Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

It was at this point in the discussion that the shy internist appeared from behind the column. Cecilia grasped at his arrival; in an act of desperation she invited him to sit with them, and when Viberti got up to go and order his usual plate of boiled vegetables she whispered to her sister that she’d forgotten she had arranged to meet her coworker, that she couldn’t send him away, and that they could pick up their conversation later on. If she thought Silvia would get up and leave them alone she was sorely mistaken. Not only did she remain seated and start eating her sandwich and sipping her tea, but she began chatting amiably with the internist. Poor Viberti was more uncomfortable than usual and tried as hard as he could to get a polite, normal conversation going with Silvia. But it was impossible to speak normally with Silvia, the conversation veered off in all directions. Like a cat on fire , her father used to say (she suddenly remembered the summer when her father had made up that expression after reading in the newspaper that pyromaniacs were drenching stray cats with gasoline, setting them on fire, and tossing them into the woods so they would spread the flames as they dashed madly from one bush to another, crazed with pain). For a while she thought she could stay in her seat and observe the scene and maybe even eat the sandwich that she hadn’t yet touched. Instead, she grew increasingly edgy, her chest felt tight and her stomach clamped, and after ten minutes the anger and pain made her leap up like a spring. Silvia had referred to her perennial boyfriend using the old name she’d stuck him with, Enrico Fermi, and among the many things about her sister that rubbed her the wrong way, her obsession with nicknames was particularly annoying. Partly because she was afraid it would rub off — when she called Viberti “the shy internist,” for example. And when she was finally outside, her eyes filled with tears at the thought of her daughter crying and saying, “I want her to like me.” Heels pounding the sidewalk as if to punish the pavement as she strode along, she reached the car, parked in the sun as usual, and too far away.

* * *

(An update on settings: the hospital has been largely decentralized, the oldest buildings demolished, my father’s section no longer exists; the Emergency wing was torn down, set up elsewhere, razed, completely rebuilt; Cecilia’s house was sold and divided into two smaller apartments; my father’s house hasn’t changed; their café is still there, and this is what amazes me the most, after all these years they’ve replaced the furnishings, naturally, but the column, the column is still standing, “like an ancient ruin,” Silvia would have said.)

* * *

A few days later, all of a sudden, she found herself thinking about how hateful her sister could be. She thought of how she had protected Silvia when their father was ill. She’d made sure she didn’t see him fall to pieces. She’d arranged her sister’s visits so that he’d seem like a retired old general, rather than a cancer victim. At the hospital one night, her father had ripped out the IV drip; they’d found him half-naked in the hallway pushing a wheelchair, he no longer knew which ward he’d run away from, he was convinced he was at the supermarket. When he returned home he’d confided to her that he was afraid of seeing Silvia alone, and she advised him to always take a Xanax before seeing her. It was odd to discover that her father behaved like all other human beings, that he ran away, and cried, and felt hopeless because he was afraid of dying.

* * *

The day the boy returned to the hospital, he wasn’t starving to death in an examining room in the ER, but was waiting for her in the outpatients’ department in Pediatrics. It was Antonio Lorenzi who called her and, in a light, playful tone that Cecilia didn’t care for, told her that her son had come to see her, with Luca, as a surprise.

“What happened?”

“Nothing serious, he had a little fainting spell at school, but he’s fine.”

She felt like she was going to die.

“Come on up and we’ll tell you all about it,” Lorenzi added.

Her heart was in her throat and her legs were unsteady and two flights of stairs were unthinkable in that state, so she got into an elevator with two male nurses pushing an empty gurney. The elevator started and then immediately jolted to a stop; the nurses tried pressing a few buttons at random but nothing happened, they were stuck.

“Are we stuck?” they asked each other. “Are we stuck?” they asked her, but she was too frightened to reply. “Well, what the heck’s going on?” one of them asked. “I’m a little claustrophobic,” the other man said, though he seemed very calm.

The first one leaned toward the control panel, sounded the alarm, spoke into the microphone alerting someone of the situation.

A voice crackled from the microphone: “I’ll check.”

“Nothing we can do but wait,” the two men said, looking at her again.

Cecilia lowered her eyes to hide her panic.

“Are you claustrophobic, Doctor?” they asked her indifferently, with no hint of irony.

“No, thank you,” she replied mechanically.

The two exchanged glances. Another crazy lady, they thought. Or: There’s not one normal person in this place. They tried pressing the buttons some more and the elevator suddenly started moving again. When it stopped at the first floor, the doors opened and the two nurses got out without saying goodbye. “You see, it all worked out,” one said to the other.

She stayed in the corner, leaning against the metal wall, stuck in place, because her legs refused to respond to her commands, and her commands were uncertain and confused.

Then the same voice as before crackled from the microphone: “So, tell me exactly what the problem is.”

Cecilia leaped forward, got out of the elevator, and took the stairs.

The first person who came up to her was Luca and she took refuge in his arms, unable to speak. Luca kept repeating “Everything’s okay,” stroking her hair, and they stayed like that, holding tight to each other as they hadn’t done in years. He told her that the child had fainted at school, that the teachers hadn’t been able to reach her (her cell phone was dead), and the ER’s number was always busy, so they called him.

They drew apart only when Lorenzi came out of the outpatients’ ward and walked over to them and said to her, “You’re white as a sheet, wait, you can’t go in to see him like that,” and he led them into the doctors’ lounge. This time the shy internist wasn’t there waiting for her.

Lorenzi made her sit down, meanwhile reassuring her, it was a simple fainting spell, no need to worry, everything seemed all right, they would do a CAT scan but it was clear that there was nothing. Then he said: “Hey, I hadn’t seen him in two years, but I thought he was in great shape,” and Cecilia was grateful to him, it was an acknowledgment of her as a mother, not a compliment from one doctor to another.

Luca said something but she wasn’t listening. Lorenzi cited a similar case. She, too, thought of one. After ten minutes, without finishing a sentence, she said she felt better and they stood up to go to the ward.

Mattia was sitting on the gurney with his back to the door, his legs dangling and his head tilted back. He was looking up at a louvered window. Cecilia wondered how long he’d been in that position, how long he’d been looking at the window from that angle. He could see only the sky so there was nothing to look at as he sat there thinking his thoughts with the blue in his eyes.

“I’m okay, I want to go home,” he said, shrugging off his mother’s hug. He sounded like an angry teenager, complaining to his parents about not being allowed to go out at night.