Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 Read Online Free PDF Page B

he cut power and let the Liberty IV drift gently dockside at the Marine Inspection Office in Manhattan. "He should have been a bronc roper."
    For Anna's money, the boat trip had been too short. The hospital, the ICU, Molly on tubes and drugs, exercised an uncomfortable polarization. Anna could not bear to be away and couldn't stand being there. Once in either place--at Molly's side or tucked in the city exclosure of Ellis or Liberty--she was okay. In transit, both ends of the journey attracted and repulsed her simultaneously. Time went out of whack, either passing with mind-bending rapidity or creeping by so slowly she could hear her bones shrinking with the onset of old age.
    True to expected perversity, the subway ride to the Upper West Side ate up several years of her life. At twelve-thirty she was eating pizza at a stand-up table in a sidewalk restaurant on 168th Street. At twelve forty-five she presented herself in the intensive care unit on the fifth floor.
    "Please wait. The doctor will be right with you." This was pronounced in indifferent tones by a distracted woman in white. It was said after she'd looked at a clipboard. That meant something; it meant she didn't say the same thing to everybody, that there was some special reason Anna had to wait, a reason articulated on that board.
    The two slices of pizza congealed in Anna's stomach and sent a geyser of what felt like quick-drying cement up her esophagus. In the eternity, she continued to stand before the counter trying to say, "Is there a problem?" The opaque pebbled glass of the sliding window closed.
    For a moment she hesitated, wondering whether to tap on the glass, but in the end she was too afraid of what she might hear. Knowing herself for a craven, she retreated across the waiting room to a blue plastic armchair flanked by angular wood-look tables covered with magazines. A woman in her early forties sat on a sofa of the same blue leatherette along the opposite wall. She was heavyset, with big hips and thighs. Her face was overly made up but open, with an eager friendly expression. The woman wanted to talk. Anna hid behind a magazine, raising the top edge till it screened not only her eyes but the whole of her face. Without being aware of it, she tucked her elbows close to her body as if she could protect all of her person with the glossy pages.
    In the next twenty minutes half a dozen people came and went. Each time, Anna jerked her head up and watched with the frightened expectant eyes that must come to haunt the sleep of medical professionals. Never was it for her. Thirty-seven minutes had creaked by before Dr. Madison finally came into the room.
    Anna didn't move. She couldn't. Don't sit, Doc, she thought. Sitting is bad. Good news was delivered standing, shouted from the door: "It's a girl!" "He's alive!" Bad news called for chairs and exaggerated eye contact.
    Madison stepped across the small area, smoothed his lab coat over his behind, sat in the chair next to Anna's and crossed his legs, plucking the seam of his trousers straight. Anna didn't utter a sound. She thought of Shakespeare, of his writing that someone's tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and that this, then, was what he had been talking about.
    "Molly's about the same as yesterday," Dr. Madison said.
    Anna eyed him coldly. "For that you had to sit down?"
    "My feet hurt," he defended himself.
    "Wear sneakers." To her surprise, he laughed. It wasn't so much pleasant as infectious, high-pitched--almost girlish--but utterly unselfconscious. Anna liked him better for it.
    "Sorry," he said, and pulling off his bifocals, he scrubbed his eyes on the sleeve of his lab coat. "I get it. I sat. Scared you. I'm so sorry." He was still chuckling. It was beginning to lose its charm.
    "I've been sorry since your dye fucked up my sister's kidneys."
    Madison looked as if he'd been slapped. Before the words had passed her front teeth, Anna regretted them. Out of a primitive need to do battle she might