Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

He would have said they were married. Only he didn’t know how to say it in Czech, and he didn’t have a ring. He was his father, chasing a foreign lover into the ER.

Inside the ambulance, the paramedics gave her two shots and unwrapped the gauze. Tee made an effort not to gag. Her wound had split open, as if her calf had ballooned overnight until the skin had reached its limit and popped. Inside, he could see the layers of muscle, covered in a film of pus. At the edges of the hole, the skin had settled back like two rubber flaps.

Katka tried to sit up, but they pressed her flat against the stretcher. “What do you see?” she said. “Tell me what you see.” She spoke Czech to the paramedics, and they glared at Tee as they calmed her. The smell stuck to the walls of his lungs. He wanted to stop staring at the raw insides of her leg, but he couldn’t.

They arrived at a different hospital than before. The nurses took her away. He tried to follow, panicked that he would have no way of knowing what was happening. She mumbled something, yet they refused him. “It will be fine,” she told him. “They will show you in later.” Arriving at the hospital had eased her nerves, as he’d thought it would do for him. Instead he imagined parts of her falling out of the crack in her leg: her kneecap, her liver, her heart.

“How will I know if something changes?”

She said any doctor would speak some English. They rolled her away. A nurse blocked the hall, pointing to a waiting room where a dozen bleary-eyed Czechs sat in chairs along the walls, a cluster of TVs hanging down in the middle, as if no one could have his back to anyone else. Tee’s feet squeaked on the white tile. He should call Pavel. On the TV, zoo workers rescued condors drowning in a giant cage. Tee didn’t know if the footage was current. It was the third day of the flood. President Havel spoke into the cameras.

When Tee checked his cell for the time — nearly ten — he saw again the nine missed calls from his mother; then, beneath them, the one received call from his father. He didn’t remember that call. Had he rolled over in his sleep and hit a button before returning to his dreams? He could call back now, but it didn’t matter. Katka was in a room somewhere on the other side of the wall. He pictured a machine that could return her leg to its normal state, as if vacuuming the air from a zeppelin. In a hospital like this, his father had lied to him, his birth mother had asked a foreign stranger to take her baby to America. His entire life, Tee had believed hospitals to be places of love at first glance. New starts.

Katka had tried to give them a new start, and he had asked her to jump into a river of disease. Pavel hadn’t hurt her so badly. Before the flood the wound could have been stitched up and forgotten. Tee felt something in his back pocket — a coaster — and he plucked at it until the scraps looked like feathers of some dead bird. On the TV, wooden beams piled up like pick-up sticks in the water. Workers in a motorboat removed the rubble, wearing yellow waders as if to fish. One smiled into the camera; for a second he thought it was Ynez. A chart seemed to show the water receding. Maybe the flood would never have risen as high as the bed. Katka and he could still be making love, she in her protective boots. Though the buildings would still be falling.

As he rewound those hours in his head, a doctor appeared and spoke rapid Czech. Everyone turned at once. Tee heard his name.

He pointed to himself. “ Americky ,” he said, not sure he had the right word. “Do you speak English?”

The doctor muttered under his breath and said, “Little bit. You not look American. You are her husband?”

She’d had the same idea then.

The doctor shook his head. “You are too young,” he said. “She needs debridement. We take away bad tissue.”

Tee didn’t care what the doctor said about him — bad tissue they could surely remove.

“Bacteria eats her leg,” the doctor was saying.

“Eats?”

The man pursed his lips as if the English had soured. His face was stubbled and haggard; he probably had many other patients. He said her organs were losing a fight against the disease. They had put her on an IV, but now they had to cut away the sick parts of her leg.

Tee asked if he could see her.

“After. Maybe at night.”

He was about to ask if she would lose her leg when the doctor turned and left.

As Tee waited, more anxiously now, people came in with coughs and flood-dirty clothes and minor skin wounds. About an hour later, a nurse gestured for him to follow. He hopped up, thinking the doctor would have come if the news was bad. In the hall, the nurse asked, “Do you need for me helping you call her family?”

“What happened?”

The nurse shook her head. “I mean for if you have trouble talking them. I help.”

He understood. She was wondering why he hadn’t called anyone about the surgery. “I’ll call,” he said. “It’s okay. My wife’s family speaks English.” Yet he had no phone number for Katka’s mother, and the only other person was Pavel.

The nurse nodded and offered her assistance if needed.

At least, he thought as he turned back inside the waiting room, no one had recognized Katka from the paintings. They were too abstract. More real than life. He pretended to dial and raised the phone to his ear. “I have some awful news. Katka’s in the hospital. Hurry. Come right away.” In the doorway, the nurse smiled.

Tee wondered if there was anyone Katka did want to see. She was getting surgery. No one should be worried unnecessarily.

As the hours passed, Tee couldn’t stop thinking. He’d spent all his idle time in Prague so far drawing and taking things, a child carving his name on a tree. He hadn’t protected Katka, or himself. He had been more interested in the stories they told each other. He wanted to believe that at any minute she would wake and he would go to her. But then there was her leg, white pus squirming from her flesh like grubs.

The scent of disinfectant, and the sterile walls, and the absence of color, seemed to hypnotize him. After a while he found himself thinking about his non-adoption again, hating that his concentration wavered. He forced his thoughts back to Katka. But the longer the wait, the more his mind wanted to go elsewhere. He wondered how his mother had felt when she first figured out the truth about him. How had she kept it to herself for so long? What more did she and his father know? Did his father know his birth mother’s hobbies? her allergies? her extended family? All those questions he’d never thought could be answered. He wondered if his father blamed him for his birth mother’s death. Was that why his father had kept her from him?

Tee pictured his mother back in Boston, her familiar frown, patterned with freckles. In one of the oldest home videos, his father’s finger traces the constellations on her cheeks, one side and then the other. Once, they were drawn to each other’s differences. Before they found out they couldn’t have a baby.

It was Tee’s fault if he knew nothing about his birth mother. He had tucked his adoption into his pockets, another souvenir.

What he really wanted, of course, was to hear Katka say everything would be fine. He remembered she had wanted him to give her the same reassurances. Was that belief in their belief in each other love?

When his mother called, in the early afternoon, first thing in the morning for her, he answered the phone. Her tenth call.

“I’m here, Mom.”

“Tee! Oh, thank God you’re okay.”

“You almost killed me with that e-mail,” he said, unable to resist. He pictured her making coffee, cooking breakfast, the phone cradled against her pale neck.