“What? Honey, no. Just… she’ll be fine. We don’t know exactly what’s going on. Go ahead over to the Geigers’ and I’ll call later tonight.”
We both turned toward the open bedroom door when Britney started to cough, and scream, and cry.
“Go ahead, Victor.” And she knelt down and kissed me on the forehead.
It was fun getting to stay over at the Geigers’ so late on a school night. I even helped myself to extra Stewart’s Root Beer to celebrate. But when the chuggachuggachugga choo choo! of their train phone went off, I figured the fun was over and it was time to head back to my soda-less abode. I even started putting my shoes back on, expecting Mrs. Geiger to call down the steps that it was time to go home. But as I started tying the second sneaker, I could hear someone coming down the creaking basement steps.
Mrs. Geiger stood in the doorway, holding the train phone in her hand. George muted the TV and Karl even turned around from the desktop, pausing his Warcraft campaign.
“Hey boys. That was Mrs. Ferraro. Britney is going to be staying in the hospital for a little while. She has pneumonia.”
I couldn’t even pretend to know what that was. I turned to Karl for an answer, but he didn’t say anything. I envisioned the black plague.
“Can you die from pneumonia?” I could barely pronounce the word, my tongue fumbling around my mouth, but did my best to ask Mrs. G.
“Well, Vic… yes. But it’s unlikely, and it’s good that she’s in the hospital. Your parents are there and they’ll make sure she gets the best treatment. I’ll take you tomorrow when Tony gets here. His mother is going to bring him right after school.”
I felt nauseous as I sat in the back of Mrs. G’s Jeep on the way to Saint Mark’s hospital. All day at school I couldn’t stop replaying the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where everyone is dumping their dead into the street to be picked up by the squeaking cart.
“You have to stay positive, Vito,” my father told me on the phone. I could hear my mother screaming in the background but could only make out bits and pieces of the colorful threats. “She’ll be okay, my friend. She’s getting better.”
Hospitals reminded me of buildings from the future, where everyone wore the same thing, color-coded depending on your rank. Where the piercing bright lights never went out on people hooked up to machines keeping them alive. But I had rarely been in hospitals in person, instead forming my futuristic interpretation from the comforts of the couch or La-Z-Boy recliner. And the longer we walked down the halls, passing room after room of the sick and wounded, my confidence in my father’s reassurances began to fade, making room for an overwhelming darkness like the changing season.
I could hear my mother before we reached the room. Mrs. Geiger said she would wait outside for Tony and me, and to give Britney a hug and a kiss for her.
Britney appeared tiny in the hospital bed. Her skinny arm poked out of the hospital gown and a mask covered her nose and mouth, making her look like Batman’s sworn enemy, Bane.
“Hey boys!” my father shouted, approaching us with a smile. “She’s going to be okay, right, hun?”
Tony walked up to Britney and planted a kiss on her forehead as he held her hand. I remained a few feet from the doorway, frozen.
“I’m going to sue that arrogant piece of shit.”
“Hey! The boys are here. Can you calm down for a second, please? Come on. She’s in a different hospital now and we know what’s wrong with her. We can discuss that piece of you-know-what later.”
A nurse in teal scrubs the same color as a Miami Dolphins jersey joined us in the room and stopped at Britney’s bedside. “How are we doing, dear?” She spoke with a thick accent that reminded me of a character from Gullah Gullah Island. She turned to me standing by the door and said, “Oh, she’ll be just fine, dear.” When she smiled, I smiled too.
A doctor came rushing into the room with a clipboard. He didn’t look up when he asked the Ferraro family, “How are we doing?”
When my mother didn’t “clock him right in his stupid face” or “choke his little chicken-shit neck,” I realized that this doctor was not the cause of my mother’s rage.
The doctor looked up and smiled at me too—the hospital of contagious smiles—and asked my mother and father to join him at the bedside.
But quickly my smile faded as the doctor unsheathed a needle so large I thought he was going to tuck it under his arm and use it for a joust. My mother, father, and the Caribbean nurse eased Britney into an upright position, and the doctor stuck her with the lance.
Her cry sent me sprinting from the room, past Mrs. Geiger, and down the sterile white hospital halls bright with artificial light as if I were tearing down an empty Lincoln Tunnel. I found a gurney sitting in the hall, dropped to my knees, and recited the Lord’s Prayer as if I was in front of the Holy Sepulcher itself.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
“Vic, you okay?” Tony asked, standing at the edge of the hall.
“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”
I remembered the whole thing.
The new millennium came
