Electric City: A Novel (35 page)

When she was startled awake by sharp rapping on the door, she pulled her hair back into a loose knot and patted her cheeks twice for extra blood flow.

“Unconscious six-year-old in Exam 1,” the nurse said. “We need you.”

“On my way,” she answered, opening the door and trotting to keep up with the blond ponytail. The hallway was bright and polished, all the marginal sounds thick with urgency, and she found herself running a little ahead of the nurse now, no time to waste.

The girl was blue when Sophie got to her, slack in the muscled arms of a paramedic kid with a crew cut and tears in his eyes.

“No pulse. I tried everything,” he groaned.

The nurse dragged a crash cart though the curtains and Sophie instructed the paramedic to lay the child on a gurney while they got the paddles ready. This was the part she’d only done with other doctors in the room, but she was on her own and there was no hesitation allowed. A heart had stopped in a six-year-old body and without pausing Sophie opened the small mouth and reached in with her fingers, making sure there was nothing in the airway.

She knew about seeing the light go all the way out, the voltage of the body shutting itself off. This was what had happened so invisibly to Henry on Iroquois Lake, his burned-out heart in the heart of dark water. Now would be the second instant of an absolute Before and an absolute After.

In a flash of detachment, she had a view of herself on translucent ice, with Henry’s glittering ghost skating by. Standing now at the side of the gurney with the defibrillator paddles in her hands, she was just like the doctors she saw in the movies, the ones saying “CHARGE.” Like a general leading an army. Like the one out front, with every atom of energy illuminated and armed.

And no matter what they prayed or hoped for, everyone knew that the flow didn’t always find its target. Sometimes the current turned aside, or stopped, simply failed to do its magic. Sometimes the dead stayed dead, and the living had to move on.

Sophie motioned for the medic to stand back.

“Charge,” she said, and that crazy thing happened where time slowed to a shimmering viscous thing. The girl’s body jumped under the shock, but the monitor showed its same straight line.

“One more,” Sophie said, her voice so clear and steady it didn’t seem to belong to anyone.

The shock almost threw the child off the table, but it worked.

Her young heart was back in its proper music now, and the line on the black screen drew jagged angles where it should, up and down, up and down.

“Her name’s Linda,” the medic said, his voice cracking a little.

“You did a good job,” Sophie told him.

She didn’t know if the parents were anywhere nearby, but hoped they’d been spared this sight. Nurses were already removing the crash cart and double-checking for the leads staying hooked up to the right places. When Linda’s eyes opened, Sophie caught her breath, placed her hands gently on each one of Linda’s bony shoulders. Her expression was unnaturally calm, pale blue eyes regarding Sophie as though they’d been through this dance before.

Is it you?

“You’re okay,” Sophie said. “Everything is okay.”

Seeing the Vietnam vet in the Mount Sinai ER had sparked a cascade of thoughts, surfacing hours later when Sophie had space in her head to review them. The idea that it could have been Martin, if he hadn’t disappeared into Canada, or even Henry, if he had lived long enough to be drafted too. She’d heard in the recent news about the Carter Amnesty, but hadn’t heard a word from Martin in years.

So many absences. First Henry, then Martin, and even Henry’s mother, whose obituary Miriam had sent to Sophie from its page in the
Electric City Gazette
. Sophie still wore the eye portrait every day, and in her Lower East Side apartment, in a small crystal vase on a windowsill, she kept the collection of eagle feathers Martin had given to her when he said goodbye. Flanking the vase were two of her grandmother’s medicine bottles.

The girl’s eyes had made her think of delft blue, the paint she had layered onto her kitchen walls. The color linked to cascading images of Haarlem/Harlem, then Amsterdam Avenue and Brooklyn, on and on, every reminder of the Dutch. Henry’s lost ancestors and her own. Her curiosity about Holland as a place somehow overshadowed by its New World echoes. The paintings of ice skaters she often visited at the Met, Brueghel and Vermeer, restless voyagers from a perfectly flat landscape.

The Hudson River flowing to Manhattan from Canada, fur traders and tobacco and beads. A beaver dam seen from the train window on her way alongside the river. One home and another.

When the power failed, Sophie was in the break room on the surgery floor, so the outage barely registered before the emergency generators kicked in. She was sitting on a lumpy couch in one of those dazed states with a cup of lukewarm coffee that she depended on to get her through the last hour of her thirty-six-hour shift. Absentmindedly, her fingers pressed a switch turning the nearby table lamp off and on, off and on.

The fluorescent bulbs of the room and hallway flickered as if in warning, and the microwave’s digital clock flashed 12:00 before going blank altogether.

Residual daylight came through the windows along one wall of the room; in the waiting area, another merciful window meant the families who had some poor relative in the OR weren’t plunged into total darkness. Sophie thanked the gods for not placing her with a scalpel in hand when the electricity paused, and then she offered up another silent prayer when the generator’s backup power restored itself.

Still, beyond the hospital, the blackout lasted. She could see only dead traffic lights from the third-floor windows, nothing blinking, and she predicted as the evening gave way to complete darkness that the lights of the city would stay asleep. They’d already been having record temperatures, with the heat rising off the pavement in waves, tar-melting heat, the kind that seemed to triple itself inside high-rise offices and stores and apartment buildings, inspiring an overwhelm of usage from every power source. She was hurtled back into her memories of November 1965, recalling the candles and her parents and the phone calls from all of their friends, the way everyone came together in the dark.

Now, the Company had relocated thousands of families so that entire neighborhoods had dispersed in less than a decade. Among Sophie’s parents’ tribe, most had semiretired by now to Florida or North Carolina; her parents had purchased their Boca Raton condo. If she could ever relieve herself of the daughter’s obligation to stay close by, she wondered for the hundredth time if she could move cross-country to California. Become reacquainted with Simon. Create a family of her own, in some other place.

At the edges of reverie, she heard her name being called, not on the intercom, she realized, but out in the hallway, from the nurses’ station.

“Dr. Levine,” over and over, not with urgency but with something like kindness, or so it seemed. “Are you all right?”

“The power’s out all over Manhattan,” said Alice Matheson, RN. Sophie took a second to read her badge. “Maybe the other boroughs too, not sure yet.”

“Oh,” Sophie said, and realized that for several minutes she’d forgotten she wasn’t in Electric City but in New York City, which scared her a little, to see how her exhausted mind had lost its geography, how it reverted so quickly to the place she used to live.

“But we’ve got our generators,” Alice said proudly, as though she were at least partly responsible. “Anyway, you’re needed downstairs in the ER waiting area.”

She studied Alice’s face for a moment, her wavy red hair clipped back with gold barrettes, her wire-rimmed glasses framing a face scrubbed pink and young. Sophie thought she looked like that other Alice she had known from high school, which seemed so long ago.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll just check on things in the OR before I go downstairs.”

“They’ve just finished up,” Alice said.

Sophie turned to see the surgeons in their scrubs coming through the swinging
DO NOT ENTER
doors, looking at once haggard and relieved, peeling off their paper hats.

“Good lord,” one of them said. “Tell me that didn’t really happen.”

Sophie smoothed cool water onto her face in the lounge, dried herself with stiff paper towels, and did what she’d been doing all her life—looked into the mirror for an image that might reveal clues to the
mystery of herself. Faint suggestions of lines at the corners of her eyes, bruised shadows of her sleeplessness, and the future impression of an older woman. She saw her girl face too, persistently hoping toward joy, with layers of sympathy and sorrow etched between her eyebrows.

When she stepped into the hallway and saw the back of his head, that unmistakable sleek hair in a braid down the center of his denim jacket, she knew he felt her looking at him. She was well past ordinary fatigue and could later forgive herself for framing the scene in a cinematic blur. But this was not about sleep deprivation or dreamy sleepwalking or anything other than a surreal day of waking up from an elongated nightmare she didn’t even know she was struggling through.

He turned around.

Here was all she had learned about the heart as an organ, the chambers and valves and ventricles, how it functioned as a pump and a motor, with its ebb and flow. An electric machine too, that could miraculously be shocked back into motion. She knew so much and so little.

Here was his smooth skin, the obsidian gleam of his eyes, the carved shape of his cheekbones and jaw, the beautiful astonished wave-breaking smile, and her once-tentative heart leaped up. It flew.