It sucked. Caitlin had volunteered at the hospital mostly to avoid having to go home to Phoenix after spring term ended, to her parents’ new empty-nester duplex on the golf course in the barren Arizonan desert that she refused to get used to. She figured the volunteering would consist of working in the gift shop, ringing the cash register and stocking satin bed jackets and stale boxes of chocolate, never imagining that she would be placed under patient liaison, which mostly involved following around Ms. Giffin, a kind of floating goodwill ambassador, taking notes and gofering lattes for her at the closest Starbucks.
Caitlin hated the hospital’s long canyons of florescent-lit hallways, air-conditioned like a meat locker. She hated the pink polo shirt and white jeans and sneakers she was required to wear. She wasn’t even so happy about the suggestion to smile constantly at the sick people, who were surly and cloying, and mostly unpleasant to be around. For instance, Mr. Baker, 81, with kidney disease, who complained about his bed pan not being emptied fast enough every morning. Who wanted a toasted bagel instead of white toast. Who stared at the phone even though his grown daughter never called. Or Mrs. Califante, 58, who suggested that the sheets were being washed with a skin-irritating bleach. Who made Caitlin send out her wig every week to the salon for a shampoo and blow dry.
The job pleased her parents, who had secret aspirations of Caitlin being a doctor, although it should have been clear from her major, English Lit, and her grades, mostly Cs, that that wasn’t likely going to happen. Mostly, until that spring, she had spent her sophomore year at Farid’s apartment, in his bed precisely, driving toward a dark, erotic fate that she had never guessed at with her high-school boyfriends.
While she forgot about her classes at the crummy, second-rate Christian college, the only one that accepted her, set in the middle of the orange groves of Orange County, Farid was finishing his Master’s in engineering on scholarship at Cal Tech in Pasadena, ready to graduate with honors. Caitlin didn’t know exactly what engineers did, other than built things like dams and bridges, except Farid built small things, tiny invisible connections hidden deep inside the bowels of computers, or at least this was as close as she could get to understanding it.
All she did know was that when she waited for him on the benches in the stark Spanish courtyards on campus, she felt a great sense of luck that he had chosen her. On weekends he would lie in bed staring at the ceiling and describing the things he would invent, the company he would start. She had never before been with someone who so clearly knew what he wanted, and it made her a little uneasy because she so clearly did not.
Farid, walking through the sunshine on campus: almond-skinned with black hair and long eyelashes like black wings. He had large hands. So large he could easily encircle her wrist between thumb and index finger, and often he guided her through busy crowds this way. Women stole long, hard looks at him. Wherever the couple went, for pizza, movies, or to the beach, it was the same — the locus of female attention he aroused. He, though, only saw pale, freckly, Caitlin. There was something swift and unsure about him, as if he did not totally understand his new country but was amazed by it, as if his new girlfriend, too, was a bit of a mystery. Often he talked of his brother and sister who lived on the East Coast, of another sister who lived in London. He grew misty-eyed when he talked of his parents in Palestine, how they were growing older, more feeble, alone. Caitlin didn’t even want to drive the six hours to Phoenix to see her own parents.
* * *
But that was in the spring. Now it was mid-summer, and Caitlin was alone, except for the spinsterish attentions of Ms. Giffin. The hospital was a ritzy private one, with patient rooms that looked over the coastal town that stood between it and the Pacific Ocean. The deluxe private rooms all had views, which Caitlin felt was a colossal waste of time when you were sick enough to be in a hospital. Actually, the silky blue outside the window, the spiky palm trees and the cocktail-napkin-crisp sails of the boats were more taunt than anything else. If she was a patient, she would stoutly close the curtains.
Ms. Giffin was a souped-up camp counselor with the bogus title of Patient Wellness Liaison, which really meant that she was a high-end concierge to affluent patients, the ones who paid handsomely for suites with stocked mini-bars and videos for their en suite flat-screens. She dealt with the special cases — celebrities, who got tons of flowers which would be distributed to the not famous; maternity ward, to guide visitors who were too loud and too drunk celebrating; the expiring, who were to be given every comfort but also hidden away from the general hospital populace to preserve esprit de corps.
Tuesday morning, Ms. Giffin and Caitlin had already been to a dozen patients, Caitlin’s hand cramping from the long laundry list of to-do’s. They had done elderly care: crutches, walkers, knitting supplies, Mr. Baker’s bed pan complaints, Mrs. Califante’s magazine subscription. Now they were at maternity: wrapped presents improperly identified, stuffed animals the size of large dogs.
Ms. Giffin looked pinched. She stood in the bluish-white glow of the hallway, dangerously purpled bags under her eyes, frowning at her clipboard. She was thin without being in the least bit fashionable. To Caitlin she simply looked without — without breasts, without behind. Stick-straight legs like a bird’s. She looked like she would be painful to hug.
“Do you want a coffee?” Caitlin asked. She was dying to escape the hospital even for a few minutes.
“We’ve got a situation.” Last time she said that, there had been a Saudi prince having his hernia fixed. A whole floor had to be emptied out for his entourage and numerous wives. It had been a crazy week of hiring limos and going to local five-star restaurants for take-out.
“Why does he get all our attention?” Caitlin complained.
“Because he funded a year’s worth of uninsured care, plus a new wing to the hospital. Sweet, huh? Not bad for finding some hummus and kebab.”
Because of Farid, Caitlin had known of a little bakery in the valley that made authentic baklava, pleasing the prince and his entourage to no end. She wanted to see the prince before he left because she had never seen a real live prince, imagining him living in a great place of emptiness and sand; kind of like Arizona, except with marble palaces and camels. On his last day, as he was wheeled out into the lobby, she was disappointed that he was old and fat. Besides, he had twelve older brothers so he would always a prince be, never a king. After he checked out, each member of the staff was given a whole, flash-frozen salmon. Caitlin didn’t know what to do with hers since she was staying in a dorm, so she gave it to Ms. Giffin, who accepted it on the condition that they have dinner together in the near future.
“Do you want a Quad Grande?” Caitlin prodded, filled with a futile hope.
“No. We’re late. Let’s go.”
They took the elevator one floor down from maternity and entered a room while the orderlies were helping a hugely pregnant woman up into the bed. From her sun-bleached long hair, Caitlin assumed she was young, but when the woman turned she was all raw-boned and haggard, with lines that stayed behind after she finished smiling.
“Hello, Mrs. Green,” Ms. Giffin said, not bothering to look up from her clipboard.
The woman tried to appear agreeable, but her face spasmed, and she doubled over with a hard contraction.
In the last month Caitlin had seen enough pregnant women to not break out in a cold sweat when one went into labor in front of her, but she had vowed to herself that she personally would never get pregnant, or if she did, she’d at least insist on an epidural. They waited politely until Mrs. Green straightened up, pain at bay, and returned her attention to them.
“You’re very kind,” Mrs. Green said, her voice barely rising above a whisper. “My husband will come after work. Could a cot be set up for him to spend the night?”
“We’ll have to see,” Ms. Giffin said.
Caitlin knew that in code that meant Ms. Giffin wasn’t going to try very hard to find that cot. There was something guileless and rural about Mrs. Green that wasn’t winning over Ms. Giffin’s sympathies. Mrs. Green seemed like the kind of woman you’d meet in Wisconsin or Nebraska, unadorned and embarrassed to be the center of attention, and Ms. Giffin had become a little bit of a star-whore in Caitlin’s opinion, fawning over those who already had more than their share in life.
“If there’s nothing else you need, we’ll be on our way.” Patently false since they had just refused the one thing she just asked for.
“Are all the beds full in maternity?” Caitlin asked once they were out of earshot in the hallway.
“These backwoods fanatics.”
“Who?”
“Severe birth defects. They refused to abort so here we are.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow. Isn’t there enough suffering in the world?” Ms. Giffin was chewing her lips, smearing lipstick across her teeth.
“I guess. I’m taking my break.”
Ms. Giffin seemed unhappy about her imminent escape. “How about coming over tonight for that salmon dinner?”
The moment Caitlin gave the fish to her she knew it had been a big mistake, would make Ms. Giffin feel indebted. She’d planned on going to her usual neighborhood cafe, drinking bad wine and not talking to anyone.
“Come on,” Ms. Giffin said. “It’ll do you good.”
When Caitlin still hesitated, Ms. Giffin sighed. “Look, you need to quit moping over that boy. Eat a good meal and then I’ll drive you back home. There will be alcohol present.” At the continued silence, she burst out: “I guarantee you he’s not sitting around, he’s not avoiding other girls.”
“Okay,” Caitlin said, sullen and startled at this probable truth.
Part Two
The first time Farid had her over to his apartment over a year ago, she had been so nervous she could hardly talk. The apartment, a bland utility, was made exotic by a Persian carpet that stretched from wall to wall, curling up at the hall entrance to the bedroom, smothering the synthetic Berber below in a pool of burgundy color. Large cushions and leather ottomans were placed around a low wooden table with a copper brazier in the middle.
“This is nice,” she said. It reminded her of an ethnic restaurant.
He shrugged. He pressed her arms to her sides as he kissed her on the mouth, over and over, as if she might bolt. Truth was, they had gone out four times — twice to the coffeehouse, once to a foreign film, once for Italian food — and he had always disappointingly been a gentleman. So nice and disinterested that Caitlin tried to think if maybe she had a pretty friend he was working his way toward. The invitation to come to his place on a Saturday afternoon had come as a surprise.
He kissed her, his hand at her throat, until she brushed against his belt buckle. Only then did he unbutton her blouse.
“How come you never kissed me before?”
“Because you are innocent, I think.”
“I’m not. Not that innocent.”
“Don’t be stupid. I mean in your heart.”
It confused her. With past boyfriends, she had politely pretended that she wasn’t too aware of what was going on below her waist. Afterwards, they were still strangers, definitely not concerned with the state of her heart. Farid pulled her up now and led her to the bedroom.
“Can we maybe have a drink first? A little wine?” She was shaking so hard she could barely stand. Truth was she had only been with two boyfriends so far, and each time she had drunk beer beforehand.
“I would prefer no, unless you insist. I want our senses clear. I want you to desire me as much as I do you.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve never met anyone like you before, Caitlin,” he said, and she wondered if that could possibly be true.
* * *
Caitlin waited an hour past her clock-out time for Ms. Giffin to finish work and drive them to her home for the mandatory salmon dinner. She sat at the nurses’ station, chewing away on a sugary piece of bubble gum she lifted from the gift shop, talking to a redheaded nurse named Rebecca, her only friend at the hospital.
“Why are you hanging around here so late?”
“Dinner with Ms. Giffin.”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. She really was very pretty, with a pierced eyebrow and a tattoo on her neck, but she wasn’t stuck up about it. They were at the stage right before real, warts-and-all friendship. “She forced me into dinner last year. Whatever you do, don’t let her get started about her divorce.”
A middle-aged man wandered in from the lobby area, obviously lost. He wore a short-sleeve dress shirt in yellow seersucker and dark blue slacks, more formal than was usual in the hospital. His hair was an undecided brown, a brown thinning and tired, and as soon as Caitlin saw the Bible in his hand she knew it must be the husband of Mrs. Green.
“Can I help you?” Rebecca said, stifling a yawn. Although she wasn’t stuck-up, she could be rude.
“Yes, my wife, Carolyn Green.”
Rebecca gave him a bored, blank look.
“I’ll take you,” Caitlin said.
Rebecca raised her eyebrows in mock astonishment. “You’re clocked out.”
“But I’m waiting.”
They took the elevator, and when the doors closed, Caitlin got the strong whiff of barbeque, and she sneaked a look over at Mr. Green. Sure enough: small, telltale red spots on the front of his shirt by the buttons. She got the feeling the Greens had come a great distance and at great cost to be at this hospital. As if people didn’t die every day in the exclusive beachside sunshine. They got off one floor below maternity, although Mr. Green might not have guessed this yet, and Caitlin led him to the dark, silent, windowless closet where his wife lay.
Monitors had been brought in and attached to her, spilling her secrets out for all to see, and a maternity nurse from upstairs was timing her contractions. An old woman in the room next door began to moan, and Caitlin quickly went out shut her door, even though officially she had no right to. When she came back in, Mr. Green was reaching through the metal bedrails and holding Mrs. Green’s hands. They both bowed their heads. Caitlin should have left, but she didn’t, and after the prayer, Mr. Green looked up, surprised to see her still there.
“Look, Carolyn, at the lovely young lady who brought me to you. She saved me from being lost.”
Mrs. Green nodded, but her face was beaded with sweat, obvious another contraction was snaking its way up her spine.
“I’ll be leaving now,” Caitlin said.
“The cot,” Mrs. Green choked out.
“I’ll get it right away.” Caitlin was angry. The room smelled of mold, it was dark and depressing, and it was just wrong. Wrong, wrong, she hummed under her breath as she made her quick way down the hall, quicker than ever when she was actually on duty. One of the orderlies, Juan, who had asked her out to a concert the week before, was loafing in the vending area. She had said she couldn’t go out with him because she had a boyfriend; at the time she was thinking of Farid and felt it was truthful.
“I need a cot in Mrs. Green’s room.”
“Who signed the request?”
“Ms. Giffin wants it, okay? She’s taking me out to dinner, and I’m late.”
“You won’t go out with me, but you’ll have dinner with that old bruja? What are you, a lesbian?”
She punched his arm. “Thanks, I owe you.”
“I’ll collect.”
The room they had put Mrs. Green in used to be a supply room, hence the no windows. Caitlin went down to the lobby and snatched a big arrangement of roses and lilies from the lounge, part of a pop singer’s take that was supposed to be “redistributed.” Which was exactly what she was doing. Just unofficially. She went back up the elevator, her face buried in flowers, and felt like a beauty pageant winner, hauling her big bouquet. Proudly she pushed open the door of Mrs. Green’s room with her foot. The overhead lights had been turned off, and only the bathroom light left on for dim illumination.
The cot was there, and Mr. Green was sitting on it, his shoulders shaking, his head buried in his hands. Looking straight down at the top of his head, it was clear, even in the semi-dark, that he was balding. Soon, only skull would be left. The hospital bed was empty.
“They took her?” Caitlin said, more statement than anything else.
Mr. Green looked up, his face swollen and moist. “How beautiful,” he said, and Caitlin had to think for a minute before she realized she was still holding the heavy vase. “Something to cheer the place up,” she said.
“Thank you for your kindness.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, embarrassed at how plastic-y the flowers looked, how without scent they were. “I have go now. I’m off work.” But she kept standing there, unwilling to leave him alone again in his dark limbo of a room. “Can I get you a magazine?”
Mr. Green wiped at his face roughly and smiled. “Have all the reading I need right here.” He tapped the black book in his lap.
“Sure. Well, good luck,” she said, escaping out the door, wanting to kill herself for saying such a colossally stupid thing. Good luck, like a moron.
Part Three
After they began sleeping together, Farid took her to parties off-campus, parties full of Middle Eastern students in shabby apartments or sometimes in pretty Spanish houses in South Pasadena, the rooms crowded with young, dark-haired men and women speaking Arabic, loud Euro-pop music blasting in the background. They were worldly by Caitlin’s standards: talking of a constant circuit between the Middle East, Europe and the United States. Her disorientation was every bit as great as if she were halfway around the world, but to his credit Farid would stay by her side and explain the various details of the food, keeping her tethered by preparing bites for her and placing them on her tongue.
As the night wore on, the talk inevitably came to politics, and the living room would be crowded with men arguing heatedly. The music was turned off, and women wove their way through the chairs, passing out small porcelain cups of cardamom-scented coffee. Farid got caught up in the debates and forgot his translating, dropping Caitlin’s hand to gesture a point. She wandered to the kitchen for a glass of water. The young Arabic women had long heavy hair, and arched eyebrows like the curved arches in doorways. Their smooth skin wasn’t pink and blotchy like Caitlin’s, but instead, creamy and impenetrable. They wore expensive clothes and gold bracelets that sounded like tiny bells when they reached for something. Sexy and knowing in a way she’d never be. They spoke fast in Arabic and French, ignoring her. Although she might be paranoid, it seemed they were talking about her, about how unlikely it was that Farid had picked her.
One girl, with startling green eyes rimmed in kohl, smiled at Caitlin. “You are Farid’s new girlfriend?”
“Kind of. Yes.”
“You’re lucky. He comes from a very good family.”
Farid suddenly appeared by Caitlin’s side, and the girl smiled wider. “I was telling your friend about the dessert. Try the znood el sit, the lady’s wrist, they’re really good.”
“Nice to see you again, Kali,” he said, as he took Caitlin’s arm. “Sorry we have to go.”
Back in his apartment, he held Caitlin’s naked hipbones like the handles of a pot.
“I’m nothing like those girls.”
“That’s what I like about you. You’re a tabula rasa.”
“You think I’m nothing?”
“I think we can be anything kind of a couple we want to be. Have any kind of marriage we choose.”
“Oh.”
“Shhh,” he whispered, running the tip of his tongue along her belly.
* * *
A few days before his graduation, Caitlin received a message from Farid to meet him at his apartment in the afternoon. His exams were all done, and she thought they would spend the afternoon together. She wore her new lace underwear, that she hoped made her as sexy as Kali of the kohl-rimmed eyes, who she had found out later was Farid’s old girlfriend. He always insisted that he loved Caitlin’s natural beauty, her unadornedness, but it sounded more like a wound than anything to be proud of. But as soon as she walked through the door, his face stopped her.
“My father called. There is new trouble in our town. I must go home.”
“Is everything okay?” she said, the news making her feel stupid, slow, as if she were underwater.
“Well, obviously not.” His face was tight, closed to her. “I’m leaving tonight.”
Not only underwater, but drowning. She sat down heavily on the bed. “You can’t leave. I mean, when will you be back?”
“I might stay for a while. I don’t have a choice, you understand.”
“Oh.” The air sucked out of her like a balloon. She had taken to wearing gold bangles, although hers were plated and made an unpleasant clanking noise now as she wiped away her tears. She could feel her unloveliness at that moment but couldn’t do anything about it.
He sighed, looking at her. “Don’t cry.”
“I won’t.” But she did.
“Come with me,” he said, trying the idea out on himself as much as her. “Then I won’t have to miss you.”
The idea as preposterous as if she had been asked to move to Mars. They made love, distracted and hurried and the smallest bit impersonal. Afterwards he stroked her face, staring hard, as if he were already forgetting her.
“Even when you are old and wrinkled, you will be beautiful.”
She pushed away from him, as if his mentioning her mortality was planting the idea that he would never again see her.
He drove her home to her dorm on the campus of the still second-rate Christian college where she was now about to file an incomplete for the whole semester. If banishment to Arizona was next, could moving to the Middle East really be so bad? The campus was nestled cozy in the middle of orange groves, and Farid slowed his car.
“This reminds me of my home. Orange, lemon, and olive orchards as far as the eye can see.”
“I never imagined it that way.”
“Except ours have been mined. No one goes in to pick the remaining fruit.”
Caitlin looked out from her kohl-smudged eyes that made her look like a raccoon. She had never thought of these boring groves that she had grown up with all her life to be like Palestine. It made Palestine seem more familiar at the same time as it made home feel more strange. She gulped the air like a fish. She was already burning from her loss of him.
“Relax,” Farid said, putting his fingers that were warm as sunlight or knives against her shoulder. “Count to three when you are frightened.”
“When will you come back?” she asked.
“Count to three.” He wasn’t.
Once he was gone, she found he had sneakily taken all the familiar with him. Just like that. One, two, three.
Part Four
Ms. Giffin lived in a raw, new apartment complex at the intersection of two main freeways, a place that used to be only orange groves as far as the eye could see. As they drove, the harsh rays of the late afternoon sun scoured the billboards, the strip malls, the chain restaurants and car lots outside the window. The land was still tender from its conversion, the remaining old trees wary, waiting to be bulldozed into a pile that would be hauled away. The empty, barren fields outside Ms. Giffin’s window spread a cloying, gritty dust like judgment whenever the wind came up. The outside of the buildings was stuccoed in earth tones, with wobbly palms like scaffolding planted along the walkways, too unrooted themselves to provide any shade. Concrete fountains splashed the smell of chlorine at the entrance. Inside, the place was as stark as a barracks, smelling of chemicals.
Ms. Giffin unlocked the door to a small one bedroom, and as she got the blender churning for margaritas, Caitlin stepped out on the miniature balcony that was barely big enough for one person, the size of a concrete bathmat, and looked down at the pool area. The pool was in the shape of a kidney, with lots of potted, dry bamboo all around, which continually dropped feathery sharp fronds onto the surface of the water. Young, bikini-clad women lay on the lounges, tending themselves in the last of the late, syrupy sunshine.
Ms. Giffin handed Caitlin a glass filled with a light green slush that went down easily.
“Good,” Caitlin said.
Ms. Giffin frowned down at the oiled girls around the pool. “Sluts.”
“Hmmm.”
“Anyway, I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too.”
“You’re an interesting girl.”
Caitlin took that to mean she wasn’t in the same category as the slicked girls down by the pool. But how did Ms. Giffin know that?
“You seem sad around the hospital. So tell me about this boy who broke your heart.” A timer went off in the kitchen, and Ms. Giffin clapped her hands. “Salmon!”
“Can I use your bathroom?”
* * *
Caitlin sat on the toilet a long time, thinking Ms. Giffin was weird but nice enough, as in probably not dangerous, but she vowed she would never be like her. She opened the medicine cabinet for a routine look-see and saw a whole army of amber bottles of anti-depressants. Now Caitlin had the medical lingo down: bupropion, citalopram, fluoxetine. A regular pharmacy, and all the bottles prescribed to her: Mrs. Ann Giffin. Next, she checked the drawers. The first held bubble bath, bath salts, massage oil. In the second, towards the back, she found a vibrator in a hot-pink silk pouch. Caitlin slammed the drawer shut, then loudly turned on the taps to wash her hands in hot soapy water, twice.
* * *
The meal was elaborate: purple heirloom tomato salad with buffalo mozzarella, then grilled salmon.
“You went to a lot of trouble,” Caitlin said. She was distinctly aware of time passing in that room, of how little noise being alone made. She started to nibble at her fingernails, a nasty habit she had overcome with Farid but had fallen back into.
“Not at all. I didn’t know you were coming for sure. I do this for myself.”
“Really?” Caitlin pretty much ate food out of cans when she was alone.
“You have to treat yourself special, otherwise how will someone else think you are special?”
“I guess they won’t.”
“Rebecca said your lover was some kind of PLO member. Or Hamas organizer?”
Caitlin reminded herself to hate Rebecca. But the word “lover” still had the power to give her a quick thrill. “Not really. He was just an engineering student. So when did you get divorced?”
It was hard to guess Ms. Giffin’s age, but she seemed to have once been hopeful. Now her face seemed to have sunk downwards, defeated, never to climb its way back to pretty. She’d plowed her way through two margaritas and half a bottle of red wine and didn’t seem any happier for it. Only her eyes gave her away, grew slack, unfocussed.
“Two years ago. One of those sluts chatted him up in a bar. Fell for his talk.”
“Rough.”
“Rough is right. They got married. Had a baby a year ago. It’ll never last.”
Caitlin nodded.
“So tell me about this terrorist of yours,” Ms. Giffin said.
Caitlin stared in the candle flame. She remembered Farid taking a sip of wine then kissing her, filling her mouth with oak and berries. “He was madly in love with me. But he said that there are more important things than happiness. Things like justice and honor. Since he might get killed martyring himself for his country, he wanted to marry me first so that I would be carrying his child.”
Ms. Giffin wrinkled her nose. “That’s barbaric. I hope your parents put an end to all this.”
Caitlin’s parents had never even heard of Farid. She bowed her head down, grief and longing for him scraping new and painful over her. “They did not.”
Ms. Giffin was temporarily at a loss. “How about cappuccinos and some chocolate sorbet?”
After watching a movie with subtitles about a middle-aged woman in Sweden living in a lonely cabin in the woods, it was late, and Caitlin wanted to go. Ms. Giffin was propped in the corner of her couch, an afghan tucked over her legs, head back, mouth open, asleep.
“I have to leave,” Caitlin said, touching her shoulder that felt like a wire hanger under her shirt.
At the contact, Ms. Giffin jumped. “I’ll drive you.”
“You’re wasted.”
Ms. Giffin blinked and put on her glasses There was something innocent and new-hatched about her face. “Spend the night. I’ll set you up on the couch. Or we can share a bed.”
“I’ve got to go home.”
“Slumber party. Please. Stay.” Her expression so naked, Caitlin had to turn away. “I worry about you.”
“Don’t.”
“How will you get home?”
“I’ll figure it out,” Caitlin said, grabbing her purse and running for the door.
Outside in the moonlight, Caitlin walked through the rutted, barren fields till she came to the pyre of orange trees. It was as long as a football field and as high as a one-story building. Caitlin felt a burn behind her eyes and looked away. The branches stretched, accusing. It felt like a graveyard, every bit as haunted as the ones her parents took her to on vacations in the South, the ones from the civil war with the corny Spanish moss and crumbling stone, so old it made death quaint and impersonal.
Part Five
The next day, Caitlin arrived late to the hospital, hungover from her late night. Usually her tardiness went unnoticed, but the nurses’ desk was in an uproar. Rebecca had her earphones on and rolled her eyes. Caitlin stopped in front of her, demanding attention.
“Thanks for telling Ms. Giffin about Farid.”
Rebecca shrugged. “I don’t even remember. It was when you first started working here, before we were friends. It was the most interesting thing about you.”
Caitlin refused to look over her to-do list for the day. As she headed for the elevators, Juan was rolling a folded up cot down the hallway.
“Lady of the Mouth, we need to talk,” he said.
“I’m late…”
“Ms. Giffin is major pissed about the cot. I had to tell her it was you.”
“Fine.”
“You owe me. I still got in trouble.”
She was getting a sharp stabbing in her head. She felt like people were trying to tear her apart, bit by bit. “What do you want?”
“Let’s go out Friday. Dinner, a movie. Real nice and quiet, that’s what you like, right?”
Once she went out on a date with another man, Farid would be officially over, as he was everywhere except inside her, in her fingernails, thighs, breasts, in her journal where the entries stopped with the day he asked her to run away with him. That morning she had woken at dawn and watched the sun come up, then had fallen back into a fitful sleep. She dreamed she was on a plane flying off somewhere mysterious. Maybe a desert, maybe orange groves in Palestine, or else some other equally unimaginable place. But even in her dream, she knew she wasn’t the kind of girl who fell in love like that. Already.
“Pick me up at seven,” she said, as if she were fitting her neck into a noose.
Juan smiled and turned away, then back. “The cot lady had her baby. I’m supposed to bring a dozen chairs for all the people inside there now.”
Caitlin nodded. It made her sick sometimes, how quickly life moved on no matter how you tried to stop it.
* * *
She put her hand on Mrs. Green’s hospital door, but it whooshed open from the inside. Ms. Giffin stood holding the purloined bouquet of flowers, now beginning to brown around the white edges of the lilies. The door closed behind them. “What exactly was going through your head?”
Caitlin looked at her feet and weighed the fact of soon arriving back in Phoenix.
“I had high hopes for you,” Ms. Giffin said and stalked off, but there was the unsteady drag of disappointment in her heels.
Caitlin knew better, but she pushed the door open and went inside. A dozen people stood around the bed, holding hands and singing what sounded like a hymn. The light was still dim, coming only from the opened bathroom door. Caitlin couldn’t see the bed, simply the backs of all the people, but the song was wistful and old-timey, and she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. Caitlin’s grandmother had told her of the time when the area around them was nothing but orange groves, and revival tents were set up glowing white in the middle of them, filled with preaching and singing and miracles. An unthinkable time past. When the hymn was over, she heard Mr. Green say, “Look, honey, who came to visit us.”
The people parted and made way for Caitlin to approach the bed.
“I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten you name,” Mrs. Green said in her same whisper.
“Caitlin.” But she knew she had never been asked.
“A beautiful name: Caitlin.” Mrs. Green’s eyes were huge and colorless and beyond pain in that semi-dark. “Meet my Mary Rose.”
The baby was swaddled in a white, crocheted blanket. Small white satin cap on her head. Truth be told, most newborns were mottled, red and misshapen, but this baby was like a pale moon gliding in an empty sky. Last night at dinner Ms. Giffin had caustically told Caitlin that the baby would be born with an exposed spine, that its frail lungs would only last hours before collapsing. “What kind of life is that, to bring a child into the world only to suffer? They’re fanatics.”
Caitlin backed away, and the human circle formed again as if never broken, hand grasping hand, and another song began. As she pushed the door closed behind her, the melody seemed the tenderest thing she ever heard, even if she couldn’t quite make out the words. She wanted to be there neither for the beginning nor the end of things.
