Chapter Twenty-Three: St. Vincent's
Late that evening, Celia’s wrist swelled beyond the loosened bandage. Maggie called the hospital. Marjorie paid for the cab and came with Celia and Elizabeth; Nell stayed at Pine Court until they returned.
At St. Vincent's, the nurse asked for Celia's address before she asked about the wrist.
Celia stood at the desk with her coat half off one shoulder, the bad hand held against her ribs. Rain had darkened the hem of her skirt. The clean bandage Maggie had tied at Pine Court had gone loose in the cab, and the skin below it showed swollen and pale.
“Address?” the nurse said.
Celia gave the Alvarado street number.
Then stopped.
The nurse waited with the pencil over the line.
“No,” Celia said. “Not that one.”
Elizabeth stood beside her with Celia's shopping bag in both hands. Two dresses, stockings, the photograph wrapped in tissue. The bag had softened at the corners. The handle had torn once already and been tied through with string from Ruthie's kitchen drawer.
Marjorie stood behind them, breathing hard from the rush to get the cab, one hand still inside her open purse.
The nurse looked at Celia. Not at the women behind her. Not at the bag.
“Do you have another address?”
Celia looked down.
“Pine Court,” Elizabeth said.
Celia turned toward her.
The nurse wrote nothing.
Celia said, “Leave it blank.”
The pencil lifted.
“All right.”
The nurse moved to the next line.
“Name.”
“Celia Vale.”
“Age.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Married?”
“No.”
The answer came fast enough to sound practiced. Too fast. Celia heard it too and lowered her eyes.
The nurse wrote.
The waiting room smelled of wet coats, carbolic, and coffee kept too long on a burner. A man with a towel around his hand sat beneath a crucifix and watched the floor. A young mother rocked a child against her chest while an older woman beside her held a paper sack spotted with grease. Two men in work clothes sat apart from everyone else, hats in their hands, both of them looking at the same closed door.
Elizabeth had not been in a hospital since a fever in Long Beach. She remembered white sheets, a thermometer, a woman telling her to hold still as if stillness were a virtue. Here, nobody had enough stillness to spare. Pain moved in chairs, in shoes, in fingers pressed into coat cuffs.
Celia kept her injured hand hidden inside the good one.
The nurse looked at it.
“How did it happen?”
Celia's mouth opened.
No sound came.
Marjorie stepped closer. Elizabeth thought she would answer for her. She did not.
Celia said, “Stairs.”
The nurse wrote fall.
Then she looked at the marks above the bandage.
The older bruises had yellowed at the edges. The newer ones had gone blue. Finger marks did not look like fingers after a few days. They looked like weather under the skin.
The nurse did not touch them.
A door opened and a man called, “Vale.”
Celia stood too quickly. Her face changed but she did not cry out.
The examining room was narrow, with gray walls and a metal tray on wheels. “I’m Dr. Arden,” the doctor said. He was young enough to still look tired in a fresh way. He asked Celia to sit. He unwrapped the wrist without hurry. The gauze stuck once where the skin had dried to it.
Celia shut her eyes.
Elizabeth looked at the wall.
A calendar showed a field somewhere green and impossible. March. Not January. The wrong month for the room.
The doctor bent the fingers one at a time. Celia held until the third finger, then made a sound through her teeth.
“Sorry,” he said.
She nodded without looking at him.
He pressed along the bone. The wrist had swollen thick at the joint. He asked her to turn the hand. She tried. It moved badly.
“X-ray,” he said to the nurse.
Celia looked at Marjorie. “I can't stay all night.”
“No one said all night,” Marjorie answered.
The doctor looked at the bruises above the wrist. Then at Celia.
“Do you want those noted?”
The room held around the question.
Outside, wheels squeaked in the hallway. Someone coughed. The nurse moved one step to the tray and stopped.
Celia looked at her own arm as if it belonged to another woman who had come in with them.
“Yes,” she said.
The doctor wrote.
He did not ask the man's name.
In the X-ray room, Elizabeth waited outside with the shopping bag between her feet. Marjorie sat beside her, elbows on knees, fingers locked together so tightly the knuckles had gone white.
The bag leaned against Elizabeth's shin.
The photograph inside it shifted when she moved her foot. Celia's mother in tissue. Dresses. Stockings. Not the radio. No radio now.
Elizabeth's own purse sat under her coat against her hip.
Two dollars and seventy-one cents. Lipstick. Cedar House card. The unfinished reference.
She did not open it.
Marjorie said, “She should have come sooner.”
Elizabeth did not answer.
Marjorie looked at the closed X-ray door.
“I should have made her.”
A woman in a gray suit came down the hallway with a notebook against her chest. She stopped at the desk, spoke to the nurse, then came toward them.
“Miss Vale has no current address?”
Marjorie stood.
Elizabeth stayed seated with the bag.
“She’s at Pine Court tonight,” Marjorie said. “Maybe tomorrow. The house closes Tuesday.”
The woman wrote that down.
“Family?”
Marjorie gave one small shake of the head before she seemed to know she was doing it.
“Employment?”
“Hargrove and Dunn. Typing pool.”
“Can she return there safely?”
Marjorie's face hardened.
“Safely?”
The woman did not repeat the word. She waited.
Marjorie looked toward the X-ray door.
“I don't know.”
The woman wrote it down.
When Celia came back, the doctor said there was no break. Sprain, bruising, swollen tissue. He wrapped the wrist in a firmer bandage and told her not to lift anything heavy.
Celia laughed once. It had no pleasure in it.
“I type.”
“Not tomorrow if you can help it.”
“I can't help it.”
He looked at her then, properly.
“No,” he said. “I suppose not.”
The woman in the gray suit gave Celia a hospital card for Sister Anselm and a second card with another number written in blue ink. Celia held both in her good hand.
“Can they make me go back?” she asked.
“No.”
The answer was plain.
Celia looked at the woman as if plain answers were tricks until proven otherwise.
The woman said, “That does not mean he won't try.”
Celia nodded.
The cards went into the shopping bag with the photograph while the pay envelope stayed inside Celia’s blouse.
At the desk, the nurse pushed the intake form forward.
Celia looked at the blank address line.
“Leave it,” the nurse said.
Celia signed at the bottom with her left hand. The name came out blunt and crooked. She stared at it, then pushed the paper back.
At the door, Dr. Arden held it while Elizabeth manoeuvred the shopping bag past the latch. She thanked him. “You were at the drugstore Saturday,” he said. “Aspirin?” She nodded. “Are you staying with Miss Vale?” he asked.
“We’re at Pine Court,” Elizabeth said. “It closes tomorrow.”
She followed Marjorie into the hall.