The Nakeds Read online

  Penny the nurse was setting down her tray on one of the tables, slipping herself into a seat across the room. She took the paper napkin in front of her and spread it out across her lap, like people did with cloth napkins at his parents’ restaurants. She had long, dark red hair in a thick ponytail that fell across her shoulder, pouty, puffy lips, and eyes so bright green he could see their color even from where he sat several feet away. He thought she was pretty, but tried not to meet those green eyes. She was staring, though, so hard that he thought he might have spilled something on himself. He brushed his shirt off and tried to ignore her. In addition to catching him that one time in Hannah’s room, he knew that she’d seen him on Hannah’s floor more than once and was sure that she had to be suspicious. Maybe she’d tell somebody and get him arrested. Now she was smiling right at him. It made him nervous, her smile, and he pretended not to see it. He wished he’d brought something to read. He thought about taking the paper dolls out of the bag for something to look at, but decided that he’d look like a weirdo, sitting alone and looking at dolls.

  He remembered he still had the brochure from the junior college his parents had left on his pillow. It was folded up and crammed in his wallet. He took out his wallet and opened it, unfolded the brochure, and spread it out next to the cinnamon roll. He stared hard at the list of classes offered, though he had the list memorized already: English 101, 102, and 103; Math 101, 102, and 103; history, and so on. Martin thought it sounded a lot like high school and wanted to do something new, go somewhere else; he wanted to start over and forget.

  He glanced up from the brochure and the nurse was still staring. She raised her cup in a sort of hello that startled Martin, his own cup slipping from his fingers and splashing coffee onto his shirt. He zipped his jacket to cover up the spot, then stood and headed to the exit. He turned around one last time to look at the nurse and she was still smiling. She gave him a little wave. He thought she was probably crazy.

  When he returned to Hannah’s door, she wasn’t there. He stood outside her room for several minutes and then made his way to the nurses’ station, where he found the green-eyed nurse who didn’t look quite as crazy as she had downstairs. “Hey,” he said.

  “You’re the guy who ran away without giving me his name.”

  “Yeah, I …”

  She motioned for him to come closer. “It’s OK,” she said. “Charlotte’s doing rounds. She’ll be giving little Leon his antibiotics. Leon likes to talk after taking his meds, so Charlotte won’t be back for a while.”

  Martin smiled and stepped closer to the nurses’ station.

  “You’re the guy who keeps bringing presents for Hannah and doesn’t want to be seen,” the nurse said quietly, looking around, making sure no one heard her. “Don’t worry. I’ve noticed you and haven’t said a word about it. I know you’re harmless. I’m a terrific judge of character. You look very trustworthy—a little sad, maybe, but not dangerous,” she said, nodding.

  I was right, she’s crazy, Martin thought. But she didn’t look crazy. She looked pretty and sweet.

  “My sister knows someone who goes to school with Hannah. One of her good friends,” he lied.

  The nurse nodded.

  “Where is she?” Martin said, trying not to stare at the nurse’s pretty lips.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, leaning forward, “but the poor girl’s back in intensive care. I used to work in intensive care.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t work there anymore. I was transferred.”

  “No, I mean with Hannah.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Of course. You don’t care about my work.” She laughed.

  “What happened to Hannah?” he asked again.

  “Fever spike—we think it’s some sort of infection. We’ve been running tests for days.”

  He looked down at his shoes and thought about giving the nurse the paper dolls for Hannah, but decided that he’d already risked enough just talking to her.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  “What’s your name? I can tell the family you came by.”

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “I won’t tell the family. Obviously, you’ve been giving gifts anonymously. What was I thinking? You don’t want me to tell the family. I won’t tell them. I haven’t told them yet, and I won’t. You don’t seem like a lunatic,” she said.

  “Thanks, I guess,” he said. Then, “I’ll come back when the girl gets better.”

  “What’s your name?” she said, again. “Hey, hey,” she called after him, but he was already walking away again, heading to the elevator, and pretending he didn’t hear her.

  11

  WHEN HANNAH’S temperature suddenly spiked, the doctors and nurses seemed to morph into other people. Aggravated and impatient, they rushed around her bed with jobs to do. Their movements were quick, setting up a new IV line, taking her pulse with extra pressure to her wrist. There wasn’t time for pleasantries or the compliments Hannah had grown accustomed to. They were busy and stern professionals. Hannah didn’t feel so smart or mature anymore. She was crying like the baby she was. Dr. Roth leaned in close enough for her to feel his hot breath on her hot face, for her to smell whatever pungent thing he had eaten for lunch. “Where does it hurt?” he asked, speaking slowly, spacing out his words.

  “Everywhere,” she answered.

  “Can you be more specific?” he wanted to know.

  Back in ICU, she was sweating and hallucinating. The bed was on fire. The doctor was her father. The nurse was a waitress. The IV bottle was a glass of milk.

  “Where does it hurt?” he asked again.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Test after test.

  Drink this chalky mixture. Pretend it’s a milk shake.

  X-rays.

  Handfuls of colorful pills.

  That’s right, swallow them all. No, no, all of them.

  Come on, Hannah.

  Be a good girl.

  Hold your breath.

  More tests.

  Stay still.

  Don’t move.

  Do you want to get better?

  You want to get better, don’t you?

  I don’t know what she wants.

  • • •

  Someone changed her sheets every hour. Someone dabbed at her face with a cool cloth. Her parents visited her individually, her mom during the days and her dad in the evenings, or maybe it was the other way around—she couldn’t be sure of anything. Her mom sang to her, pausing to shake pills into her palm, to tip back her head and swallow them. Her mom sighed and said, Who did this to you? Her mom said, Where is he? The pills her mom had swallowed kicked in, but her anger and resolve stayed strong. One day I’ll find him, she said, slurring her words. Her mom stared at the mute TV suspended in the air in the corner of the room. Her mom closed her eyes and curled up in a chair. Someone begged Hannah to eat, spooning salty broth into her mouth. Someone rubbed cold lotion on her shoulders and chest. Someone fanned her with a magazine. Her dad’s eyes were red. He’d gotten a haircut, his curls flat now and pressed to his scalp. He wasn’t wearing his wedding ring. He’d brought a blonde friend along. Maybe the gash on his cheek was closing up, healing as it should have been healing, or maybe time was moving backwards and the wound was opening up, big and red again, about to swallow her. Eddie Epstein and his mother stopped by or maybe they didn’t. After Penny checked her temperature, she smoothed Hannah’s hair away from her forehead. Another nurse fed her slivers of ice. Someone slinked in. Someone picked up the snow globe from the nightstand. Someone shook the snow globe in front of Hannah’s face before putting it back down. Someone called her name. Someone called her name again. Someone pulled up a chair and sat down by her bed. Someone said he was sorry. Someone was weeping. Someone was blowing his nose. Someone was holding his elbows, rocking back and forth. Someone stood up and looked at her. Someone said he was sorry one more time. Someone walked away.

  12

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nbsp; NINA THOUGHT about him at night, but sometimes during the day too. Some days every man in every truck at every red light was the criminal. A man without a heart. She’d look over, stare into his front seat, see his hands on the steering wheel, and feel certain there was an empty space in his chest where his heart should have been. She’d look away as the light turned green, and by the time her foot hit the gas, she’d be imagining a pocket of air surrounded by red flesh, a place where he could store his cruelty.

  Nina was alone in bed, thinking about him, and Asher was in bed with Christy, thinking about him too. Asher thinking, That man hit my Hannah and left her in the road to die.

  Asher and Christy had probably just said a prayer. They might have just had sex. Either way, Asher would start thinking about him. He’d think about how he wanted to punish him, what he’d like to do to him if he ever found out who he was.

  Asher and Nina spent an increasing amount of time wondering who he was and what he looked like. They wanted a face and a name, someone to be accountable.

  Asher dreamt of a faceless man in a bathtub and he killed him with a baseball bat. He talked about the man to Christy, saying, That fucking man drove away.

  “Don’t say fuck,” Christy said. “I mean, don’t say the f-word. Let’s pray.”

  And they’d pray. It wasn’t just a thing they did before dinner. It was after every argument. It was on Sunday afternoons and evenings, in preparation for the new week ahead. Christy wanted to pray for the man who’d hit Hannah, but Asher refused. “You pray for him alone,” he said. “A human being stops his car,” he told her.

  On Nina’s particularly bad days, it wasn’t just men in trucks, but every man in the grocery store. He was the old man reaching for the eggs. He was the young man pulling cereal from a shelf. He was the boy with bad skin and braces bagging her groceries. He was the middle-aged man smiling at her in line. She wanted to yell at all of them. How could you have left her there? she wanted to scream.

  13

  THE NEW doctor arrived, and he was young and lean, wearing jeans under his white jacket, with a degree from Stanford. He insisted they both call him Dr. Seth, and he was smarter than the rest, her mom whispered in Hannah’s ear. When he entered the hospital room, Nina nearly jumped up from the chair and smiled like she hadn’t smiled in weeks. She was giddy, a girl, Hannah thought. She was sucking in the little bit of stomach she had, and straightening her skirt, and Hannah hoped her mom didn’t forget to breathe.

  Although the last three tests had come back negative, Dr. Seth believed that Hannah’s liver was abscessed, which meant she’d undergo yet one more test. She’d have to drink another chalky ten ounces of what the technician called a milk shake, and she’d have to lie there very still while the machine took pictures of her insides.

  “It’s most likely in a place we can’t see—a spot the scans haven’t picked up,” Dr. Seth said, demonstrating on her mom’s hand. “Here’s what we saw in our first X-rays,” he said, “and here’s the underside.” He flipped Nina’s hand over in his own and looked at her blushing face. She shyly pulled her hand away.

  “We’re so lucky you’re here,” her mom said, fixing her hair, poofing it up with her fingers.

  “We’ll know definitively this afternoon. I’ll find out what’s wrong and then I’ll fix it.” His voice was deep and confident.

  “Hear that, Hannah? We’ll know soon,” she said.

  • • •

  In the middle of the night the rushing nurses told Hannah nothing about what they knew. They talked to each other in hushed tones. One of them inserted a new IV into her hand. Two orderlies lifted her from the bed onto a gurney and hurried her down the hall and into the elevator, where, despite the excitement, she watched the numbers light up and her eyelids grew heavy.

  • • •

  When Hannah woke up there was a thick tube snaking out of her waist, poking out from under the sheet and traveling across the room. It spewed the infection into a huge machine that seemed alive with its chirping, blinking, and constant hum. Dr. Seth explained that it was cleaning Hannah out, which made her wonder what kind of a girl she was—just what kind of girl gets dirty on the inside?

  14

  MARTIN WANTED to go back to the hospital and tell Penny his name. He wanted to bring her a plate of lasagna and a cup of spumoni ice cream from one of his parents’ restaurants. He wanted to ask her questions and get to know her, but mostly he wanted information about Hannah and her progress. He wondered if an abscessed liver could kill a girl.

  It had been nearly a week since the last time he’d hurried away from Penny. Now he stood at the nurses’ station trying to get the chubby nurse’s attention. He could have sworn that she’d spun around in her chair when she saw him coming down the hall. She was talking on the phone with her back turned to him, laughing, obviously flirting with whoever was on the other end.

  What about the sick people on your floor? Someone might be dropping dead this very minute. Penny would never ignore someone, he thought.

  She twirled the phone cord around her finger and said, “You didn’t, did you? You did!” and then she laughed. Martin watched her fat finger going white. He shuffled around in his shoes. He sighed. He coughed. He cleared his throat.

  “I gotta go,” the nurse said into the phone. She hung up the receiver and spun the chair around, staring at him. “Can I help you?” she said, all put-out.

  “Is Penny working tonight?” he asked.

  “Nope.” She stood up and snatched some charts from a shelf. “What do you want with Penny?”

  “Do you know when she’ll be back?”

  “She’s working tomorrow—the night shift.”

  “How’s Hannah Teller?”

  “Are you her brother?

  “A friend of the family.”

  “She’s still in ICU.”

  “I’m sorry,” Martin said.

  Something buzzed—two lights at once were flashing red. “I gotta go,” the nurse said, turning and rushing off, her ample hips teeter-tottering away.

  After peering in and seeing Hannah with the woman he assumed was her mother and a young doctor at her bedside, Martin went to the ICU waiting room and sat down. No one was there—the many couches empty, the TV on but so quiet you couldn’t hear what the newscaster was saying. Damn it, fuck it. He wanted to die. His miserable sister was right. Hannah wasn’t going to survive. She was still in ICU. Wasn’t that where they took people right after a horrible fucking trauma, like when they were shot or had a heart attack? She’d been doing so well. He was a murderer. He was a fucking killer. A monster. He knew it. He’d known it all along. He’d known it from the beginning, he’d felt it, and now it was happening.

  He’d been sitting there, berating himself for nearly an hour when he saw Hannah’s mother coming down the hall with her purse over her arm, wiping her eyes with a tissue. The young doctor was next to her and they were heading toward the elevator. The doctor held a clipboard at his chest and spoke to her out of the side of his mouth. She was nodding as he talked, agreeing. Martin thought they knew each other better than they should and wondered where Hannah’s father was.

  • • •

  Martin tried to obey his hospital rules, but the night after he’d seen Hannah’s mom and the doctor go into the elevator together, he broke one. After drinking three beers alone in the park, he showed up at the nurses’ station. He’d had a roast beef sandwich, an apple, and half a bag of potato chips, and he’d sipped the beers slowly, over the course of a couple hours, so he wasn’t really drunk, but mildly buzzed, which ended up giving him the confidence to approach Penny, to ask her things. He’d walked down the bright hallway and popped a mint in his mouth.

  “What’s your name? I’m not talking to you until you tell me your name,” she said.

  “I’m Marty Kettle,” he said.

  “You’re pretty like a girl, Marty Kettle,” she said, softening.

  “I’m a mess,” he said.

 
“You know Hannah, don’t you?” she said.

  “I don’t know her,” he said. “My sister used to sit with her at lunch sometimes, that’s all.”

  “Then why—” she began.

  He lowered his voice and looked at her solemnly. “I live a few houses away from her. And I heard the whole thing,” he tried. But he could see it wasn’t enough.

  Penny’s arms were crossed against her chest.

  “OK,” he said. “You want the truth?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I have another sister, I mean, I had another sister,” he said, and as he lied, his eyes welled up. “She’d never eat and no one said anything. Not my mom or dad—it was like they couldn’t see her. And I didn’t help. And then she died in a car wreck.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Penny said, looking like she meant it.

  “It’s been very hard,” he said. “She and I were close. I feel like I lost my best friend.”

  Penny uncrossed her arms, dropped them to her sides. “I don’t think Hannah likes the snow globe because, you know, she grew up here, by the beach,” Penny told him.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I guess she doesn’t care about snow.”

  Penny told him that Hannah’s parents had mostly given up on finding the driver, who they’d heard was a very old man. “He probably couldn’t see where he was going,” she said. “Old men get cataracts.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Old women too.”

  “All of us,” he said.

  She nodded and stared at him hard. “Their eyes cloud up and they can barely see.”

  15

  SHE’D BEEN hooked up to the machine that was draining the abscess from her liver for just two days and her fever disappeared and her cheeks were pink and her appetite was back. She ate plates of unrecognizable meat and the palest, softest vegetables and blue Jell-O or red Jell-O and little cups of ice cream that she opened herself, pulling the tab. They had moved her downstairs to the floor where the kids were just sick, not necessarily dying, her mother said.

  “Katy had her tonsils taken out yesterday and she’s going home today—isn’t that right, Katy?” Nina pulled the curtain that separated the two girls to one side and popped her head around.