“But I have been in the hospital, for something really serious, and it hasn’t changed a thing.”
This wasn’t entirely true. It had changed everything, but not the way she needed it to.
“That’s why it only works as a fantasy,” Luca replied.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know how I’m ever going to heal this way. I feel like I’m healing backwards, the end result being . . .”
She couldn’t say it. Didn’t have to. Luca acknowledged it with a nod. Then she started to unpack her equipment. “Let’s take a look at you.”
Luca did the exam. “Your EKG looks great and your heart and lungs sound fine. Your pulse is a little weak and I wouldn’t be surprised if you were anemic so when you get your next blood work done, have them test for iron. But you appear otherwise healthy. You’re clearly run-down, but not in any imminent danger I can see.”
“That’s good, I guess,” she said before she started to cry again.
“It is good, Maribeth.” Luca squeezed her hand. “You can be happy about that.”
But how could she be happy when every day that she supposedly grew stronger—healthier—she felt more and more terrified? The specter of death had seemed abstract before, even after the heart attack, even as she was watching the image of her heart on the screen in the cath lab. But now it was real. It was a presence as physical and demanding of her attention as her twins. Maybe that was why she wanted to stitch Oscar and Liv into her body, and at the same time, she wanted to jettison them far away from her.
“Is there anything else going on?” Luca asked. By now, she’d been there more than twice the allotted time.
“No,” Maribeth answered. “I mean, I’m probably just run-down, like you said.”
Luca packed up. Before she left, she embraced Maribeth. Then she held her at arm’s length and looked at her as if deciding something.
“I believe you have a healthy heart,” she said. “The doctors have done their part. But if you want to get better, really better, well, you’re going to have to do that for yourself.”
Pittsburgh
13
It had been surprisingly easy.
Maribeth had walked downstairs and hailed a cab, carrying only a hastily packed duffel bag with a few changes of clothing and her medications. She’d left her cell phone, her computer—pretty much everything else—at home. None of that felt necessary anymore. She had e-mailed Jason. An apology? An explanation? She wasn’t sure. By the time she was in the cab, the details of her note had already begun to fade.
“Penn Station,” she told the driver. She had not known that would be her destination until the words came out of her mouth.
Twenty minutes later, she was at the train station. Across the street was a branch of her bank. Maribeth was about to pull cash out from the ATM but instead she wandered into the lobby and asked a teller how much she could withdraw.
Twenty-five thousand dollars turned out to be surprisingly portable. It fit snugly into her duffel bag.
Easy.
When she entered the mildewy cavern of Penn Station, she still hadn’t known where she was going. She’d thought maybe some quaint coastal New England town. And then she saw the departure board.
She bought her ticket for the Pennsylvanian and went to one of the cell phone kiosks for a burner phone (testing out a vocabulary acquired during that one season she’d managed to watch The Wire). The clerk handed her a pay-as-you-go flip phone with a 646 number. She paid for one hundred minutes of talk time. She went into a Duane Reade and bought a bottle of water, a pack of gum, and some lice shampoo, just in case. Then she boarded the train.
Easy.
When the train emerged onto the wetlands of New Jersey, Manhattan glittering in the afternoon sun, Maribeth thought it looked like something from a movie. Which was how it had felt. Like something happening to some actor on a screen. She was not Maribeth Klein, mother, leaving her two young children. She was a woman in a movie going somewhere normal, perhaps a business trip.
On the train, exhaustion overcame her, a different flavor from the dragged-down lethargy that had plagued her back home. It was the floppy satisfying tiredness one gets after a long day of doing nothing in the sun. Using her duffel bag as a pillow, she went to sleep.
Easy.
When she woke up and went to the café car to get something to eat, she found a discarded City Paper on one of the tables. Inside was a tiny real estate section, with not much advertised, but there was a one-bedroom in a neighborhood called Bloomfield. She called from the train and spoke to the landlord, an elderly sounding man with a thick accent (Italian? Eastern European?) who told her the apartment was available, and not only that, it was furnished. The rent was eight hundred dollars a month. For an extra fifty bucks, she could move in a few days before the first of the month. She took it sight unseen.
Easy.
She spent her first night in Pittsburgh in a janky motel near the train station. The next morning, she took a taxi to her new apartment and gave the landlord, Mr. Giulio, first month’s rent, one month’s deposit, and signed a month-to-month lease. There was no FBI-level background check required of a New York City rental. No broker fee amounting to 15 percent of a year’s rent. Just sixteen hundred dollars. When she paid in cash, Mr. Giulio did not bat an eye.
Easy.
As for leaving, leaving Jason, leaving her children, she kept hearing Luca’s words: You have to do that for yourself.
A task assigned to others, falling back to her. In some ways it was comforting.