She’d gone into labor, is what happened, and then when that went horribly awry, she’d had her C-section, been tethered to the bed with IVs and drugs and pain right upstairs from him but unable to get herself down the hall and to the elevator. When Cecily wasn’t back yet, and Asher was in New York, and there was really no one left to stay by his bedside. She’d thought of calling casual acquaintances and asking them to check on him, but he was closer with the nurses than with random old neighbors, and these nurses knew what they were doing; they’d held hands for hours with many men dying alone. Besides which, Fiona just needed to recover and then she could get back down there to the third floor, take care of him again.
But meanwhile Yale fell into deep unconsciousness, and Fiona had to make the medical decisions over the phone, the maternity nurses looking on with concern. She’d send Damian down again and again with messages for Yale, despite the fact that he likely couldn’t hear a thing, and when he came back up she’d make him tell her what Yale looked like. “He’s got so many tubes coming out of him,” he said. “He’s the wrong color. Fiona, I don’t know. I’m so tired. I’ll go back again if you need, but every time I’m in there I think I’ll pass out.” Yale’s old friend Gloria and her girlfriend did some shifts, but only in the afternoons. When Nico had died, there were too many people wanting to be in the room, jockeying for position, vying for the roles of caretaker and hand-holder and chief mourner. And now there was no one. Yale had been there for Nico, and Terrence, and even fucking Charlie, and there was no one left for him, not really, and it killed her.
Claire was thirty-six hours old and nursing wasn’t working, and Fiona, who’d been prepared for the tearing of a natural birth, was in disbelief at the howling pain that ran through her entire body when she tried to adjust her torso, tried to sit up on her own just the slightest bit. She’d go light-headed and collapse back, blind. In the five minutes the Lamaze instructor had devoted to C-sections, she’d never mentioned the pain, the crippling. Fiona made it to the bathroom on the arm of the nurse, and nearly fainted. She asked if they could take her down to the AIDS unit in a wheelchair, and the first nurse said she’d have to ask the doctor, but then she never came back. The second nurse said it could be done in the morning. Fiona might have fought harder, but the pain was too much, and the drugs were closing her eyes, and in the morning everything would be easier.
Claire stayed in the nursery all night that night, and Fiona slept late. She woke to Dr. Cheng’s face. He’d come all the way upstairs. When his expression came into focus she screamed so primally, so loudly, that if she’d been anywhere other than a maternity ward, everyone would have come running.
It was early this morning, Dr. Cheng said. Debbie the charge nurse had been with him.
But that wasn’t enough.
And if Fiona hadn’t sent his mother away, he might have heard her voice through the haze. He might have been comforted on the deepest childhood level.
Nicolette had come to the bench and was opening her little bag of crackers. Cecily patted the bench and she climbed up, sat with her legs swinging off the edge.
Fiona touched the blonde curls, unimaginably soft.
She said, “It was the biggest mistake of my life, Cecily. I think I’m being punished for it now. I shut my own mother out and I sent Yale’s mother away, and it all boomeranged and hit me in the face.”
Nicolette said, “Do you live in America?”
Fiona dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Yes. Did you know that I’m your mama’s mama? And Cecily is your daddy’s mama.”
Nicolette looked back and forth between them as if a great joke were being played, as if they’d told her one was the Easter Bunny and the other was the Tooth Fairy.
“Your mama came out of my tummy, and your daddy came out of Cecily’s tummy.”
“Show me,” Nicolette said, and Fiona lifted up her sweater and pointed at the pale line of scar.
“Right there,” she said, and Nicolette nodded.
“But it didn’t ouch?” Nicolette asked.
“Not a bit.”
Nicolette chewed her cracker, and Cecily said to Fiona, “I don’t know if this is helpful, but whenever I felt guilty about something when I was young, my mother would say, “How do you make up for it? What’s a thing you could do that would make you feel better?” It sounds like Mr. Rogers, I know, but it’s always grounded me when I’m upset.”
“I could move to Paris,” Fiona said, and she was joking until she heard it and realized she wasn’t.
Nicolette wanted her books now. Cecily pulled her onto her lap and read to her about Pénélope, about the game she and her animal friends played with their trunk of colored clothes.
1991
Fiona was waiting for them right inside the Brigg’s front door. She said, “Rescue me from my family!”
“Help us first,” Cecily said. There was a ramp, but the rubber strip right in the doorway was catching Yale’s wheels, and so Cecily had to rock him back while Fiona grabbed the armrests and pulled forward, and Yale held tight and tried to lean back so he wouldn’t fall forward when they put him down again.
The landing jarred him, knocked the oxygen tank into his spine. But they were in. Fiona helped him pull his coat off.
Cecily said, “We have exactly one hour.”
“I actually have two hours of oxygen,” Yale said. “She’s being conservative.”
“Well she’s right!” Fiona said. “What if there’s a traffic jam on the way back? I can’t believe they let you out.”
“For the record,” Yale said as they wheeled him down the hall toward the gallery, “if you’re ever questioned in a court of law, they did not let me out, and Dr. Cheng definitely did not help us steal the oxygen or the chair.”
“Of course not.”
“He says hi.”
* * *
—
The gallery was already full. Yale was vastly underdressed—every other man wore a tie, and he wore an old sweater that used to fit snugly and now hung like a tent—but his clothes weren’t what anyone would be looking at, anyway.
There was Warner Bates from ARTnews, waving, pointing him out to someone else. Warner had come to interview him last fall right after Gloria’s initial Trib feature appeared. He’d brought along a photographer who’d shot Yale sitting on his own couch, laughing with Fiona. Yale was embarrassed by the attention, by the focus on his role. Gloria’s story had been about the collection itself. “After Seventy Years,” the headline read, “an Artist Claims His Prize.” It included plenty of helpful quotes from an unwitting Bill Lindsey, who didn’t realize the focus would be Ranko Novak. The article wasn’t dishonest; it never stated directly that Novak’s pieces would be in the show. But in talking at length about Novak’s pieces, as well as his life and death, it implied as much. “She wanted him to have his due,” it quoted Yale as saying. “She wanted him hanging next to Modigliani.” That article itself might not have been enough to force Bill’s hand, but the half-dozen more pieces it spawned in the art press were. And suddenly Ranko’s name was all over the gallery’s own press for the show.