Skeleton Key(35)

Actually, Eve thought, turning over in bed and wishing the chills would stop, it wasn’t true that every patient without insurance had to have money right up front. There were people, like that writer who lived in town, who just seemed to call up depths of sympathy in doctors and dentists and nurse practitioners. Eve had read an interview with the writer in the Waterbury Republican—about how this woman had lost her insurance when she lost her husband, young, to cancer; about how good and helpful and kind all the medical professionals had been, a year later, when she fell in her driveway and sustained a multiple fracture of her right leg. Eve could see the difference, even in the grainy black-and-white photograph—although she couldn’t have said exactly what it was made up of. It was a kind of a puzzle she had spent her whole life trying to solve, without success. For some reason, she could just tell that the writer was someone who had gone to a good college, had grown up in a family that owned a decent house, had learned to expect that she would be treated well. She could tell this even though the writer was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and sitting cross-legged on the floor of what looked like a wide front porch.

Eve turned over in bed and tried to breathe. Her chest hurt. Her head hurt, too. When she tried to move her head from side to side, there was so much pain in her neck she almost cried out. She had no idea how much money she had in the bank, or how she was going to find out. When she tried to move, everything inside her seemed to explode.

If worse came to worse, she could go to the emergency room at St. Mary’s Hospital in Waterbury. St. Mary’s was the one that took anybody in. Their waiting room was always full of Spanish boys who had cut each other and pregnant women with four other children in tow. There were policemen stationed there, at the doors, all the time. It had always made Eve wonder. Did the doctors and nurses feel they were under attack? Did the people come in from off the street and try to steal things?

Eve’s apartment was just one big room, at the front of a house just off Hemenway Place, in Watertown. From that window she could see the tiny mall called Depot Square and one side of the old Hemenway School. The house was an old clapboard one with a barn out back that had been converted into a garage. Her car was in the garage with four others, the ones that belonged to the other people in the house. She had to get out of her bed and out of her apartment and out to her car, and then she had to drive it.

She did manage to get out of bed. She mostly fell onto the cold linoleum floor, but she got out. She looked at the faded black-and-pink-and-silver pattern of swans and thought that she should have done something about it long ago, bought a rug or had the floor pulled up at her own expense. The pattern was so ugly. She grabbed the side of the bed and pulled herself up. She could stand if she held onto things. She was holding onto the wall.

She had gone to the Hemenway School herself, when she was small. She had walked up the hill from the little house where her family had had their own apartment and watched the big yellow school buses come in from the subdivisions in the north part of town. In those days she had wanted nothing as much as she wanted a split level, with two bathrooms, and a room that wasn’t the living room to put the television in.

She looked around and saw that she had made it to the door. She was still wearing her nightgown. She was still shivering. She was sure she had forgotten something, but she couldn’t remember what. She had to get to her car, that was the thing. It didn’t matter if she was in her nightgown. Nobody would see her until she got to the hospital, and at the hospital nobody would care.

She went out into the hall and looked around. She could hear music coming from the apartment across the way. Classical music, that was what it was called. Except that it sounded funny, even for classical music, tinny, maybe, or very high-pitched. Eve’s head hurt so badly that she thought it was going to pop open.

The door had clicked shut and locked behind her before she realized what it was she’d forgotten—and then it was too late, of course. She didn’t know what she was going to do.

Her keys. She didn’t have her keys. She was in her nightgown, and her keys were in her pocketbook on the table with this morning’s breakfast dishes. She had sat down to eat just after she got in from work, but she had already been feeling awful. She’d been feeling worse than awful. She never threw food away. She couldn’t stand the idea of wasting it. This food she’d left sitting in its dishes, as if fairies would come to eat it in the night.

If her keys were still on the table, she wouldn’t be able to drive her car. She wouldn’t even be able to get back into the apartment The door locked automatically when it closed. She felt the tears well up behind her eyes. It wasn’t true that everything was her fault. It really wasn’t. Some things just happened.