CHAPTER 17
Eversince Schuyler could remember, she had spent every Sunday at the hospital. When she was younger, she and her grandmother would take a cab all the way to the uppermost reaches of Manhattan. Schuyler was such a familiar face, the guards never even gave her a visitor's badge anymore but simply waved her through. Now that she was older, Cordelia rarely joined her on the weekly visits, and Schuyler made the trip solo.
She walked past the emergency room, through the glassed-in lobby, and past the giftshop selling balloons and flowers. She bought a newspaper from the stand and walked to the back elevator. Her mother was on the top floor, in a private room that was outfitted like a suite in one of the city's best hotels.
Unlike most people, Schuyler did not find hospitals depressing. She had spent too much of her childhood there, zooming up and down the hallways in a borrowed wheelchair, playing games of hide and seek with the nurses and orderlies. She ate every Sunday brunch in the basement cafeteria, where the servers would pile her plate high with bacon, eggs, and waffles.
She passed her mother's regular nurse in the hallway.
"It's a good day," the nurse informed her, smiling.
"Oh. Great." Schuyler smiled back. Her mother had been in a coma for most of Schuyler's life. A few months after giving birth to her, Allegra had suffered an aneurysm and gone into shock. Most days, she lay placidly on the bed, not moving, barely breathing.
But on ?good? days, something happened - a flutter underneath the closed eyelids, the movement of her big toe, a twitch in her cheek. Once in a while, her mother sighed for no reason. They were small, infinitesimal signs of a vibrant woman trapped in the cocoon of a living death.
Schuyler remembered the doctor's final prognosis, made almost ten years ago. "All of her organs are functioning. She is perfectly healthy, except for one thing. Somehow, her mind is closed to her body. She has normal sleep and wake patterns, and she is not brain dead by any means. The neurons are firing. But she remains unconscious. It is a mystery." Surprisingly, the doctors were still convinced there was a chance she could wake up given the right circumstances. "Sometimes, it's a song. Or a voice from the past. Something triggers them, and they wake up. Really, she could wake up at any time."
Certainly, Cordelia believed it was true and encouraged Schuyler to read to Allegra so that her mother would know her voice and perhaps respond to it.
Schuyler said thank you to the nurse and peeked through the small glass window cut in the door so that the nurses could check in on their patients without having to disturb them.
There was a man inside the room.
She kept her hand on the knob, without turning it. She looked through the glass again.
The man was gone.
Schuyler blinked. She swore she had seen a man. A gray-haired man, in a dark suit, kneeling by her mother's bedside, holding her hand, his back turned to the door. His shoulders had been shaking and it looked like he was crying.
But when she looked through the glass again, there was nothing.
This was the second time now. Schuyler wasn't as much troubled as curious. The first time she'd glimpsed him was several months ago, when she'd left the room for a moment to fetch a glass of water. When she'd returned to the room, she was startled to see someone there. Out of the corner of her eye, she'd seen a man standing by the curtains, looking out the window at the Hudson River below. But the moment she had entered, he had disappeared. She hadn't seen his face - just his back and his neat gray hair.
At first, she had been frightened of him, wondering if he was a ghost, or a trick of the light and her imagination. But she had a feeling she knew who the nameless, faceless visitor could be.
She pushed open the door slowly and walked inside the room. She put the thick layers of the Sunday newspaper by the rolling table next to the television.
Her mother was lying on the bed, her hands folded at her stomach. Her fair, blond hair, long and lustrous, was fanned out on the pillow. She was the most beautiful woman Schuyler had ever seen. She had a face like a Renaissance Madonna - serene and peaceful.
Schuyler walked to the chair next to the foot of the bed. She looked around the room again. She peered into the bathroom her mother never used. She pulled back the curtains in front of the window, half expecting to find someone hiding there. Nothing.
Disappointed, Schuyler resumed her spot by the bed.
She opened the Sunday paper. What would she read today? War? Oil crisis? Shootings in the Bronx? An article in the magazine about new, experimental Spanish cuisine? Schuyler decided on the ?Styles? section - the "Weddings and Celebrations." Her mother seemed to enjoy those. Sometimes, when Schuyler read her a particularly interesting ?Vows? column, her toes wriggled.
Schuyler began to read. "Courtney Wallach married Hamilton Fisher Stevens at the Pierre this afternoon. The bride, thirty-one, a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Business School ..." She looked hopefully at her mother. There was no movement from the bed.
Schuyler tried another. "Marjorie Fieldcrest Goldman married Nathan McBride in a ceremony at the Tribeca Rooftop yesterday evening. The bride, twenty-eight, an associate editor at ..."
Still nothing.
Schuyler searched the announcements. She could never predict what her mother would like. At first, she thought it was news from people they knew, the marriages of heirs and heiresses to old New York families. But just as often, her mother sighed upon hearing a moving story of two computer programmers who had met at a bar in Queens.
Her thoughts drifted back to the mysterious visitor. She looked around the room again, and noticed something. There were flowers by the table. A bouquet of white lilies in a crystal vase. Not the cheap carnations they sold downstairs. This was an exquisite arrangement of tall, glorious blossoms. Their intoxicating smell filled the room. It was funny how she hadn't seen them as soon as she walked in. Who would bring flowers to a comatose woman who wouldn't be able to see them? Who had been there? And where had he gone? More important, where had he come from?
Schuyler wondered if she should mention it to her grandmother. She had kept the stranger's visits a secret, worried that Cordelia would do something to keep the stranger away somehow. She didn't think Cordelia would approve of a strange man visiting her daughter.