carving aspirin flowers with her hair falling in a net over her work; and I could picture her fumbling for the cell phone in her coat pocket with that faint click in her throat that she used, or I imagined she used, when she thought it might be Skandar.
“Have you got your stuff?” I asked, stupidly. “Margot, get his backpack for me? We’ll go in my car, right now.”
Velma stood back, releasing him, and cleared her throat. “I’m going to check the medical form, Nora. You can’t just take him anywhere.”
“Children’s. I’ll take him to Children’s: it’s the best, if they have to sew it up again. Let’s put a compress on for the trip. Do you think you can hold it, sweetie? Hold it there with your hand?”
Velma sighed, shook her head. “We should have the mother come here,” she said. “That’s the rule except in an emergency.”
“You don’t think this is an emergency? His mother is a friend of mine,” I said (and do you know, even in that crazy moment I was proud to say this, like turning a trump card, and proud to think that it was actually true). “And I know she wouldn’t want us wasting any time. I’ll call her on the way and she’ll meet us in the emergency room. Come on, Velma, you know it’s the right thing.”
Velma shook her head again, just slightly. “I know it’s what’s going to happen, Nora; but I need you to call this boy’s mother right here before you go. I can’t have you take him without her say-so.”
So I called Sirena from Velma’s office. I cannot convey the strangeness of that. I was self-conscious so many times over: to be the one to tell Sirena the news, as though Reza had been stricken on my watch (Margot was still in the room, her face fixed in a rictus of anxiety); to have them all hear me speak to her, since I didn’t know how to modulate my voice when I spoke to her any more than I did when I spoke of her; afraid to sound either too intimate or too formal, too loud or too soft; and in front of Reza, too, who surely had no clear sense of the extent to which his school and home lives were, almost behind his back, intertwined. He knew that his mother and I made our art in the same studio, but he had no idea what, practically, that might mean, and surely didn’t understand that when he was at after-school, or shunted into Maria’s care, his mother was, more often than not, nibbling biscuits with me, chattering, as his father had said, like a schoolgirl. Or rather, like a childless artist, than which there could surely be no greater betrayal.
But I made the call, stiff and stern and fake in my voice, the teacher’s voice Sirena hadn’t heard since the beginning, and still I was sure that Velma looked at me oddly. I told Sirena what had happened, and that his eye was okay but would need stitches—at which point I heard a muffled sound on the line and said, my tone all wrong for Velma’s office but I couldn’t help it, “Don’t cry, Sirena, don’t cry; it’s okay,” and she said, “I’m not crying. I’m putting on my coat”—and I told her we were going to the ER at Children’s and we’d meet her there.
“I don’t know the way,” she said.
“Take a cab—call one. I’ll bring you home again.”
Which, eventually, I did. But not before we were seven hours in the emergency room. (“They always do that at Children’s,” Esther explained later. “It is the best care, but it means they’ve got a reputation to uphold. They can’t afford to make mistakes.”) He was seen by a nurse; and then by a resident; and then by the attending doctor, who summoned the ophthalmologist to be sure; and finally by the plastic surgeon, who happened by good fortune to be checking on a patient elsewhere, and who sewed him up in tiny, tidy stitches. Between visitors to our clammy curtained booth—vaguely reminiscent of a fortuneteller’s at the fair, but strewn with medical posters and lit by a ghastly gray light—where we grew hungrier and more glazed by the hour, stretched vast swathes of useless waiting time. At first I offered to read to Reza and then I suggested that I fetch everyone something to eat, but I could tell that Sirena, still anxious, didn’t want me