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backdrifterWhen he arrived at St. Luke’s in Manhattan, he wasn’t carrying Kathy nearly so high, and his stride wasn’t quite as long. The toddler had wailed herself asleep again, and the shoulder of his ragged shirt was damp. He dragged himself to the front desk, pushing Kathy a little higher. “I need,” he said wearily, “to speak with Dr. Chenault.”
“Do you have an appointment?” the woman in lavender scrubs asked, blinking rapidly.
“No. He knows me.” He set a still-sleeping Kathy in a sitting position on the counter, her warm head still leaning against his shoulder. “Can you call him?”
“He’s with a patient right now,” she said, looking at something he couldn’t see with the counter in the way. “Is it an emergency? Otherwise, you’re going to have to make an appointment like everybody else.” She clicked a few things on her PC. “When are you available?”
“Right now!” he bellowed, banging a fist on the countertop. The impact woke Kathy, who lifted her head and looked around with bleary eyes for a moment before she launched right into a throat-wrenching cry. People looked at the pair of them from the corners of their eyes, or over waiting room magazines, and Respa felt self-conscious, the two of them standing there in threadbare clothing, Kathy loud and feverish. A picture of welfare.
The nurse frowned for a moment, and then leaned upward to press a manicured palm to Kathy’s forehead. “She’s burning up,” the nurse murmured. “You know Dr. Chenault isn’t a pediatrician, right?”
“Please, please, he knows me, just call him,” Respa found himself begging, picking Kathy back up off the counter and bouncing her in a futile attempt to get her to quiet the hell down.
“You need to get your little girl home and into bed, not out here with a bunch of sick people,” the nurse chastised him. “Give her some acetominophen, get her into a bath, and—“
“Aceto-what?” he repeated, derailed by words he didn’t know. He shook his head clear, hefting Kathy again. “Listen, just tell him that Respa is here. He’ll know who that is.”
“I don’t care,” the nurse said, hands on hips. “You could be the president of the country and I’d tell you to sit down or go home just the same. Now please, sir.”
A thought struck him. “Well then, what about Nurse Constantinides?” he asked, rubbing Kathy’s back.
The nurse sighed. “You’re in luck, I guess. She hasn’t started rounds just yet.” She sank back down into her seat, fingers clacking across the keypad of the phone as she picked up the handset. He tuned out as he glanced around the waiting room, and as he looked at each person, their eyes darted down in embarrassment, trying to pretend they hadn’t noticed the spectacle he’d made.
“She’s on her way,” the nurse said, bringing him back to the present. He mumbled his thanks, and took a seat away from everybody else, Kathy on his lap. She was starting to wind down, the sobs more like hiccups now, and she rested against him in a defeated manner.
Five minutes later, he was beginning to worry he’d been deceived, but a wide pair of hips in red scrubs appeared in his line of vision, tiny pudgy hands resting on either side of them.
“Baby, did you ever clean up?”
“Nurse Constantinides,” he said, looking up with a sincere smile. “Yeah, I got clean. Just some stuff happened.”
She pushed her hands into her thighs as she sat down beside him, and like the nurse at the desk, she too pressed the back of her hand to Kathy’s forehead. “Who’s this?” she asked, smiling gently at the sniffling toddler. .
“This is my daughter, Kathy.” Kathy reached a small hand out to Nurse Constantinides’s, wrapping her fingers tightly around the pinky and ring fingers.
“How old are you, Kathy?” the nurse cooed, but Kathy gave her a blank look. The nurse repeated herself.
“She can’t really talk,” Respa explained, unhooked Kathy’s hand from the nurse’s. “She’s kind of…behind, in everything.”
“And you’re not worried?” She smoothed a cowlick on Kathy’s head, and Kathy pushed her face into her father’s armpit.
He pulled a grimace of a face, looking at the top of his daughter’s head. “Well, I know the cause of it, so what good’s worrying gonna do either of us? Her bit—her mother,” he corrected himself, his earlier discovery of Tanya’s body still fresh in his mind, “kept shooting up while she was breastfeeding, and since Kathy developed an addiction that way, she never weaned her, either. So she’s slow.”
“Then that fever is withdrawal,” Nurse Constantinides decided, pursing her lips. “She can’t be in here with all these sick people.”
“I know, I know, I should take her home—“
“Hardly! Do you remember your withdrawal?”
He shuddered in response.
“Well, then, imagine what she’s going through. She doesn’t even understand what she’s feeling, she has no point of reference. I doubt you know the first thing to do for her.”
“Probably not,” he admitted, though he resented being called an ignorant parent. Even though he was.
“Come on, baby. I’ll find you a nice pediatrician for you to talk to, and then I have to do my rounds or Dr. Forman will jump down my throat.”
“I don’t want to talk to a pediatrician,” he said, not shifting from his seat. “I want to talk to Dr. Chenault!”
“You know, that’s real funny that you say that, because I remember four years ago you didn’t want to talk to the doctor,” the nurse snapped, fingers motioning that he had better goddamn follow her. “What’s the matter, baby, things got too hard? Need the good doctor’s help now that you’ve finally swallowed your pride?” Sarcasm lacing her words like aspartame in Tanya’s heroin. “You lost your chance. Now come on.”
“Fine,” he grumbled, rising slowly to stand by Nurse Constantinides. She began to walk toward one of the hallways that led away from the waiting area, and he chanced a look down the other one.
And there he was. Clipboard in hand, freckles smattered across his pale smiling face, black curls kept neater than he remembered. A hint of silver flashed at his temple, and the crow’s feet at his eyes seemed to have deepened a smidge, but otherwise it was as though Respa had never left the hospital. He was talking to an older man in a wheelchair, looking reassuring as he shook the patient’s shoulder. The patient looked happy and comfortable, as much as he could for a man in a hospital gown and wheelchair.
He held Kathy tighter to his body, arms wrapped around her body and head, and he was suddenly sprinting to the right, hurtling toward the doctor. Nurse Constantinides shouted something, but it wasn’t important right now. The wheelchair patient looked alarmed, arms suddenly in a frenzy to turn his wheelchair around and roll away. The doctor held his clipboard up, looking astonished, but otherwise held his ground.
And to his credit, Respa didn’t slam into Dr. Chenault. He skidded and jogged to a stop, exhaling hard a few times; he wasn’t in the best of shape. Kathy, for once, was laughing, more thrilled than scared by the short ride.
“I, um… What can I do for you?” the doctor asked, looking dubiously at the top of Respa’s head as he set Kathy down and held his knees. Kathy threw an arm around her father’s ankle, as if anchoring herself.
“I need,” Respa said, regaining his breath as he straightened, “your help.” There, he’d said it. “For her.” He pointed down.
`
“Respa!” the doctor exclaimed. His face transformed rapidly, going from surprised to skeptical to grim. “I can’t help you, Respa. You turned down my help years ago, and you’re not going to get it now, especially not bursting into my hospital and frightening my patients.”
“I’m not asking for me, I swear,” he pleaded, picking Kathy up again. “I’m only asking that you help me help her. Find her a new family, or something; anything so long as I’m not in her life.” He held her up by the armpits to the doctor, and the older man took her in his arms. He, too, pressed a hand against Kathy’s face, but he seemed to look deeper, looking for other symptoms.
“She’s in withdrawal, I think. Nurse Constantinides told me,” he said, watching the doctor. “Her junkie mother never weaned her, no matter what I said…”
“So you want, what, to be relieved of the responsibility?” Dr. Chenault asked angrily. Before Respa could reply, he continued, saying, “I don’t know whether to take her away from a negligent guardian like you, or make you face your responsibilities and leave now. You can’t just run away from something like a child, Respa.”
“That’s not it!” he shouted, and a nearby nurse glared at him. “I,” he said in a quieter voice, meeting the eyes of the nurse, “can’t be the parent she needs.”
“Nevertheless, you are the parent she has, and you must—“
“I hit her mother, doctor,” Respa interrupted, stone-faced. “I knocked her off her feet, I strangled her, and toward the end I left her alone for a week with Kathy.” Staring into the doctor’s eyes.
Dr. Chenault looked away first, sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose as if to stem a headache. Kathy stroked his tie contemplatively. “Let’s talk in my office, Respa. Please,” he added. “This is not a public matter.”
Kathy was handed back to her father, and Respa followed the doctor down what felt like the same hallway over and over again to his office. The doctor gestured to the chair in front of the desk, entreating him to sit, and went to draw the blinds on the glass pane in the door. He took his own seat in a rather more impressive chair at the desk, leaning back and steepling his fingers in an unwittingly classic pose. “Talk to me, Respa.”
“I can’t be the father she needs,” he said, looking down at her on his lap. “It’s not because I don’t want to—I want more than anything else to be there for the rest of her life.” He met the doctor’s eyes. “But I don’t think that’s what’s best for her.”
“Well, at least you sound like you’ve matured,” Dr. Chenault remarked. “Go on.”
“Go—go on?”
“Yes, if you would,” the doctor said, rolling his hand in the air.
“What more can I say? I know that I’m not the best thing for her, and she needs to be with a family who can really support her, give her the attention and the things she needs. Someone who can actually clothe her and feed her, and,” he took a deep breath, “someone who will never, ever hurt her.”
The doctor arched his brows. “You think you might hurt her someday?”
“I don’t know,” Respa sighed, fixing his eyes on something besides the doctor. That ridiculous poster with the cat on the branch, for example. “I just…every day I lived with Tanya, I saw more and more of my father in myself, and it scared me to death. I don’t want to be that to Kathy. I don’t want to take that chance.”
“I see,” the doctor said, and for a moment they both paused. “I take it your father was abusive.” Respa only nodded, the cat poster still holding his false interest. “It’s a legitimate fear, I suppose. You’re being more responsible about this than I’d expect you to be, so yes, Respa, I’ll help you find Kathy an adoptive family. You realize,” he added, standing to come face to face with Respa, “that there’s a chance she may resent you the rest of her life, whether her new home is happy or not. She may always wonder just what kind of person would abandon her.”
The doctor moved back to his desk to flick through his Rolodex. “Furthermore, you will have no parental rights—you won’t even be allowed to contact her. She can come searching for you, but you can never look for her. If the adoptive family chooses, of course, some of these things can be changed, but generally speaking…”
“No, I don’t want her to be able to find me. I don’t want her to know a thing about me,” he said, petting her soft baby hair. “Who I am, what I look like, what I’ve done—I don’t want her to know anything. She can’t know anything about her mother, either, or any of her grandparents.”
Dr. Chenault contemplated him for a moment, and then nodded, plucking a card out of the Rolodex. “It’s your decision.” He cradled the handset of his standard black office phone between his cheek and shoulder, and dialed the number on the card he held up.
“Do you have an appointment?” the woman in lavender scrubs asked, blinking rapidly.
“No. He knows me.” He set a still-sleeping Kathy in a sitting position on the counter, her warm head still leaning against his shoulder. “Can you call him?”
“He’s with a patient right now,” she said, looking at something he couldn’t see with the counter in the way. “Is it an emergency? Otherwise, you’re going to have to make an appointment like everybody else.” She clicked a few things on her PC. “When are you available?”
“Right now!” he bellowed, banging a fist on the countertop. The impact woke Kathy, who lifted her head and looked around with bleary eyes for a moment before she launched right into a throat-wrenching cry. People looked at the pair of them from the corners of their eyes, or over waiting room magazines, and Respa felt self-conscious, the two of them standing there in threadbare clothing, Kathy loud and feverish. A picture of welfare.
The nurse frowned for a moment, and then leaned upward to press a manicured palm to Kathy’s forehead. “She’s burning up,” the nurse murmured. “You know Dr. Chenault isn’t a pediatrician, right?”
“Please, please, he knows me, just call him,” Respa found himself begging, picking Kathy back up off the counter and bouncing her in a futile attempt to get her to quiet the hell down.
“You need to get your little girl home and into bed, not out here with a bunch of sick people,” the nurse chastised him. “Give her some acetominophen, get her into a bath, and—“
“Aceto-what?” he repeated, derailed by words he didn’t know. He shook his head clear, hefting Kathy again. “Listen, just tell him that Respa is here. He’ll know who that is.”
“I don’t care,” the nurse said, hands on hips. “You could be the president of the country and I’d tell you to sit down or go home just the same. Now please, sir.”
A thought struck him. “Well then, what about Nurse Constantinides?” he asked, rubbing Kathy’s back.
The nurse sighed. “You’re in luck, I guess. She hasn’t started rounds just yet.” She sank back down into her seat, fingers clacking across the keypad of the phone as she picked up the handset. He tuned out as he glanced around the waiting room, and as he looked at each person, their eyes darted down in embarrassment, trying to pretend they hadn’t noticed the spectacle he’d made.
“She’s on her way,” the nurse said, bringing him back to the present. He mumbled his thanks, and took a seat away from everybody else, Kathy on his lap. She was starting to wind down, the sobs more like hiccups now, and she rested against him in a defeated manner.
Five minutes later, he was beginning to worry he’d been deceived, but a wide pair of hips in red scrubs appeared in his line of vision, tiny pudgy hands resting on either side of them.
“Baby, did you ever clean up?”
“Nurse Constantinides,” he said, looking up with a sincere smile. “Yeah, I got clean. Just some stuff happened.”
She pushed her hands into her thighs as she sat down beside him, and like the nurse at the desk, she too pressed the back of her hand to Kathy’s forehead. “Who’s this?” she asked, smiling gently at the sniffling toddler. .
“This is my daughter, Kathy.” Kathy reached a small hand out to Nurse Constantinides’s, wrapping her fingers tightly around the pinky and ring fingers.
“How old are you, Kathy?” the nurse cooed, but Kathy gave her a blank look. The nurse repeated herself.
“She can’t really talk,” Respa explained, unhooked Kathy’s hand from the nurse’s. “She’s kind of…behind, in everything.”
“And you’re not worried?” She smoothed a cowlick on Kathy’s head, and Kathy pushed her face into her father’s armpit.
He pulled a grimace of a face, looking at the top of his daughter’s head. “Well, I know the cause of it, so what good’s worrying gonna do either of us? Her bit—her mother,” he corrected himself, his earlier discovery of Tanya’s body still fresh in his mind, “kept shooting up while she was breastfeeding, and since Kathy developed an addiction that way, she never weaned her, either. So she’s slow.”
“Then that fever is withdrawal,” Nurse Constantinides decided, pursing her lips. “She can’t be in here with all these sick people.”
“I know, I know, I should take her home—“
“Hardly! Do you remember your withdrawal?”
He shuddered in response.
“Well, then, imagine what she’s going through. She doesn’t even understand what she’s feeling, she has no point of reference. I doubt you know the first thing to do for her.”
“Probably not,” he admitted, though he resented being called an ignorant parent. Even though he was.
“Come on, baby. I’ll find you a nice pediatrician for you to talk to, and then I have to do my rounds or Dr. Forman will jump down my throat.”
“I don’t want to talk to a pediatrician,” he said, not shifting from his seat. “I want to talk to Dr. Chenault!”
“You know, that’s real funny that you say that, because I remember four years ago you didn’t want to talk to the doctor,” the nurse snapped, fingers motioning that he had better goddamn follow her. “What’s the matter, baby, things got too hard? Need the good doctor’s help now that you’ve finally swallowed your pride?” Sarcasm lacing her words like aspartame in Tanya’s heroin. “You lost your chance. Now come on.”
“Fine,” he grumbled, rising slowly to stand by Nurse Constantinides. She began to walk toward one of the hallways that led away from the waiting area, and he chanced a look down the other one.
And there he was. Clipboard in hand, freckles smattered across his pale smiling face, black curls kept neater than he remembered. A hint of silver flashed at his temple, and the crow’s feet at his eyes seemed to have deepened a smidge, but otherwise it was as though Respa had never left the hospital. He was talking to an older man in a wheelchair, looking reassuring as he shook the patient’s shoulder. The patient looked happy and comfortable, as much as he could for a man in a hospital gown and wheelchair.
He held Kathy tighter to his body, arms wrapped around her body and head, and he was suddenly sprinting to the right, hurtling toward the doctor. Nurse Constantinides shouted something, but it wasn’t important right now. The wheelchair patient looked alarmed, arms suddenly in a frenzy to turn his wheelchair around and roll away. The doctor held his clipboard up, looking astonished, but otherwise held his ground.
And to his credit, Respa didn’t slam into Dr. Chenault. He skidded and jogged to a stop, exhaling hard a few times; he wasn’t in the best of shape. Kathy, for once, was laughing, more thrilled than scared by the short ride.
“I, um… What can I do for you?” the doctor asked, looking dubiously at the top of Respa’s head as he set Kathy down and held his knees. Kathy threw an arm around her father’s ankle, as if anchoring herself.
“I need,” Respa said, regaining his breath as he straightened, “your help.” There, he’d said it. “For her.” He pointed down.
`
“Respa!” the doctor exclaimed. His face transformed rapidly, going from surprised to skeptical to grim. “I can’t help you, Respa. You turned down my help years ago, and you’re not going to get it now, especially not bursting into my hospital and frightening my patients.”
“I’m not asking for me, I swear,” he pleaded, picking Kathy up again. “I’m only asking that you help me help her. Find her a new family, or something; anything so long as I’m not in her life.” He held her up by the armpits to the doctor, and the older man took her in his arms. He, too, pressed a hand against Kathy’s face, but he seemed to look deeper, looking for other symptoms.
“She’s in withdrawal, I think. Nurse Constantinides told me,” he said, watching the doctor. “Her junkie mother never weaned her, no matter what I said…”
“So you want, what, to be relieved of the responsibility?” Dr. Chenault asked angrily. Before Respa could reply, he continued, saying, “I don’t know whether to take her away from a negligent guardian like you, or make you face your responsibilities and leave now. You can’t just run away from something like a child, Respa.”
“That’s not it!” he shouted, and a nearby nurse glared at him. “I,” he said in a quieter voice, meeting the eyes of the nurse, “can’t be the parent she needs.”
“Nevertheless, you are the parent she has, and you must—“
“I hit her mother, doctor,” Respa interrupted, stone-faced. “I knocked her off her feet, I strangled her, and toward the end I left her alone for a week with Kathy.” Staring into the doctor’s eyes.
Dr. Chenault looked away first, sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose as if to stem a headache. Kathy stroked his tie contemplatively. “Let’s talk in my office, Respa. Please,” he added. “This is not a public matter.”
Kathy was handed back to her father, and Respa followed the doctor down what felt like the same hallway over and over again to his office. The doctor gestured to the chair in front of the desk, entreating him to sit, and went to draw the blinds on the glass pane in the door. He took his own seat in a rather more impressive chair at the desk, leaning back and steepling his fingers in an unwittingly classic pose. “Talk to me, Respa.”
“I can’t be the father she needs,” he said, looking down at her on his lap. “It’s not because I don’t want to—I want more than anything else to be there for the rest of her life.” He met the doctor’s eyes. “But I don’t think that’s what’s best for her.”
“Well, at least you sound like you’ve matured,” Dr. Chenault remarked. “Go on.”
“Go—go on?”
“Yes, if you would,” the doctor said, rolling his hand in the air.
“What more can I say? I know that I’m not the best thing for her, and she needs to be with a family who can really support her, give her the attention and the things she needs. Someone who can actually clothe her and feed her, and,” he took a deep breath, “someone who will never, ever hurt her.”
The doctor arched his brows. “You think you might hurt her someday?”
“I don’t know,” Respa sighed, fixing his eyes on something besides the doctor. That ridiculous poster with the cat on the branch, for example. “I just…every day I lived with Tanya, I saw more and more of my father in myself, and it scared me to death. I don’t want to be that to Kathy. I don’t want to take that chance.”
“I see,” the doctor said, and for a moment they both paused. “I take it your father was abusive.” Respa only nodded, the cat poster still holding his false interest. “It’s a legitimate fear, I suppose. You’re being more responsible about this than I’d expect you to be, so yes, Respa, I’ll help you find Kathy an adoptive family. You realize,” he added, standing to come face to face with Respa, “that there’s a chance she may resent you the rest of her life, whether her new home is happy or not. She may always wonder just what kind of person would abandon her.”
The doctor moved back to his desk to flick through his Rolodex. “Furthermore, you will have no parental rights—you won’t even be allowed to contact her. She can come searching for you, but you can never look for her. If the adoptive family chooses, of course, some of these things can be changed, but generally speaking…”
“No, I don’t want her to be able to find me. I don’t want her to know a thing about me,” he said, petting her soft baby hair. “Who I am, what I look like, what I’ve done—I don’t want her to know anything. She can’t know anything about her mother, either, or any of her grandparents.”
Dr. Chenault contemplated him for a moment, and then nodded, plucking a card out of the Rolodex. “It’s your decision.” He cradled the handset of his standard black office phone between his cheek and shoulder, and dialed the number on the card he held up.