Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb Page A

well. He’s still unconscious—he will be for a while—but he looks good. I can take you up to see him.”
    We packed up our books and followed Richard to the staff elevator. We didn’t speak. The tension of the past days and weeks trailed us into the elevator and up to the sixth floor.
    No paintings hung on the walls of that floor; there were no couches, no solariums. Just random medical machinery I’d never seen before, parked throughout the corridors; the hulking machines looked like creatures from the future, as if theycould scuttle away on their own. Nurses and doctors flurried by, their gazes gliding over our heads. Richard led us into the brightly lit recovery room. The beds were lined up like in an orphanage. He pointed out my father’s body.
    His bed was at my chest level. Alex and I stood stunned before it, hypnotized. The transparent blue of the oxygen mask, the clicking and whirring of pumps and electronics, the breathing machine, the closed eyes, the random spots of dried blood, brown on the blank bedsheet. My father’s blood. It ran in tubes, transported to and from another machine. His whole body seemed like a technological, digital thing, as if where the machines started and stopped couldn’t be defined.
    It wasn’t our father. It was some replacement, a wax model, a plaster shell. Our real father was upstairs with his Times and Sanka. The body in front of us was a mistake, and we stood there blinking at it, and at the other sheet-covered shapes with their mechanical breaths and computerized heartbeats, until finally Richard tapped our shoulders and led us out.
    None of us spoke in the elevator, but Richard seemed proud and eager, as if seeing our father had actually pacified us somehow, instead of making me feel like I’d just seen him dead.
    I held on to the straps of my book bag. Richard led us to the place where we’d been sitting before. He stared over our heads and stood beside us, as if waiting for something. I wanted to speak to him, to tell him that it wasn’t my fatherin that bed—to let him comfort me, wrap me in his arms and keep everything away—but I couldn’t say it; I didn’t even know how to begin.
    Richard’s eyes focused on something down the hall; I turned to see what it was. I heard Gina Petrollo’s shoes clicking toward us even before her figure came into view.
    â€œHow did it go?” she asked, out of breath.
    â€œWonderfully,” he said. “No complications—everything’s fine.”
    He stretched out his arms; his hand touched the edge of her back. It was the tiniest gesture, a flick. If I hadn’t been replaying his every movement again and again in my mind over the past three days, I’d have missed it. But there was something unmistakable in the motion that was intimate and familiar, the way my sister and I would sometimes pick a bug off each other; it was a touch that indicates more.
    â€œI’m so glad,” Gina said, grinning at us. “We were so worried about you.” She reached over and enveloped my sister in a tight, long hug. Then she hugged me.
    For a second I thought I’d suffocate, and I wanted to wrench myself away. But gathered into the pillow of her marshmallowy chest, inhaling her perfume, I almost didn’t want to be released. I couldn’t remember when I’d last been hugged—really, tightly hugged. Once clutched to her body, it almost didn’t matter who she was, until she let go.
    She stood beside Richard, who smiled at us.
    â€œThanks, for everything,” Alex said quietly.
    I couldn’t speak. Richard and Gina said “you’re welcome” with a kind of finality to their voices, and Richard shook our hands as he said good-bye.
    As they walked off down the hall I started to cry. It was the first time I’d cried openly in the hospital. My body shook, my hat fell off, and some of the cotton balls roamed toward the