"Pretend," Lisa said. "Imagine you are someone else. Imagine that you're a woman who can ask for a file or raise a complaint or make a scene."
Suki shook her head. She insisted she was no good at pretending, either. Doctors hurried by and she slipped out of their way, closer to the wall.
"Imagine you're a person who can pretend. Imagine you're me." Lisa reached out and took Suki's hands to implore her. The fabric of her t shirt was clammy, wet in the arm pits, cold against her ribs. She was taller than Suki, who was of course just the same size as Bobby and Lisa felt as if she towered over the other woman. Be careful, she admonished herself. Go slowly. "You have to find out what's going on."
Suki shook herself free of Lisa's grasp. She knew what was going on; Bobby was in ICU, doctors were hard at work, she would only interfere - slow things down. "He's getting good care."
"How do you know that?" Lisa knew about Suki's crazy shrine of all nations. In her wedding vows, she'd talked about how she believed things worked out for the best, always. She'd been unashamed to say she had prayed for Bobby to come back to her and -- worse yet -- that it had worked. Next to Sam, Lisa had cringed, and he had laughed at her. "Someone has to advocate for him. That's what Sam said."
Suki considered this. She admired Sam. She took out her cell. "I'll call him. He's up, right? Oh --" She noticed a sign outside the entrance to the ICU that showed a cell phone with a red line through it. "I have to go down to the lobby I guess … "
Lisa had already made several calls from this exact spot or one slightly hidden in case anyone came out and saw her. "Go then. Go, go, go."
She watched Suki go down the hall and turn towards the elevators. She listened for the sound of an elevator arriving, the ping or the doors, but the general noise in the hospital was too loud so she counted off a minute and a half. Then she pressed the call button on the entrance to the ICU. When they asked who she was, she told them she was Suki without thinking twice.
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Even if I'd never read a word of this story before, I'd know everything that was going on here because the subtext is just so rich. You packed so much emotional content into such a short section, I am - as always - enormously impressed.
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