few lines. “Well, not a world-class athlete, clearly. But athletic, and he’s invented these special responsive feet that give energy back to the leg, so you don’t just walk around, clump, clump, clump, and there’s a special suction cup so the whole leg just goes on—” She makes a sharp, sucking sound.

Mr. Shenker stood up. “I’m going to take a little walk,” he said. Mrs. Shenker and Frances saw him through the glass block wall of the solarium, chatting with Theresa the charge nurse and, like magic, two more nurses showed up and they passed a box of doughnuts around and Theresa disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, carrying real coffee cups and giving one to Mr. Shenker. Mrs. Shenker had the solarium and the doctors and Mr. Shenker had the nurses. Frances had bumped into him a couple of times when he was walking out of an empty exam room, straightening his tie, and when she looked over her shoulder, she saw a nurse come out and lock the door behind her. The nurses looked transformed; they looked as if they had been handed something immensely valuable and fragile, whose care could not be entrusted to ordinary women. Mr. Shenker looked as he always did, handsome and doomed.

Frances said to Mrs. Shenker, “I have a few patients to check on. Do you want to sit with Beth?”

“Isn’t she napping?”

Frances admitted that Beth probably was napping. (Although napping was not the right word; Beth Shenker was on enough methadone to anesthetize a three-hundred-pound man and the only thing that woke her for the first eight days was a gnawing pain of the kind you get with pancreatic cancer. On the bright side, while almost no one survives pancreatic cancer, Frances thought that Beth Shenker, like most necrotizing-fasciitis victims, would survive into old age.)

Mrs. Shenker said, “All right, it’s almost time for Judge Judy . I’ll go watch that with Beth. Tell Mr. Shenker where I am, when you see him.”

Beth was dreaming. She was five, jumping up and down on her new big-girl bed in the middle of the night, clean sheets under her soft, pretty feet, the cool air tickling her soles as she jumped higher and higher, and in the dream, her little feet lit up the dark room like fireflies.

Lorraine Shenker smoothed Beth’s sheet over the metal hoop that protected her legs and straightened out Beth’s IV line and kept her eyes on Judge Judy, who was looking over her bifocals to tell a fat nineteen-year-old African American mother of twins that she deserved to lose custody of her children. The way Judge Judy waved her hand dismissively and then slipped off the bifocals to award damages to the girl’s attractive, well-dressed brother, whose car the young mother had totaled while he looked after those twins, was wonderful. It would be nice if there were a Dr . Judy, handing down diagnoses and reversing the decisions of other, dumber doctors. Dr. Judy would have taken one look at Beth and said, firmly, This young lady is not going to have a gross and permanent disability. Case dismissed.

Frances walked past Beth’s room, reading over Beth’s chart, and by the time she got to the nurses’ desk, Nathan Silverman was taking the cruller she wanted. Nathan Silverman was Beth’s surgeon, and he’d done a great job and he told everyone he’d done a great job, and Frances thought, Narcissistic grandiosity with excellent fine-motor skills, and thinking that made her smile warmly whenever she ran into him.

Dr. Silverman smiled back, yellow pieces of cruller flying everywhere, and Frances said, “Hey, Dr. Silverman,” and put her hand on her second choice, a chocolate doughnut. Her fingers sank deep into the chocolate icing. Dr. Silverman brushed the crumbs from his tie and stretched his arms over his head. Finally, he said, “Is Maria Lopez around?”

Frances said, “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s her break,” and she picked up a napkin with her free hand.

She didn’t say, If you get a move on, you can probably catch up with Maria Lopez when she comes out of Exam Room #2, right after Mr. Shenker.

“I just thought Maria might be chatting with Beth,” Dr. Silver-man said. “You know, cheering her up.”

“Could be,” Frances said.

Maria Lopez was the pinup girl of the adolescent-medicine unit. She liked to slip off her white clogs and massage her lovely calves at the end of her shift and give everyone a good look at her rhinestone-studded toe ring.

What kind of grown woman wears a toe ring? Frances thought.

Dr. Silverman said only, “Let’s get Beth thinking about recovery. She’s just a kid, Frances.”

Frances thought about Beth’s recovery all the time. Beth was thirteen, and although she could wear long sleeves to hide the river of scars that would always run up her right forearm and she could wear turtlenecks to hide the thick red web spread across her collarbone, she would always have a stump at the end of her left leg, and if Frances Cairn had had to contemplate all that at thirteen, she’s pretty sure she would have flipped open her laptop as soon as she was conscious and Googled the most effective form of suicide.

S.S. ENDURANCE

Dear Beth ,

I hope your recovery is continuing to progress. As I hope you know, everyone at the hospital was impressed with your fortitude .

Frances crossed out “fortitude” and wrote “strength of character” and went back to “fortitude,” which sounded sort of magnificent, even if Beth was unlikely to know what fortitude meant. Frances had never seen Beth read anything. Frances was with her every day for almost a month, holding her hands while Beth screamed as her arms and legs were debrided and bringing endless cups of juice and endless bags of ice chips. Frances watched Beth come out of two comas, and each time, she was the person who comforted Beth after Mrs. Shenker and Dr. Silverman had to tell Beth what day it was and how long her coma had lasted and then finally told Beth that she had only one foot. Frances did everything she could to bond with Beth and the Shenker family; at Beth’s discharge, she walked the Shenkers to the lobby, she gave Beth a care package from the staff (lip balm and Lifesavers, a photo of Beth and the floor staff, a pink T-shirt that said NO LIMITS! and a little stuffed penguin with a red-and-white Red Cross scarf around its neck). Between the multiple surgeries and the painkillers and the life ahead, Beth was hardly speaking when she left, and when Frances promised to visit Beth at home, Beth nodded, with her eyes closed, and the Shenkers drove off.

Dear Beth ,

I’ve been meaning to visit for the past three weeks but things have been really hectic at the hospital. Remember your old room 13a, the nicest private room? A new patient is in there. T— has two broken legs — nothing compared to you, I know — and sadly, his father is facing charges for having thrown him off the roof of their apartment building. T — s mother doesn’t speak English and we have not yet found an Eritrean interpreter but Dr. Silverman — I know you remember him — seems to think that if I act out each of his phrases carefully, T — s mother will understand what’s going on… .

Frances’s handwriting hadn’t changed since the sixth grade. It was the round, hopeful handwriting of girls who wrote things like: So glad we sat together in Econ! You rock. Let’s B BFF. You are so awesome. Don’t ever stop being who U R! over the pictures of CLASS CUT-UPS and the YOUTH EFFECTIVENESS SEMINAR; things that she, Frances, had never actually written to anyone. Frances’s friends were the disfigured and the disabled, one way or another, and Beth Shenker would have been one of the pretty, giggling girls who looked right through them as they limped and staggered down the hall.