Page 38 of The Dutch House

“Oh, Jesus,” Maeve said when she saw me. “She swore to me on her sister’s head that she wouldn’t call you.”

“She lied,” I said.

The man in the suit stood up. It took me just a second and then I placed him.

“Danny.” Mr. Otterson held out his hand.

I shook his hand and leaned over to kiss Maeve’s forehead. Her face was flushed and slightly damp, her skin hot. “I’m fine,” she said. “I could not be more fine.”

“They’re giving her antibiotics.” Mr. Otterson pointed to the silver pole from which an ever-collapsing bag of fluid was hung, then he looked at Maeve. “She needs to rest.”

“I’m resting. What could be more restful than this?”

She looked so awkward in the bed, like she was trying out for the role of the patient in a play but underneath the blankets she would have on her own clothes and shoes.

“I should be going,” Mr. Otterson said.

I thought that Maeve would try to stop him but she didn’t. “I’ll be back by Friday.”

“Monday. You think we can’t even make it a week without you.”

“You can’t,” she said, and in return he gave her a smile of great tenderness.

Mr. Otterson patted her good hand then nodded to me and left. We had met many times over the years, and I’d worked inhis factory in the summers when I was home from Choate, but I never had a sense of him as being anything other than shy. I could never understand how such a man had grown such a business. Otterson’s frozen vegetables now shipped to every state east of the Mississippi. Maeve told me that with no small amount of pride.

“If you’d called me first I could have told you not to come,” she said.

“And if you’d called me first I could have told you what time I’d be here.” I picked up the metal chart that hung from a hook at the foot of her bed. Her blood pressure was ninety over sixty. They were giving her Cefazolin every six hours. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“If you’re not going to pursue medicine professionally then I can’t see how you’re allowed to pursue it personally.”

I walked around the bed and picked up the hand with the IV. An angry red streak of cellulitis started at a cut on the top of her hand, then twisted up and around to the inside of her arm, then disappeared into her armpit. Someone had outlined it with a black marker so as to track the infection’s progress. Her arm was hot, slightly swollen. “When did this start?”

“I have something to tell you if you’d put down my goddamn arm. I was going to wait until the weekend but you’re here now.”

I asked her again when it had started. Maybe medical school had done me some good after all. It certainly taught me how to persist with a question that no one saw the point in answering. “How did you hurt your hand?”

“I have no idea.”

I moved my fingers up to her wrist.

“Get away from my pulse,” she said.

“Did anyone explain to you how these things go? You getblood poisoning, you become septic, your organs shut down.” Maeve worked at clothing drives, food drives, stocking the closets and pantries of the poor on weekends. She was always getting cut, some rogue staple or nail catching her skin. She was bruised by the boxes she loaded into the trunks of waiting cars.

“Would you stop being so negative? I’m lying in a hospital bed, aren’t I? They’re pumping me full of antibiotics. I’m not exactly sure what else I’m supposed to be doing.”

“You’re supposed to get yourself to the doctor before the infection that started in your hand gets to your heart. It looks like someone ran a paintbrush up your arm. Did you not notice?”

“Do you want to hear my news or not?”

The anger I felt when she was lying there was unseemly. She had a fever. She could have been in some pain, though I was the last person she would have admitted that to. I told myself to stop it or she’d never tell me anything. I went back to the other side of the bed and sat in the chair, still warm from Mr. Otterson. I started again. “I’m sorry you’re sick.”

She looked at me for a moment, trying to gauge my sincerity. “Thank you.”

I folded my hands in my lap to keep from plucking at her. “Tell me your news.”

“I saw Fluffy,” she said.