Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley Page B

sleep so I can be of use to Luke in the morning.” Then he pulls a blue blanket one of the nurses gave him up around his chin and closes his eyes.
    I don’t know if he really sleeps. I lie awake for hours. I forgot to eat anything all day and I’m thirsty, too. The fake leather squeaks whenever I move in the chair, and I’m afraid of waking Luke. So I sit very still and keep my eyes on him.
    When he started making me the hamburgers, I’m not sure he believed Mom was ever coming back from Greece. He knew things about her I didn’t know. He was adult like that, even when he was thirteen. He loved her in a way that forgave her the big things. For Greece. For the way she allowed her husband to live for a while with a blond undergrad who majored in river ecology. Luke didn’t ask Mom the hard questions. Why she got so mad at Dad. At us. Why she railed against the hospital where she worked when they didn’t have a bed for one of her patients. It was as if Luke already knew all the reasons. I must fall asleep at some point, but I don’t know when. Then I’m up with the earliest nurse, who comes in at dawn to check Luke’s vital signs. His fever broke during the night, and his breathing’s almost normal now.
    Later in the morning I lie on his bed with him, waiting for the bronchoscopy results to come back. Gaird stands at the end of the bed, reading the chart. Maybe Luke has cancer or maybe he has a bad cold with a horrible cough? Or maybe his lung collapsed in a freakish, singular cellular event because he’s been working too hard? He wears thick, white circulation stockings, which poke out from the end of the bed and make his feet look like golf clubs.
    “What’s really going on? Do you think anyone has a handle on it?” Luke asks when he wakes up.
    “Your poor lung collapsed. You couldn’t breathe. That is why you felt so awful.” I try to be light.
    “I’d love to know what I have.”
    “We all would. Gaird and Sara and me. We would all like to know.” I push the bed tray away on its wheels, and Gaird puts the chart down.
    “You two cannot do this talking thing together when I am with you.”
    “Gaird,” I say. “We are speaking English. It’s a common language known throughout the world.”
    “No more jibber jabber. Enough.” He raises his right arm in the air and waves it back and forth like he’s tracking a fly. Then he leaves.
    I make my eyes really big. “What just happened? I’ve never seen his temper before. His accent always makes it sound like he’s having a great time.”
    “He’s nervous. He needs to blow off steam.”
    I take Luke’s hand. “Tell me you feel better.” I wonder if I need to call my father, just to check in. He’ll either be at home or in the desert. But this is when Dr. Picard walks in and explains that Luke has an interstitial lung infection. Picard’s a short, heavy man who looks like he works all the time and never sees sunlight. He wears tortoiseshell bifocals and a blue oxford with a red-and-white-striped tie. The buttons on his lab coat strain at the midsection.
    “This means the infection invades the interstices between the lung sacs.”
    “Then I cough too much.” Luke leans over to spit into the kidney-shaped pan.
    “Then you cough too much, and in some cases, like yours”—Picard pauses and offers a small grin—“a lung collapses.”
    After Picard leaves, I put a wet washcloth on Luke’s forehead and try to emanate calm. Pulses of electricity shoot through my arms and legs whenever he starts hacking. Gaird comes back and apologizes profusely to Luke for his little fit and somehow manages to make no eye contact with me.
    I go home to shower as quickly as I can and change into clean clothes. Then I take a cab back across the river to my chair in Room 129 and try to sleep.
    On the morning of his third day, Luke eats part of a falafel sandwich I bring him. We all wait to see if it will go down. He naps, and when he wakes up, I ask him how he feels.