Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley Page A

and study the thin plastic ten-inch-long tube that comes out of Luke’s chest. A catheter line feeds into a clear bag on the floor, where the smallest amount of dark brown urine has collected. The bag of pee looks very serious. So does the IV line that runs out of the top of his left hand, where a bandage has been taped. Purple bruising has started around the places where the IV line and the chest tube go into his body. He looks lost lying there—gone from us. What if I yank the line and pull on the tube in his chest and take him home with me?
    A nurse steps in and peers at me over the top of her white face mask. She replaces the saline bag on the metal pole next to Luke’s head. Why doesn’t she talk? Why doesn’t someone explain? The cement walls are pink, and a piece of waist-high, three-inch-wide white paneling wraps the room. A watercolor of the Seine bordered by fuzzy green trees hangs in the middle behind Luke’s bed, near two stainless-steel electrical outlets with thick plugs for the different devices. It’s the painting that makes me long for home. Like a punch in the stomach. It’s a tourist poster—water glinting off the river and the trees too perfectly shaved and what are we doing here in this country? It’s okay to be a foreigner until somebody gets sick. I’m homesick now. Not for our house but for the people who lived in it. Luke’s face and arms twitch in his sleep. I take his hand.
    “I’m here. Just sleep. There’s explaining to do in the morning.”White metal tables flank the bed. The one nearer to me has a pink water pitcher on it. I pour Luke a glass for when he wakes up. Then I stand frozen like that until Gaird comes back from the bathroom and presses my right arm with his hand and walks to the other side of the bed.
    Sara puts her head in twenty minutes later, and charges in and hugs me so hard I have to break away to get a breath. Then she stands inches from my face. “Willie. Willie Pears. You must try to listen to me.”
    “I don’t want Luke to hear you,” I whisper. I’m now convinced that there’s something really wrong with him and that the tubes coming out of his body mean he’s dying. So I’m kind of delusional.
    “He’s in a deep sleep, Will. But we’ve given him lots of delicious pain meds, and he’s going to nap for a long time. He could barely breathe. But now he’s happy. You must believe me, and you must pay attention. He’s going to be fine.”
    I wipe some snot on the inside of my hand and study her lips while they move. “What’s he got? What’s made him so sick, Sara?”
    “We’ll know more in a few hours.”
    I can’t stop crying. “But, I mean, why are we here?” I wipe my nose with the back of my hand this time.
    “Well, for starters, he’s got a collapsed lung, so he couldn’t breathe by the time they got him here. A collapsed lung isn’t fun for anyone.” Sara looks at Luke. “We’re running blood tests. We’re looking at everything. He’s got a high fever, that’s for sure.”
    We’re in some dark French indie film: Sara playing doctor and Luke playing patient. Soon they’ll stand back and change roles. Luke’s already had the flu twice since I moved to France. He works too hard. He works on movie sets, yes. But there are more Water Trust projects in China in the border regions along the Gobi Desert, where the drought is on, and a big new one in Sichuan Province and one in Guangdong. China is six hours ahead of France, so when Luke wants to catch his engineers and CEO at the start of the day, he stays up until three in the morning to make the calls.
    Hours pass in the hospital. Luke sleeps. There’s a small windowon the right side of the room, darkened by tan venetian blinds, and I can just make out the streetlights outside. It must be after eight o’clock. Gaird and I camp out in reclining chairs on either side of Luke’s bed. “He wasn’t supposed to get sick again.”
    “I know it,” Gaird says. “I am going to