Part Nine: The Hospital
He drove her himself.
This was not what he had planned — he had arranged a car service, which was the standard and sensible option — but when the car arrived, Lina had looked at him with an expression that was trying not to ask something, and he had looked back at her, and he had told the driver to go ahead, he would take her.
Marguerite had watched him leave with the expression she had been unable to entirely conceal all morning.
The hospital was across the city. They went through afternoon traffic that was beginning to thicken, and Lina sat in the back seat and looked out the window at the Paris that was different from twenty-eight floors up — larger, noisier, full of particular people doing particular things.
“Have you been to this hospital before?” he asked.
“Once,” she said. “When I was little. I had my tonsils out.”
“Does that seem like a long time ago?”
She thought about it. “A medium time ago,” she said.
He found himself smiling at this. He found, actually, that he had been smiling more in the past six hours than he could easily account for in recent memory.
They arrived. He walked her in. The receptionist at the desk, faced with a forty-one-year-old man in a suit and a five-year-old in a cleaning uniform, handled the situation with the professional equanimity of someone who worked in a hospital and had seen all configurations of human arrival.
Sofia Martins was on the third floor.
She was awake, and sitting up slightly, and when the door opened and Lina ran to her, her face did something that Alexandre had to look away from for a moment because it was not meant for him.
He stood in the doorway while the reunion happened. He heard Sofia say Lina, Lina, what did you do, you weren’t supposed to— and then incoherent sounds, the sounds of a mother holding her child, and Lina’s voice, muffled: I went to work, Maman. I made sure you kept your job.
After a moment, Sofia looked up.
She saw him.
She was perhaps thirty, with dark circles and the pale look of someone who had been feverish and frightened all day. Her hair was down and her hospital gown was the standard issue and she looked, he thought, exactly like someone who had been very worried.
“Mr. Delorme,” she said. Her voice had a faint accent he recognized as Brazilian Portuguese.
“Mrs. Martins,” he said. “I’m sorry to intrude. I wanted to bring her to you myself.” He paused. “And to tell you — your position is protected. Medical leave, full pay. Whatever time you need.”
She looked at him for a moment.
“She came to the office,” Sofia said.
“She did.”
“In the uniform.”
“She was very professional,” he said. He meant it.
Sofia looked at Lina, who had climbed up onto the bed and was sitting beside her mother with the specific satisfaction of a mission completed.
“I told him she couldn’t lose the job,” Lina said. “He said she wouldn’t.”
Sofia looked at Alexandre again. In her expression he saw things he was not sure he had the right to receive — gratitude, yes, but also something complicated, something that knew more than gratitude about what the morning had required and what it had meant.
“Thank you,” she said.
It was a simple thing to say and it was not a simple thing.
“Thank you,” he said, and meant it for Lina, who had already stopped listening to the adult conversation and was telling her mother about the view from twenty-eight floors up.
