“Me?” he said with a look of great surprise.
“You,” she said, leveling a massive finger at him. “You been here too long already.”
“But I have to stay here,” he said.
“No, you have to go,” the nurse said. “Doctor wants her to rest awhile. Alone.”
“Go ahead,” Debs said softly, and Chutsky looked at her with an expression of hurt. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Go on.”
Chutsky looked from her to the nurse, and then back at Deborah again. “All right,” he said at last. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, and she did not object. He stood up and raised an eyebrow at me. “Okay, buddy,” he said. “Guess we’re evicted.”
As we left, the nurse was battering at the pillows as if they had misbehaved.
Chutsky led me down the hall to the elevator, and as we waited for it he said, “I’m a little bit worried.” He frowned and poked at the down button several more times.
“What,” I said. “You mean about, um, brain damage?” Deborah’s statement that she wanted to quit was still ringing in my ears, and it was so completely unlike her that I was a little worried, too. The image of vegetable Debbie drooling in a chair while Dexter spoon-fed her oatmeal still seemed hauntingly awful to me.
Chutsky shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “More like psychological damage.”
“How do you mean?”
He made a face. “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe it’s just the trauma. But she seems … very weepy. Anxious. Not like, you know. Herself.”
I have never been stabbed and then lost most of my blood, and in any case I could not remember reading anything that explained how you are supposed to feel under the circumstances. But it seemed to me that being weepy and anxious when these things happened to you was a relatively reasonable reaction. And
before I could think of a tactful way to say so, the elevator doors slid open and Chutsky charged in. I followed.
As the doors slid shut, he went on. “She didn’t really know me at first,” he said. “Right when she opened her eyes.”
“I’m sure that’s normal,” I said, although I was not really sure at all. “I mean, she’s been in a coma.”
“She looked right at me,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “and she was like, I dunno. Scared of me. Like, who am I and what am I doing there.”
To be perfectly honest, I had wondered the same thing over the last year or so, but it hardly seemed proper to say so. Instead, I just said, “I’m sure it takes time to—”
“Who am I,” he said, again apparently without noticing that I had spoken. “I sat there the whole time, never left her side longer than five minutes at a time.” He stared at the elevator’s control panel as it chimed to let us know we had arrived. “And she doesn’t know who I am.”
The doors slid open, but Chutsky did not notice at first.
“Well,” I said, hoping to break him out of his freeze.
He looked up at me. “Let’s get a cup of coffee,” he said, and headed out the elevator door, pushing past three people in light green scrubs, and I trudged along behind.
Chutsky led me out the door and over to the small restaurant on the ground floor of the parking garage, where somehow he managed to get two cups of coffee rather quickly, without anyone shoving in front of him or elbowing him in the ribs. It made me feel slightly superior: obviously, he was not a Miami native. Still, there was something to be said for results, and I took the coffee and sat at a small table wedged into the corner.
Chutsky didn’t look at me, or anything else for that matter. He didn’t blink, and the expression on his face didn’t change. I couldn’t think of anything to say that was worth the air it would take, so we sat in chummy awkwardness for several minutes, until he finally blurted out, “What if she doesn’t love me anymore?”
I have always tried to maintain a modest outlook, particularly when it comes to my own talents, and I know very well that I am really only good at one or two things, and advice to the lovelorn was very definitely not one of them. And since I do not actually understand love, it seemed a little unfair to expect me to comment on its possible loss.
Still, it was quite clear that some kind of comment was called for, and so, dropping the temptation to say, “I don’t really know why she loved you in the first place,” I fumbled in my bag of clichés and came up with, “Of course she does. She’s just had a terrible strain—it takes time to recover.”
Chutsky watched me for a few seconds to see if there was any more, but there wasn’t. He turned away and sipped at his coffee. “Maybe you’re right,” he said.
“Of course I am,” I said. “Give her time to get well. Everything will be fine.” No lightning struck me when I said it, so I suppose it was possible that I was right.
We finished our coffee in relative silence, Chutsky brooding on the possibility that he was no longer beloved, and Dexter anxiously gazing at the clock as it approached noon, the time for me to leave and get in place to ambush Weiss, and so it was something less than chummy when I finally drained my cup and stood up to go. “I’ll come back later,” I said, but Chutsky just nodded and took another forlorn sip of his coffee.
“Okay, buddy,” he said. “See you.”