“You’re up, darlin’,” the woman said.
Sidney walked to the door next to the glass partition and pulled it open after the woman buzzed it unlocked.
“No camera crew?” the woman asked.
Sidney smiled. “Not today.”
The woman pointed down a row of booths, where glass barriers separated visitors from inmates.
“Number six.”
“Thanks,” Sidney said as she headed down the row. She was always careful to pay no attention to the other visitors sharing this intimate time with those that were locked away. She kept her eyes down and stared at her feet until she was seated in her booth. Only then did she look up at the glass divider. Sometimes he was seated there, waiting. At other times, he appeared from a side door as a guard walked him to the booth.
Today she waited nearly five minutes for him to materialize. The orange suit he wore looked far too big. His skinny, pale arms leaked from the sleeves like wilting vines. He offered a subtle smile as he sat down. She knew inmates learned only that they had a visitor, not the identity. He picked up the phone and placed it to his ear. Sidney did the same.
They stared at each other without saying a word. Sidney blinked a few times and finally spoke.
“Hi, Dad.”
CHAPTER 14
Thursday, June 1, 2017
ON THE FIRST THURSDAY IN JUNE, AS TEMPERATURES IN MANHATTANbegan to surge and humidity hung heavy in the air, the hospital room was cool. Too cool, in fact, for the nurses, but kept at the frigid temperature by the room’s sole resident for two simple reasons. One: He despised being hot, and his body overheated in a flash. Always had, since the age of fifteen. And considering he wasn’t able to bathe himself yet, the last thing he needed was to wallow in sweaty sheets and a foul-smelling T-shirt. And two: He knew the thermostat set at sixty-one degrees pissed the nurses off. And, well, to hell with them.
The blinds were closed and the last he remembered was the final remnants of the summer evening spilling through the boxed edges of the window. Physical therapy wiped him out by seven o’clock each evening, causing him to doze the nights away, only to wake alert and restless at three each morning. This was something else that angered the nurses, since he pressed the call button as soon as he woke to ask for assistance to the bathroom. He didn’t piss in bed, he’d toldthe nurses more than once. And the other act was completely out of the question.
They didn’t like his defiance, his contempt, or his generally curmudgeonly attitude, and the nurses had let him know.
“I’ll add you to the long list of folks in my life who feel the same way,” he had told the head nurse who staged an intervention-type sit-down with him two days after his arrival. “I’ll even do it today if you’d just help me to the john.”
What pissed him off most about being in this place was that he had no control over his environment. Helplessness had never been part of his character. He simply didn’t buy into the premise. He had lived his life by taking control of situations, and lying in this hospital bed had stolen not just his dignity, but his authority as well. To ram this reality home, the nurses played the game of making him wait for half an hour before they appeared each morning. He was sure most chumps in this place soiled themselves during the wait, or filled the clear plastic container that stood on the breakfast table and then lingered like cattle for their keepers to come and congratulate them on such a fine accomplishment before dumping their waste in the toilet.
But he was new to this place, having just been delivered after surgery a little more than a week before, and the nurses hadn’t quite figured out that he wasn’t like most chumps. Once he recognized the purpose of the waiting game, which he took as a nonverbal way for the nurses to explain to him how things worked, he turned the predawn hours into a real treat for everyone yesterday when he purposely capsized the breakfast table in his attempt to make his own way to the toilet. The chaos sent nurses sprinting into his room to find him sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Lil’ help would be nice,” he had said.
They were not amused.
That was yesterday morning and the witches had adaptedtheir strategy this morning. He noticed now as he opened his eyes in the darkened room that they’d moved the breakfast table to the other side of the room; and while he slept, the plastic receptacle had been tucked between his good hip and the side rail of the bed. They may as well have attached a sticky note:Up yours.He almost appreciated their tactics.
The glowing windows were dark now, the first clue that he’d been asleep for at least a few hours. The next was the pressure in his bladder. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, the wall clock told him it was just past 3:00 a.m.
He pressed the call button and waited. He took a deep breath, adjusted in bed to take the stress off his bladder, and considered that he might have no choice this morning but to use the plastic receptacle. He watched the clock tick along until the minute hand crept past the nine. He knew that’s what they wanted—to walk into his room and discover that they had broken him. A broken man he was, there was little doubt of that. But beaten? Not a chance. He didn’t piss in bed, simple as that.
The IV and port came out first with a surge of pain up his arm. The tubes in his nose next, and the sticky buttons on his chest after that. One of them—he couldn’t tell which, since he’d ripped them all in such quick succession—created a hell of a racket with alarms beeping and blasting. The nurses were there in a blink, two of them bolting through his door.
When they saw him alert and awake, they started their scolding.
“What are you doing, Mr. Morelli?”
“I’m not playing your game,” he told them. “I pressed that button forty minutes ago.”
“We have other patients to take care of,” the nurse said as she assessed the damage, picking up the loose IV. “You could’ve hurt yourself pulling this out.”
“At three in the morning? You’re not so busy in the middleof the night that you can’t at least check on me. I have to take a leak. I’m not asking you to fluff my pillow. If I could make it to the bathroom on my own, trust me I’d do it.”
“There is a urinal right here,” the nurse said, holding up the plastic container.
