A History of the Present Illness by Louise Aronson

Author:Louise Aronson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

Vital Signs Stable

A chunk of wet clay on a linoleum floor, a pair of black suede pumps with leather mignons and two-inch heels, a scream. At ninety-eight—her bones like a frivolous dinner set from early in the last century, the china still functional but thinned to near translucence, its pieces prone to shattering as might an heirloom dropped on the ground from even the modest height of four feet, ten inches—Edith Picarelli had been shrinking for decades.

“I heard it,” said the nursing home’s art-room assistant. “This sound, like chimes?”

“Too many pieces for counting,” commented the radiologist in New Delhi by teleconference.

“Damned heels,” said the English administrator when informed. “Her right hip, I’m afraid,” she explained to Frank Picarelli’s answering machine when she called Edith’s son with the news.

It was a cool summer Saturday morning in San Francisco. From his cell phone at the window table of a popular brunch café, the on-call physician told the nurse to send Edith to the hospital. After he hung up, he put a spoonful of scrambled eggs in his toddler daughter’s mouth and said to his wife, “Sweet. That was easy.”

An hour later, a teenager smoking in the designated area outside the University Hospital ambulance bay said, “Yo, what’s that noise?”

The ambulance attendants lowered the gurney to the asphalt and push-pulled it up over the curb and through the sliding glass doors of the Emergency Department. “Hang in there, dear,” one of the attendants advised, patting Edith’s shoulder as her screams intensified and they parked her in the hallway near the triage desk.

The nurse pretended to cover her ears with her hands. “Gee thanks, guys,” she said while sizing up Edith’s arm to decide whether she’d need a small-adult or a child-size blood pressure cuff.

“On our way,” the paramedic with Edith Picarelli’s paperwork in his back pocket said into his radio as he and his partner disappeared back through the sliding doors. They’d just had a call about a near-fatal accident on Nineteenth Avenue and had to hurry.

Quentin Chew, the new intern in the emergency department, didn’t know what to make of the almost feral cries or the fact that no one else seemed troubled by them.

“Stand back, stand back! Coming through!” shouted an orderly who couldn’t see over the supply cart he pushed down the hall.

Quentin flattened himself against the wall to avoid being hit by the cart. He’d heard similar awful screeching only once before, while watching a documentary on the great migration of herbivores across the Serengeti. The film consisted mostly of sweeping vistas and the occasional mother and baby shot, so he’d grabbed Ralph’s arm when, without warning, the action cut to a group of trophy hunters shooting into the herd. They missed their target, an impala with massive spiral horns, and hit a wildebeest instead. As the herd dispersed, the angry and frustrated hunters took turns shooting the injured wildebeest, aiming anywhere but the head or the heart. The animal, down on its side, its hide soaked with blood,

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