“Methodist Hospital,” I told the driver. “The emergency room.”
The driver nodded and shifted the cab into drive.
I looked down at the phone in my hand. The battery icon was at twelve percent.
Before the screen dimmed, a notification popped up from my bank app. It was a transaction alert from earlier that evening.
Four thousand two hundred dollars had been charged to my card at a luxury hotel in Miami, Florida.
I rubbed my gold wedding ring, my thumb tracing the smooth metal.
I looked out the side window as the cab turned onto Flatbush Avenue.
In the distance, over the dark rooftops of the Brooklyn brownstones, the first colored bursts of the New Year’s Eve fireworks began to light up the Manhattan skyline.
Maya shivered in my arms, her fingers clutching the front of my coat.
The sliding glass doors of the Methodist Hospital emergency room hissed shut behind us, cutting off the distant crackle of the midnight fireworks over the East River. The air inside smelled of bleach, pine cleaner, and the dry heat of industrial radiators.
A triage nurse in green scrubs immediately wheeled a metal gurney forward, her eyes scanning Maya’s grey face and the bundled winter coat in my arms. She did not ask for our insurance cards or our names, only pointed toward the swinging doors of the treatment area.
Within three minutes, they had Maya behind a heavy beige curtain, and a pediatric nurse was carrying Liam toward a small side room for a full assessment. I wanted to follow him, but the nurse gave me a quick, firm nod that told me to stay with my wife.
I stood in the corridor with my hands empty, my thumb dragging over the edge of my gold wedding ring until the skin turned white. The silence of the hospital was punctuated by the distant beep of heart monitors and the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on tile.
The attending physician, Dr. Robert Vance, stepped out from behind Maya’s curtain at ten past one, pulling a pair of blue latex gloves from his hands with a sharp snap. He looked like a man who had worked thirty hours straight without a break.
“Are you the husband?” he asked, his voice flat with the exhaustion of a holiday shift.
“Yes,” I said, my voice sounding thin and foreign in the sterile hallway. “David Vance. What is happening to her?”
He looked down at his electronic clipboard, then back up at me with a hard, appraising stare that made me feel entirely transparent.
“She has a severe systemic infection at the site of her C-section, and her electrolyte levels are dangerously low,” he said.
I rubbed my wedding ring again, my boots sliding slightly on the highly polished linoleum floor.
“She was recovering at home,” I said. “My mother was staying with her to help with the meals and the newborn.”
Dr. Vance let out a short, sharp breath that was not quite a laugh, his fingers tapping the edge of the clipboard.
“Your wife is severely malnourished, Mr. Vance, and she has been running a fever of over a hundred and three for at least forty-eight hours.”
I looked toward the gap in the beige curtain, where a red monitor light blinked in the dimness of the cubicle.
“She didn’t tell me,” I whispered. “I was in Munich for the turbine installation, and she said everything was fine.”
The doctor stepped closer, his voice dropping into a low, professional register that chilled me more than the freezing wind outside.
“If you had arrived tomorrow, we would be having a very different conversation.”
I felt a cold weight settle behind my ribs, a sudden, sharp realization of how close I had come to losing her.
“Can you treat it?” I asked, my throat dry.
“We started her on broad-spectrum intravenous antibiotics and fluids, but we need to run more blood work to ensure the infection hasn’t reached her bloodstream,” he said.
He turned back toward the curtain, leaving me alone in the middle of the wide, brightly lit hallway.
By two in the morning, they had moved Maya to a temporary holding room on the third floor while we waited for a bed in the maternity recovery ward. The small room was dark except for the green glow of the IV pump and the streetlights outside.
Maya lay beneath three scratchy hospital blankets, her face looking smaller than I had ever seen it against the stiff white pillowcase. Her skin was dry and burning hot to the touch, and her lips were cracked, a tiny fleck of dried blood clinging to the lower lip.
Even in her restless, feverish sleep, her right hand remained pressed flat over her surgical incision, her fingers curled tight against the pain. I wanted to take her hand, but I was afraid of moving her arm and dislodging the clear plastic tube of the IV.
I sat on the low, vinyl-covered chair beside her bed, leaning my forehead against the cold metal rail.
“I am going to fix this, Maya,” I said, my voice barely louder than the steady, rhythmic click of the infusion pump.
Her eyelids fluttered slightly, but she did not wake, her breath coming in shallow, ragged puffs that smelled of hospital air and dry heat.
I pulled the folded piece of thick cream paper from my coat pocket and unfolded it under the harsh light of the corridor shining through the window. It was my mother’s heavy stationery, the elegant cursive written in black ink with her expensive fountain pen.
The words were brief and sharp: “Maya, please do not play the victim. We have gone to give you some space. Eleanor.”
My mother had raised me to believe in the absolute sanctity of family, in the duty we owed to one another above all else. Now, looking at my wife’s hollow cheeks, I felt the first hairline crack in everything I had believed about Eleanor.
Why would she write something so deliberate, so cold, to a woman who had just undergone major abdominal surgery and could barely stand?
I folded the paper back up, the sharp crease clicking under my thumb as I slid it back into my pocket.
Downstairs at the admitting desk, the clock on the wall read twenty past two, the second hand sweeping silently around the white face. The clerk behind the safety glass partition was a tired-looking woman with graying hair, her name tag reading Beatrice.
